The Shadowknight Class

Tevinter said:
Paladins have bad mitigation, but provide the best raid / group utility of all the tanks by a significant margin. Has the ability to heal others. Has the flexibility to become a healer for an encounter by using Althuna's Conduit.
Shadowknights provide very little, if any (buffslots almost never permit it) raid utility. Poor mitigation outside of /s 6 which has pretty limited use. Does not have the option to flex and fill another role.
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Paladin and Shadowknight mitigation is basically identical in stance 3/ . I was talking about self-healing while tanking. (a paladin can conduit and just out heal anyone anyways if we are including flex spots).

The discussion for us was more:

Warrior(Tank) + Cleric (Strongest Healer) = Paladin
Warrior(Tank) + Necro (INT DPS) = Shadowknight

Part of me thinks if I started this question in the Paladin Thread, the answer would have been:
Warrior - 2
SK- 7
Paladin - 10

(ie, whatever they are offering, always start the bid high)

Anyways.

We made this ranking back in 2020. For Tanking-Self-Healing. (Before Bloodlust nerfs) I was given the numbers:
Warrior - 3
SK - 2.5
Paladin - 1

This is strictly three being the best, down to 1.

And at the beginning of 2021, probably after weapon nerfs and leech stance bug fix:
Warrior - 1
SK - 1.8
Paladin - 1.5

And repeating what we had above:
Warrior - 1
SK - 2
Paladin - 3

Now all the metrics combined:
Single-Target Aggro
AE Aggro
Healing (Self only while tanking)
Mitigation
Emergency Buttons
Single Target DPS (While Tanking)
AE DPS (group play)

So what would be nice to know is; if SK needs to be a 10, what is it now? I feel like no one answered this for a reason. ie. If players are mad that leech stance was gutted, but SKs still out heal paladin then it is hard to stay mad? maybe? I don't know. I didn't expect to get hung up on SK conversion but this game is full of land mines.

Also, don't take anything I am saying personal please. Forum chat makes this difficult. I did voice chat with an enchanter recently while grouping. A lot easier to discuss things via voice. I know deein wanted to do like, twitch stream AMAs or whatever. I thought this was a good idea.

(Maybe I can alter my parse thingy to output total healing over 5 minutes if players are interested)
 
Just a warning that I ended up getting way off topic because I've spent a lot of time thinking about tanking / tank balance not only in this game but also in WoW for the last couple years, what makes the strong tank classes good, and why some tanks always seem doomed to be bad by design. Easier for me to talk about this over voice at some point if possible (and likely easier to keep me on topic!)

Would've given the same answer in the paladin thread, Paladins still heal other people while actively tanking thru tears of the crusader procs, ghot, hand of piety, protection of the lady. Unsure of what SK self healing would be now, afaik it should be a bit better than paladin still. Its just a lot smaller margin than what it was before. And like i mentioned previously unless the power gap between a class that has little to no utility (SK in this case) and a class that has very useful / strong utility (Paladin in this case) is significant, playing the class without utility feels bad.

Its also hard to say without seeing the full picture of whats planned, i.e if SKs are receiving non-trivial boosts to mitigation but paladins are not, then SKs having worse self healing makes more sense. Or if they're intended to have significantly higher damage. Or if they're receiving new group/raidwide utility spells / abilities.

Other things not mentioned are things like the fact that raw mitigation becomes insane vs low damage output exp mobs, the value of certain utility diminishes outside of raid, mana/stamina sustain in a long fight or a non-raid environment etc. Its really hard to just rank one aspect of tanks in a vaccuum when tanking is such a dynamic thing that can't really be reduced to a spreadsheet or ranking system. Consistency and ease of play / ease to heal is another thing to be considered.

Raw self healing on its own is only really useful when comparing a tanks ability to handle incoming spell damage, which is a very niche scenario for tanks in SoD. I think a more realistic way to frame self healing would be self sufficiency in different scenarios. Something like how hard of a (typical auto attack no spell damage, no weird shit like it attacking super fast) mob should each tank be able to reliably live against for a reasonable period of time without any healing (This is different from just raw self healing as a value). How should the tanks compare to each other in terms of EHRPS (external healing required per second) vs a standard on tier raid boss? How are they achieving this number - for example, a tank that reduces their external healing required primarily through avoidance or self healing would less favorable by design due to them being less consistent and requiring more healer attention.
 
In answer to your question Cole I actually never noticed that change in the patch notes so I never retested assuming they were garbage for the low level stuff I have been targeting I haven't made a new SK in months except maybe a level 1 one for Hazel the shrew.
 
While it’s on my mind, aggro mechanics are really awkward when tagging a pull and your class drastically changes when you get a Teash wrist. Before the wrist: a puller splits, you cast a terror to tag when they’re FD, the mob runs into camp but then beelines for whomever it chooses because it hasn’t had damage done to it. Once you get the 100% proccing wrist, this isn’t a problem and the mob will run to you since it’s been damaged. I forgot how noticeable this was until I was trying some different wrists on.

