[Dark Knight's] actually not held down by archaic design at all, considering it got almost completely redesigned in Shadowbringers.
Not really.
Effectively Edge of Shadow/Flood of Shadow is what Dark Arts used to be, an off gcd mana spender that gives damage, you just spam it less than in Stormblood and it doesn't have some synergy aspect to it like old Dark Arts. It also serves as a simplification for Darkside, which kind of screws up their original lore but that is another story.
TBN is mostly the same, just much more straight forward because it just refunds your mana if it breaks instead of the convoluted Mana + off gcd vs Blood + gcd dps math where you can lose dps because Bloodspiller used your gcd while Dark Arts didn't. It still has some jank because as you get more gear you get can sometimes make TBN breaks that used to work not happen anymore which is really annoying.
Abyssal Drain was SE giving up on trying to make this work within their 2 button tank aoe rotation design, so they just made it an off gcd that doesn't cost mana unlike what Dark Passenger used to be. Salted Earth is a HW ability that honestly doesn't need to exist anymore if they want to keep jobs simple and not have random filler seeming abilities. Dark Mind is a holdover from HW when they wanted Physical and Magical specialized tanks for some reason, despite making most dangerous tank busters magical. No other tank cooldown works this way anymore, so why does Dark Mind? I have no idea I'd rather it was something else. All they did to Dark Mind in the "rework" is remove the DA enhancement which is hardly a rework at all.
The most rework heavy thing is that DRK gets an Inner Release window like Warrior, while before your burst window was getting as many Dark Arts enhancements as you could during raid buffs which felt more like what Gunbreaker is today with all the off gcd weaving. If you want a real rework, look at Machinist that job has been effectively remade twice now because it sure doesn't work like it did in HW even remotely.
You could remove Abyssal Drain, Salted Earth, and Dark Mind and Dark Knight would be plenty coherent with its gameplay style of spend mana for defense/offense which was its original playstyle in HW with just more buttons that could use mana. GNB's off-gcds and Sonic Break mostly serve as burst fodder for your No Mercy burst window which is why everything except Bloodlust aligns pretty much perfectly and Bloodlust aligns every other time you use it. Gunbreaker has a pretty strong focus on burst due to it having only one burst cooldown at 60 seconds and is a very coherent design relative to Drk. Abyssal Drain and Salted Earth do nothing for Drk's Delirium window and are just filler off gcds just to have them. Even Upheaval on Warrior serves more of a purpose to its design considering it has synergy with Inner Release and at least makes it less "Fell Cleave" the job because Upheavel is more efficient to use than Fell Cleave.
Interesting to know that, yet again, what I hear on the grapevine about the meta is completely fucking wrong. Thanks for the feedback.
Where do people come up with ideas like Dark Knight being the worst performing Tank right now from anyway?
Eh, DRK is in a very weird spot and for most groups WAR is probably as good or better for a "prog friendly MT" because Inner Release is much easier to use and cash in damage than ensuring your DRK doesn't just monkey mash their mana outside of raid buffs or misses breaking TBN because they gained more gear last week so TBN doesn't break the same anymore. I wouldn't say its wrong, just overly simplified like most big brain meta analysis for FFXIV is while also missing the bigger picture.
It is very playable and if you are really autistic you can thrive in speedkills according to fflogs which involves some super mega strats that I won't bother to explain, if you want to know
read this. Also people tend to compare TBN and DRK differently for some stupid reason, TBN is an amazing button and probably the best singular tank CD in the game, but DRK as a whole kit is an example of how all the streamlining and trimming they did really gave it some stupid design choices and unless you go super autistic WAR is probably better. Also DRK doesn't gets its raid mitigation in SB Ultimates, while everyone else does, because reasons I guess.
Think of "Dark Knight bad" like saying "Machinist is bad"
Machinist is more or less objectively the worst dps in the game at top play if we look at data, it has perks in low percentile because uptime is super easy, but is it playable and can clear everything fine? Absolutely, but it is still the worst. FF14's balance is tight enough that it really doesn't matter what you play which has been the truth since after Gordias' release in HW really. It is only when you speed kill or whatever that balance matters, but that is just a given really. This is what I mean by missing the bigger picture. FFXIV for better and for worse isn't like most MMOs, you can't really "screw up" or "build wrong" and then play something that can't clear anything or if it can it is a massive hassle. That hasn't happened since 2.0 WAR and 3.0 PLD/AST pretty much.
