Dark Knight needs serious help

[Absimiliard]

You said “things you do by yourself you don’t do as a group” the only thing that would apply to that involves needing that high sustain is WAR and PLD being able to solo content they shouldn’t be able to solo, otherwise the content is also balanced to allow DRK to do it therefore meaning that PLD/WAR’s self sustain is excessive

Ah, you're missing context. I see. This somewhat makes more sense now. The post you were reacting to was made in response to others seemingly wanting PLD and WAR to lose their healing without being duly compensated in other areas, which would prevent them from properly engaging with certain forms of content due to their kits being designed with that healing in mind. You appear to be interpreting their kits as mitigation + healing, but that healing is in fact intended to serve as part of their mitigation. Their current kits would not be adequate in the event the healing was gutted.

[Supersnow845]

Ah, you're missing context. I see. This somewhat makes more sense now. The post you were reacting to was made in response to others seemingly wanting PLD and WAR to lose their healing without being duly compensated in other areas, which would prevent them from properly engaging with certain forms of content due to their kits being designed with that healing in mind. You appear to be interpreting their kits as mitigation + healing, but that healing is in fact intended to serve as part of their mitigation. Their current kits would not be adequate in the event the healing was gutted.

If you gutted both of their healing PLD would lose nothing at all, WAR would need some slight adjustments to nascent flash and bloodwhetting to counter they are weaker on the mitigation side (but not by much), WAR and PLD with zero healing would still be around the level of current DRK

[Zairava]

Man, ya'll just really want tanks to be helpless without healers, don't you?

Responding to this like 2 months late, but, no. I want healers to actually need to heal me and others in a game where the holy trinity is involved. Otherwise what's the bloody point of having them?

It is indeed funny how when in new EX my co-tank DRK was eating dirt due healer not topping him for White Hole while 8x WAR can easily clear it https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1945423090 as they can self heal through that

That's not a DRK issue, though. That's a "WAR has too much healing" and the healers either having a skill issue or ignoring them until it was too late, put bluntly. There's a lot of healing tools healers have at their disposal, so much to the point it'll be considered detrimental soon if it isn't already.

There's a lot of issues with DRK right now, but not being to invalidate healers isn't one of them. I would MUCH prefer they actually worked on its combat identity before anything.

[Lyth]

There's nothing wrong with tanks overlapping with healers in terms of support functions. These redundancies give players the potential to cross-compensate for the weaknesses of others in easier content.

That being said, a major problem with a lot of the self-healing effects that we've seen introduced this expansion is that they don't require any skill to use. When you insert a passive 'Additional Effect: Restores HP' effect on to every action, you have not designed a lifesteal tank. You might as well pin a passive regen buff on to tank stance. The tanks encouraging this design approach are likely the ones who screech at their healers every time their HP dips below 90%.

If you want to design a lifesteal tank, you need to create a skill differential around how well the player understands damage patterns. The idea being that you can't burst heal on demand. You either need to align your offensive burst window with damage spikes, or you're left with a short window after your HP has dropped to critical levels to try and save yourself. You'll know you've done a good job when everyone is on the edge of their seat wondering whether you or the boss will go down first. It needs to feel risky to play.

It's also worth remembering that every tank needs to have similar opportunities for carry potential, even if they don't all go about it the same way. If WAR or PLD can step in for a fallen healer to save a run, what equivalent benefit does DRK or GNB bring to the table?

[Supersnow845]

^except it’s not an overlap, it’s straight up the tank doing the healers job for them

Overlap would involve the healer functionally being able to be an off tank in certain situations if the situation demanded it, but healers are the squishiest role

There is never any overlap with healers there is only ever healers getting their job given to other roles with no return

[Zairava]

DRK survivability is fine, it just gets overshadowed by Warrior's ridiculous amount of self-sustain in dungeons and the other new toys the other tanks got at lvl 82. I'd much rather they actually give it its own [offensive] identity again by making it not Warrior with more ogcd's.

