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The worst experience I've had with this expansion by far.
DRK definitely is the tank job that requires proper spacing of mitigations and it's very tricky to weave in cooldowns when there's so much to press in burst phases. But yes it doesnt make sense that Delirium got the same treatment Inner Release got yet Blood Weapon is still the same buff that makes skill speed have value. Having TBN also kind of counteracts Abyssal Drain since you have to wait for the shield and your hp to go down for value. Or maybe it's just abyssal drain being a damage skill and a heal based on more targets being niche on a tank that spams a shield.
The only problem I have with DRK is dungeon sustainability and BW not being stacks like Delirium. Dungeons are such a miniscule part of what I play though, that I honestly don't care one way or another. I feel fine in dungeons even with my lack of self heals. I'm not saying I wouldn't appreciate some self heals, like how old Delirium worked or the one that was a debuff you placed on an enemy, and when they died you got healed.
Ultimately as it stands right now, in Savage, I am maintaining 5.3k dps and most tankbusters I just eat with an Oblation and a TBN. I don't feel like paper at all.
Yoshi-P has stated he will never change Living Dead… even though he's been flooded with requests to buff/change it.
It's a Lore-Reason he says… so that is that.
Wow, that first tankbuster in the video with your first TBN, I had thought after leveling SGE and SCH that barriers in general had been made snappier. But TBN’s shield still looked really delayed for the animation
My way of giving it a rework,
Remove carve and spit and turn it into souleater 60 Sec cd but heals for you a flat amount ( this way it stays lore correct and usefull )
Turn replace original soul eater to old power slash but call it power drain ( basically the same as soul eater just a reskin/rename )
Bring back Dark arts but only let it work on very limit skills/abilities.
Give TBN the reaper shield stuff. but make it 30 sec CD cost less MP and work with dark arts to make it AOE regen. without dark arts just single target regen on the target it breaks on and remove that it gives you access to a free flood/edge of shadow.
stand in the asylum sir Madge
While this job does well in Trials and Raids, it still really needs a lot of changes. Blood weapon, TBN, Living Dead, etc. The got NOTHING this expansion. Also who asked for enhanced unmend? LIKE WHAT?
I disagree with your Living Dead Buff Idea…. Living dead technically last 20secs and it would make it broken if you give its invun the Bloodwhetting treatment. DRK doesnt need to be like Warrior.
Maybe make it so that if you get KO'd during in living dead, you become walking dead where you become unkillable for 10secs but gain the "Weakness" state which can be cured. A good trade off for a invun that could potentially last 20secs.
Drk has a really good dps output, but it needs a lot more utility and a rework of living dead. Drk just feels like such a squisy tank now and living dead is hard to heal during huge pulls or raid mechanics so unless ur a whm or blow ur load using all ur healing resources its gonna die. My idea for a living dead rework is that after u die u become invul and get a healing potency up buff. That way healers have a easier time healing living dead and auto attacks no longer become a factor in this.
I think another option might be to go back to the spirit of Blood Price and old-Reprisal, and the flavor of the class they imply during the intro quest. Make it so that if someone gets hit while Oblation is active, the DRK (and/or the target?) gets a bonus. A regen effect after being hit would likely be thematic as well as help with the no-sustain issue, and would encourage use of Oblation a lot more. Right now I personally use it when either I need a little extra help on a buster, or as a last-ditch effort to save 2 people during a raidwide and someone else got the TBN. Or of course trash pulls in dungeons because DRK needs all the mitigation they can get x.x.
As it is, it really just feels slapped on so they can say DRK got something, as a fairly weak vanilla defensive. But, they can flavor it to help with a deficiency in the toolkit.
It's not great… But I still love it.
I think my main issue is the design is just a mess and makes no sense.
Theres so many just outright "this is kinda bad" things, that the good stuff gets overshadowed.
As someone who is playing DRK everywhere atm since my co-tank in my static is a PLD one trick, I do feel a lot of what is said is fair. The biggest props I have to give is acknowledging that if TBN loses its MP cost, its cooldown needs to be increased AND it can't keep its free damage from proccing it if it is free. I don't entirely agree with everything (definitely don't like the auto crits on Living Dead idea, since it would make DRK a similar outlier for gear as WAR), but I feel like this is one of the more fair reviews of current DRK out there between the "DRK HIGHEST DAMAGE SO GREAT" copium and "DRK = TRASH BECAUSE NOT FLASHY" copium. Personally, I don't mind Oblation. I wish it was better, but I don't mind it. If I had to give a list of things to change about DRK atm:
– Living Dead. For the love of god, it's been since HW and they still have done nothing for this skill. At the very least giving it a Thrill of Battle-esque effect that you are easier to heal would go a long way to acknowledge the skill is flawed.