A solution to this is already in the spell parser:
BCF7F109-1924-4697-8A4F-0A901451A25A.jpeg


I know adding relics to hybrids probably isn’t in the picture, but it would help smooth out some huge spell progression jumps amongst hybrid classes (sk kedge veil drop vs. R2, beastlord level 63 pet vs. R2, etc). I’m sure there is a paladin example but I’m not familiar with the class enough to comment on what void a relic would fill.

Lastly, in following with the paladin Tears of the Crusader tome (proc to heal group with melee swings), it would be nice if shadowknights got the same type of tome but with a mana restore instead of health. It would follow the lore of warrior + necro and help with the overall mana situation of shadow knights. Something like 10/20/30/40 mana back to your group at the same rate as Tears. Obviously the numbers could be tweaked, but it would be a nice little bonus to the group and offer a little bit of raid utility as well.
 
Hmm, from my ogre point of view. silly at the grobb spell sellers for seemingly uncurated merchants. It was a hairraising time trying to solo, till i found the specific areas. good. The reverse dmg shield i use alot touch of succubus comes to mind. buffing the whole group (with what who knows), there might be more to that idea. sorta like we have access to a mana or hp leech. , ..,? maybe its proper equipment or just looking at the skill set. it just feels like i dont have the correct grasp of the class as it were. its got taunt. some DD. pet.. mostly useless spells. can hold its own . taking a beating lifetapping. fd if necessary. semi return to battle. hp dots. as for fundamentals.. . never going to be anti undead paladin. still get necro expulse undead and such. some finetuning... argh. said my piece. incoherent?
 
Shadowknights should be best self healers, it's their niche now for better or worse. Also it fits their setup as the 'selfish' tank.

Having no context for the numbers and the class rework overall doesn't allow for good feedback.

Please make sure to not change up the niches. The rogue rework seems to have gone well but the enchanter rework is in need of a rework, and the big difference IMO is that one class was allowed to stay in it's place and the other was not.
 
Just wondering if there is a timeframe on the pet abilities being fixed? Clicking the pet ability, having it auto target the pet, thus losing your primary target, is really clunky gameplay. Not to mention as soon as the ability goes off you need to turn auto attack back on and try to find your target again. I assume something like this requires a patch and was wondering if it’d be included in the next one.

I also spent some time recording some instances of not damaging a mob and pulling with a terror and then it running for another character who simply casts a spell. This has been a known problem for years, a fix was asked for in this thread numerous times, and it wasn’t addressed at all. Please check out the following link for some of these examples, I’d love to record more if that is needed to hammer home this point:


This brings me to the next topic of disciplines. The player base has been adamant that disciplines have a wonky, very inconsistent range associated with them. I can be in melee range and still not be able to hit my discipline button. I have a video displaying this in the link above and can make more. I was compiling a list but it got to be just about every mob. Knockback/stunning spells (upheaval, cata, wizard jylls, etc) make this happen even more frequently.

Not being able to click discipline stances or abilities while spell gems are greyed out is another really clunky aspect of adding them to spellcasters. We don’t even have it as bad as Paladins (ghot grey out is massive), but it is still very noticible and affects gameplay a lot. We rely on these new buttons for mitigation/damage/utility and having them unclickable while we are casting is poor design. Trying to min/max your character shouldn’t be penalized.

A lot of these problems have been brought up numerous times and we (the players of the game) feel they have not been addressed very well. Being told “well, wait until we change all the other classes before we circle back to fine tune yours”, is really off-putting when there are fundamental aspects wrong with classes being reworked.

I realize dev-ing is a full time job and you guys have other commitments. These changes have been a ton of work and testing and I’m sure it’s sucks getting criticized, but these are real problems affecting the current game and how it’s played.
 
stever said:
Not being able to click discipline stances or abilities while spell gems are greyed out is another really clunky aspect of adding them to spellcasters. We don’t even have it as bad as Paladins (ghot grey out is massive), but it is still very noticible and affects gameplay a lot. We rely on these new buttons for mitigation/damage/utility and having them unclickable while we are casting is poor design. Trying to min/max your character shouldn’t be penalized.
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afaik disciplines on every other version of EQ i've played aren't effected by spell gem grey-out and its pretty jarring when experiencing it in SoD. would be a huge improvement to the feel of knights if there was a fix for it.
 
Tevinter said:
Damage in this game is incredibly spiky (particularly on knights who have poor mitigation) so having buttons you can press instantly and frequently to respond to it feels really good. Part of the reason old /s 7 felt so good is you could literally swap into the stance while casting a lifetap to respond to a bad melee round.
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shamelessly quoting myself here, the new buttons do not feel very responsive and a lot of the time theres a non-trivial delay when trying to react to a big damage spike.
 
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