Dark Knight's /Dark Missionary

[Jolyin]

When is SE going to make dark knight's dark missionary level 70???
it would be nice if dark knights get to use their dark missionary 70
while PLD passage arms GNB has Heart of Light War has shake it off Drk at has to rely on others to help with mitigation
at level 70 content this matters a lot
All i would like to see from SE is to make Drk Dark Missionary level 70
so drk can use it for level 70 content
i find it very unfair when other gets to have their fun with there mitigation while i sit there do nothing

[Archwizard]

Ideally, DMis would be reduced to around 64-68 for parity with Heart of Light and Shake It Off (not to mention Passage), with TBN (or some minor downgrade to it) to something like 54-58 for parity with Raw Intuition and Sheltron.

It's kinda wild that DRK and GNB get their mitigation skills so late compared to other tanks. DRK can't even say it gets early burst damage out of that deal, since its biggest damage tools are 80/90 and its knockoff Fell Cleave comes 8 levels after the real deal.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

If I may be blunt, but other than Lv70 Ultimates this hardly matters. Arguably Heart of Light shouldn't have been this low even, given the ridiculous damage output it has at Lv70. DMissionary has nearly no impact in non-Savage/Ultimate duties in that level bracket and the only reason people want it is "because the other tanks have it". Unlike Stalwart Soul which is a fundamental combo (and thus got moved to Lv40), Dark Missionary has nothing cool to it other than being a DRK-flavoured Tactician.

I'd prefer to keep it at Lv76 so we don't overload DRK's potential for Lv70 ultimates, as Dark Mind and TBN go a MASSIVE way to justify their existence on top of the Blood+MP burst.

[Oizen]

If I may be blunt, but other than Lv70 Ultimates this hardly matters. Arguably Heart of Light shouldn't have been this low even, given the ridiculous damage output it has at Lv70. DMissionary has nearly no impact in non-Savage/Ultimate duties in that level bracket and the only reason people want it is "because the other tanks have it". Unlike Stalwart Soul which is a fundamental combo (and thus got moved to Lv40), Dark Missionary has nothing cool to it other than being a DRK-flavoured Tactician.

I'd prefer to keep it at Lv76 so we don't overload DRK's potential for Lv70 ultimates, as Dark Mind and TBN go a MASSIVE way to justify their existence on top of the Blood+MP burst.

I don't like the idea of ignoring the ever growing issues with Level sync'd jobs solely based on the existance of ultimates.

Its a problem this game that has been growing for a while now, and I'd rather see it addressed instead of saying "but the content that not even 1% of the playerbase even touches!!"

But hey thats just me.

[Archwizard]

I'm personally less worried about Ultimates than I am about level sync'd content or just leveling the dang job in the first place. A lot of jobs suffer from getting actions trimmed one expansion only to have a replacement added in the next near level cap, so it makes lower levels less fun and more difficult to play at.

DRK's already lost original Dark Arts, Dark Dance, Dark Passenger, Sole Survivor, Blood Price, spammable Abyssal Drain, and Shadowskin -- and those are just the actions that impacted its survival. In the process, its rotation has been reduced to knockoff WAR aside from a double-weave heavy burst at max level, and its "replacement" survival tools all come at level 70 or later.

So I'm not going to say it "hardly matters", especially when a majority of players go through duty roulettes every day on every job under the sun but only 1% actually go through Ultimates.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I'm personally less worried about Ultimates than I am about level sync'd content or just leveling the dang job in the first place. A lot of jobs suffer from getting actions trimmed one expansion only to have a replacement added in the next near level cap, so it makes lower levels less fun and more difficult to play at.

DRK's already lost original Dark Arts, Dark Dance, Dark Passenger, Sole Survivor, Blood Price, spammable Abyssal Drain, and Shadowskin -- and those are just the actions that impacted its survival. In the process, its rotation has been reduced to knockoff WAR aside from a double-weave heavy burst at max level, and its "replacement" survival tools all come at level 70 or later.

So I'm not going to say it "hardly matters", especially when a majority of players go through duty roulettes every day on every job under the sun but only 1% actually go through Ultimates.

