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In today’s video, I talk about my impressions with Dark Knight in Fantasy 14 Dawntrail !
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I hope in the future they can have dark knight have more cool downs that can regenerate MP, I think something like Lucid dreaming would be cool, I felt like that they can make the job more fun that way by having other skills besides blood weapon to regenerate MP. or Have TBN be available at lower levels because having made an alt, I didn't remember DRK being a bit stressful in early leveling tbh.
Give Drk another oblation charge, and buff 100 lvl version of Shadow Wall to give more HP.
There is literally no reason to play dark knight anymore. Less actions per minute than warrior, bad sustain (reliant on healers) , way less flashy and impactful skills than the other tanks, low damage etc. I genuinely can't think of a reason to play dark knight unless you really really like the aesthetic
I'm surprised nothing was said on Salted Earth being this tiny AoE and unrewarding compared to the DoT of other tanks that just smack the target and get it.
Dark Mind being tied to magic makes it so that most fights… this doesn't even get used. And Oblation doesn't feel like it needs to be an ability, random 10% mit isn't worth a button press.
Dark Missionary needs to be lowered to below 70. The other tanks get theres prior to 70. Pre level 70 DRK is also very lacking. Most of the time the only mits you have are the ones you get from being the tank class like Rampart/Shadow Wall. In fact this goes further, now I don't know if anyone truely cares about lower level content. But losing Plunge damage, losing 2 hits of Blood Weapon, having no additional mit until 70. Salted Earth being lackluster can make DRK just feel awful at lower levels.
Oh and the new Dash is 🙁 it feels awful to use imo.
All that being said, I agree with what you said and I'll still keep playing DRK cause I'm a sucker for greatswords and dark armor.
Dark Knight is the one tank I haven't touched yet in DT. It was always the "low sustain but high damage" but now Gunbreaker does stupid damage and DRK is just left in the corner. I'll level it to 100 but unless they do something big with it in patches, I'm going to drop it after that and stick to Warrior.
As a healer main that moonlights tank I love Drk. And if any Tank could be said to be feminine it's Drk since they use emotions as power. Often I'll use Tbn to eat aoes to get more uptime
I've been thinking that all tanks really need to get less homogenised. I've been thinking that a cool idea for Abyssal drain is that is places an hp drain over time. So you get the burst of healing and then the enemy mobs will all apply a small hot on you. Also make it like a 30 sec cd with 2 charges
Buffing drk rn is so easy…
1. Buff oblation
2. Carve and Spit, and Abyssal Drains separate cooldowns.
3. Turn de-esteem into an ability
4. I like the delierium mix, but there was no reason to remove the 5 stacks of BW.
5. Have TBN not use MP anymore, You need to DPS and you have to either sacrifice a ton so you can always have 3k mp for a specific scenario or almost never have it.
Bro i feel like you were looping hard in this video xD anyways, i like tanks, i like playing or rather liked playing all of them but especially drk in SB, drk should be the tank with the highest hp drain through dark or blood skills, Paladin has to be the one with the most dmg reduction and protection ability, gunbreaker is the fastest and highest dps and warrior should just be that tank who buffs the party with shouts like in wow where you buff the dmg or the hp or the dmg reduction of your party, and remove selfheals from warrior, they have zero reason to heal themselfes or partymembers and also they have no bussiness of being able to shield the party i like warrior but i hate that they can solo dungeons and bossfights, literally makes zero sense… , this way all classes have their intended identitiy and feel unique.
While I have issues with DRK, I honestly still do really live TBN ever since unlocking it so long ago. It does have a really unique feeling reward in a game that's heavily based on "press button for free stuff". The DPS loss for missing it can suck but it's dynamic utility is way more interesting. You can use it on others which can be a lifesaver if a healer has some vuln stacks (usually stick on oblation too), In the recent normal raids we've seen sustained damage pop up as a common replacement for vulns, and it will eat from the TBN barrier first, which again can save people who aren't as familiar with the mechanics. I worry that if people complain about TBN in its current state, as we've seen already with DRK, CS3 will end up eating away at the few pieces of interesting gameplay expression tools Dark Knight has left, as they have shown they will do, and have done recently with plunge. I do think however your concerns do highlight that there should be something more to FFXIV's encounter design past "maximum dps possible". I've always preferred doing easier content with unskilled players as having to adapt to these situations are more rewarding than perfecting a rotation and learning mechanics.
