Watch the WARRIOR version here: th-cam.com/video/SG_q-IG9ZAE/w-d-xo.html Watch the PALADIN version here: th-cam.com/video/er9huBEamPg/w-d-xo.html Due to popular demand, you can download these old skills as a standalone mod now (which also includes instructions and more ways to further customize your toolkit). You can download these files using the following links: - bit.ly/3PqO9YL - bit.ly/3IwMA9u Please stay tuned, as more Jobs will be covered soon!
This is simply fantastic, i feel that i'm actually dealing more DPS with some of these lolol Is there any way to put Power Slash file into the Syphon strike skill tho?
Bummed that's removed! I never got around to properly leveling up Dark Knight but I always loved that animation. I wound up becoming a GNB main, but I still want to get back to leveling DRK at some point, especially considering how good I've heard the job quest story is.
Except that it was very clumsy looking. IMMA SLOWLY SWING MY SWORD, GET IT STUCK BEHIND ME. REACH OVER MY SHOULD for a tiny pop of darkness. Your sword is still back there as if your wimpy arms couldn't hold it up to start with, and your back is still pointed at the enemy. I know SAM does it all the time, but they have the decency to stab people behind their back, not turn their back because they louged thier big ass sword into the dirt behind themselves like a slow clumsy dolt.
@@CobaltDysprosium You wanna knock it for not being "combat effective"? Bitch at least you stab the MF, jump with the blade still in and come down on them with the sword still in front of you. Realistically the jump killed the target. Power slash? LOOK AT ME JAM THE FUCKING SWORD BEHIND ME AND CRISS CROSS MY ARMS OVER MY SHOULDERS FOR A PUNY SHADOW POP. No big ass blast. Just sword jammed ass side and tiny pop all while your ass is front side. Wowwy so combat effective. Power slash never looked good and it's weak, clumsy AF looking animation matches how useless it was.
@@hiddenmaster6062 You were the one who brought up combat effectiveness when you mentioned how Power Slash turns your back to the enemy when Souleater does the same shit mid air lmao. It's okay to be wrong man, no need to get so worked up over an animation. CnS is just a cooler Souleater anyway, at least if we had PS instead there'd be a bit of animation variety.
The 123 that DRK has now looks unbelievably clunky. I fucking hate it. Bring back these old animations, because although DRK is pretty fun gameplay-wise, style-wise it sucks shit.
@@NoOne-us9xv I love drk and think it plays fine, but damn these abilities looked great. The dark arts mechanic was also really cool, shame they stripped down all complexity to make it a busy ogcd spam mess.
@@Coolguysup What's great is that SE's logic behind removing it was because using it every 8 seconds was boring and spammy. Now we have nothing interesting behind our design while PLD is some kind of holy badass, WAR gives zero fucks, GNB has a few old staples bolted to it that we lost. Oh, and they literally designed an entire bubble healer job based on using Dark Arts and their homogenous healer design philosophy: SGE!
@@Zegreiart Either way yall complain, spend some time playing paladin and you'll say it's outdated and has low damage, spend time playing war abd it will be it's boring and too easy... spend time playing gunbreaker and it's too complicated... Honestly people should just make up their mind, can't find a sine general consensus of the state of tanks, they're either all bad or just okay or really good no one agrees on any one thing
Sole Survivor only restored 30% of both HP and MP when the target died within 15 seconds after it had been used. If the skill expired it would restore only 20% of both. That coupled with the fact it had a 120 second cooldown made it fairly useless in a boss battle and its long cd meant you usually only got to use it's full potentional once during mob pulls befor you reached the next boss. Not entirely horrible but very, VERY limited use. Tar Pit was just a standard PVP aoe with a heavy debuff and mild heal.
@@Duskaria Sole Survivor would actually be pog now that abyssal drain shares cd with carve&spit, 20% max hp heal is way better than legit no healing (except for souleater)
All I wanted them to do w/ Sole Survivor was introduce a trait where you could manually proc it (like you can manually detonate Earthly Star/Macrocosmos atm) to restore 100% hp if active when/if the ‘Walking Dead’ effect were to trigger from LD I really think that ability could have been nice with later traits added to it.
@@Duskaria or what they could do is make it a 1 min cd since having no plunge makes the job feel more empty (imo, i miss plunge) and have its effect be around 10% instead. would give it the sustain it needs along with tarpit, drk would likely be fine with those two alone
God I miss Power Slash and Sole Survivor so much. Low Blow being given to all tanks hurt on a different level. Finding out that DRK fights dirty to stun their opponent was a great thematic note when compared to the chivalrous knights they were in opposition to.
Them giving Low Blow to everyone always confused me a bit. Sure, it's so new tanks know what's the stun but having all the tanks have a flavoured stun unique to them is just cool. The confusion bit can be solved by just reading the tooltip.
Was an objectively good change to give all tanks the tools, but wouldn't hurt to let each one have their own animation and flavor. Paladin still has 2 stuns.
dark knight was so good back in HW that they have to "sunder" it and split it to other tanks 1. dark dance = anticipation (back in STB) 2. low blow 3. reprisal 4. delirium (animation) = interject endwalker DRK is now 9/14th of its former self
And yet, they saw us being able to pop TBN more often and two charges of a mini-rampart as acceptable. Why the hell don't we have at least two charges of Abyss Drain or something? Tar Pit does need to come back in some form...
@@childOFtengu Dude I miss the old Abyssal Drain so much. It has such a cool animation to be limited to 60 secs. I miss the days of Dark Arts+Abyssal Drain. So much self sustain. They even kinda nerfed it cuz it shares a cooldown with Carve and Spit now
@@childOFtengu Gonna be honest, outside of initial burst. Having 2 charges of something is a garbage idea unless the job has a mechanic built in to refresh it quicker. Like infuriate on Warrior.
I've played drk since it was released as a casual and into my ffxiv raiding career. Seeing the old animations makes me wonder how good the dark knight COULD have been if even a few of these abilities were maintained. Sole survivor was one of our best tools, and scourge was nothing if not satisfying to execute. Not to mention powerslash will forever be one of my favorite tank animations, and I severly hope if they rework dark, that they bring these back
Man i remember when they buffed Sole Survivor to give back slightly less HP/MP when the debuff wore off instead of nothing. That might have been the same patch when Dark mind was buffed to a flat 30% magic damage reduction. Man those were good days.
I would love to see some of these moves brought back too. Something like when GNB uses that special combo of theirs that has a cooldown after using it, and have them used during a special DRK combo.
I too am a dark knight main since day one it came out in Heavensward. I feel like DrK is suffering a identity crisis rn as all the other tanks basically do DrK’s job far far better than it. I genuinely feel it needs a complete revamp/rework. I would like to see it go back to its original roots, in the form of a power house tank that draws on its health to dish out enhanced powerful attacks and high sustain within reason. Because ofcourse I don’t want to break the healer synergy with a tank.
@@Arctic.Sirius DRK used to have a spammable abyssal drain instead with better healing when combined with dark arts, the healer didn't need to heal as long as they had blood price giving them their MP back
Imagine if we still had Sole Survivor, and an AoE version. Like base one gives 20% HP/MP back, AoE gives 5% per enemy. That's all the sustain drk needs
I agree 10000000% smh Sole Survivor saved me SO MANY times back in hw and I feel removing that ability is "solely" what led to its downfall. At least if they're gonna place Abysmal Drain/Carve and Spit on shares cd, they couldn't given c&s a decent heal
Id easily trade in soul eater animation for this. It was glorious. Though i have a good feeling some damn good stuff is coming our way the next expansion
I like how the ending lyric was "All our splendor, bathed black in silence." Meanwhile you cut it off after "All our splendor" and then it's just silent and pitch black. If intentional, I see you. If not, providence.
Hsw Drk was the peak for me, it had it's jank as did a lot of jobs back then. It needed improving not having it's identity and flavour slowly chipped away.
tbh, it feels like lately, whenever a job stands out too much, SE's answer is to take away its identity and homogenize it with other classes in the same role like they did with scholar
@@rocketdog734 SCH was another job that had a lot of jank but was very fun, I can't even look at current SCH or any of the other healers if I'm being honest. I preferred all of them massively back in HW despite the jank.
I think Scholar in Endwalker is playable again. I disagreed with the direction they took in SB and ShB but EW seems to be removing some of the homogenization and allowing for some uniqueness back somewhat. Some may disagree considering all the jobs got a lot of the same treatment and changes like cast times (which was needed to weave btw) I think for all the jank and sometimes skill bloat of HW it definitely did have the most unique class design and a lot of effort put in to how cool a class could be imo there needs to be (another) rework at this point of DRK, AST, and NIN since those seem to have gotten screwed in EW
DRK in HW emphasized less DA spam and more DA for additional utility. Though if you were trying for DPS numbers DA SE was still the go to combo. Wasnt until SB when DA spamming was really prevalent.
I remember in PvP when Low Blow would yeet someone and Plunge caused a stun. Lot of times where I'd plunge stun then yeet kick someone off of the edge of a cliff.
All the slashes in this video are soooooooooooo much cooler than the ones we have in game. We absolutely need Hysteria, Power Slash, Spinning Slash and Sourge back. Honestly it's such a shame they removed these incredibly cool animations.
Warrior's kind of in the same boat. Man I wish we kept the Butcher's Block animation instead of Storm's Path, though at least we got Steel Tempest and Inner Beast back with Chaotic Cyclone and Inner Chaos.
I recall reading somewhere that they wanted to wind down the attack speed of Dark Knight in Shadowbringers to make it feel "heavier". This was where they abandoned the rather unique Hans Tolhoffer european longsword combat style inspiration and went for a more generic "GUTS BUT EVIL WIZARD" visual aesthetic, which is just incredibly short-sighted. I suspect this is due to Dark Knight falling under new management who didn't understand or simply didn't care for the nuance of the class and wanted a copy-paste Warrior with thick, heavy swings to attract the Berserk crowd. The end result is a class that moves like molasses, like its animation frames got slowed, instead of looking like something that strikes with momentum.
