Frontline Darknights

[maximesan514]

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[JuicyHeals]

I feel the problem with dark knight isn't how tanks they are are or how much damage they do. They're whole value comes from salted earth that assuming your team is paying attention is to AOE the crap out of the enemy.
I know when I play drk that's my sole reason I feel for existing.

[Teno]

Let's be honest, the biggest offender is that the pull snapshots the whole map while immobilizing you in the process. If not for that it'd be ok.

[Rexxus]

Let's be honest, the biggest offender is that the pull snapshots the whole map while immobilizing you in the process. If not for that it'd be ok.

This right here.

The problem isn't DRK. The Problem is the Animation Lock that occurs when the game relocates your character during a pull in/push out effect. You can still take damage and/or be crowd controlled while being pulled, but you can't do anything to lessen the incoming damage from the DRK and whoever else is following up. Even if you tapped Guard as soon as the draw happens, the animation still plays and you'll take the full amount of whatever damage was dished out even after Guard has taken effect.

Two solutions:
1) Remove the animation lock entirely. Have pulls/pushes move you a set distance, but allow a person to move during the effect. This is completely possible, just look at the way NIN's LB works - if the attack doesn't kill the target, they're free to move around wearing the Ninja like a backpack.
2) Put in a damage/cc immunity during the 0.5-1s of relocating your character. Invincibility Frames (I-frames) for the draws/pushes specifically.

[Archeron]

In the reality we are in that FF devs both don't care for front lines whatsoever, (Or PvP as a whole.) I'd be satisfied if they just halved the radius of salted earths pull. It should punish teams for being clustered, not within 5 miles of a Dark Knight casting AOE. Even if you fixed animation locking the servers are still unresponsive garbage, and you'd probably still take damage through guard or while you're supposed to have I-frames.

[Laun_dingo]

Also just the simple fact that there are 72 people in frontlines and no matter what kind of balancing the game does you're always going to have problems when a lot of the same job is stacked.

This !! This is also a very big problem, and Im always sad that they have yet to consider it a problem. 72 people is way to many and creates a horrible inbalance where everyone is just in one big ball getting stun locked and killed every second.

[Noox-115]

Idk how dark knight is in Frontline but absolutly love DRK in CC it's risky but it feels so powerful last time I did a fight a life time defended the crystal for 5 min it didn't move handed up with 7 kill 1 death 20 assit it was so epic

[Eastwall]

..... Just cap all the aoe skills to 5 targets. I hope the sphegatti code is not why se didn't do it

[Oizen]

Frontline will never be a good mode.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

eh... lets not make the snowballing in Frontlines even worse by linking abilities to kills (or damage)

also i agree with the overfocus on DKR, they arent the issue per se, its more the coordination difference between a prebuild group (maybe even with voicechat)
and a bunch of mute randoms thrown together

Eh, way to easily abused by scholar, heal a bit, spread herpes around, generate 3 times as many lb's in a match compared to a monk.
This means they'd have to make every single skill have x amount of lb generation, will never happen knowing how it took half a year to fix pala exploit in onsai.

I get both your points regarding your fears about snowballing / LB charging too fast, but I did not mention under which performance conditions it would charge.

1.) LB charge rate is already dynamically adjusted based on your team's standing in Frontline - 1st place generates less, 2nd standard, 3rd more, no? Tweak the amounts to reduce snowballing getting out of hand.
2.) LB charge based on performance wouldn't necessarily be based on damage dealt but more on successful application of a skill. I.e. a Shield Bash landing with the stun would generate LB, if the target had CC immunity it would not at all. Biolysis only generating on the initial application, maybe slightly more if it had the buff to enhance it but the spreading wouldnt generate it, etc.

The idea is that semi-active to active combatants would charge LB at roughly the same pace as we do now, but LB drones would wait a fair bit if they refuse to engage without it and not engage in fights to charge it up.

It would also benefit desyncing certain LBs easier that way - which is part of an issue here given how close Sky High (90s) and Celestial River (105s) are in charge time right now.