I’m starting to think that when it comes to deciding on job reworks and the like, the dev team looks purely at some flat statistical numbers. It would explain why the job continues to be abandoned despite being so gutted in shb, not only its’ gameplay but its’ toolkit is especially lacking compared to other tanks, it’s just more visible in endwalker. Yet it remains to be a popular option because “aesthetics” or “the story is really good”.
Meanwhile you have warriors having both a fun story and not requiring healers in dungeons ever since shb. (yes, that was already a thing back then)
something about saying “Night Elf” or “Blood Elf” or “Rocky Road Elf” or whatever in RP conversation always felt super cumbersome to me, but also saying their name in the proper language always seemed… Toolish to me.
Also update from paradise as my land lord’s goons replace the back door that was broken and I just ended night shift six hours ago and I wanna go to sleep but the dog hates guests and they’re using power tools.
Its probably a mixture of job uptake and personal biases. I don’t think SQE actually balance things in the same sense that Blizzard (used to) do. I mean Yoshi P has openly said a few years ago he makes sure BLM plays the way he wants it to because it’s his main class. He actually made changes to it to make it more difficult because it was “boring” to him, so obviously it must be boring to everyone else.
The DRK story writer was the main scenario writer for Endwalker and one of the main ones for SHB too so her writing cues can be seen all over the place. Design wise though the class is a hollow shell compared to what it was back in Heavensward or even Stormblood and there’s no objective way to dispute that.
Everyone likes to say Square Enix doesn’t nerf things but DRK has been consistently chipped away at since its inception because it was apparently “too hard” for console players to play - which is the only real balancing SQE does.
Can this job be played on a PS4/5 controller easily?
I guess there’s the thematic thing of the DRK class being all about suffering and pain and emotional angst so having players play a brain dead class that doesn’t do much and is the weakest performer of tank in all content outside the top 5% percentile (which no one here is) kind of fits the aesthetically.
Want to play a bad class, be underperforming and feel bad for it? Play Dark Knight.
You don’t even have half the cool animations you had in Heavensward (though thankfully modders managed to put them back into the game).
I am convinced that one of the senior devs though play Warrior and want them to be the strongest. Not only that but its very dumb fun to play too.
Don’t want to be that guy but its a pretty significant name drop there, considering prior context you get earlier in the expansion.
Dark Knight is fine. Strong, even. They’re just specialised in boss fights, not dungeon trash. They’re the most popular tank for high-end raiding, and deal the most damage of any tank.
The issues people have with it is generally that it is unfun rather than weak, which I agree with. It’s like a Warrior, but without the ability to make the entire healer role obsolete in dungeon content. It’s got some pretty bad animations too.
At a guess it’s because Dalaran is a laggy POS and Azsuna isn’t, so they dump people in Azsuna to prevent zone-port crashes, because investing in their servers doesn’t make money.
The fact it still has living dead unchanged from its’ current iteration doesn’t make it anywhere close to being ‘strong’ in my book lmao.
Also I cast doubt on it dealing the most damage out of all tanks but I haven’t touched any endwalker endgame content so I don’t have any firsthand knowledge about that.
In long term savage prog content (the 5% percentile I mentioned, which no one here will be doing since they’re all new players) yes they sometimes edge above Paladin, who do more
Standard and casual content its a toss up between Paladin and Warrior, then Gunbreaker and DRK.
The fact that the class had so many abilities pruned and given to other classes doesn’t make it strong either. The fact its the only tank class that is MP starved doesn’t make it strong. The fact you cannot even do wall to wall pulls as a DRK (and even struggle doing single pulls with a Sage) does not make it strong.
It is a weak class with a clear bias against it from SQE’s developers. They don’t know what to do with the class, much like Bard and Scholar.
