DRK changes that would make it really fun to play

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

[...]

HP spending would in fact be proportional to Max HP, which scales on a similar level as Strength, which will be your primary stat for heal boosting from HP recovery abilities. The spending values would also probably be different for various abilities and for simplicity, a minimum threshold before you can spend should be >=50% HP (if we want a safe guard).

The MP = 10,000 change has been introduced as it fundamentally made no difference for non-Healer jobs with very minor exceptions such as Black Mage, as the MP costs got scaled with their current max MP (except Healers who had maxMP Piety available at the time). The main interaction between different MP pools came from Mana Shift, which granted different MP values depending on the Caster. All of this got neutered however and MP got simplified to 10,000, making MP cost balancing (and actually implementing) less stressful for the devs.

HP however has always been scaling as a survival threshold to ensure you obtain newer gear or equip the correct gear (pre-VIT-on-Accessories). To answer on the amount though, it would essentially depend on what damage numbers will be considered "expected" and what rotation are considered "expected play".

Based on the HP drain of such expectation, you take HP recovery of this +10-30% of leeway, depending on how the HP recovery is applied (burst vs over time). Warrior is currently a great job at displaying burst vs (semi-)over-time healing, so we can take inspirations. Otherwise, something like Bloodbath with lower gains but longer durations would also be possible.

So, within expected parameters the tank should be self-sufficient on his spending, with only minor gains to actual survival, making a Healer still essentially in charge of your HP pool for trinity puproses. Since this is essentially high risk/skill, damage numbers would need to be highly rewarding, however the scaling needs to be very delicate, otherwise we may see 2x DRK here because it does too much damage, as you said. I won't say it is impossible, but I admit it is difficult. In fact, sometimes tanks have been chosen for progression more on how their defensives interacted over damage a lot of times, with Abyssos being a recent example of the latter.

However, if we consider "what if we spend HP at a bad time", this is fundamentally no different from using your defensive cooldowns at a bad time. Though I suppose the difference is that more players will sooner hold cooldowns than not have them, since almost none of them provides damage gains (except Vengeance).

[...]

Correct, however Convert and Blood for Blood were DPS abilities. DPS are fundamentally not designed around withstanding excessive amounts of damage as part of their damage rotation, if they were they would basically be pseudo-tanks minus enmity. Making HP spending a tank thing and giving them the fitting tools to fuel it is not only safer to do around raidwide attacks, but is also generally more logical as they can use excess HP before healing hits them that they would get anyways, even if they only need a fraction of it (example Medica II).

MP management was indeed the compromise and generally the safer venue - however, they have truly mishandled MP interactivity by removing MP-Blood interaction (Stormblood: Delirium, Quietus, TBN, Blood Weapon/Price) and made it extremely bland in an attempt to make it more accessible. The irony is that more people prefering accesibility will still flock to Warrior. A dilemma to me, as it essentially cost me a ton of fun and interaction with my kit.

But as you say, letting such a design (HP spender-drainer Tank) loose on the playerbase would spell an initial wave of people clashing as they figure out what is acceptable and what is essentially being a liability to people. On the flipside, having this gap means there is a lot more room for team optimisation and using excess tools otherwise held, making more use of the tools of the party this way.

I however do not consider toxicity a factor, as we have some folks getting all antsy over like a SGE giving his WAR a shield and the WAR getting pissy over it. If they made every decision in this game purely to eliminate factors of toxicity occuring, we would be playing a very bland game.

Anyways for everyone reading this, I'm sorry for the massive wall of text. :sweat:

[Archwizard]

Unfortunately, if you define DRK as draining HP to deal damage, then that really isn't going to work well when it is a tank

However, that's not actually how I defined it. You'll note I said "use of health as a resource" and "becoming more powerful as health gets lower", both of which can broadly fit the Dark Knight archetype without necessarily having to literalize "drain your HP to deal damage". Hell, damage doesn't even have to come into it.
For instance, you could have DRK gain skills that increase in effect the lower their HP is when they use it, or based on the damage they receive in a given period -- self-healing along the lines of Essential Dignity or Macrocosmos for instance, or a burst of damage reduction that snapshots their missing HP, giving more mitigation the lower their HP is (like the Hellblade's Last Resort from the Bravely series).
Alternately, you could rework Living Dead to be a Full Immunity skill that drains a percentage of HP over time in lieu of the "all or nothing" Doom clock.
Since 14 emphasizes Barriers in DRK's kit, you could have them convert some percentage of HP into a barrier that raises their effective health, or add a cooldown that fills in all of their missing health with a barrier while giving them life leech until the barrier breaks. The possibilities are pretty much endless.