Only thing I really find boring about Dark Knight in Dawntrail is that basically everything you got is GCD's that, if you are doing it right in encounters, never ever see because you double Weave Animation Cancel every-single-one of those GCDs so basically it's still just Endwalker
I'm not too worried for DRK right now because it seems fairly easy to buff into a good state. Like compared to something like BLM or SMN, it seems like a much more simple fix. Here's hoping it gets some love when Savage drops.
I feel like they should remove the interation tbn has with dark knight's damage, they could take away the mp for tbn if they want to smoothen it out more and leave more room for damage. I've seen so much misuse of tbn where the mp goes to waste where an edge of shadow would have been a better choice instead of a wasted tbn. Do that and increase the duration of it to 15s would massively help a lot, not to mention that holy would be less intrusive to dark knights with this change. The stun from holy is just way too disruptive between the two. Why these two have always had friction with each other has been baffling to me.
For some self sustain, for one just put a heal on carve and spit since they want it tied to abyssal drain, at this point and time I doubt they'll seperate the two with the design they want for it for now. If they're gonna let abyssal drain give both hp and mp, I don't see why carve and spit can't do the same, possibly a 600 potency heal for carve and spit. After that they could possibly make this combo a stacked action. Then maybe put a heal when oblation expires. I think a 400 potency heal could work for oblation.
I think the fact that abyssal drain heals off of each target it hits makes it a really good heal with mobs. This can do a lot , but a minute is a long time to wait for this heal with how little self sustain is in dark knight's kit. The above changes would increase both the dps and the sustain for dark knight, which seem to be two of the big points people have to say for the job right now. While a little more would likely be needed for dark knights's damage, this would allow for less potency changes to some of the skills.
i just want DRK to feel like it's own job, to me it still just feels like Warrior: Linkin Park edition and just feels so… odd without them replacing the buttons they got rid of without filling those gaps with other stuff. It's also just really odd to me, that they sit there and say that they made certain changes to dark knight to "reduce business" or "reduce button bloat" yet, paladin is still one of the most fucking button bloated jobs in the GAME right now, and even it feels better to play right now
What Dark Knight needs: TBN needs the same treatment that PLD, WAR, and GNB got (TBN SHEILDS DAMAGE not Mitigate remember what Xenosys Vex said about the difference of Mitigating and Shielding)>>>Fix Dark Mind to mitigate Damage not just Magic Damage>>>Abyssal Drain be its own button with more regen effects>>>Take out the effect that Living Dead dose if not healed up. (its especially worse if the drain effect you get from LD comes from one enemy). If the developers do this…i would love healing DRKs as a Sage again…but in this current state especially last expansion…this pairing is extremely difficult in dungeons…raids…in totally cool with DRKs
either have TBN heal on break or have AD have increased heal potency at 20 – 30 sec cooldown(seperate for CnS obviously).
Honestly, Dark Knight is still my favorite tank overall, but I think you hit the nail on the head as far as my personal critiques go. Mainly, I've been complaining about Abyssal Drain ever since Shadowbringers dropped. I absolutely loved how you could pull everything in a dungeon, flick on Blood Price, then just Dark Arts + Abyssal Drain till the cows came home. Broken as hell, but so, SO fun. Losing that functionality hurts. And it wouldn't take much to fix it, as you say.
Sustainability is a big issue with Dark Knight, and some of that does have to do with the changes to Abyssal Drain. Against bosses, Dark Knight does very well overall. But it seems like it flags during large pulls, compared to Warrior or Paladin, especially. Even Gunbreaker got a nice turnaround in Endwalker, but Dark Knight is still so reliant on healers and I feel like that needs some serious adjustment. As a Dark Knight/Scholar main, I see both sides of the issue pretty clearly. I had a really nasty run of Skydeep in roulette the other day, where my pug White Mage literally refused to heal 99% of the time (and not just me as the tank – they also didn't keep up with raidwides on the bosses, leading to multiple deaths and even a couple wipes). They had their head so far up Holy III's ass, I was at about 9% HP and they STILL couldn't be bothered to throw a Benediction or even Afflatus Solace my way. We died twice on trash pulls because of this. I consider myself to be very good about staggering cooldown usage so that I always have SOMETHING available to mitigate (not just TBN) but my brother in CHRIST. This White Mage didn't use even a fraction of their toolkit, and I refuse to believe they would be at level 96 (with Sage at 100) and not understand that you need to actually heal once in a while. If I had been on Warrior or Paladin, it would have been no problem, but Dark Knight? Not so quite easy…
If I could choose one tank to revert to how it was in Stormblood, It would be Dark knight.
