Dark Knight

you can zerk at 70%+ bonus damage if you stay at 70% hp

 

I think DK is a class requiring high proficiency to get high returns. Just like corsairs.
This change will make DK another Hero (with HB but weaker).

The real problem in old school maple is high level bosses are doing too much damge.
Maybe we should buff DK's damage reduction instead.

 

Soapbox Warning

Seems like a good time to remind everyone that zerk used to simply offset the extra 60% hp dk had "passively". If washing did not exist, a level 200 warrior could expect to have around 12.5k clean hp, and 20k hp with hb. A 55% zerk would put the dk's effective hp at 11k hp, and 60% zerk at 12k hp. Vanilla zerking left dk basically just as defensive as any other warrior but without the ability to tape down their potion button.

Fast forward to today. Thanks to washing, anything non-mage can be 30k innately and even combine that with skills like shifter that were never intended to be on characters with the same hp as warriors. Even among warriors the assumption is that all warriors are already 30k, and the "tradeoff" for higher base hp thanks to hb is just gone. Thus, we are left with a nigh-useless skill, the entire warrior archetype in shambles with no class identity as the high avoid dpms become the tanks, and the dk class itself requiring many bandaid tweaks to deal with its ever diminishing hp as damage values inevitably rise.

...And then Balance Team said "what if we made dks play with even LESS hp?" and introduced scaling zerk as if that doesn't ultimately make the problem worse.

I've said it before and I'll say it as many times as needed. Warriors don't have an "easy" wash, they got the trial version of washing, unable to benefit from washing proportionally to everyone else. All the warriors suffer from it (just look at the state of pb survivability), but dk got a double serving of fuck you.

The now memed "defense rework" is our hope to restore balance to effective hp among the classes, and even fix dk along the way, but ranged characters gotta get their hp to facetank everything first.

 

scaling zerk is fine as is; just make achilles scale to offset some of that loss in effective hp. something like 30%+x% missing hp might be enough, maybe with some cap

 

You can zerk at 70% hp, having 70% bonus and also the active zerk is a 1/1 hit so it won't matter how much hp youre at you'll receive the smg bonus while active, just gotta learn to use it

 

lf shield mastery > shield elemental
rework

 

I think leaving the Achilles at 50% would solve it,since normally it only uses half of the HP, the risk for damage is more than corsair, you die if you make a mistake =/

 

It's okay, most of us DKs learn to remake to other classes and start all over. We're masochists like that.

 

too real, tbh I feel shame asking to join boss runs (jk or maybe not jk?). Problem is that HB becomes more and more useless as time goes on. After nearly 10 years the effects are showing.

What are everyone's thoughts on the active zerk? 30 seconds and 60 second CD

 

problem with dk is survivability, not damage

 

Wouldnt it be both? You can keep yourself topped off at 30k hp and not die. You just wont do dmg.

survivability becomes an issue when you want to do damage

 

zerk is a core identity and functions as a tradeoff between your damage and hp so there has to be some hp management involved. max hp is 30k so the only way to increase effective hp further is via achilles.

 

Regular DKs are the squishy class. Their identity is in having low avoid and getting hit often.

 

DK is meant to reward the player for pushing the limits of game knowledge and putting in maximum effort, but as it stands the class just feels like constant punishment. DK needs wayyy more single target DPM to fill the role of berserker and be worth the sweat

Every job deserves a niche that makes them worth investing time and resources into as a main, not just a mule on the road to building NL(s). As cool as pressing HB is, 1 party skill shouldn't doom DK to being devoid of any other merits. Post roar nerf DK is not good at farming, depends on SE+SI to do mediocre dmg in bosses, lacks basic QoL features such as Range, Flash Jump, Avoid, Accuracy, innate movespeed/jump, 200% healing from potions, or Farmable weapons. The range of HB, their 1 schtick, is also tiny and the duration is short. They mostly specialize in CWK and Zak arms, which is shared with Hero

There was a forum poll where ~50% of responses said they wouldn't play DK even if they hypothetically did more dmg than NL. It's evident that the meta heavily favors chillness and QoL, after all this is a game where you attack mushrooms for hours at a time. NL will always be top dog because it has the niche of simple and reliable ranged damage, as well as being the most mobile, and the most pot efficient, and extremely durable. NL does not also need to top the theoretical damage charts, let that be DK's niche

 

Well said

 

ignoring hb, SE+SI dependability is fine, they have ok range, avoid is kinda interchangable with achilles/stance, accuracy is fine, mount solves movement issues, healing from potions/farmmable weapons are negated by other stuff. below are wyman's numbers but could also be adjusted for power creep over time. again, their problem isn't damage but survivability and all the good dk afaik have quit/moved to other classes

pb statue
pb body

 

Theoretically, what if the maximum HP on Dragon Knights was increased to something like 48,000 (30k+HB)? It would let them lean more into their class identity and what makes them unique, without shaking up the attacker DPS chart.

 

You can do this in other ways like increasing their effective HP by buffing Achilles specifically for the DK class.

 

Personally a big problem of drks is the problem with pot costs....
The poll only asks if drk does more potential dmg than nl but not what it would take to reach those dmg and whether is it worth it.