Power Slash looks weak and clumsy. And you say that Soul Eater, the move everyone loved to use since 3.0 where you do a powerful jumping double slash is less cooler than wimpy reach over shoulder while sword is stuck in ground for a wimpy little shadow pop.
@@inuxys If you don't find it braindead now compared to how it played in Heavensward, you are the type person Dark Knight is now for. Not trying to be insulting, we all have different things we enjoy in a playstyle.
@@Far_Dee i knew you would bring the "compared to hw" argument. Calling drk braindead now is calling all tanks braindead, because as of rn its the most complex one. The reward is being the dps pumping tank. Rn drk has many problems but being not complex enough is not one of them. If u wanna say "compared to", then sure, it might be. But calling drk braindead in EW is just disingenuous
@@inuxys The only reason one wouldn't consider it braindead is because you unlock the skill that keeps the entire class together at lvl 70. If it weren't for TBN, the entire job would just be 1-2-3 until raidbuffs. Just sucks they didn't expand upon what makes this job fun, and rather focused on expanding Salted Earth and adding another FoS.
@@inuxys I mean... Every tank IS brain-dead now compared to how they used to play. You don't have to manage your enmity, you barely have to manage your cooldowns (every cooldown used to be longer and do less), and rotationally they're very simple. Even Dark Knight now is just: Use all your oGCDs every 2 minutes and then spam Soul Eater combo for the other 80% of the fight. The hardest thing about the job is timing Blood Weapon correctly so you don't miss a GCD under it, and that's only because it's been implemented poorly and doesn't work like every other 10 second buff in the game. This shit is a shell of its former self.
Dark Passenger 0:02 Delirium(Old) 0:13 Power Slash 0:24 Scourge 0:39 Spinning Slash 0:51 Tar Pit 1:04 Brimstone 1:16 Cardinal Chill 1:28 Sole Survivor 1:39 Low Blow(Old) 1:50 Reprisal(Old) 1:59 Blood Price 2:09 Dark Arts 2:18 Dark Dance 2:28 Dark Side 2:34 Shadowskin 2:44
DRK seriously needs some of these abilities now! Compared to the other tanks, it seems pretty behind. When i run dungeons, i just get rekt always waiting for TBK to come back up to be gone in 2 seconds while praying the healer is spamming heals on me.
Its not as behind as you may think in high end duties but I definitely feel like they could get a rework. That being said, I'm one of ones who completely disagree with their direction in terms of tank design so I'm of the opinion that they need to rethink every tank.
@@jamielee2353 It's funny cuz they just got a rework one expansion ago lol. I agree that tank design in general has gone downhill and I'm a casual player. I miss the days of stance dancing and having to not only balance your dps but also holding enmity. Tanks are just glorified DPS now.
@@jamielee2353 DRK's main advantage and what makes it "popular" is its high damage output. It's ahead of the other tanks by an almost silly margin, but they pay for this by being made of paper. They have a fraction of a fraction of the sustain and mitigation that other tanks have, and so are absolutely useless in the MT role. Unless it gets changed (which, it almost certainly will), the Savage speedclear meta will be bringing DRK as OTs, pretty much as a glorified melee DPS with the odd mitigation cooldown to throw on the main tank. In essence, this is the early HW/early SB meta of wearing Melee accessories on a tank, crippling your survivability in exchange for damage.
Yeah DRK is just stupidly fragile now in dungeons, wall to wall pulls would absolutely smash it to pieces since they lack selfheals (souleater is just so pathetic)
I am not a main tank, far from it, but since everyone is talking about a potential rework of the job, i wonder : Would it work if DRK was a shield tank ? What i mean is, all others tanks seems to have good HP recovery (from what i know), so giving something equivalent to DRK would just make him like all the others, yes/no ? TBN is an amazing cooldown, so why not go all out in this direction and give it more shields that give more free stuff if used right ? I only started to play in ShB, so i never knew what was DRK before, and i kinda like it right now at a casual level. If they pushed that even more, would it be fun and viable ?
This video is about DRK but looking at old footage every class seemed so much more interesting back then. Full of situational but powerful tools that separated the okay players from the really good ones who knew how to use them. I wish I started playing the game sooner.
I appreciate the improvements and QoL changes we've gotten over the years and think the game is better for them, but I definitely wish we had more of that. The HVW classes were definitely hit hard by that weird sort of homogenization. They were lopsided and odd, but I wish they had leaned into that instead of just sanding off a bunch of edges. Now as they attempt to maintain what identity DRK has left, it feels stunted compared to the other tanks who they've been more liberal in gifting
I would trade Hard Slash for Spinning Slash as the first combo action without a second thought. Hard Slash just looks like you're throwing your back out and is too sluggish. I know DRK uses a large greatsword, but it's still a tank. That weightiness of your swing isn't translating to power. At least not those sluggish actions on the job anyway. Same for Souleater. Rework the animation to be one of these removed actions' animation.
I've actually modded syphon to be scourge, Souleater to be power Slash, Flood of Shadow to be Dark Passenger, Current Delirium to be Dark Arts. Hard Slash is a bit weird, but I can't stand the animation for Syphon Strike.
I miss Power Slash's animation. Didn't get a lot of use once you had established a sufficient amount of enmity, but it had always been one of my favorite animations for the job.
Today is the 25th of June, 2024. We shall be adding Plunge to this list by the time tomorrow hits... at least, in PvE? We might still have it in PvP, hopefully.
I will never forgive the devs for butchering DK kit and personality. Its gameplay is completely souless, full of weird ogcd's. Plus, how could they get rid of such cool animations? I want HW DK back.
Power slash and low blow was the main things that sold me on dark knight when it first came out. Also how it was a harder tank to play really had to pay attention to what you was doing .
I always hated just how much they've been dumbing down the class with SHB and Endwalker. Part of the fun was actually managing the Mana bar so when you remove the need to really manage it you remove a massive chunk of it's skills and what made it fun and unique. It's second melee rotation gets trashed with all of its cool animations, dark arts was fun being able to choose which skills to make better, mark for death added a bit of a challenge to burn down an enemy in time. Now the entire class boils down to spam melee rotation, keep damage buff up and just spend resource bar whenever. It's as if they took out the fun of Dark Knight and gave it to Gunbreaker to make it the new "blue DPS"
But GNB is boring as shit, it literally has three 30-sec burst buttons, two 60-sec burst buttons, three buttons for the single-target rotation and it all is synced, making the whole rotation extremely dumb and static. It is the most basic of tanks, it doesn't have survivability skills that all other tanks have (like clemency, tbn or nascent flash), nor the ranged rotation like paladin. I don't know why it even exists.
I truly didn't know there was a way to revisit these animations in the modern era of the game. Colour me surprised. Here to reminisce about Scourge and Power Slash... I know many will obviously agree with that sentiment. Just makes me sad the direction of classes with the game - likely to continue as they keep adding more per expac, as homogenisation and minimisation makes it easier to manage power-scale for use in end-game content and all. I'm probably in a small demographic but I'd prefer we had just gotten 1 more set of Healer, Tank and DPS after SAM and RDM then called it a day permanently - the degradation of Job uniqueness is not worth the platitude of calling different variances of role 'new' jobs. AST and SCH obviously being the primest candidates but it is hard not to look back in a little bit of sorrow at the stripped identity of others, Dark Knight in particular. The larger willingness to have room and space in how things operated in combat was exciting, I remember being able to put spells on classes, yeah it was silly and ineffective but its that element of creativity and engagement that was appealing. The important thing about levelling was getting into that broadening scope of how a role's Job differentiated itself from its counterparts but now its just playing Tank, Melee, Caster, Healer or Ranged - the actual Job barely matters beyond flavour and feel. With that all being neither here nor there though, its kind of by proxy we lost the aesthetic appeal that translated thanks to the wider range of abilities and design philosophies. I can't be the only one to remember in rumour that Dark Knight was largely inspired by Guts from Berserk (heck such a legacy was carried at the Ul'dahn memorial held by Dark Knight mains in Kentarou Miura's memory for goodness sake) and resultantly Powerslash was specifically designed in that mode of aesthetic parallel - why the heck they would take that from the Job and not Souleater, is not only beyond me, but plain stupid. I remember Dark Knight felt like it was, yes big heavy and slow, but also like it was making intentional use of the weight in impactful ways. Look at Delirium for instance and how it still pulls of cool and fantastical manoeuvres whilst making it feel like its leaning into the weight of the sword. Now its all about big swings and big effects and darkness - to a degree there are similarities but I MUCH preferred intermingling Dark Arts with Powerslash, Scourge, Souleater and Abyssal Drain - now its just fast and empty feeling Edge of Shadow. And whilst Bloodspiller is... okay, things like Shadowbringer are certainly not, just this little whiny poke animation with weird burbling effects flying forwards? I don't even understand it. I might be a bit of an elitist purist in terms of my views on FFXIV at this point as I am personally not fond of a lot of the directional movements it has taken recently but it always hurts a lot more when there is a clear boundary of things being taken out of the game. Even if they are just animations it feels like huge loss considering the attachment they can carry to an actual player character's identity and the feeling of playing the game as a particular Job. Gods just look at how smooth, clean and faultless Scourge looks... and that sound......
I had actually forgotten about Sole Survivor until this video honestly lmao. But seeing Scourge makes me a bit nostalgic, it's the only animation I miss. Also, small note for Delirium, it also reduces the targets Int iirc. Hope to see more of this in the future. :)
Yes, scourge reduced the target's int, which removed MNK's guaranteed spot in progression parties for the int reduction that Dragon Kick had at the time. The int reduction was basically required for undergeared prog, even with Vit melds.