DRK was such a fun Job in Stormblood as it was a Drain tank with Spamable Abyssal Drain.
But in ShadowBringers, they made it a water downed version of Stormblood WAR and made WAR into a souped-up and easier version of Stormblood DRK.
and I still wonder, to this day, how that freaking happened and WHY it hasn't been fixed yet. Have only been complaining about it for OVER 6 years now!
TBN also feels bad for me because it has a cool down and an MP cost whereas you arent really guaranteed to gain a free dark arts and so the penalty is pretty high if you misjudge OR if the sage/sch shield gets eaten first and your TBN remains :(. I would think it would be really cool if living shadow "covered" the DRK and could absorb a certain amount of dmg as well to help with the self sustain.
I feel like with BW and Delirium combined, you create this situation where MP regeneration is SUPER uneven. Right off the bat, you gotta dump MP to make room to restore with Delerium, but then you're trying to conserve so you don't get caught with less than 3k MP when you need a TBN. And a TBN that doesn't pop is SUPER feels bad and can easily happen. Did the boss's ultimate move take too long to wind up? Did you press it a second too late and even though you saw the animation before the tank buster you ate it anyway? Did you pop too many cooldowns and the hit didn't end up doing enough to pop it?
Honestly, I'd love it if they'd take the MP cost off TBN and just make it pure reward for using it correctly without a loss in dps. Then give us something else to use MP on, like making Spit&Carve/Abyssal Drain cost mp, have no cooldown, and restore HP. Drk has a absolutely shitty time restoring HP with Abyssal needing a huge pack (thus garbage on bosses). And if they did less damage than your 2 Dark Art abilities, you'd have to choose between DPS and restoring your health.
Trash tank
I’ve been enjoying DRK a lot in DT and I’ve mained it through ShB to present and will be playing it for Arcadion Savage but man does it really need some love from the devs, sustain is definitely an issue, I’ve been ok in dungeons because of rotating my CDs conservatively but if you get an especially bad Healer then you’re going to have a much rougher time 😅 What annoys me more is the reduced stacks of Blood Weapon meaning we gain less MP/minute, this means we can’t pop TBN as often as the other Tanks can spam there short CD which is really bad when you’re main tanking and want to use TBN against heavy boss autos in Savage/Ultimate… Really DRK needs more abilities to give it Lifesteal to restore HP and it needs the mana back that it lost with the Blood Weapon changes, because atm it feels like it’s being punished unnecessarily compared to the other Tanks 🥲
100% with you on Abyssal Drain – separate cooldown, 30s at most, it should have increased healing potency on the first target hit so that it actually does something in raids and trials.
That said I fundamentally disagree about TBN. Whenever I hear "it's the only tank that…" to me that is a good thing! Tanks are – as you note in the opening – very similar to each other, any kind of mechanic that makes them less similar is something that should be protected. Unless you want to optimize your DPS to the absolute highest the only thing DRK has to manage is MP and TBN. Darkside never drops and Blood Gauge is just a cosmetic cooldown on Bloodspiller/Quietus, you can remove both gauges from the UI and still play DRK near perfectly. Even WAR has at least its buff that is has to press buttons to maintain. TBN is fine, it works really well on all tank busters in all tiers of content, you can use it back to back on two tank mechanics in many encounters, sometimes in the same tank mechanic (Mountain of Fire in EX1 you can pop TBN twice). The fact that mashing it on cooldown will likely bite you in the ass is also fine. DRK just needs other sources of sustain (like AD) to compensate for the fact that you can't use TBN like you can Bloodwhetting on WAR to just up your HP between major mechanics.
As the tanks are now i genuinely don't even see why we even have 4 different ones.