I previously wrote up a skill idea for DRK I called "Martyr", intended to be its sort of Passage of Arms. It would let the DRK channel a high potency barrier, but at the cost of transferring part of the damage taken by nearby allies to the DRK.
I played around with its MP consumption to ensure it would be best used as a group mitigation rather than just an extra strength TBN, but that's not really relevant to this topic; the point is that it uses the DRK's health pool as a resource for the whole raid.

And even if we do bring damage into it, you can also see in the PVP version of DRK that it plays with the "drain HP to deal damage" concept without necessarily needing to invoke it in a way that compromises the DRK's survival. Shadowbringer can be used at the cost of HP, but this cost is negated by Dark Arts, effectively doubling the survival value of TBN.
It actually wouldn't take that much effort to clone something like that into PVE, and would make a very effective way to remove TBN from MP (should the need ever arise in some rework).

Combine any number of ideas along these lines and you could create a tank whose entire kit is based on Risk vs Reward.
But right now the only RvR skill in DRK's kit is Living Dead. And speaking as a healer... a lot of people still misunderstand the "Risk" element of it.

[TouchandFeel]

I think that one of the main factors against making HP a resource for DRK that seems to be getting overlooked is simply that it is not encapsulated solely within the control of the DRK themselves.

Damage buffs that players can place on others are very highly controlled, existing within the 2-minute raid buffs, and are that way for the reason of being predictable and more easily measured in terms of the expected output gains which is necessary for proper balancing between jobs and the tuning of content. We can of course debate if 2 minutes is too long of an interval of buff-based burst cycles and whether it should be shorter/longer or stuff like that, but the importance of such buffs being defined to exist within very controlled parameters of availability and frequency is undeniable.

By making HP a resource for DRK to fuel ability usage, you are essentially breaking that above tenet because HP is far more fluid and something other jobs, particularly healers, can at any time and constantly be pumping their resources and effort into, in function allowing healers to pretty much give or deny DRK a dps buff whenever they please. Now the DRK is no longer in full control of their own performance on a moment to moment basis and in order to maximize their individual output, has to rely on other players focusing on them and providing them a constant external source of a resource for them to use. That will just lead to a very frustrating situation. Frustrating for the DRK because they won't feel like they are in control of their own capabilities and game-play, frustrating for the healers because they will be expected to go above and beyond to be constantly feeding the DRK so that they can perform better and immensely frustrating for the developers because this would be incredibly difficult to balance around due to the drastically increased variability of DRK dps performance resulting from this forced interplay.

It's not too hard to come up with various ideas about how to make HP a resource on DRK and it's not too hard to come up with justifications for why your version is good or works, however the sheer level and amount of complications and issues that come with trying to implement this will always make it a hard sell.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

And even if we do bring damage into it, you can also see in the PVP version of DRK that it plays with the "drain HP to deal damage" concept without necessarily needing to invoke it in a way that compromises the DRK's survival. Shadowbringer can be used at the cost of HP, but this cost is negated by Dark Arts, effectively doubling the survival value of TBN.
It actually wouldn't take that much effort to clone something like that into PVE, and would make a very effective way to remove TBN from MP (should the need ever arise in some rework).

Combine any number of ideas along these lines and you could create a tank whose entire kit is based on Risk vs Reward.
But right now the only RvR skill in DRK's kit is Living Dead. And speaking as a healer... a lot of people still misunderstand the "Risk" element of it.