Damn, as someone who only joined the game just before 5.4 and has been maining PLD and DRK I really understand now why people are _so_ angry with the current state of DRK, like yeah I agreed it needs some love rn but I never got the visceral anger. But seeing things like Dark Arts and Sole Survivor…. I kinda get it
If you look at the combat mechanics listed in the video for each ability, it's easier to understand the former complexity that made the class alluring: DRK used to operate on MP as its primary energy resource (unlike the three different kinds you have to roll through now, which only give the illusion of complexity), and you would generally expend MP on a select few abilities, but mostly Dark Arts. You could use Dark Arts to supercharge your strongest attacks and utilities, letting your Soul Eater combo regenerate 25+% of your HP, bolster Abyssal Drain's potency, power-up the damage on Carve and Spit, etc. You could also combine Dark Passenger's blind effect (causing enemies to miss 10~20% of the time) with the cross-class skill that gave you 10% evasion to temporarily turn you into a dodge tank. DRK would also bleed MP while their Darkside ability was toggled on in exchange for extra damage, so you had to really pick and choose what you were doing in the moment to maximize your power because if you ran out of MP you were in big trouble. But *DAMN* was it rewarding when you popped Dark Arts and threw something big at the enemy. The Darkest Night was the beginning of the end for DRK. It was a defensive skill that dipped into your MP pool and could deprive you of offensive options. They would remove Darkside's MP drain to offset this. Shadowbringers knocked DRK down huge peg mechanically foremost by making Dark Arts no longer a skill, but only a trait now tied to TDN which gave you a free OGCD skill use, and the class was further flogged into operating like a weaker version of Warrior, presumably because "all it needs is TDN, it's just that good!" TDN continues to be a wild card in DRK's sustained output since barrier buffs are becoming increasingly common across the board and their overlap prevents TDN from shattering to activate the modern Dark Arts trait. Furthermore, everyone now has a flavor of TDN, so even that isn't uniquely attributed to the class to justify its bastardization. Further frustrating DRK's issues is that its OGCDs were once quite limited, which meant you wanted to balance and time their use with Dark Arts. This felt like a properly rewarding mechanic because of the lead-up. But now, you could roll your face on the keyboard and still not activate all the OGCDs at your disposal. OGCDs do *not* feel rewarding on their own because it requires no feedback from the player to set them up - only waiting. And not a one of our OGCD attacks have unique buff/debuff mechanics like HW DRK had to offer, so there's no stacking or preparation required -- just slamming those buttons as soon as they come off cooldown. The design gimmick is so miserably uninspired that I have to wonder if the person currently in charge of managing DRK was hired out of nepotism rather than actual design experience.
My god these effects and animations are sick! Once DRK gets a rework one day these animations NEED to come back! Scourge literally looks like a move Guts or Artorias would pull off in a frenzied state
I would love to see all the moves removed from Scholar or Ninja, because it was quite a lot over the years. Shadowbringers was especially rough on Scholar but seeing leeches again would be a nostalgia trip.
Ah I remember dark arts and the other combo. Speaking of the other combo it's so weird to me they wasted these incredible effects and animations... like give us one of those defensive CD's back... dark mind is so bad in dungeons :(
ikr? i duno why the feel the need to replace shadowskin with a generic rampart animation just buff WAR's foresight to 20% mitigation and make it so that it mitigate all damage isntead of physical only no need to remove shadowskin and replacing it with rampart
@@sagadellic6616 And it was. The only downside to it was that in Stormblood, it was locked behind Grit, which was your tank stance, a GCD that cost 1200 mana to activate and could be turned off without making the GCD roll but couldn't be weaved and always clipped. Furthermore, it decreased the damage taken by 20% and the damage dealt by 20% as well. AKA: you nerfed your damage back down to the level you'd be at without having Darkside turned on, which in Stormblood, had the downside that any refresh actions (like the Bard's Refresh or the MP-sharing skill that all casters had, so yes, BLM could get into Ice and give healers and DRK like 2000 MP for free, but only if you had Darkside turned off, and Darkside cost 800 MP to activate on the oGCD, but it was a net gain) was blocked, as were your MP ticks. Basically meant you were completely on your own when it came to your MP regeneration most of the time, but it allowed for cool downtime tricks, like turning on Grit to let Blood Price tick whilst turning off Darkside so your MP would start ticking up too. If you had a lot of MP at that time, and you knew the boss was gonna come back in 10 secs, you could combine that with Dark Arts so you'd have one ready whilst letting the spent MP regen, and you could look your caster very nicely in the eyes and ask them for a portion of their MP XD, or look at the Bard very nicely and ask when Refresh is coming back off cooldown lol. Or hell, you could even ask the Astrologian if they'd use the Ewer on you during downtime, which back then gave a 15 sec MP regen. So the dungeon strat was: You have Grit on to start with. you pull a big mob using Abyssal Drain, which was a 1200 MP AOE GCD with increased enmity with a 20 yalm range and 10 yalm radius. (Basically meant DRK was the only tank which could pull a group of mobs on command from range, which was so nice.) You put up some damage mitigation like Rampart or whatever you had. (You're using Unleash or AB in the meantime for aggro and damage) You typically activated Delirium whilst under Blood Weapon and Blood Price so you could do this for twice as long as Delirium doubled the duration of Blood Weapon and Blood Price, plus it gave you more MP. You then turned Grit off whilst activating TBN, which when popped, would give you 50 Blood. Said blood could be spent on Quietus, a GCD AOE around you that hit like noodles, just 140 potency per target as opposed to the 280 from AB, but restored MP for every target hit. 480 MP per target, in fact. So if you had 6 mobs, that's 2880 MP, a net gain on the 1600 MP cost of TBN. That excess mana was used to fuel Dark Arts and Abyssal Drain, which when used in combination, also restored your HP. Oh, and when under the influence of Blood Weapon, Quietus' MP restoration would double, and you'd gain blood for every enemy hit, meaning BW Quietus fuelled itself while TBN was on cooldown. Consider your max MP is 9600, and that's half your MP bar filled in 1 GCD. Which was spammed on more Dark Arts Abyssal Drain, or Dark Arts Dark Passenger on the oGCD (which inflicted blind and dealt 280 potency to all targets without dropoff, meaning it was the hardest hitting AOE you had ever as it wasn't on the GCD). Even Salted Earth granted you 1 blood per tick per enemy. That was your AOE rotation in dungeons. Naturally, Sole Survivor aided you in this as well. Your Sole Survivor target was the one you'd single target on and kill them (usually the one in the centre cuz of dropoff potency AOEs from the DPS like Flare from BLM) when you were on a MP low. Once you ran out of MP and blood, you would then get enough mana back using Syphon Strike and maybe non-DA Carve&Spit depending on mob count to activate Grit and Blood Price. Without MP, you couldn't cast Abyssal Drain, which was your hardest-hitting AOE GCD, so you weren't hitting for much anyway. But Grit also increased the MP restoration of Syphon Strike, so it was just a small bit of single targeting to get yourself back on track, get the MP to use TBN, and restart the cycle of spending MP like mad with DA AB and regaining it with Blood Weapon Quietus. (You'd even break combo in certain mob counts, skipping Souleater and go straight back to Hard Slash -> Syphon Strike) The result? DRK was the king of dungeon self-sustain and damage too. WAR couldn't even sniff at it with their pathetic little Equilibrium and Thrill of Battle, and all they had that did remotely decent damage was IR Decimate which they only could use every 90 secs, but Blood Weapon was 40 secs, granted haste, MP and Blood. Once a good DRK got started on a mob, the healer paid attention not to their health, but their MP, and if it hit really low, how long it took for it to fill back up, as well as how many mobs were left, as the more enemies there were, the stronger the self-sustain was. Whenever you were a healer in a dungeon in Stormblood and saw a DRK, you didn't have to heal until they ran out of MP completely due to Blood Weapon downtimes and Blood draught, and even then, you'd know when they had nothing the second they put on Grit, which was 20% damage mitigation to begin with and came packaged with Blood Price. The main downside to this was that it hinged on Blood, and TBN in particular, which was your capstone level 70 ability, so it was expert dungeons only. At lower levels, you still had DA AB. AB was level 56, if I remember correctly, and DA level 30. So it was just spend your MP until you run out for self-sustain, activate Grit and Blood Price and wait until it's filled up that way whilst spamming Unleash, which also cost MP, albeit a small 400-800 or something. If you didn't want to use Unleash, all you had was single target sword-swinging GCDs. So... it had its issues at lower levels. It only really functioned at level 70. But holy shit, it was so much fun to run DRK in expert roulette. Every expert I did without my friends, I did as DRK. There was no better dungeon job; it even rivalled some DPS in its complexity, busyness and even damage at times. Comparing it to WAR Overpower spam with the occasional Decimate and IR Decimate spam, or PLDs Total Eclipse spam with just Circle of Scorn and Flash (they literally had nothing else), there was no contest. DRK was king of AOE among the tanks, and it could out-DPS a machinist during its burst. You got so much MP back that you were even using Dark Arts on Quietus just not to overcap, and DA DP was super-handy to dump half your MP into a mitigation through blind debuff AOE that hit as hard as your AB did on the oCGD. In dungeons a DRK could even heal themselves through their own Living Dead if they wanted, which led to some troll DRKs scaring new healers by dropping themselves to 1HP before starting their burst. Myself included :P. DPS loved DRK in their dungeons because their AOE had increased enmity built-in without any need for sacrificing DPS, and they could do it at range even as they were pulling mobs. Healers didn't even sprint after a DRK running in without waiting on anybody because they could probably solo it for a full minute minimum. "They'll be fine! They got self-sustain and mitigation for days." ...It's sad to see its current state. All that mitigation and self-sustain? Gone. MP-based AOE rotation? Gone, replaced by a dumb 1-2 with the occasional oGCD MP spender spam. TBN just gives you a free one, and that's it. Abyssal Drain has been dragged through the mud, turned into a shadow of its former self, as has Quietus, Blood Weapon and Delirium. The Blood Price was removed for no reason, as was the awesome Dark Passenger to make room for sword-swinging silly-looking replacements, and they even did in mah boi Sole Survivor and Dark Arts. They destroyed DRK identity and just made it WAR light, all the while saying to old DRK mains: "hey, here's a semblance of what you had, now on WAR with this new cool ability Nascent Flash. We stole everything you had and put it on WAR because we simp on WAR, and to make you not feel bad, we made your old job just like WAR but without its self-sustain because you had your fun and its WAR's turn now to play. Oh, and if you wanna feel like a DPS again, here's Gunbreaker. With the shittiest tank AOE in the game since PLD! Have fun." It was better in Stormblood. It didn't need no rework, just some QoL fixes.