There's the [Correct tanks] and [Incorrect tanks] because the only difference is that 2 of them arbitrarily do less dps, and one of them arbitrarily has no sustain on top of no damage. Presumably to make the people who play the [Correct tanks] feel better.
I miss serving sea food to trashmobs with Dark knight
dark knight was the love of my love in stormblood and shB, i remember hearing the abyssal drain sound when sleeping and spamming osmosis was also so fun, but now you just empty your MP in 3 seconds and then try to get it back up while praying your healer doesnt suck ass or tries to dmg cuz if he does your dead….. my god they butchered my boy so hard. I never played other tanks but i came back 1 month before DT and leveled GNB and PLD and they just felt 3 times more chill and reliable, leveling WAR rn but i would drop all of them instantly if they get my boy back on his feet.
Fantastic vid.
I love dark knight but i hate what they did to my boi.
Do you think dark knight would be fixed if they reduced Carve and Spit/ drain to 30 secs?
More actions per min, 2 uses per minute? Would that be too rough?. I feel that would be perfect as far as gameplay.
It needs a rework. I’m completely honest.
Also abyssal drain needs to go back to gcd.
Without a full rework, idk how much TBN can actually be changed. On one hand I want it moved off of MP, baseline, give DRK more offensive options to spend MP instead, like maybe a VPR style passive buff/debuff rotation style thing but with MP and all as oGCDs, just an abstract idea I've had for a while, and in doing so just move TBN off of MP and give it something other then Dark Arts, like combine it with Oblation and remove that nearly unnoticeable ability, so TBN gets 2 stacks, no cost, the shield and the small Mit, it keeps it's flexibility and with two stacks it differentiates itself from other tanks and you don't need to worry about the MP side of it cause you'll be actively using MP offensively.
But that's nearly a rework already, might as well just go all the way and fully redo the damn job again at that point. The only other way to really address the problem of TBN without a massive overhaul would be to just change Dark Arts a bit, instead of getting a free use of Edge you instead get a different oGCD attack that basically does the same thing but TBN turns into that attack when it breaks or expires. Yeah just a bandaid, but anything other then fully altering how the job functions will be a bandaid at this point.
Also breaking CnS and AD up without any further changes wouldn't really solve anything. AD would still be just as infrequently used in dungeons and in everything else it would just become another low damage potency button bloat spam ability that does next to nothing on a single target. AD would have to be changed for that to actually accomplish anything.
No, unfortunately DRK needs massive changes to address it's glaring issues, like even if they added more healing into it's kit, that just supplements it in content below Savage, makes it less of a joke to play in the easier content but doesn't do much else.
It needs to be fully reworked, make it unique by having it's oGCD rotation entirely use MP but give it more means to actually manage MP, like a combination of buffs/debuffs from VPR but a build/spend MP system like BLM, then put far more healing into all of it's kit and have a lot of it's defensives use health in exchange for larger barriers, so you don't just heal ad nauseum and have to spend it to build up your bit which would be mostly barriers cause that works well with health costs and also fits the theme. That's how I see a potential rework working, but again if we're not gonna go full rework then DRK won't ever have it's issues be fixed and we'll have this "sustain sucks and TBN is subpar still" conversation every single expansion.
This should be the next class to get a major rework. Bring back the og DRK from HSW PLEASE. Replace the garbage salted earth and enhanced unmed trait with something good 😭
Salted Earth should function like it’s PvP counterpart somewhat where it mitigates dmg (with still dealing dmg) while the Dark Knight is standing in it and it’s follow up (Salt and Darkness) giving a either a potent regen/flat heal to Drk once executed.
Abyssal Drain needs to be put back on the gcd and made part of the aoe combo
TBN should ALWAYS give you Dark Arts up front along with giving you the shield
Dark Arts should be buffed to having a 3rd/4th option of being able to enhance Abyssal Drain and/or reducing recast of Carve and Spit if it’s on cooldown (that’s to go along with Abyssal Drain being back on the gcd-like old times). Along with already giving a free use of Edge/Flood.
Delirium combo…should be extended to a 5 hitter like Drg. Come up with 2 additional hits or re introduce some older animations for the job that it had in earlier xpacs.
Dark Mind…either reworked to either being a temporary self buff.
