Dark Knight Filler is Boring

[RSS News]

I know there's been a lot of discussion about issues Dark Knight has, but there's one I haven't seen talked about as much that I wanted to bring up, and that's that Dark Knight's opener is incredibly busy and active (and quite fun, IMO), but once those ~20 seconds are over and they're back to spending ~40 seconds doing filler, Dark Knight's rotation is extremely simple and repetitive. To compare it to what other tanks get to do in between their 1-minute windows:

Paladin:

• Their filler combo is 7 steps long. Steps 1 and 2 can be done before finishing steps 4-7, and one step is ranged, giving them lots of room to shuffle things around if they want for uptime or buff alignment.
• Circle of Scorn and Spirits Within/Expacion are both 30s cooldowns, so they get to hit them each once again while waiting.

Warrior:

• They have two 3-step filler combos to bounce between, one to maintain a damage buff and one to build gauge and self-heal.
• Every two filler combos (or every ~1.88 on average, I think?), they get enough gauge to use Fell Cleave, and using that further decreases the cooldown of Infuriate to give more Fell Cleave (and its upgraded variants).
• Upheaval is a 30s cooldown, so they get to hit it once again while waiting.

Gunbreaker:

• They have a single 3-step filler combo that gives them a cartridge every time, which they need to balance between making sure they have enough for Gnashing Fang and Double Down, while spending extra ones on Burst Strike.
• Gnashing Fang is on a 30s cooldown, so they get to do the combo again while waiting.
• Danger Zone/Blasting Zone is a 30s cooldown, so they get to hit it once again while waiting.

Dark Knight:

• They have a single 3-step filler combo.
• Every 3 filler combos (or every 2.5 on average), they get enough gauge to use Bloodspiller.
• I guess you could count Salted Earth as something since it's 90s? So it's going to naturally drift in and out of every other filler window.

So in comparison to the other tank jobs, Dark Knight has:

• The simplest filler combo (single 3-piece, tied with Gunbreaker)
• The least resource gain from their filler combo (letting them "earn" less uses of other buttons between DPS), meaning they're stuck doing the same loop more than other jobs.
• No 30s damage cooldowns to hit during each filler

In regards to least resource gain, you could argue that your combo gives you MP, which does directly give you more uses of Edge of Shadow, but you gain so little that if you just use it during your 1m/2m windows (like you'd probably want to anyways to align with party buffs), you don't gain enough MP to ever have to worry about overcapping.

cont. next post

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