Today I’m going to talk about Dark Knight, which has a lot of complaints from many players since Dawntrail released, including myself. I have been doom mode about DRK for quite a bit and constantly complain about it but I decided to make my personal analysis on what’s good and bad about the job. I also have been talking to many DRK players since day 1 of Dawntrail to share our thoughts on everything and most of us have very similar opinion and complaints about it, to the point some have moved on to other jobs (I have been mostly playing other tanks and Viper) while others are still playing the job due to personal preference.
I personally think the job needs a rework because outside of trying to min max mit uses, the job gameplay doesn’t feel good or satisfying in general. The changes in Dawntrail just made it worse and in this video I explain why I think it’s a problem. I also have suggestions on what can be done for the most part to improve the job gameplay overall and also add some QoL for general content.
00:00 – Intro
03:12 – Rotation
05:48 – Suggestions on Rotation
09:00 – Defensive toolkit and self healing
18:51 – Dark Knight at 60/70/80/90
26:16 – Recap on Complaints and Suggestions
33:48 – Conclusion
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jaydenz
Shoutout to Zairin for allowing me to use his DRK PoV from POTD:
https://www.twitch.tv/zairin1446
source
Thanks for sharing Jay you hit a lot of pain points I felt leveling drk, and I agree with a lot of the suggestions especially on the missing bw stacks. They should make abyssal drain similar to how it was in stormblood where it was an mp damage spender that restored hp. They could also make salted like how it is in pvp where you get healing/mit for standing in it. and tbn to 12s would be sweet to catch that last auto! I love drk but unfortunately I've shelved it until it gets reworked, been having a lot of fun with paladin this tier though.
11:20 They could give the next dark arts powered edge of shadow/flood of shadow lifesteal when your TBN breaks.
SE has no idea what theyre doing, drk is the strongest tank at current content but is now by far the weakest in all legacy ults due to losing plunge and edge damage. drk is advertised as a tank with this lower cooldown mitigation that you can use "more frequently" but a nerf to our mp regen is a nerf to tbn so we cant even really make use of its lower cooldown. I would like to see them change abyssal drain into something like pld's holy spirit. do your 123 and you get a proc for a free abyssal drain which gives you hp and mp. would fix the mp issue and our lack of self sustain.
Definitely some good points here. I dont agree with the rotation bit because the mesh of delerium and blood weapon is a QoL change for the majority of players not just the small high end raid community. Mitigation on DRK is actually abysmal and it needs reworking to fit in comparison to what other tanks have. The reality of SE is that they are going to make jobs simple and easy so majority of people can play and enjoy them, just look at the recent jobs like RPR, SGE, VPR, MNK rework, and then the VPR change as well. Unfortunately the higher raid community doesnt have the best interest of the vast community that sports this game but it would be cool to see them rework the job altogether and try to find a good middle ground that makes the parsers happy and then rest of the community happy
Soul Eater Crit heals, under dark side, sounds basic but we press souleater A LOT
For TBN I'm in favor of working as it is currently but it costs no mana. If it's kept at a short cooldown and still gives you the DA proc when broken, I think it may help a lot with MP issues. This change feels borderline OP but would put it in line with other tanks for their sustainability.
what makes me feel worse is that I will have to wait 2 more years to see if they can make it right.
i really hate the "But TBN is unique for being 15 seconds" argument. This literally has never mattered, there has never been a fight where being able to get a second TBN in during those 10 seconds has mattered in a major way. Im all for skill expression but this is a bad form of it
honestly after years of use i think its important to realize that TBN is just not that good compared to the other tank mits. I would rather have: Holy Sheltron, Bloodwhetting, or Heart of Conrundrum in the MAJORITY of situations. Like yeah there is situations for TBN where it stands out but those are genuinely few and far between. I feel the same for their magic mit cooldowns, it doesnt feel good to have completely useless mit buttons in fights.
Also oblation is not that helpful, it really isnt. I regularly give oblation to people and I promise its completely placebo, it does not save NEARLY as many lives as u think it does.
We also do not have an excellent mit toolkit, we are literally down multiple cooldowns compared to others. Our aoe mit is only magic and our short non tbn one is only magic. Of the 40% mits we also got the worst upgrade. The healing increase in rampart is also useless to us compared to pally or war since we dont heal much. We literally have the worst end of the stick with every comparison. Oblation is just worse when compared to what the other tanks get.
100% agreed, as my first main and only job I liked playing before Viper, this is my breaking point it just feels like a beta design.
i'm really glad more people are talking about this.