Or give it the additional effect of being able to self cleanse the Walking Dead debuff if it’s triggered when using their invuln. With the bonus of restoring significant hp if a cleanse of Walking Dead is registered.
I wish i could say something about DRK, but leveling this tank is so bad that im stuck at 55 for over a year lmao
Us Dark Knights suffering isn't entirely a bad thing… at least we can say with confidence that we're lore accurate XD
All jokes aside tho, every time they seem to have DRK take an awesome leap forward, it takes a skull-shattering flip backwards. Its just sad at this point.
It just honestly feels kind of terrible right now.
It does everything decently, but excels at basically nothing.
Meawhile, Gunbreaker and Warrior can basically do everything incredibly well and Paladin's only weakness is its low average damage output. If it had that, then DRK really would be the WORST Tank Job in the game in every way.
So basically don't play dark knight
TBN as DRK's main ability is way too dependent on elements outside the player's control. Will the SGE/SCH over-shield you? Will the DPS cause the boss to skip the mechanic you were prepared to mit? It'd be cool if the use of TBN shortened the cooldown of Abyssal Drain, assuming it was no longer tethered to Carve & Spit. DRK has a strong visual identity, but not a strong mechanical one.
The survivality of DRK has been shit in Endwalker as well, but back then they used to do decent damage so everyone was just complacent with the shitty mitigation. I am glad DRK damage is shit now, so people finally start fucking talking about DRK mitigation. While Endwalker certainly helped with boosting some of DRK's defensive abilities, DRK still feels squishy during W-t-W pulls in dungeons. When I'm playing any other tank, I do not have to anxiously rotate literally all of my defensives on each pull. When I'm playing a healer, if there's a DRK in the group, I'm always ready to start GCD healing, because it's inevitable that their ass is going to drop otherwise.
Job is so punishing now, with less blood weapon stacks, that means missing a TBN shatter is a huge dps loss. The filler between bursts is dreadfully boring. The job needs a complete rework. It’s terrible.
I don’t think TBN itself needs changes, I think Dark Arts should have its results improved. Maybe if the shield dissipates after the timer runs out, then you would still get a free Edge or the MP refunded or something, but if you manage to succeed it, then it would deal more damage.
DRK isn't even hard to fix.
TBN – just a straight cd. no mp or dark arts
Abyssal Drain – no cd. give it an MP cost.
Living Dead – why is this STILL terrible. Remove the dying mechanic.
Get right of salted earth. shadow flare was removed for a reason.
I honestly love everything about DRK, except running it in dungeons. Which, lets be honest, is the content you're going to spend most of your time at max level doing. I know they aren't what the game is balanced around (bloodwhetting, aka the I win button, is a perfect example of that) but it should at least be fun to do them.
TBN has always been there since Stormblood unlocked as their LV70 job skill, not Shadowbringers.
Stormblood DRK was the best, it actually required thought to its MP management since it's dps stance always drained it's MP in combat. So you need to use a myriad of abilities (most of them removed since then) to fill your MP back up. Blood Weapon use to give haste. Delirum was a weaponskill 3rd hit of a GCD combo that applied magic Stat debuff, not an ability like it is now. Salted Earth use to increase it's job Gauge per dmg tick.
Soul Survivor debuff, if an enemy with it died, you heal certain percentage of HP/MP.
Dark Arts costed MP to give secondary effects to your other actions.
Abyssal Drain use to be a spell GCD, enhanced by Dark Arts it healed you for as much as War Bloodwhetting. DRK use to have superior self heals with it, then Shadowbringers reworked it nerfed it into the ground. MP management gone, self sustain gone, basic surface level mechanics. Now on the 3rd expansion keeping Shadowbringer drk with mild changes here and there, still mostly same since 2019 meh.
Maybe it could get the salted earth treatment, if it doesn’t pop you get a very short window where the button changes and can be detonated. Something along those lines could probably work.
fix for blackest night
REMOVE MP COST
ADD HP DRAIN
additionaly
REMOVE SALTED EARTH AND REPLACE IT WITH SINGLE TARGET DOT (like Power slash, old attack from stormblood)
ADD DRAIN DURING DELIRIUM
REMOVE SHARED RECAST ON ABYSSAL DRAIN