Jesus christ, bring back ALL these skills/abilities, Yoshi-P! I completely forgot most of these over the years. Dam, do I miss Power Slash for just sick animation alone... Would love to have Unmend and its combo skill replaced with Tar Pit. Now THAT'S a bad arse dark Knight move!
Why the fuck did SQEX make all the tanks copy pastes of eachother. They used to be so unique from one another with their Buffs, debuffs etc. They had more identity. Now they all have the same group of abilities with different ability skins for each class.
I rlly wonder what were they thinking when doing DRK in EW, it's not only the worst tank right now, it actually is way less fun, they should put more effort in this job.
You have to show spinning slash INTO power slash, cmon now. Show everyone how batshit it is that siphon/souleater are the animations we’re stuck with just because of their old effects 😂
This right here...is the reason I got into the game back in HW. Your telling me I could be an edgy Knight throwing around darkness and looking damn good doing it, SIGN ME UP!!! And so I grinded paladin through ARR with the sole purpose of unlocking Dark Knight. The job back then was the definition of clunky between Dark Arts, keeping Darkside up (it had a constant MP drain and would fall off if MP hit 0), and some of the weird buffs/debuffs but the feeling of always having something to do and being able to choose how I wanted to spend my MP in an offensive manner unlike Paladin felt good. Maybe it's just me wearing some rose tinted glasses but this made Dark Knight feel way different then all the other tanks and it had a unique identity as an MP Tank, these days (at least in my opinion) it feels like Warrior with a few differences here and there (a few extra OGCDs, Non-crit Inner Release, Holmgang but terrible etc.) I didn't mind the streamline back in Shadowbringers but I do think Dark Knight lost some of that unique flavor over the years...and I do think that's a shame, really hope they give it a rework sometime there certainly seems to be enough people upset about the state of it so it could happen. Maybe not go quite as far back as the mega clunky days, but maybe give it some love here and there.
Dark Knight gets 16 skills removed. Paladin, Warrior, and Gunbreaker still have all the same type of skills that were removed. SE really hates Dark Knights.
Why did they replace shadowskin with rampart? Why not just buff shadowskin and let DRK keep its DRK themed ability and animation? WHY REMOVE IT AND RE-ADD IT WORSE?
Some additional information about the skills; 2:00 Reprisal could only be activated after parrying, this made "parry builds" a meme since Battledance materia increased parry chance back in the day, people shat on it hard tho but restricting "build variety" is lame. 2:10 Blood price could only be activated with Grit on, since it's a "tank stance" ability, Blood sword was the non-grit ability which turned damage caused into MP; thus making stance dancing very viable for MP regeneration. 2:18 Dark Arts cost around 2400 mana and mana wasn't universally at 10k like it is today, Also mana increasing materia was a thing, this skill was the coolest shit. 2:28 Dark Dance, based parry build even stronger. 2:35 Darkside, constantly drain mana whilst it's active, having this on, using Dark Arts that drains more mana to make more damage, swapping between Grit on and off to use Blood price and blood sword to replenish your mana whilst using cooldowns during pulls or bossfights to mitigate for the loss of 20% damage reduction coming from that tank stance ( oh yeah grit used to not just increase affinity but gave you a 20% dmg reduction and 15% less damage caused, lol ) this is why you only used tank stance for the duration of Blood Price, since you could activate it only when you had tank stance on, and less damage is less speed in dungeons. Yeah people used to bully tanks for not knowing how to play, yeah the game used to be somewhat difficult, yeah I want OG Heavensward servers. Yeah a private client is being made fuck you square enix you stole the most beautiful job class ever made. In summary; this job used to have a lot of things to manage in order to play it optimally, and it was fun. For me and probably a small amount of other people who really liked this job, fun is no longer allowed.
This just shows what a joke DRK has become after Heavensward. All the newer animations are just purple/black smoke stuff with absolutley no weight to it. Aside from the old 123 combo nothing really feels like you are swinging a Greatsword.
They did my boy DRK dirty taking away so many of these abilities... :c I admit the class plays better now, but they kept so many of the boring animations and ditched the awesome ones.
Many jobs, admittedly mainly DPS, have skills and traits that change skill animations by transforming the skill into something else. They absolutely should do this for DRK to bring back some of these skills. Power Slash was THE most badass ability in the game.
Watch the WARRIOR version here: th-cam.com/video/SG_q-IG9ZAE/w-d-xo.html
Watch the PALADIN version here: th-cam.com/video/er9huBEamPg/w-d-xo.html
Due to popular demand, you can download these old skills as a standalone mod now (which also includes instructions and more ways to further customize your toolkit). You can download these files using the following links:
- bit.ly/3PqO9YL
- bit.ly/3IwMA9u
Please stay tuned, as more Jobs will be covered soon!
This is simply fantastic, i feel that i'm actually dealing more DPS with some of these lolol
Is there any way to put Power Slash file into the Syphon strike skill tho?
@@Idiosynchrosis I'll see if I can add more options after the holidays.
Any possibility of doing this with other jobs?
Thank you so much, these animations have always been so beautiful to use and watch, this is magnificent!
@@Idiosynchrosis I added the option you wanted.
For the folks unable to recall some of removed actions, keep in mind that some are from PvP.
I miss Power Slash, that dark energy blast from the hand after cutting was such a cool animation
Bummed that's removed! I never got around to properly leveling up Dark Knight but I always loved that animation. I wound up becoming a GNB main, but I still want to get back to leveling DRK at some point, especially considering how good I've heard the job quest story is.
Except that it was very clumsy looking. IMMA SLOWLY SWING MY SWORD, GET IT STUCK BEHIND ME. REACH OVER MY SHOULD for a tiny pop of darkness. Your sword is still back there as if your wimpy arms couldn't hold it up to start with, and your back is still pointed at the enemy. I know SAM does it all the time, but they have the decency to stab people behind their back, not turn their back because they louged thier big ass sword into the dirt behind themselves like a slow clumsy dolt.
@@hiddenmaster6062 Yeah much better is Souleater where you do a stab and a pointless floaty jumpy twirl. So much more combat effective.
@@CobaltDysprosium You wanna knock it for not being "combat effective"? Bitch at least you stab the MF, jump with the blade still in and come down on them with the sword still in front of you. Realistically the jump killed the target. Power slash? LOOK AT ME JAM THE FUCKING SWORD BEHIND ME AND CRISS CROSS MY ARMS OVER MY SHOULDERS FOR A PUNY SHADOW POP. No big ass blast. Just sword jammed ass side and tiny pop all while your ass is front side. Wowwy so combat effective.
Power slash never looked good and it's weak, clumsy AF looking animation matches how useless it was.
@@hiddenmaster6062 You were the one who brought up combat effectiveness when you mentioned how Power Slash turns your back to the enemy when Souleater does the same shit mid air lmao. It's okay to be wrong man, no need to get so worked up over an animation. CnS is just a cooler Souleater anyway, at least if we had PS instead there'd be a bit of animation variety.
PSA: Brimstone, as far as I found out, was never a real ability. This was instead the animation DRK performed when placing Salted Earth pre Endwalker.
Power Slash was probably the coolest ability in-game, removing it was such a disservice to the job.
The 123 that DRK has now looks unbelievably clunky. I fucking hate it. Bring back these old animations, because although DRK is pretty fun gameplay-wise, style-wise it sucks shit.
@@NoOne-us9xv I love drk and think it plays fine, but damn these abilities looked great. The dark arts mechanic was also really cool, shame they stripped down all complexity to make it a busy ogcd spam mess.
@@Coolguysup What's great is that SE's logic behind removing it was because using it every 8 seconds was boring and spammy. Now we have nothing interesting behind our design while PLD is some kind of holy badass, WAR gives zero fucks, GNB has a few old staples bolted to it that we lost. Oh, and they literally designed an entire bubble healer job based on using Dark Arts and their homogenous healer design philosophy: SGE!
@@Zegreiart Either way yall complain, spend some time playing paladin and you'll say it's outdated and has low damage, spend time playing war abd it will be it's boring and too easy...
spend time playing gunbreaker and it's too complicated...
Honestly people should just make up their mind, can't find a sine general consensus of the state of tanks, they're either all bad or just okay or really good no one agrees on any one thing
@@Grimnoire And then you have the ones who contribute absolutely nothing to the conversation aside from complaining about other people instead...
Tar Pit and Sole Survivor feels like it would be fantastic additions to today's DRK toolkit.
Sole Survivor only restored 30% of both HP and MP when the target died within 15 seconds after it had been used. If the skill expired it would restore only 20% of both. That coupled with the fact it had a 120 second cooldown made it fairly useless in a boss battle and its long cd meant you usually only got to use it's full potentional once during mob pulls befor you reached the next boss. Not entirely horrible but very, VERY limited use.