The PvP kit works because healing is intrinsically a limited resource in PvP, and 90% of the healing is controlled by the DRK itself, leading to the DRK having majority control of its own gameplay flow.

in PvE, such a kit would be ridiculously hard to balance, dps wise. Do you balance for the fact healers can theoretically vomit tons of heals into the DRK to continuously let them use higher power potency skills with no risk the entire time for greater overall damage than if the healer was spending those GCDs to dps, or do you balance around an expected number of uses of those skills per minute assuming healers aren't healing more than necessary? Because in the former, you make the DRK kit severely underpowered if your healer doesn't want to play personal healbot, and in the later, severely overpowered if your healers are willing to play healbot. Not to mention the arguments that will no doubt arise in DF/PF from DRKs demanding personal healbots in the care of the latter. This entire balancing methodology is precisely why the devs made old darkside prevent MP infusion from outside sources, since mana transfer skills/songs could be used to inadvertently give DRK more power than the devs wanted it to have. That way, with MP locked exclusively to the DRK's actions, the system became entirely self contained.

There's also major problems with any tank that wants to be low on HP for any reason, since it literally runs counter to the healer role's modus operandi. Making its mit be based on how low or high your HP is completely robs control of your own ability to use said mit in an effective manner, since it robs personal control from you based on what the healers do (In fact, this is precisely one of the reasons old living dead was reviled so much - you had zero control over it as a mitigation tool and were entirely at the healer's mercy). If there's a mechanic like solo Ahk Morn towers or taking Cauterize w/o invuln, or taking a double buster solo which requires incredibly high levels of mit to survive, having one or more of you defensive options fall into the range of 'if your HP wasn't low enough when you used them, you auto die to this mechanic because the mitigation on them is now too weak to survive the hit(s) even at full HP post heal' just because you got an infusion of cure 1 + tetragrammaton right before you used your mit button(s), then you just kneecap DRK's survivability and make its defensive kit wildly inconsistent.

Even beyond that, there's just the issue of how you'd balance the actual mitigation values contrasted to the other tanks. Since you either end up in a situation where DRK's mit is weaker than every other tanks 90% of the time and only equal if the DRK is at low HP to prevent its mitigation from being overpowered, resulting in a tank that is far more cumbersome to utilize in a group setting compared to just picking literally any other one, or you make their mits equal in 90% of situations to maintain parity with other tanks, but then make them OP when the DRK is at lower levels oh HP, resulting in DRK being wildly out of whack and a mess to balance since it would easily trivialize tougher mitigation checks or basically have infinite invulns with proper setup.

There's literally only one case in the DRK kit where lower HP could be a conditional flair, and that's its personal healing. Having soul eater & Abyssal Drain have modular lifesteal based on missing HP wouldn't break anything, so long as the potencies are capped off at reasonable levels.

It's why MP is the perfect substitute to keep the general flow of 'resource bar go up and down rapidly, but you can potentially put yourself in a bad situation by overspending' that the HP gimmick of DRKs in past games utilized on. It's a self contained system that the DRK possesses full control over, and doesn't run counter to both the tank & healer role's entire modus operandi.

TL : DR: The PVP kit works because of the environment its designed in. There's far too many additional factors in PvE for such a kit to work without having massive balancing issues, positive or negative. For Health scaling damage/mitigation to work in PvE, the differences between minimum & maximum %s/potencies/etc would have to be so small to maintain parity with other tanks in 95% of situations that you'd simply run into the issue of 'why even bother in the first place?'

[Archwizard]

in PvE, such a kit would be ridiculously hard to balance, dps wise.

I think you're misinterpreting the point I was trying to make.

I'm not saying "we need a 1:1 copy of the PVP Shadowbringer" because that would be ridiculous since, as you pointed out, PVP has an entirely different scope and context than PVE. A DRK dies in PVP and only he suffers; a DRK dies in PVE and your group just lost their tank. The PVP version of Shadowbringer is spammable as long as you have the resources, making it available significantly more often than you can use the accompanying TBN and allowing you to dump HP until you're at a critical level. Obviously, we can't afford something that high risk.

Rather, the point I was trying to make was focusing on the use of Dark Arts to subvert that cost, negating any such risk for a tank in PVE under normal circumstances. Presently, the existence of Dark Arts doesn't "reward" proper use of TBN, but rather refunds the cost TBN had in the first place in order to induce a "counterattack" narrative via Edge/Flood.