– Dark Mind. While, on paper, I love this skill, this skill has 2 big issues: 1) it is a pain in the ass to know what damage is magical in game and 2) the mitigation being magic only sucks. Either make indications for physical vs magic damage that aren't scrolling through the battle log or make the mitigation, similar to how Feint and Addle were handled, also a little bit of physical mitigation. Increase the cooldown if you have to, but this skill needs something.
– Dark Missionary. Same as above with an extra dose of: this skill is the exact same as Heart of Light. That's boring. Do something to differentiate the two. Even just giving them the Addle vs Feint treatment would be better.
– Carve and Spit + Abyssal Drain. Give CaS a healing effect like AD and make AD better from 3 targets or more instead of 4.
Doing any (ideally all) of these would improve DRK a lot for the feeling. Ultimately, it is still going to be the black sheep of the expansion for the community at large, just like WAR was last expansion despite actually being quite good, but we can at least make some things better about it.
if you queue into dungeon as DRK you are griefing
While leveling War, Gnb and Pld to 90, I didnt die once in dungeons. I levelled Drk to 90 on Saturday and today, and I died four times during trash pulls. It just feels so bad. Wheres my Heart of Corundum, Bloodwhetting or even just Holy Sheltron? TBN just doesnt cut it, man. I dont think Im gonna touch Drk unless they make it feel better.
I really liked your suggestion for TBN and living dead. I was thinking if they left living dead to be so underwhelming they could maybe give DRK a battle res where you have to heal the ally to full just like LD. Might sound a bit ridiculous though so maybe that skill could share a recast timer with LD or something
Not sure if that would be too strong but I feel it thematically works and would make me personally forgive LD’s huge flaw
I have a friend who hard-stans Dark Knight and I simply do not fucking get it. I'm 99% sure the difference is she levelled it during Stormblood when it was good, and I started in Shadowbringers, so I had to start from 30 with ShB DRK. This class genuinely does NOTHING and the only reason it's not my least favorite job is because MCH exists.
– Blood Weapon has always been dogshit, and somehow they didn't make it stack-based.
– It is impossible to get 5 hits of Blood Weapon in AoE because your AoEs are spells for some ungodly reason (why is THIS one of the only sources of flavor left on any class in the game??)
– Blood Weapon is meant to be the fun powerful 60s burst phase like Fight or Flight or No Mercy, except actually all it does when you stop and think about it, is if you perfectly land 5 GCDs in this window you get… one extra Edge of Shadow. Fucking hooray.
– Bloodspiller and Quietus are literally just Fell Cleave and Decimate, except Bloodspiller does a whole 60 more potency, but they don't auto-direct crit in your 60s window, so they feel utterly limp.
– Living Dead is a worthless joke of an invuln because it's now functionally the only one that lasts less than ten seconds, because if you get 'ten seconds worth of value' out of Living Dead then you fucking Die at the end. It's worthless healer stress, you have no sources of healing in your kit outside ~Abyssal Drain~ so it's completely anti-synergistic with the class itself, it's virtually only good for Savage tankbusters, at which point congratulations, you've invented Worse Holmgang.
– The levelling experience is truly horrendous because it's the only tank that doesn't have both hits of its AoE at level 40, instead taking until **72** to regenerate either meter or MP in 2+ target scenarios.
– It also takes the longest to get its anti-tankbuster cooldown, because people can gas up TBN all they fucking want but that's no excuse for taking until fucking 70 to get it when Gunbreaker gets it 8 levels after unlocking the class, Warrior gets it mid-Heavensward levels, and Paladin literally gets it at 35.
– Also Dark Mind is a useless button more than 80% of the time, even moreso in dungeons, because most sources of magic damage are raidwides that would bounce off the tank anyways, and bosses that sprinkle in tank-targetted Magic damage are frequently untelegraphed like A12's Divine Spear and thus incredibly hard to compensate for, making this a slap in the face to get at level 45 when the class is already hurting for mechanics, meanwhile the other three tanks already have their class gauges by now. It is absolutely no substitute for the real extra cooldowns Warrior and Gunbreaker have at this level in Thrill of Batltle and Camoflage.
– Then all it gets from 50-60 is more fucking weaves, getting your gapcloser early is not a substitute for mechanical depth.