Tar Pit was just a standard PVP aoe with a heavy debuff and mild heal.
Sole survivor was always worthless but tarp it would a great second aoe before stalwart soul
@@Duskaria Sole Survivor would actually be pog now that abyssal drain shares cd with carve&spit, 20% max hp heal is way better than legit no healing (except for souleater)
All I wanted them to do w/ Sole Survivor was introduce a trait where you could manually proc it (like you can manually detonate Earthly Star/Macrocosmos atm) to restore 100% hp if active when/if the ‘Walking Dead’ effect were to trigger from LD
I really think that ability could have been nice with later traits added to it.
@@Duskaria or what they could do is make it a 1 min cd since having no plunge makes the job feel more empty (imo, i miss plunge) and have its effect be around 10% instead. would give it the sustain it needs along with tarpit, drk would likely be fine with those two alone
The saddest part about this is how they removed so many good animations and yet they allow Soul Eater's floaty ass to stick around
DRK in general got slowed way down it feels like.
It's a good animation. you're just racist against floaty people! 🤣
Keeping Soul Eater over Power Slash was the biggest travesty.
God I miss Power Slash and Sole Survivor so much. Low Blow being given to all tanks hurt on a different level. Finding out that DRK fights dirty to stun their opponent was a great thematic note when compared to the chivalrous knights they were in opposition to.
Them giving Low Blow to everyone always confused me a bit. Sure, it's so new tanks know what's the stun but having all the tanks have a flavoured stun unique to them is just cool. The confusion bit can be solved by just reading the tooltip.
@@nycto5335 Also ruined the Paladin's Shield Bash as a result. They have embraced the techniques of their antithesis.
@@deviousspirit3156 Still Shield Bash is more fun to use than Low Blow as Paladin.
Same. This Dark Knight was a 10/10.
Was an objectively good change to give all tanks the tools, but wouldn't hurt to let each one have their own animation and flavor. Paladin still has 2 stuns.
dark knight was so good back in HW that they have to "sunder" it and split it to other tanks
1. dark dance = anticipation (back in STB)
2. low blow
3. reprisal
4. delirium (animation) = interject
endwalker DRK is now 9/14th of its former self
...9/14th of its former self... We need to restore the world to what it once was. whole.
@@REDtheBEAST *ascian music starts playing*
Makes me wish I played it back in HW. Seems like I missed out
Not to mention "Eukrasia" for Sage is effectively Dark Arts 2.0
I miss HW DRK so much....
They sundered DRK T-T
Tar pit would be amazing as an un-upgraded version of stalwart.Would give drk the proper early sustain it DESPERATELY needs.
And yet, they saw us being able to pop TBN more often and two charges of a mini-rampart as acceptable. Why the hell don't we have at least two charges of Abyss Drain or something? Tar Pit does need to come back in some form...
@@childOFtengu Dude I miss the old Abyssal Drain so much. It has such a cool animation to be limited to 60 secs. I miss the days of Dark Arts+Abyssal Drain. So much self sustain. They even kinda nerfed it cuz it shares a cooldown with Carve and Spit now
Yes I fully agree and I'm crying rn :( give my boi some love
@@TaqSoto the shared CD with Carve and Spit is outright outrageous
@@childOFtengu Gonna be honest, outside of initial burst. Having 2 charges of something is a garbage idea unless the job has a mechanic built in to refresh it quicker. Like infuriate on Warrior.
I've played drk since it was released as a casual and into my ffxiv raiding career. Seeing the old animations makes me wonder how good the dark knight COULD have been if even a few of these abilities were maintained. Sole survivor was one of our best tools, and scourge was nothing if not satisfying to execute. Not to mention powerslash will forever be one of my favorite tank animations, and I severly hope if they rework dark, that they bring these back
Man i remember when they buffed Sole Survivor to give back slightly less HP/MP when the debuff wore off instead of nothing. That might have been the same patch when Dark mind was buffed to a flat 30% magic damage reduction. Man those were good days.
I would love to see some of these moves brought back too. Something like when GNB uses that special combo of theirs that has a cooldown after using it, and have them used during a special DRK combo.
I too am a dark knight main since day one it came out in Heavensward. I feel like DrK is suffering a identity crisis rn as all the other tanks basically do DrK’s job far far better than it. I genuinely feel it needs a complete revamp/rework. I would like to see it go back to its original roots, in the form of a power house tank that draws on its health to dish out enhanced powerful attacks and high sustain within reason. Because ofcourse I don’t want to break the healer synergy with a tank.
I only joined in march 2020, but Tar Pit seems like it would be a great tool to have in today’s kit especially with wall-to-walls
@@Arctic.Sirius DRK used to have a spammable abyssal drain instead with better healing when combined with dark arts, the healer didn't need to heal as long as they had blood price giving them their MP back
Imagine if we still had Sole Survivor, and an AoE version. Like base one gives 20% HP/MP back, AoE gives 5% per enemy. That's all the sustain drk needs
I miss sole survivor so much.
@@AiroDusk same :(
Your asking the devs to give dark knight something good.Thats just not possible.
@@bearandthebull2372 yeah how can we the players feel the hate and suffering if our class design is good
I agree 10000000% smh
Sole Survivor saved me SO MANY times back in hw and I feel removing that ability is "solely" what led to its downfall.
At least if they're gonna place Abysmal Drain/Carve and Spit on shares cd, they couldn't given c&s a decent heal
The power slash animation was my favourite. Miss my agro rotation :(
Id easily trade in soul eater animation for this. It was glorious.
Though i have a good feeling some damn good stuff is coming our way the next expansion
TBH idk why they didn’t change rotations with Emity skills. Example being If you have grit on your 1-2-3 changes
I like how the ending lyric was "All our splendor, bathed black in silence." Meanwhile you cut it off after "All our splendor" and then it's just silent and pitch black. If intentional, I see you. If not, providence.
Unintentional, tbh.
Hsw Drk was the peak for me, it had it's jank as did a lot of jobs back then. It needed improving not having it's identity and flavour slowly chipped away.
tbh, it feels like lately, whenever a job stands out too much, SE's answer is to take away its identity and homogenize it with other classes in the same role
like they did with scholar
@@rocketdog734 SCH was another job that had a lot of jank but was very fun, I can't even look at current SCH or any of the other healers if I'm being honest. I preferred all of them massively back in HW despite the jank.
@@arcadema SCH was so fun I actually enjoyed healing. Now even just leveling healers is a pain.
I think Scholar in Endwalker is playable again. I disagreed with the direction they took in SB and ShB but EW seems to be removing some of the homogenization and allowing for some uniqueness back somewhat.
Some may disagree considering all the jobs got a lot of the same treatment and changes like cast times (which was needed to weave btw)
I think for all the jank and sometimes skill bloat of HW it definitely did have the most unique class design and a lot of effort put in to how cool a class could be
imo there needs to be (another) rework at this point of DRK, AST, and NIN since those seem to have gotten screwed in EW
@@Elunev DRK is fine right now: absolute unga-bunga resource expender and deals the biggest damage out of all the tanks in exchange for no recovery.
Basically all the cool and fun abilities have been removed. Great...
We can now add Plunge to the list when DT comes
god yes.
ffs such a stupid choice. if they didnt want it part of the rotation in melee then give it a dead zone
I miss Dark Knight from HW so much. I personally loved the Dark Arts spam. I miss Delirium like whoa.
DRK in HW emphasized less DA spam and more DA for additional utility. Though if you were trying for DPS numbers DA SE was still the go to combo. Wasnt until SB when DA spamming was really prevalent.
I remember in PvP when Low Blow would yeet someone and Plunge caused a stun. Lot of times where I'd plunge stun then yeet kick someone off of the edge of a cliff.
All the slashes in this video are soooooooooooo much cooler than the ones we have in game. We absolutely need Hysteria, Power Slash, Spinning Slash and Sourge back. Honestly it's such a shame they removed these incredibly cool animations.
Warrior's kind of in the same boat. Man I wish we kept the Butcher's Block animation instead of Storm's Path, though at least we got Steel Tempest and Inner Beast back with Chaotic Cyclone and Inner Chaos.
Delirium got recycled as the animation for Interject I want to say, but I’d love Scourge back
I recall reading somewhere that they wanted to wind down the attack speed of Dark Knight in Shadowbringers to make it feel "heavier". This was where they abandoned the rather unique Hans Tolhoffer european longsword combat style inspiration and went for a more generic "GUTS BUT EVIL WIZARD" visual aesthetic, which is just incredibly short-sighted. I suspect this is due to Dark Knight falling under new management who didn't understand or simply didn't care for the nuance of the class and wanted a copy-paste Warrior with thick, heavy swings to attract the Berserk crowd. The end result is a class that moves like molasses, like its animation frames got slowed, instead of looking like something that strikes with momentum.
spinning slash isn't the best, but the others, yes
Power Slash looks weak and clumsy. And you say that Soul Eater, the move everyone loved to use since 3.0 where you do a powerful jumping double slash is less cooler than wimpy reach over shoulder while sword is stuck in ground for a wimpy little shadow pop.
DRK really got the shitstick in this expansion
"All Of Dark Knight's Removed Abilities"
You mean 70% of its kit? God DRK is so braindead now I hate it.
explain how drk is braindead
@@inuxys If you don't find it braindead now compared to how it played in Heavensward, you are the type person Dark Knight is now for. Not trying to be insulting, we all have different things we enjoy in a playstyle.