Were something like PVP Shadowbringer to be introduced in PVE, tuning knobs such as a cooldown and charges could be set in place to ensure that it's only used roughly as often as you can acquire Dark Arts, with the raw HP cost merely providing you an alternative to casting it when you don't get DA so that your mitigation and DPS won't negatively impact one another. Same flavor of Dark Arts we have now, but it actually rewards you rather than just refunding.
In an extreme (and however unlikely) case, you may even use such an HP cost as sort of a magic wand to charge up some of the other effects I previously listed, giving you a small measure of personal control over your HP as TouchandFeel noted we lack. I'm not trying to advocate this route specifically, I'm just noting the open possibility to make and connect such tools.

Overall though, the reason I brought it up at all was to highlight that DRK's history and flavor provide plenty of opportunities for creative tanking tools (especially with PLD intentionally being straightforward and WAR not having any thematic magic or gadgetry), which is part of what makes its current position so underwhelming.

There's also major problems with any tank that wants to be low on HP for any reason, since it literally runs counter to the healer role's modus operandi.

God if I don't know it from DRKs screaming at me to stop healing them 'cuz they popped LD at the top of a pull with two HoTs, an external DR and a barrier on them.
(Like, I don't know what you want me to do there, bud. I'm on SGE, if I sneeze too hard it heals you. Learn how to use your invuln.)

Of course, I'm also convinced the 6.1 LD buff was just a holdover for a future rework, since they did the same thing for skills like Acceleration or the entirety of MNK's kit last expansion before bigger reworks in EW. The literal layers of complication on it now (in lieu of just... removing the Doom timer) have that certain vibe, y'know?

Even beyond that, there's just the issue of how you'd balance the actual mitigation values contrasted to the other tanks. Since you either end up in a situation where DRK's mit is weaker than every other tanks 90% of the time and only equal if the DRK is at low HP to prevent its mitigation from being overpowered, resulting in a tank that is far more cumbersome to utilize in a group setting compared to just picking literally any other one, or you make their mits equal in 90% of situations to maintain parity with other tanks, but then make them OP when the DRK is at lower levels oh HP, resulting in DRK being wildly out of whack and a mess to balance since it would easily trivialize tougher mitigation checks or basically have infinite invulns with proper setup.

And I also suggested that a Macrocosmos-esque effect that charges up as you take damage would fit too, rather than just snapshotting while you pray you hit the mit before Bene goes off.
... And even that couldn't be any worse than Oblation.

The list I threw out wasn't comprehensive, nor end-all-be-all. At the least, it was my attempt to illustrate the versatility of the theme besides just "Dark Wave go brrrr"; at most, an effort to get creative juices flowing.

[Mikey_R]

Rather, the point I was trying to make was focusing on the use of Dark Arts to subvert that cost, negating any such risk for a tank in PVE under normal circumstances. Presently, the existence of Dark Arts doesn't "reward" proper use of TBN, but rather refunds the cost TBN had in the first place in order to induce a "counterattack" narrative via Edge/Flood.

That's the thing though, you don't want to reward the use of a defensive buff with more damage, otherwise the defensive will be used for offence and will feel bad if if absolutely had to save it to use it for an actual defensive purpose. You can just look to HW and, IIRC, SB PLD for an example. Sheltron/Bulwark were useful tools to get a Shield Swipe proc and were often used for the purpose. Sheltron even had MP regen attached to it in SB and, with how tight PLD's MP economy was then, you bet Sheltron was used to help restore MP so that you could get all 5 Holy Spirit casts in.

Rewarding defensive play with offence just does not work.

[Archwizard]

That's the thing though, you don't want to reward the use of a defensive buff with more damage

Rewarding defensive play with offence just does not work.

Have you met my friend, The Blackest Night? I think you two would hate each other.

[ForsakenRoe]

Have you met my friend, The Blackest Night? I think you two would hate each other.