It while still not the best in ew was still fine. but in dt they not only changed virtually nothing but it just feels even worse.
anyone who says its fine, is NOT a drk and is definitely a healer that wants something to do.
i can understand removing damaging dashes, but give us something in return.
i said multiple times sinces the rework of dark knight and the birth of TBN that it is flawed and dumb. it needs to give you the buff regardless of the shield popping or not and now that you mentioned it tbn would be the perfect candidate to get bloodprice as passive upgrade to give you more mana regen.
and they also need to find a way to gives us old dark arts back. give us the choice do i spend my mana on more damage buffing damage with dark arts or do i use it for sustain by dark arts abyssal/carve for big heals.
getting powerslash back to be able to choose damage or selfheal for 123 combos would also be really cool plus powerslash had one of the best fucking animations ever on dark knight.
on the topic of TBN because i start to get pissed hearing this way too often: using it correctly is not a skill expression. depending on the boss fight it's either only usable for tank busters or the RNG autohits that aren't guaranteed.
tank busters are guaranteed though and guess what: the game is balanced around them being 25 seconds so the shorter CD on TBN does nothing. even tank busters aside, the short CD is only applicable if you use it on cool down. that requires you or at least one player to reliably take enough damage to pop it. miss it ONCE and it's a DPS loss. A MITIGATION ABILITY SHOULD NOT AFFECT DAMAGE DEALT WTF.
also my real issue is with the lazy design on DRK altogether.
Flood of Shaodws, Shadowbringer and Disesteem are realistically the same ability. 10y line attack with only flood having the difference of buff upkeep. it's really lame
Drk is in desperate need of a complete overhaul/rework. No amount of mild tinkering here and there will fix it. I’ve been trying off and on to level this tank but I had to give up this expac officially until something major changes with the job, it and blm will be the last jobs I get to 100 for the mount. But I can’t see myself using drk for anything when I think war, pld, and gnb feel much better
Great video, I completely agree with the job feeling "empty" now. With everything the devs removed this expansion, there's a ton of design space open on DRK for blood and mana management so here's hoping they take advantage of it sooner than 8.0. At a minimum they NEED to fix the mana, I don't mind waiting for a rework as long as they can at least bring us back to EW levels. I think your short term solutions are perfect, realistic and easy solutions for the devs that cover the majority of the complaints that people have. For long term, I'm also a bit hesitant to take away the MP cost of TBN, but if they can a find way for us to bank a mana stack somewhere in our rotation that still feels good to pull off I'd be okay with it. The new MP/Blood management ideas you mentioned could be what makes a 0 cost TBN not as detrimental to the fun of the job so it'll really depend on how they go about changing it.
I think oblation is awesome, it's probably what I use to save people the most because I don't have to think about if it will break I can just react. So as long as I still have that, I'll still be able to have fun defensively on DRK. Offensively, separating abyssal drain from carve again makes the most sense to me. They can even make abyssal a 30s cooldown so that outside our 2 min is more engaging like a plunge replacement and increases our self sustain at the same time. Living Shadow blood management wasn't the most difficult thing in the world but it made the blood gauge feel useful at least, having a new kind of blood spender will give us a reason to care about our gauge again.
I'm huffing the copium that they fix the mana soon (like 7.1), so I don't have any plans to swap off DRK but it's obvious that the job really needs help right now.
LVL 70 DARK MISSIONARY
Dark Arts proc needs to allow abyssal drain usage. Abyssal Drain needs to provide MP and its CD sharing with CaS needs to be removed.
TBN is removed from using MP.
A different thing that can be done with abilities that use mana is that they only use 2000 or 2500 MP instead of 3000. That would be 4-5 usages compared to 3 with a random 1k mana left over.
Everyone complaining about how 15s TBN is completely useless needs to go play it in DSR, P6 alone makes me respect 15s TBN
Good video Jay 👍
Thank you all for watching! I'm really enjoying the different suggestions people are giving for a future DRK rework, some of the ideas are definitely super interesting and very different than what I had in mind. Let's hope SE gives us some love!
I just don't get why they treat DRK so differently compared to the other tanks and for all the wrong things
GNB and Dark Missionary were added in the same expac yet GNB gets HoL retroactively and DRK gets it as a ShB "expansion feature"
PLD and to a lesser extent WAR got upgrades to older animations that they easily could have gotten away making them DT "expansion features" but they didn't! They gave them those buffs/changes retroactively!
But not DRK? The Scarlet Delerium combo is a DT expansion feature, why? Why couldn't DRK get the well needed animation upgrade the instant DT launched and given something worthwhile mechanically in exchange at level 96 like how PLD gets an aoe+range upgrade to Req and WAR gets a OGCD to IR that, imo, makes it more fun to press
i enjoyed the mp management from HW and SB, i wish they would tune DRK back towards that playstyle
i wouldnt mind a 3k mp or 50 blood cost chunky self heal either
If anything, we need something to do within Burst windows. I experienced DRK with a high level dungeon and I miss Plunge weaves so much. Plus I feel even worse if my healer sucks and can't stay alive.
Sadly we didn't get Omnislash but GNB got Lion Heart
random comment: I saw the thumbnail and got gaslighted thinking it was my WoL (also DRK main and same body glam for GNB lol)
Now regarding the main topic, I couldn't agree more: same reasons I listed in official forums, same reasons DankTankXIV mentioned, and same reasons you specified.