@@Far_Dee i knew you would bring the "compared to hw" argument. Calling drk braindead now is calling all tanks braindead, because as of rn its the most complex one. The reward is being the dps pumping tank. Rn drk has many problems but being not complex enough is not one of them. If u wanna say "compared to", then sure, it might be. But calling drk braindead in EW is just disingenuous
@@inuxys The only reason one wouldn't consider it braindead is because you unlock the skill that keeps the entire class together at lvl 70. If it weren't for TBN, the entire job would just be 1-2-3 until raidbuffs. Just sucks they didn't expand upon what makes this job fun, and rather focused on expanding Salted Earth and adding another FoS.
@@inuxys I mean... Every tank IS brain-dead now compared to how they used to play. You don't have to manage your enmity, you barely have to manage your cooldowns (every cooldown used to be longer and do less), and rotationally they're very simple. Even Dark Knight now is just: Use all your oGCDs every 2 minutes and then spam Soul Eater combo for the other 80% of the fight. The hardest thing about the job is timing Blood Weapon correctly so you don't miss a GCD under it, and that's only because it's been implemented poorly and doesn't work like every other 10 second buff in the game.
This shit is a shell of its former self.
Dark Passenger 0:02
Delirium(Old) 0:13
Power Slash 0:24
Scourge 0:39
Spinning Slash 0:51
Tar Pit 1:04
Brimstone 1:16
Cardinal Chill 1:28
Sole Survivor 1:39
Low Blow(Old) 1:50
Reprisal(Old) 1:59
Blood Price 2:09
Dark Arts 2:18
Dark Dance 2:28
Dark Side 2:34
Shadowskin 2:44
Man, I WISH I could have played this DRK. Even cooler looking attacks with actual self-sustain? Sign me right the hell up!
Holy crap DRK lost so much cool stuff.
It's literally a shell of it's former self. Not going to touch it again till rework.
DRK seriously needs some of these abilities now! Compared to the other tanks, it seems pretty behind. When i run dungeons, i just get rekt always waiting for TBK to come back up to be gone in 2 seconds while praying the healer is spamming heals on me.
Its not as behind as you may think in high end duties but I definitely feel like they could get a rework. That being said, I'm one of ones who completely disagree with their direction in terms of tank design so I'm of the opinion that they need to rethink every tank.
@@jamielee2353 It's funny cuz they just got a rework one expansion ago lol. I agree that tank design in general has gone downhill and I'm a casual player. I miss the days of stance dancing and having to not only balance your dps but also holding enmity. Tanks are just glorified DPS now.
@@jamielee2353 DRK's main advantage and what makes it "popular" is its high damage output. It's ahead of the other tanks by an almost silly margin, but they pay for this by being made of paper. They have a fraction of a fraction of the sustain and mitigation that other tanks have, and so are absolutely useless in the MT role. Unless it gets changed (which, it almost certainly will), the Savage speedclear meta will be bringing DRK as OTs, pretty much as a glorified melee DPS with the odd mitigation cooldown to throw on the main tank.
In essence, this is the early HW/early SB meta of wearing Melee accessories on a tank, crippling your survivability in exchange for damage.
Yeah DRK is just stupidly fragile now in dungeons, wall to wall pulls would absolutely smash it to pieces since they lack selfheals (souleater is just so pathetic)
I am not a main tank, far from it, but since everyone is talking about a potential rework of the job, i wonder : Would it work if DRK was a shield tank ?
What i mean is, all others tanks seems to have good HP recovery (from what i know), so giving something equivalent to DRK would just make him like all the others, yes/no ? TBN is an amazing cooldown, so why not go all out in this direction and give it more shields that give more free stuff if used right ?
I only started to play in ShB, so i never knew what was DRK before, and i kinda like it right now at a casual level. If they pushed that even more, would it be fun and viable ?
Power slash has the rawest fuckin' animation ever, very sad that it wasn't reused for something else.
This video is about DRK but looking at old footage every class seemed so much more interesting back then. Full of situational but powerful tools that separated the okay players from the really good ones who knew how to use them.
I wish I started playing the game sooner.
I appreciate the improvements and QoL changes we've gotten over the years and think the game is better for them, but I definitely wish we had more of that. The HVW classes were definitely hit hard by that weird sort of homogenization. They were lopsided and odd, but I wish they had leaned into that instead of just sanding off a bunch of edges. Now as they attempt to maintain what identity DRK has left, it feels stunted compared to the other tanks who they've been more liberal in gifting
the dank knight aint so dank anymore...
all the cool edgy animation budget went into reaper...
I would trade Hard Slash for Spinning Slash as the first combo action without a second thought. Hard Slash just looks like you're throwing your back out and is too sluggish. I know DRK uses a large greatsword, but it's still a tank. That weightiness of your swing isn't translating to power. At least not those sluggish actions on the job anyway. Same for Souleater. Rework the animation to be one of these removed actions' animation.
I've actually modded syphon to be scourge, Souleater to be power Slash, Flood of Shadow to be Dark Passenger, Current Delirium to be Dark Arts. Hard Slash is a bit weird, but I can't stand the animation for Syphon Strike.
@@Kayem237 is it a publically released mod by any chance?
@@-Strides- No, my friend put it together for me.
@@-Strides- a mod by dekken called vampire lord has scourge and power slash as replacements for syphon and soul eater respectively, i recommend it
Look how they massacred my boy
Look how they massacred my boy.
I miss Power Slash's animation. Didn't get a lot of use once you had established a sufficient amount of enmity, but it had always been one of my favorite animations for the job.
Today is the 25th of June, 2024. We shall be adding Plunge to this list by the time tomorrow hits... at least, in PvE? We might still have it in PvP, hopefully.
I will never forgive the devs for butchering DK kit and personality. Its gameplay is completely souless, full of weird ogcd's.
Plus, how could they get rid of such cool animations? I want HW DK back.
Pain condensed into 3 minutes.
Man... I want to cry... Drk was so fun... I can only hope for a remake of the class but I doubt that it will ever happen...
Add Plunge and Blood Weapon to the list. RIP. :(
Power slash and low blow was the main things that sold me on dark knight when it first came out. Also how it was a harder tank to play really had to pay attention to what you was doing .
Stance dancing was great. 3.0 drk was so much fun
Great compilation, Machinist also lost a ton of it's cooler looking moves over the years. i'd love to see a compilation of those.
From a mechanical standpoint I can understand the romval of most of these, but I am a sad that the animations are mostly gone.
I always hated just how much they've been dumbing down the class with SHB and Endwalker. Part of the fun was actually managing the Mana bar so when you remove the need to really manage it you remove a massive chunk of it's skills and what made it fun and unique. It's second melee rotation gets trashed with all of its cool animations, dark arts was fun being able to choose which skills to make better, mark for death added a bit of a challenge to burn down an enemy in time. Now the entire class boils down to spam melee rotation, keep damage buff up and just spend resource bar whenever. It's as if they took out the fun of Dark Knight and gave it to Gunbreaker to make it the new "blue DPS"
But GNB is boring as shit, it literally has three 30-sec burst buttons, two 60-sec burst buttons, three buttons for the single-target rotation and it all is synced, making the whole rotation extremely dumb and static. It is the most basic of tanks, it doesn't have survivability skills that all other tanks have (like clemency, tbn or nascent flash), nor the ranged rotation like paladin. I don't know why it even exists.
I truly didn't know there was a way to revisit these animations in the modern era of the game. Colour me surprised.
Here to reminisce about Scourge and Power Slash... I know many will obviously agree with that sentiment. Just makes me sad the direction of classes with the game - likely to continue as they keep adding more per expac, as homogenisation and minimisation makes it easier to manage power-scale for use in end-game content and all. I'm probably in a small demographic but I'd prefer we had just gotten 1 more set of Healer, Tank and DPS after SAM and RDM then called it a day permanently - the degradation of Job uniqueness is not worth the platitude of calling different variances of role 'new' jobs. AST and SCH obviously being the primest candidates but it is hard not to look back in a little bit of sorrow at the stripped identity of others, Dark Knight in particular.
The larger willingness to have room and space in how things operated in combat was exciting, I remember being able to put spells on classes, yeah it was silly and ineffective but its that element of creativity and engagement that was appealing. The important thing about levelling was getting into that broadening scope of how a role's Job differentiated itself from its counterparts but now its just playing Tank, Melee, Caster, Healer or Ranged - the actual Job barely matters beyond flavour and feel.
With that all being neither here nor there though, its kind of by proxy we lost the aesthetic appeal that translated thanks to the wider range of abilities and design philosophies. I can't be the only one to remember in rumour that Dark Knight was largely inspired by Guts from Berserk (heck such a legacy was carried at the Ul'dahn memorial held by Dark Knight mains in Kentarou Miura's memory for goodness sake) and resultantly Powerslash was specifically designed in that mode of aesthetic parallel - why the heck they would take that from the Job and not Souleater, is not only beyond me, but plain stupid.
I remember Dark Knight felt like it was, yes big heavy and slow, but also like it was making intentional use of the weight in impactful ways. Look at Delirium for instance and how it still pulls of cool and fantastical manoeuvres whilst making it feel like its leaning into the weight of the sword. Now its all about big swings and big effects and darkness - to a degree there are similarities but I MUCH preferred intermingling Dark Arts with Powerslash, Scourge, Souleater and Abyssal Drain - now its just fast and empty feeling Edge of Shadow. And whilst Bloodspiller is... okay, things like Shadowbringer are certainly not, just this little whiny poke animation with weird burbling effects flying forwards? I don't even understand it.
I might be a bit of an elitist purist in terms of my views on FFXIV at this point as I am personally not fond of a lot of the directional movements it has taken recently but it always hurts a lot more when there is a clear boundary of things being taken out of the game. Even if they are just animations it feels like huge loss considering the attachment they can carry to an actual player character's identity and the feeling of playing the game as a particular Job.
Gods just look at how smooth, clean and faultless Scourge looks... and that sound......