[Lyth]

All tanks have had a significant increase in the amount of defensive functions that they provide, well past what any of the encounters actually require. The problem is that those improvements have been unequal in a lot of cases. Could DRK clear a physical only fight, which knocks out two of their defensives completely? Absolutely. Can DRK clear fights despite actually relying on their healer for heals? Definitely. The question being asked is: what unique benefit does DRK bring to the table to offset these unique disadvantages?

If we want Dark Missionary and Heart of Light to be magic only, they should be unambiguously better than Shake it off, as well as the combined effect of Divine Veil and Passage of Arms, all of which work on all damage types. What we have right now is unambiguously worse, even before we account for the fact that these effects are magic only. If you have a problem with that, then just make all mitigation work against all damage types. What a novel concept.

It's fine to have variations in self-healing between the tanks, because content is generally meant to be done with a healer present. But if you want to have one tank be unambiguously better than the others at self-sustain, then you need alternative exclusive benefits to offset this. Perhaps other tanks bring movement speed buffs, or raidwide knockback negation, or perhaps even effects that make spells lose their cast times. Of course, when you do that, the arms race continues. Where's WAR's Plunge? Where's WAR's TBN? Where's WAR's speed boost?

[Oizen]

WAR's Plunge?

Didnt this one already happen? DRK used to be the gap closer tank way back when.

Now WAR has 4 gap closers to DRK's 2 and a hilarioously underwhelming trait.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Didnt this one already happen? DRK used to be the gap closer tank way back when.

Now WAR has 4 gap closers to DRK's 2 and a hilarioously underwhelming trait.

What's worse they made Onslaught *in fact* WAR's Plunge i.e. Plunge copy #3 (#1 is Intervene, #2 is Rough Divide) which in various ways is actually less desirable than the Beast Gauge spending version of it. Forced usage during raid buffs for damage rather than pooling 20 gauge for a dash in a fight for better uptime (the damage difference was basically neutral unless you ended a fight on a Heavy Swing otherwise).


But other than that, love how we moved into the realm of pure homogenization from both directions - WAR gets "QoL" of having no-gauge-cost dashes so noobs can pull bosses with gapclosers (eww) and DRK got neutered since Shadowbringers to "Inner Release but worse (Delirium) and Shinten but *probably* worse (Edge of Shadow)".

All for the great overlords who wanted "accessibility" in our game. Which we had, we called it "play Warrior if Dark Knight is too hectic".

[Rithy255]

What's worse they made Onslaught *in fact* WAR's Plunge i.e. Plunge copy #3 (#1 is Intervene, #2 is Rough Divide) which in various ways is actually less desirable than the Beast Gauge spending version of it. Forced usage during raid buffs for damage rather than pooling 20 gauge for a dash in a fight for better uptime (the damage difference was basically neutral unless you ended a fight on a Heavy Swing otherwise).


But other than that, love how we moved into the realm of pure homogenization from both directions - WAR gets "QoL" of having no-gauge-cost dashes so noobs can pull bosses with gapclosers (eww) and DRK got neutered since Shadowbringers to "Inner Release but worse (Delirium) and Shinten but *probably* worse (Edge of Shadow)".

All for the great overlords who wanted "accessibility" in our game. Which we had, we called it "play Warrior if Dark Knight is too hectic".

brings me back to SHB warrior which was 100% designed way better, yes it was still simple but it had nuances to it, I don't know why they made beast gauge just a "fell cleave" gauge even if that's your main spender.

That and I loved how flash/rawint worked as it was a Choice which actually made the class feel pretty unique defensively.

Funny thing is Shadowbringers was meant to be the expansion to make things super simple but EW design has just doubled down on it so much that now every job feels/plays the same even more so then it did.

I'm not saying we should go back to something like HW design, but I really hope 7.0 doesn't double down further on EW's design.