TBN is damage neutral...? Like, yeh, the 'benefit' of a welltimed TBN is that you get the bonus of 'oh it didn't cost 500 potency', but many people have (quite rightly tbh) pointed out that this is not a bonus, this is a kick in the groin when you DON'T get the refund. Having damage gains attached to mit is as bad an idea as attaching damage to healing tools. Look at Assize or Earthly Star. We don't use em to heal, we use them for damage, and if healing happens to line up, that's just a bonus on top. Now look at Pneuma and Macrocosmos, they have the same potency as the filler spell they're replacing, so they're completely damage neutral. Unless you're in AOE, in which case they're a gain, but that's beside the point. Back to DRK we can see that in this regard, TBN's issue becomes clear. It's not the fact that you get a 'free Edge' when you use TBN, it's that there's a chance to 'lose an Edge' by MISusing the skill. That shouldn't be a thing. Just adding a side effect that says that you get the effect of Dark Arts when the TBN is broken or expires would fix the issue. You still 'lose out' on job effectiveness by mistiming TBN, but it's by having part of the barrier unused. It's not fun to suffer a 'punishment for mistiming the barrier' when you're progging, use TBN, and the boss autoattacks once and then starts casting a spell that interrupts it's autoattack cycle.

TBN doesn't 'reward use of defensive buff with more damage' unless you count 'you can move an extra Edge into raidbuffs'. It rewards use of defensive buff with 'you didn't get cucked for 500p' which is a much more apparent issue.

[Archwizard]

TBN is damage neutral...?

Yes. And what I suggested wouldn't affect damage at all -- the only reward I'm suggesting is a cost reduction that effectively increases survivability, which is no different from people arguing for it to HoT when the barrier breaks.
You're not locked out of using the DA spender if the barrier isn't broken in time, because you can still use it without DA and TBN doesn't eat the resources needed to cast it in the first place.

If you want me to get more specific with what I mean, here's an example to clarify:

* TBN no longer costs MP to activate, but it's on a 25 sec CD like other on-demands. A weaker version of TBN (Shadowskin?) is available at lower levels that has a lower potency barrier and doesn't give DA.
* Shadowbringer has a 30 sec CD and 2 charges, no MP cost but consumes 20% of HP when activated. A weaker version is available at the level TBN is introduced (Flood of Shadow?).
* DA reworked, now causes Shadowbringer/Flood to be cast without an HP cost, and up to two DA charges can be stored at once.
* Abyssal Drain replaces Flood of Darkness/Shadow as the AoE MP spender. Carve & Spit is upgraded to a cone attack with damage falloff on additional targets, and no longer shares a CD with Abyssal Drain.
* Edge of Darkness/Shadow now restores HP whenever it deals damage.

MP is used for draining attacks to heal you just like PLD's spells (which also helps recover from any Shadowbringer overspending), DA remains damage neutral because it's not on an MP cost or refund. You can choose to play conservatively, only using Shadowbringer as often as you have DA, or take calculated risks using the extra charge during burst (which you can quickly recover from with your MP spenders), and how well you thread that needle could become a point of skill for the job at high-end play.

And disclaimer, I want to make explicit here that I'm only defining this example to clarify what I mean, not as advocacy for a specific path the devs could or should take. I'm illustrating just one of many possibilities.

[Mikey_R]

* TBN no longer costs MP to activate, but it's on a 25 sec CD like other on-demands. A weaker version of TBN (Shadowskin?) is available at lower levels that has a lower potency barrier and doesn't give DA.
* Shadowbringer has a 30 sec CD and 2 charges, no MP cost but consumes 20% of HP when activated. A weaker version is available at the level TBN is introduced (Flood of Shadow?).
* DA reworked, now causes Shadowbringer/Flood to be cast without an HP cost, and up to two DA charges can be stored at once.

Let's just cut to the relevant bits.

You have made TBN an offensive action now. By giving you a free Shadowbringer you save your own HP but also the healing from healers and all you have to do is make sure you TBN every 30 seconds. What, you want to save it for the tank buster? But, if I delay it, I lose out on a free Shadowbringer. I want to pump out as much DPS as I can, without hindering everyone else. I don't want the healer to stop DPSing just so that they can help to heal that 20% HP I lost when I can get it for free. Even if I use Edge to mitigate the healing (depending on how many you need to heal yourself by 20%, let's assume 1), then technically, the Shadowbringer is not free, it has cost me 3000MP, maybe more if it requires more casts, and if I cannot supplement that healing requirement, it then falls onto the healer, so now you have punished them instead.

Whilst this might work thematically, please please think about how it would work in a fight. If I were to do this, what are the consequences of these actions. Is this choice going to negatively affect someone else.

Also, point to a healer that would like to see a tank's HP yoyo around as they use their kit.