I had actually forgotten about Sole Survivor until this video honestly lmao. But seeing Scourge makes me a bit nostalgic, it's the only animation I miss. Also, small note for Delirium, it also reduces the targets Int iirc. Hope to see more of this in the future. :)
Yes, scourge reduced the target's int, which removed MNK's guaranteed spot in progression parties for the int reduction that Dragon Kick had at the time. The int reduction was basically required for undergeared prog, even with Vit melds.
www.xivmodarchive.com/modid/39809
@@supersonicgamerguru You mean Delirium reduced Int, Scourge just applied a DoT.
Yep, Delirium reduced int by 10%. Dragon kick on MNK also used to give the same debuff with also blunt damage up. Scourge was a 30s dot gcd.
Their biggest mistake was removing power slash and sole survivor.
Damn, as someone who only joined the game just before 5.4 and has been maining PLD and DRK I really understand now why people are _so_ angry with the current state of DRK, like yeah I agreed it needs some love rn but I never got the visceral anger. But seeing things like Dark Arts and Sole Survivor…. I kinda get it
If you look at the combat mechanics listed in the video for each ability, it's easier to understand the former complexity that made the class alluring: DRK used to operate on MP as its primary energy resource (unlike the three different kinds you have to roll through now, which only give the illusion of complexity), and you would generally expend MP on a select few abilities, but mostly Dark Arts. You could use Dark Arts to supercharge your strongest attacks and utilities, letting your Soul Eater combo regenerate 25+% of your HP, bolster Abyssal Drain's potency, power-up the damage on Carve and Spit, etc. You could also combine Dark Passenger's blind effect (causing enemies to miss 10~20% of the time) with the cross-class skill that gave you 10% evasion to temporarily turn you into a dodge tank. DRK would also bleed MP while their Darkside ability was toggled on in exchange for extra damage, so you had to really pick and choose what you were doing in the moment to maximize your power because if you ran out of MP you were in big trouble. But *DAMN* was it rewarding when you popped Dark Arts and threw something big at the enemy.
The Darkest Night was the beginning of the end for DRK. It was a defensive skill that dipped into your MP pool and could deprive you of offensive options. They would remove Darkside's MP drain to offset this. Shadowbringers knocked DRK down huge peg mechanically foremost by making Dark Arts no longer a skill, but only a trait now tied to TDN which gave you a free OGCD skill use, and the class was further flogged into operating like a weaker version of Warrior, presumably because "all it needs is TDN, it's just that good!" TDN continues to be a wild card in DRK's sustained output since barrier buffs are becoming increasingly common across the board and their overlap prevents TDN from shattering to activate the modern Dark Arts trait. Furthermore, everyone now has a flavor of TDN, so even that isn't uniquely attributed to the class to justify its bastardization.
Further frustrating DRK's issues is that its OGCDs were once quite limited, which meant you wanted to balance and time their use with Dark Arts. This felt like a properly rewarding mechanic because of the lead-up. But now, you could roll your face on the keyboard and still not activate all the OGCDs at your disposal. OGCDs do *not* feel rewarding on their own because it requires no feedback from the player to set them up - only waiting. And not a one of our OGCD attacks have unique buff/debuff mechanics like HW DRK had to offer, so there's no stacking or preparation required -- just slamming those buttons as soon as they come off cooldown. The design gimmick is so miserably uninspired that I have to wonder if the person currently in charge of managing DRK was hired out of nepotism rather than actual design experience.
would pay to see someone make a mod that replaces current animations with these
I'm working on that.
@@ParavantStudio oh! very nice to hear, thank you.
@@ParavantStudio That is some interesting, and very good news to hear!
@@shishi6201 www.xivmodarchive.com/modid/39809
@@ParavantStudio damn, that's some high quality work. props to you
I joined in shb so any other job videos you make like this would be greatly appreciated. Awesome job!
My god these effects and animations are sick! Once DRK gets a rework one day these animations NEED to come back! Scourge literally looks like a move Guts or Artorias would pull off in a frenzied state
These are sick as fuck and I was hoping for some of them to come back in endwalker. Instead all we got was new eventide in pvp 😔
I would love to see all the moves removed from Scholar or Ninja, because it was quite a lot over the years. Shadowbringers was especially rough on Scholar but seeing leeches again would be a nostalgia trip.
They basically removed the smn skills on sch, thats all.
Ahhhh do I miss DANCING EDGE it had such a awesome animation too
I quit DRK when they removed power slash and scourge
These animations are really cool, what the hell
And now Plunge is going to be on the chopping board.... whether or not it can be modded onto Shadowstride, though...
Ah I remember dark arts and the other combo. Speaking of the other combo it's so weird to me they wasted these incredible effects and animations... like give us one of those defensive CD's back... dark mind is so bad in dungeons :(
ikr? i duno why the feel the need to replace shadowskin with a generic rampart animation
just buff WAR's foresight to 20% mitigation and make it so that it mitigate all damage isntead of physical only
no need to remove shadowskin and replacing it with rampart
Even if none of them, Blood Price would be disgustingly good in dungeons.
@@sagadellic6616 And it was. The only downside to it was that in Stormblood, it was locked behind Grit, which was your tank stance, a GCD that cost 1200 mana to activate and could be turned off without making the GCD roll but couldn't be weaved and always clipped. Furthermore, it decreased the damage taken by 20% and the damage dealt by 20% as well. AKA: you nerfed your damage back down to the level you'd be at without having Darkside turned on, which in Stormblood, had the downside that any refresh actions (like the Bard's Refresh or the MP-sharing skill that all casters had, so yes, BLM could get into Ice and give healers and DRK like 2000 MP for free, but only if you had Darkside turned off, and Darkside cost 800 MP to activate on the oGCD, but it was a net gain) was blocked, as were your MP ticks. Basically meant you were completely on your own when it came to your MP regeneration most of the time, but it allowed for cool downtime tricks, like turning on Grit to let Blood Price tick whilst turning off Darkside so your MP would start ticking up too. If you had a lot of MP at that time, and you knew the boss was gonna come back in 10 secs, you could combine that with Dark Arts so you'd have one ready whilst letting the spent MP regen, and you could look your caster very nicely in the eyes and ask them for a portion of their MP XD, or look at the Bard very nicely and ask when Refresh is coming back off cooldown lol. Or hell, you could even ask the Astrologian if they'd use the Ewer on you during downtime, which back then gave a 15 sec MP regen.
So the dungeon strat was: You have Grit on to start with. you pull a big mob using Abyssal Drain, which was a 1200 MP AOE GCD with increased enmity with a 20 yalm range and 10 yalm radius. (Basically meant DRK was the only tank which could pull a group of mobs on command from range, which was so nice.) You put up some damage mitigation like Rampart or whatever you had. (You're using Unleash or AB in the meantime for aggro and damage) You typically activated Delirium whilst under Blood Weapon and Blood Price so you could do this for twice as long as Delirium doubled the duration of Blood Weapon and Blood Price, plus it gave you more MP. You then turned Grit off whilst activating TBN, which when popped, would give you 50 Blood. Said blood could be spent on Quietus, a GCD AOE around you that hit like noodles, just 140 potency per target as opposed to the 280 from AB, but restored MP for every target hit. 480 MP per target, in fact. So if you had 6 mobs, that's 2880 MP, a net gain on the 1600 MP cost of TBN. That excess mana was used to fuel Dark Arts and Abyssal Drain, which when used in combination, also restored your HP. Oh, and when under the influence of Blood Weapon, Quietus' MP restoration would double, and you'd gain blood for every enemy hit, meaning BW Quietus fuelled itself while TBN was on cooldown. Consider your max MP is 9600, and that's half your MP bar filled in 1 GCD. Which was spammed on more Dark Arts Abyssal Drain, or Dark Arts Dark Passenger on the oGCD (which inflicted blind and dealt 280 potency to all targets without dropoff, meaning it was the hardest hitting AOE you had ever as it wasn't on the GCD). Even Salted Earth granted you 1 blood per tick per enemy. That was your AOE rotation in dungeons. Naturally, Sole Survivor aided you in this as well. Your Sole Survivor target was the one you'd single target on and kill them (usually the one in the centre cuz of dropoff potency AOEs from the DPS like Flare from BLM) when you were on a MP low. Once you ran out of MP and blood, you would then get enough mana back using Syphon Strike and maybe non-DA Carve&Spit depending on mob count to activate Grit and Blood Price. Without MP, you couldn't cast Abyssal Drain, which was your hardest-hitting AOE GCD, so you weren't hitting for much anyway. But Grit also increased the MP restoration of Syphon Strike, so it was just a small bit of single targeting to get yourself back on track, get the MP to use TBN, and restart the cycle of spending MP like mad with DA AB and regaining it with Blood Weapon Quietus. (You'd even break combo in certain mob counts, skipping Souleater and go straight back to Hard Slash -> Syphon Strike)
The result? DRK was the king of dungeon self-sustain and damage too. WAR couldn't even sniff at it with their pathetic little Equilibrium and Thrill of Battle, and all they had that did remotely decent damage was IR Decimate which they only could use every 90 secs, but Blood Weapon was 40 secs, granted haste, MP and Blood. Once a good DRK got started on a mob, the healer paid attention not to their health, but their MP, and if it hit really low, how long it took for it to fill back up, as well as how many mobs were left, as the more enemies there were, the stronger the self-sustain was.
Whenever you were a healer in a dungeon in Stormblood and saw a DRK, you didn't have to heal until they ran out of MP completely due to Blood Weapon downtimes and Blood draught, and even then, you'd know when they had nothing the second they put on Grit, which was 20% damage mitigation to begin with and came packaged with Blood Price. The main downside to this was that it hinged on Blood, and TBN in particular, which was your capstone level 70 ability, so it was expert dungeons only. At lower levels, you still had DA AB. AB was level 56, if I remember correctly, and DA level 30. So it was just spend your MP until you run out for self-sustain, activate Grit and Blood Price and wait until it's filled up that way whilst spamming Unleash, which also cost MP, albeit a small 400-800 or something. If you didn't want to use Unleash, all you had was single target sword-swinging GCDs.