– Abyssal Drain is the one source of stimulus this class provides in trash pulls, and you only get it once a minute, and NOW for some reason it shares a cooldown with Carve and Spit and it's only a gain on FOUR targets or more if you don't need healing, so any dungeon with a forced single pull is even more dull than usual.
– Salted Earth is still on fucking 90 second cooldown for some reason even though almost everything else in the game got standardized to 60/120, so now that Beeg Number Go Brrr weave they give you at 86 doesn't fall under raid buffs half the time.
– Delirium 'granting MP' is a joke at the player's expense in single target because for some reason it only makes Bloodspiller give 200, which means you barely bought yourself one Syphon Strike or Stalwart Soul over three GCDs, and that's one-fifth of an Edge or Flood, whoop-di-shit.
– Living Shadow is genuinely a fucking hazard to the party because the number of times I have adjusted to a mechanic in savage around Fray pissing about in the background thinking he was a real player is entirely shameful.
– Living Shadow is also a completely uninteractive mechanic similar to Automaton Queen, which I also hate, except even in that case you have one button to press to command her to do the big power move if you need to catch it in raid buffs or before the boss disappears. In Fray's case, he literally just does 'stuff, idk', making him unreliable in AoE because sometimes he'll do Quietus and sometimes he'll just Bloodspiller and burn a ton of damage.
– Also Living Shadow is tied to the same meter as your Blood moves, meaning unlike Queen it's possible to overspend and drift one of your most powerful buttons, so thanks Yoshi P, I really appreciate that.
– Oblation is the only thing this class gained in Endwalker to feel less like complete dogshit in trash pulls, and functionally it's literally just an extra cast or two of Reprisal, when the class is in desperate need of another BIG cooldown, not more smaller shittier ones, since you already have TBN as a more renewable source of small cooldowns in dungeons, this is the only thing the class has going for it and they still insist on stepping on its toes.
– Then after Oblation, all it gets is ~mOrE fUcKiN' wEaVeS~, because that's the only identity this class has now, 'it presses a lot of OGCDs once a minute'.
Like genuinely back to front Dark Knight is a miserable experience, both to level from 30 and at cap and I do not understand what anyone sees in it. I can't fathom why you wouldn't play any other tank in the game, especially when Warrior is RIGHT THERE and does literally everything Dark Knight wants to do. It has an infinitely better levelling experience (ESPECIALLY after they buffed Raw Intuition), more lifesteal, a better 'take damage but live at 1' invuln, a more satisfying 60 second burst, better and more satisfying defensive cooldowns, more interesting and interactive filler than just 'pressing a high number of weaves' with Infuriate management, it's the same fucking class except not a joke.
Shittiest job experience ever in endwalker… wth Yoshi.
Make living dead a self revive pepega
Everyone I've heard has said "DRK is fine. It does top dmg among tanks, so it's fine"
Numbers really don't mean anything to me at this point. DRK feels like garbage to play; Straight and simple. Blood Weapon is crap, Dark Mind feels useless in 95% of content, and don't even get me started on Living Dead….it's simply not fair with it's consistency compared to how other tank jobs play.
TBN is a joke. In savage, tank buster hit for around 100K without mitigation. TBN is basically a 20K shield with tanks having 80K hp. But Bloodwhetting 20% DR alone already 20K less dmg taken. Its inclusion of a 400 potency barrier and 4x 400 heals afterwards (which can crit) make its total effective mitigation/heal of about 40K worth. BW is basically 2x as strong as TBN.
DRK is the new floor tank in dungeon
Drk levelling also needs an urgent overhaul. I played it yesterday after a long while, did a lv 70 roulette, and couldn't believe how poorly its systems work. Sitting at 40 blood gauge in a big pull, 10 away from a quietus, but unleash does not trigger blood weapon and stalwart soul (a damn 1 2 aoe combo) is not unlocked until 72. That was so shit.
instead of trying to fix Living Dead, they also could just make something complelty new.
TBN becoming free is fair, but then DRK has no mana management. It becomes like WAR's Beast Gauge, so just fluff tbh. If they're making TBN free then they need to rework DRK so it's not even more brainless than it is right now.
What sword is that and how do I get it?
I like the idea of TBN also adding a heal when it pops but disagree with other changes. If it was given a longer CD or changed too much to be like the other tank spammables they should just be taken away and replaced with another rampart. BW def needs charges or something different
I love DRK but playing it has just been painful. I can get the burst I want while still self heal as GNB. How the hell am I unable to life steal with Blood Weapon or Bloodspiller? If any Tank should be the sustainer it’s DRK.