The difference between casual content and high-end raiding is that a -10% mitigation skill vs only magic damage not being available outside of high-end raids (Ultimates) is because numerically, your impact is so minimal there is no need for the average player to learn that action yet, whereas for the Ultimate raiders you'd push the job from "already damn good" into "you are stupid if you don't bring it" tier. What you want is more engagement at Lv70, which I think is good. I don't agree with the "streamlining" by pushing even more mitigation downwards and making Bahamut and Ultima even easier, especially in light of the recent Living Dead rework. (huge buff in my opinion)

How about fundamental offence gameplay changes, like those in Stormblood or Heavensward? You mentioned various skills of it after all.

[Archwizard]

What you want is more engagement at Lv70, which I think is good.

No, what I want is for DRK not to feel like it's made of paper when I'm healing it outside of 70-80 content. The "huge buff" you praise on LD was a bandaid on the fact it put a Doom effect on you for 7 years and put the onus on your healer to keep you alive despite you popping a supposed invuln -- it brought it up to a level passable with others of its caliber, which rather emphasizes my point.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

No, what I want is for DRK not to feel like it's made of paper when I'm healing it outside of 70-80 content. The "huge buff" you praise on LD was a bandaid on the fact it put a Doom effect on you for 7 years and put the onus on your healer to keep you alive despite you popping a supposed invuln -- it brought it up to a level passable with others of its caliber, which rather emphasizes my point.

Two potential suggestions:
1.) Dark Mind mitigation gets split half-and-half (10% generic, 10% magical) to make it more applicable in turn of a 1% net nerf on magical damage mitigation
2.) Dark Dance being readded as a 1:1 physical counterpart to Dark Mind (60s CD, 10s duration, 20% physical mitigation)

Missionary being put in a lower level bracket will not make you any tankier as most mobs in the levelling dungeons tend to do the majority of their damage in physical, which my suggestion helps with. For anything with magical damage, DRK is beyond fine with Dark Mind alone. For group mitigation you still have Reprisal every minute.

[Archwizard]

2.) Dark Dance being readded as a 1:1 physical counterpart to Dark Mind (60s CD, 10s duration, 20% physical mitigation)

Would first require an action trim, since DRK is currently so bloated that all bars are filled. Also unlikely since Dark Dance was given to GNB as Camouflage.

But stranger to me is that you would propose adding a new action for personal mitigation at lower levels, as an alternative to dropping the level of TBN, a tool it already has... while also claiming that dropping the level of a tool would make it too powerful in specific content, in full defiance of the fact that the changes you proposed would also make the job more powerful at end level?

How are you more concerned about locking out actions from lower level content "that hardly matters", than you are about proposing actions that would affect ongoing, relevant content? The math... isn't mathing.

Missionary being put in a lower level bracket will not make you any tankier as most mobs in the levelling dungeons tend to do the majority of their damage in physical [...] For group mitigation you still have Reprisal every minute.

You say that... but then we have Gunbreaker getting DMis at 64. And yes, you've already said GNB shouldn't have HoL at that level either, but it's already the reality we live in and raising the level on it now would be an unnecessary nerf.

So we're in a state where not only has DRK lost many of the tools it had sub-70 for personal mitigation which is a whole can of worms on its own because it means DRK no longer performs in Level 70 dungeons/trials/raids the way it did when they were introduced and tuned to a certain expectation of the job's capabilities... but to the relevant point, that another tank has been introduced who has the tools within that bracket that DRK does not get until significantly later.
... Plus Gunbreaker has its entire burst combo at 70.

As I mentioned in my first post to this thread, the point is parity. All tanks bring Reprisal to the table for group mitigation, but beyond that you have 3 tanks who ADDITIONALLY have alternative forms of group mitigation at or below level 70 that don't require a target (which is great because the biggest raidwides often lack a target to debuff anyway) which they can interweave with Reprisal... and one who conspicuously doesn't, for the tradeoff of being a middling performer at that level due to its most powerful tools being pushed higher towards the level ceiling.

You brought up Ultimates as the reason not to drop the level of DMis, but from what I can tell, even the Ultimate raiders want to make that change. Why willingly take DRK at that level when GNB does everything better?