So... it had its issues at lower levels. It only really functioned at level 70. But holy shit, it was so much fun to run DRK in expert roulette. Every expert I did without my friends, I did as DRK. There was no better dungeon job; it even rivalled some DPS in its complexity, busyness and even damage at times. Comparing it to WAR Overpower spam with the occasional Decimate and IR Decimate spam, or PLDs Total Eclipse spam with just Circle of Scorn and Flash (they literally had nothing else), there was no contest. DRK was king of AOE among the tanks, and it could out-DPS a machinist during its burst. You got so much MP back that you were even using Dark Arts on Quietus just not to overcap, and DA DP was super-handy to dump half your MP into a mitigation through blind debuff AOE that hit as hard as your AB did on the oCGD. In dungeons a DRK could even heal themselves through their own Living Dead if they wanted, which led to some troll DRKs scaring new healers by dropping themselves to 1HP before starting their burst. Myself included :P. DPS loved DRK in their dungeons because their AOE had increased enmity built-in without any need for sacrificing DPS, and they could do it at range even as they were pulling mobs. Healers didn't even sprint after a DRK running in without waiting on anybody because they could probably solo it for a full minute minimum. "They'll be fine! They got self-sustain and mitigation for days."
...It's sad to see its current state. All that mitigation and self-sustain? Gone. MP-based AOE rotation? Gone, replaced by a dumb 1-2 with the occasional oGCD MP spender spam. TBN just gives you a free one, and that's it. Abyssal Drain has been dragged through the mud, turned into a shadow of its former self, as has Quietus, Blood Weapon and Delirium. The Blood Price was removed for no reason, as was the awesome Dark Passenger to make room for sword-swinging silly-looking replacements, and they even did in mah boi Sole Survivor and Dark Arts. They destroyed DRK identity and just made it WAR light, all the while saying to old DRK mains: "hey, here's a semblance of what you had, now on WAR with this new cool ability Nascent Flash. We stole everything you had and put it on WAR because we simp on WAR, and to make you not feel bad, we made your old job just like WAR but without its self-sustain because you had your fun and its WAR's turn now to play. Oh, and if you wanna feel like a DPS again, here's Gunbreaker. With the shittiest tank AOE in the game since PLD! Have fun."
It was better in Stormblood. It didn't need no rework, just some QoL fixes.
@@digitalatom6433 Goddamn, that was a good write-up. Thank you!
@@InfinityZwei I'm glad someone read all that. Thank you for reading.
Next step is remove DRK.
Jesus christ, bring back ALL these skills/abilities, Yoshi-P! I completely forgot most of these over the years. Dam, do I miss Power Slash for just sick animation alone... Would love to have Unmend and its combo skill replaced with Tar Pit. Now THAT'S a bad arse dark Knight move!
BUH MY ENHANCED UNMEND!? :P
Dark Passenger and Scourge hurt the most.
Amen to that.
I forgot how fun and cool dark knight used to be. It’s okay now but man,dark arts was fun and unique
Why the fuck did SQEX make all the tanks copy pastes of eachother. They used to be so unique from one another with their Buffs, debuffs etc. They had more identity. Now they all have the same group of abilities with different ability skins for each class.
I rlly wonder what were they thinking when doing DRK in EW, it's not only the worst tank right now, it actually is way less fun, they should put more effort in this job.
here to jump on the missing power slash wagon before hiddenmaster comes out of the woodwork again
rip all these amazing animations
You have to show spinning slash INTO power slash, cmon now. Show everyone how batshit it is that siphon/souleater are the animations we’re stuck with just because of their old effects 😂
I guess you can now do Samurai now that Kaiten is gone. :C
I knew the movement for the updated Salted Earth looked familiar. I was remembering Carnal Chill.
Funnily enough, it's not the same animation. They could have re-used it, but it's different.
This right here...is the reason I got into the game back in HW. Your telling me I could be an edgy Knight throwing around darkness and looking damn good doing it, SIGN ME UP!!! And so I grinded paladin through ARR with the sole purpose of unlocking Dark Knight. The job back then was the definition of clunky between Dark Arts, keeping Darkside up (it had a constant MP drain and would fall off if MP hit 0), and some of the weird buffs/debuffs but the feeling of always having something to do and being able to choose how I wanted to spend my MP in an offensive manner unlike Paladin felt good.
Maybe it's just me wearing some rose tinted glasses but this made Dark Knight feel way different then all the other tanks and it had a unique identity as an MP Tank, these days (at least in my opinion) it feels like Warrior with a few differences here and there (a few extra OGCDs, Non-crit Inner Release, Holmgang but terrible etc.)
I didn't mind the streamline back in Shadowbringers but I do think Dark Knight lost some of that unique flavor over the years...and I do think that's a shame, really hope they give it a rework sometime there certainly seems to be enough people upset about the state of it so it could happen.
Maybe not go quite as far back as the mega clunky days, but maybe give it some love here and there.
The most screwed class on the game. They really had a meeting, and decided to strip the DRK identity.
HW Dark Knight is the only version, this class was ever fun
Pour one our for Power Slash, arguably the coolest animation in the game
I am really happy I was there and able to play HW-era DRK. It truly was something special that the game can and will never support again.
no wonder i dont like that class anymore - they remove all the good skills
the demoted dark knight to knight
Why didn't they use Power Slash for the animation for Shadowbringer in EW? This just feels accurate in my head cannon.
Dark Knight gets 16 skills removed.
Paladin, Warrior, and Gunbreaker still have all the same type of skills that were removed.
SE really hates Dark Knights.
Sole Survivor and Delirium looked so fucking cool. I'm sad they removed them. DRK just doesn't feel the same anymore.
Great animation, poor mechanics that could of easily been fixed.
I honestly thought they'd fix up dark knights for EW but instead they 🚼ed them.
Dark Arts should come back and work like sage's Eukrasia, maybe changing some of DRK actions into the deleted ones
Still waiting for them to come back
Yes Square did put all of the best DRK animations on abilities they've since removed.
Kinda miss the whole debuffer thing we had going.
Power slash... Delirium... Dark passenger... Scourge... Why yoshi p! Why!!!!
Scourge was bae
Why did they replace shadowskin with rampart? Why not just buff shadowskin and let DRK keep its DRK themed ability and animation? WHY REMOVE IT AND RE-ADD IT WORSE?
Some additional information about the skills;
2:00 Reprisal could only be activated after parrying, this made "parry builds" a meme since Battledance materia increased parry chance back in the day, people shat on it hard tho but restricting "build variety" is lame.
2:10 Blood price could only be activated with Grit on, since it's a "tank stance" ability, Blood sword was the non-grit ability which turned damage caused into MP; thus making stance dancing very viable for MP regeneration.
2:18 Dark Arts cost around 2400 mana and mana wasn't universally at 10k like it is today, Also mana increasing materia was a thing, this skill was the coolest shit.
2:28 Dark Dance, based parry build even stronger.
2:35 Darkside, constantly drain mana whilst it's active, having this on, using Dark Arts that drains more mana to make more damage, swapping between Grit on and off to use Blood price and blood sword to replenish your mana whilst using cooldowns during pulls or bossfights to mitigate for the loss of 20% damage reduction coming from that tank stance ( oh yeah grit used to not just increase affinity but gave you a 20% dmg reduction and 15% less damage caused, lol ) this is why you only used tank stance for the duration of Blood Price, since you could activate it only when you had tank stance on, and less damage is less speed in dungeons.
Yeah people used to bully tanks for not knowing how to play, yeah the game used to be somewhat difficult, yeah I want OG Heavensward servers. Yeah a private client is being made fuck you square enix you stole the most beautiful job class ever made.
In summary; this job used to have a lot of things to manage in order to play it optimally, and it was fun. For me and probably a small amount of other people who really liked this job, fun is no longer allowed.
I'm dying to play HW drk. Where can I find info on this server?
It would be neat if Living Shadow used some of these just for the visual flair.
I'm so pissed off why did they remove sole survivor???????? drk is a TANK they need SELF-SUSTAIN, and they have NONE now, wth se!!!!
I know the moves are important, but I'm more mad that these cool animations are just...gone now. Especially Scourge, Power Slash and Dark Arts.
I wish SE would let us choose the appearance of skill.
Scourge was so fun to use.
Can we get a FF classic? HW was so fun mechanically
This just shows what a joke DRK has become after Heavensward.
All the newer animations are just purple/black smoke stuff with absolutley no weight to it.
Aside from the old 123 combo nothing really feels like you are swinging a Greatsword.
If only Sole Survivor survived
The animations are so cool! The stuff we have right now really looks meh imo.
终于把我个人最讨厌的souleater替换了，感谢作者的辛勤付出！
It’s insane that we’ll never get to see Power Slash again. What a baller ass move.
They did my boy DRK dirty taking away so many of these abilities... :c I admit the class plays better now, but they kept so many of the boring animations and ditched the awesome ones.
'Member when blood Weapon made it so you attack 20% faster? I 'member.
Man you had to actually work to be a good DRK back in HW. Now you can literally play it half asleep and one handed.
For a moment I read the title as "FINAL FANTASY XIV: All Of Dark Knight's Abilities Removed" and was like, "Well that's a bold design decision."
I miss Power Slash animation
Many jobs, admittedly mainly DPS, have skills and traits that change skill animations by transforming the skill into something else.
They absolutely should do this for DRK to bring back some of these skills. Power Slash was THE most badass ability in the game.
Dark knight needs help. Warrior is way better in every single way currently