Also the dungeon memes are true but dungeons aren’t where competent players rate job performance
The salted earth placement was annoying to weave for frontal bosses north of arena where you have to be up close (think phantom train), especially if a macro was used for it.
Also LD durations in the tooltip are always very deceiving. Despite it’s long description. You will always only get less than 10 seconds of value for walking dead (because you’re healed before the max duration expires) else you would just have been dead. The walking dead activation has also been historically buggy in certain fights for very specific mechanic conditions that other tank invulns never have a problem with. The list goes on and on for problems with that skill
DRKS DPS window hides the fact that it needs a complete rework..not just self heal buffs.
my problem with DRK is that it has no identity. it's just like playing WAR with a tonne more filler oGCDs to mash during your burst window. that, bundled with a bunch of QoL issues and the living dead being the worst invuln by far, makes me less inclined to play it
Well for starters, WAR doesn't lose IR stacks on anything that doesn't use Beast Gauge, so it is still better then Delirium in every imaginable way.
On TBN, I agree with your stance on it's current state, I think anyone who says "it's still the best" or even "it's fine as is" are on some heavy copium or literally just don't play DRK, HOWEVER, just removing it off of MP may solve some of the issues with TBN but then you have spammable abilities that cost TRUCK LOADS of MP and we'll be boiled down to just using them as soon as you are able to without thought. So if TBN is taken off MP, then something has to be done about it's usage overall to avoid the class becoming mindless button smashing for damage output.
Personally I'd prefer it to stay on MP but you wouldn't NEED it to break to get Dark Arts, and the fact that TBN would still cost the same as Edge or Flood means it couldn't be used to get more damage, it would just result in the same outcome if you had used it for damage, that being it's particular flavor over the others. You wouldn't be punished for it, basically, and maybe increasing the shields duration just a tad couldn't hurt either, it's a much tighter window then all the others without lasting effects, so even with this kind of change it could use some more love…..
Oblation is kind of fine simply cause I like being able to put it on other people, but it is extremely boring, so honestly just throwing it onto TBN seems good to me as well. That being said Dark Mind is still utterly worthless in more then half the content, so maybe instead combine it with Oblation and give it something more interesting to do as our secondary defensive, like all the other tanks have ONCE AGAIN.
As for healing honestly I just think putting Cure potencies on Bloodspiller and Quietus would be the best option. It would make Delirium a valuable sustain tool especially in dungeons, giving it SOMETHING over IR, plus those abilities use BLOOD gauge! Does it not just make sense to heal yourself when using something from your BLOOD gauge!? Also they need to put a Cure potency on CnS, the fact they didn't is kind of an embarrassingly stupid oversight since they went out of their way to put MP regen on AD…….
On LD though, I think your solution is overly complicated, tbh. Just remove the "you die at the end and there's nothing you can personally do to stop it LOL" aspect of it, just straight up. Make it so once Walking Dead activates you can't be reduced past 1 HP for 10s, it will still have a longer CD then Holm so the ease at getting the full use of the 10s would be the longer CD. Boom, it's on par with the others and DRKs can stop hating the fucking button….
Also putting BW on a charge system should have been done for 6.0, there is no getting around that. I'd honestly prefer it to be a constant trait instead, cause if we could generate MP more steadily like every other MP using job in the fucking game, a lot of the jank around the class could be directly addressed. But seeing as how that's super unlikely, a charge system would make the ability bearable, maybe same duration as Delirium with 3 stacks for 1000 MP, would be the same total as 5 stacks for 600 MP and less of a hassle to get full use out of it, but even so any charge system would be better then the current shit.
I do say that they really could do some button consolidation.
Imho they could've just turned Edge of Shadow into Shadowbringer and make Flood of Shadow an equivalent version, with making Dark Arts immedately grant a charge and if you have 0 Dark Arts have them cost the normal 3000
(And ofc, have Dark Arts generate over time for 60 seconds per charge)
And heck, that could give a Blood Weapon a more important use with it auto generating two charges of Dark Arts.
As for Oblation, why couldn't they just make it a "Counter Window" abiltiy for DRKs alone rather than targetable, with half the cost of TBN.
TBN is targetable and is for even bigger hits (And grants Dark Arts)
Oblation would be personal, and would grant healing on breaking rather than Dark Arts
DRK is an absolutely fantastic job! I can join Savage groups and simply go "you go MT; I'm DRK" and then just play blue DPS for the entire fight and only hit a few mit buttons here and there! Its super relaxing