Should Dark Knight get a Rework?

[OdinelStarrei]

Too much has been taken from DRK without any real compensation, certainly.

That being said, though...

Was a Monkey's Paw issue. HW DRKs asked to be able to apply Reprisal more reliably. Non-DRKs asked for access to percentile raid miti. This was the monstrous birth that followed.

From what I remember, this is true. We kept a bit of the counterattack gameplay via TBN, but tying rep to a mitigation wasn't the best idea. Monkey's Paw. I'd at least like the old animation back with the explosion compared to the swirly.

Probably because it was literally Rampart. (I am of course all for it filling the place of TBN pre-70, though, if we are to remain fixated on/around TBN, which I would be... okay... with, as at least it is the most unique among tank defensives.)

Agreed. However, I think an ability, even if it's identical in function, should at least reflect the identity of the job that is using it in animations. Shadow Wall, Nebula, and Sentinel (with Vengeance being the small outlier) are not role actions, so I don't see why Shadowskin, Foresight, Rampart, and a new GNB exclusive 90 sec can't also be unique.

...was cooler on paper than in practice, as it ultimately just siphoned would-be direct potency into mild AoE ppgcd gains (over previously spammable AD) via Quietus. I do still miss it, though, yeah.

Yeah in single target, this wasn't a big deal, but as soon as you got a clump of enemies, it was just something that filled your Blood guage REALLY fast. From a potency perspective, it's whatever, but from a resource perspective, it was kinda awesome, because it directly gave you extra Quietus, and under old BW, you'd regenerate thousands of MP instantaneously, which you fed into DA ADs for health sustain, and Salted would just kinda support the gradual Blood build up. Being a 45 second CD, and thus able to repeat this loop every pull made it a really compelling dungeon experience!

The only form that's been tortured since was the StB ability, but that was a 90s CD that simply applied a partial duration bump to a lesser CD. It can and should be really awesome, I would think, with a name like that (more so than the original spinny spin spin slight potency bump for no self-healing combo finisher), but it really never has been. (The Stormblood version was less copy-pasta than its iteration since, but calling it actually good or interesting would, imo, be like calling Barrel Stabilizer an awesome CD.)

I will admit my bias. I love buff extenders and internal mechanic interplay, even to the smallest degree.

Then: Trade offer! You give me Blood, I give you MP, and more time going really fast! Accept?
Now: Trade offer! You give me nothing, I give you straight damage! Or in the case of Living Shadow, you give me Blood, I give you straight damage! Wait isn't that what Bloodspiller is (technically no, but let me have this one ok)

Didn't Darkside make you "immune" to all MP-granting effects? Soul Survivor, likewise, didn't trigger from allies, only from the affected enemy being slain in its duration (or, later, at the end of the duration regardless).

Hoho, you're correct, but only if Darkside was active. Darkside was technically a stance that could be disabled at will. Turning it on took 400 or 600 MP, if I'm remembering right. So during downtimes, you could have a caster (specifically Black Mages in Umbral Ice), shove some MP into you for a free Dark Arts when resuming combat, or even just let the passive MP regen take over as long the downtime was long enough to be MP positive after you factored in the cost of turning it back on. Things like Refresh and Ewer were much less common. You saw usages of this in A12S, O8S P1, Ultimate phasings, even some really long dungeon intermissions like Ghimlyt Dark if people were sweaty enough. Just a little bit of optimization to keep things interesting. It wasn't a big deal, really, just a tiny micro optimization where you gain 140 potency here or there, it was just fun, like a "ohhh, look how smart I am for playing around your restrictions." or a little bro moment you could have with your casters. Playing SkS DRK, my main focus was accumulating as much MP as possible, as quickly as possible, whatever way I could. I had an Xiphias Eureka with like +800 Skill Speed, I was a true degenerate.

On all other counts, completely agreed.

:: And those few above I mention only because I feel like DRK threads a little too often rapidly devolve into "It was so much better back then!!!" acritical nostalgia-munching despite HW and StB DRK also having plenty of flaws, stale points, copy-pasta, etc., that we definitely could and should do better than if we were to bother with a large rework. We should take cues and direction from it, but by noting and addressing the bad, too, not just repeating the good.

Of course. You got the jist of my point though. It's not that I want the old versions to return. It's that the things old versions did for DRK and other jobs are no longer congruent with current FFXIV job philosophies. I've gone on record now saying that I don't think Dark Knight has ever really realized it's full potential, and the lack of explanations and commitment to just fix stuff is why the discourse is so tumultuous at times. Back then, there was always jank, there was always inconsistent design choices, there were always counter-intuitive gameplay decisions (invincible, non-Grit dungeon tanking is the perfect example of this). It was always a flawed job, but it was always a fun job to me, even now to an extent. I am okay if I have to put up with this version of the job, because when the really bad stuff was addressed finally, the Blood Weapon, the Living Dead, those massive issues got resolved after much teeth pulling, and I do not think the job design team is capable of anything else without a complete upheaval, they're far too entrenched in the current system. Even if I think that what we have now is wasted potential, there's far bigger issues in the game right now from a gameplay perspective as a whole then in just my tiny corner of DRK-land. I think this is the healthiest way to proceed until further information is acquired, probably in a year or so. There comes a point where you have to stop mourning the canary in the coal mine, and just try to salvage whatever is left.

And as a sidenote, Jeeqbit, yes, I know Parry/Ten was/is trash. The system was poor. The substat system is still poor. Considering that there were not many bosses in all of Alexander that inflicted magic auto attacks, with the exceptions being Brawler, Swindler, and I think Manipulator???, Reprisal was easy enough to get where it was needed. My point is, that it was a removal in a list of removals with minor to major impacts, and I'm already biased against role actions specifically because they offered almost no equivalent replacements in the kits they pulled from or did changes to fights with things like autocrit/random crit, specifically when Anticipation and Awareness were removed(UCOB double nael/twin). Not that I expected them to, I am just stating what they did. I am not asking for Reprisal to be removed off of Role Actions, or from the game. It is unambiguously more useful now. I am not intending to be revisionist or say all removals ever done were unjustified and bad because that's not true, and change is inevitable. It'd just be nice if it said change was with a scapel instead of a sledgehammer.

And I used macros for Salted Earth. Doesn't mean I didn't have another bind of unmacro'd Salted Earth sitting in a less popular location in the event I wanted to place the Salted Earth ahead of where I was running or pulling because bosses weren't locked to the center of the stage 24/7. Yoshi-P told me that Blood Weapon was a ping issue and that dying to Living Dead was part of the DRK identity, gaslighting DRKs for years, so when it comes to DRK-specific discourse, he's about the last person on Earth I'd want to hear from, producer or not.