I know there are complaints since SB release, personally I started playing XIV in 4.5, 1 week before ShB release. And levelled DRK to 80 at patch 5.3 (2nd job I maxed out). Always liked the vibe, managing my MP, having to break a TBN before burst window. I mained it during all EW and cleared TEA and TOP with it. I understood and kinda agree with its identity issues and it not being the same as HW but personally I found it fun for the reasons I listed.
Now in DT, breaking TBN is horrible: sometimes you don't have any raidwide or buster to make it happen (EX2 first sync mech, you need to save some MP in your opener to have enough and make it break with auto attacks), others it doesn't break at all (M1S duo stacks) forcing you to use a macro and use it on a healer (something I already did when I was not MT and there was a raidwide). And considering this issue present in current fights it also makes the MP management worse; you generate less and if it doesn't break it punishes you a lot. At least in EW there were some specific ways to put 6 Edge of Shadows into your burst making it also possible to fix this in case you missed it.
And then the MP generation: I really wonder why they cut down weaving by a lot. Fusing Delirium and Blood Weapon was a clear change I saw coming since it made sense, plunge removal? ok, it's supposed to be a gap closer I can get it despite losing a cool animation. But reducing BW stacks and MP generation? No one who mains DRK would have a complaint with weaving EoS and MP management. Let's not even talk about the lack of Blood Gauge management
They changed the job so the bare minimum braincell can play it, same as MNK and same with VPR changes they applied in 7.01 (even before Savage release, not giving enough time to optimize the job). I'm not against having a super easy job for each role, but don't make all jobs to play like SMN. Don't want to spend time learning MNK timers, DRK resource management and heavy weaving, or find VPR DoT hard? Go and play other job. A game developer once said, "if you make a game for everyone, you're making a game for no one", same can be said about jobs.
Lmao y’all new darks man bruh OG Heavensward dark was and still is and will always be the best
That kit was useful everywhere and hell a lot of its kit was stripped and givin to other classes which as a of dark pisses me off to this day seeing classes constantly get fed our old kit
Man you’d honestly need to have played to understand it back then using dark arts to power abilities and strengthin defense abilities was wild
Mp management was real now it’s not even nothing to think about lmao
Every other tank has mad action going on meanwhile drk is based around tbh which is so damn stupid
To bad they love war so damn much they aren’t gunna do any meaningful changes lol
We will prolly get some half ass regen or some other weak shit foreal and thas IF they stop meat riding warrior lol
If we get a full rework of the class then you best pray it drops within a year and not next dlc😂😂😂
DRK has sucked since shadowbringers started. the job was complete shit, but people who didnt play any other expacs dont have any frame of reference and just dont and will probably never understand how much better drk was. theyre probably never reworking this job and have pretty much tripled down on shadowbringers awful iteration, this is it!
There’s genuinely so much I have issue with when it comes to Dark Knight, even from a more casual perspective.
It’s genuinely one of the worst jobs to level, Dark Mind is factually useless until you do a trial or raid because there’s no magic damage in dungeons, and you’re short a mitigation until level 70. That’s 40 levels and two entire expansions before coming on par with other tanks.
And the rotation, hurling out tons of oGcds that do nothing but damage and tie nothing together with the jobs mechanics, and then literally nothing but the rare edge/flood for darkside, a job mechanic that’s completely worthless. And once you’ve stripped away the Ogcds what are you left? WAR but with an edgy coat of paint. The closest the job has to a skill ceiling I feel, is breaking TBN.
Like at least fix the MP issues thanks to the blood weapon changes.
If it were up to me, I’d rework the job to take a step back on the jobs mechanics to Stormblood, with Dark Arts being the main mechanic of the job. Reworked to be on a short 20-30 second cooldown giving multiple uses of Dark arts.
And each stack of Dark Arts changes your actions to new actions, like Syphon slash into spinning slash, Soul eater into Power Slash, Dark Passegner could return and become Shadowbringer under Dark arts. Abyssal drain becomes a spell again that gets huge healing buffs under Dark arts.
Just something unique instead of just a recolored WAR.
Just like you, I'm not a "DRK has the worst CD suite" kind of person, I'm a "DRK has too many hoops for their mits" person. The next closest for narrow mits are GNB with Heart of Light and Camo, or PLD with cover (who has it made up for by having wings, too), and WAR's equilibrium (is less good when off tanking, the horror).
People who want to do fundamental changes to TBN or Oblation are looking at the wrong parts of the kit to fix the problem. They are two buttons, and oblation exists because of TBN being strong in a unique way. TBN is as strong as the mana generation of DRK and is the root problem, like you said. You also covered what I think would be good fixes for dark mind and dark missionary.
Long term? I would like to see more damage come from blood spending, and more utility+mit from mana spending. Blood spenders giving mana, and mana spenders giving blood contextually. That way it's a looping payoff instead of just hoping your TBN pops to remain neutral, and to also solidify DRK as the tank who integrates good mitigation with damage instead of being edgy warrior with less APM.
All they have to do is make it so Blood Weapon gives us 1000 MP instead of 600, that would solve all the MP issues if they want to keep it at only 3