Our previous niche was masters of hate, we simply need that restored. Faster cast on terrors and aes, higher hate value on terror in particular, some high damage + hate dps dots would go a long way. Right now we are way too reliant on our 2 aa ae hates for snap aggro, imo, and the 45s timer hurts. The beam hate is borderline useless with the excessive timer, poor hate value and issues with levitation effects.
I knew someone would take my statement out of context. I guess you're the winner. As well you think all raids are same, apparently. Like I said before each raid is different and requires a specific strategy to win. I then gave a SPECIFIC example where SK's did well in a task/roll for that particular raid that a paladin or warrior were not suited for. I also stated that other classes for that raid had different rolls, again for that particular raid. Warriors being main tanks and paladins splashing. So the whole "SK's need to be useful" title for this thread is misleading. Sk's are still needed and in some cases for something very specific or in general off tanking and DPS. Personally I would like some changes to life taps, it's seems I'm the only one though.. No Dev is going to take this thread seriously though just from the(whiny) title. When discussing the needs for a class be smart and constructive about it. The title just ruins it at the gate.
The issue your not addressing is that if you take a 54 man raid with 1 sk and replace him with a war/pal they can do the kiting just as well as the sk, while not inhibiting the other pal/wars. Oh and when not kiting they can add more to the raid. Kiting is not a role, its a task, one that many can do, just like rooting. There is nothing we can do that cannot be substituted easily or better by another tank. Pallies have splash, therefore cannot substitute. Wars have the best mitigation, cannot substitute. As for tanking and dps, well war and pal can do those too, even better when it comes to tanking in case of war, and both can do just as much dps as an sk.
/ramble on Pretty sure our other tanks and healers appreciate having SK epic up nearly constantly. It lowers the healing load on everyone. Regarding heals, yes with our passive heals, procs, epic, etc we are more likely to actually heal than someone outside casting every few seconds. However, if you're just burning lifetaps on cooldown and not timing them to the incoming damage. You could have the best gear known to man, but if you aren't actively anticipating damage and timing your abilities in sync with them, you're doing it wrong. Keeping up temp hp, temp ac buffs between damage spikes is just maximizing your ability to not get one shotted. Healing 50-75% of a round of damage the instant it hits will keep you alive through those random AE effects or gaps in heals. It takes understanding what kind of damage you take, at what pace does that damage come, what kind of pace you can survive, how much mitigation do you need to stack up via discs or heals to stay above that max pace, and how many healers are actively watching and healing you. So basically know all the raids backwards to forwards, and a great feel for what to use when. I see a lot of people talking about our ability to tank and ability to DPS as being separate entities. I see my ability to tank directly correlate to my ability to do more DPS. The more DPS I do, the more healing I can cover between rounds of damage. As long as I'm not getting one rounded, it's just a matter of managing/minimizing the few times there's a lag spike, or a lull in the incoming heals to stay above that threshold of getting one rounded. That is still a completely different approach than warriors and paladins would appear to take, and I think a lot of you guys are trying to mirror your counterparts instead of maximizing your own abilities. Step #1: Don't ever stop casting spells/AA's/abilities. Weave those AA's in between global spell cooldowns. Quantity > quality most of the time. Step #2: Learn to time said spells/abilities to incoming damage Step #3: Learn to stack said abilities with your friends to increase the effectiveness of whatever you're doing. (You guys have those right?!?) j/k ;-) Step #4: ???? (More deeps!) Step #5: Profit If you're going to be reactionary and wait until you need something. Chances are you'll never need it. You'll never have practice as to when the best time is to use it, and sure won't know the best timing to weave that in with everything else. Don't even need to use a parser for most of it, just go pull more than you should without letting your group know. Use it all the second you see an opening for it. Maybe after doing that for a few months or years you'll have enough of a muscle memory that it becomes second nature. You'll use those oh crap abilities more times on average while you're raiding increasing your overall damage and uptime. Kill mobs faster, and force the people you're grouping with to dig deep as well to refine their timing and skill/spell selections. Ie, do I have enough time to get off another lifetap before the next combat round, is Reprove up, or am I low enough to use Leech touch to save DI from popping when the next combat round hits. Or is this mob hitting so hard I should be burning while mantle is up and then call for the next tank. Maybe it's barely hitting that I can burn and not waste a disc. Maybe I need to use carapace with the burn. Maybe I can take these 3 types of trash raid mobs without a disc, and that other type of mob adds and I need to burn everything to stay alive. Don't expect the old holy trinity of EQ to ever return, I really don't want to ever see it again personally. Just embrace what we have now, and play what you enjoy. Stop listening to all the naysayers and use that as motivation to prove them all wrong. I've had plenty of people call me stupid for making a raiding guild on the newest server, but it's a hell of a fun time doing all of this with a talent pool 1/10th the size of some of the other servers. It's forced us to be creative to beat raids, and to be unconventional. Try it sometime, and stop leaning on tactics or play styles that worked a decade ago. TL : DR blah blah blah they took our jerbs! blah blah blah sacrifice some more gnomes blah blah blah /ramble off
Oh stop, a warrior and paladin can't kite as well and a SK(I gave a bad example) They can't because they don't get FD or snare,(I don't think pallies can snare, anyways I gave a bad example). Everyone wipe that out of thier memory. The point being Sk's are not pointless and we do serve purpose. (For someone in a guild with only 1 SK that's a guild with a problem, not an SK problem). We have at least 3-6 knights on for every raids. Generally 6 is too many. So I got it now you are saying we can't tank like a warrior and can't heal like a paladin and there is nothing unique to our class so what's our purpose. Well I say make our dots significantly better and changes to life-taps that make them significantly better(mostly life-taps need work). However this still won't make you happy because you want a specialty, something that is very visible to others in the group/raid, and that no other class can do as good as you. What is it exactly you want (please don't say aggro or I'll take my SK and make him commit suicide ) We can't 'hate' to death a mob after all (would be cool though). At this point I think my opinion is just different in terms of whats needed.
I'm going to highlight this. A lot of posts in this thread (e.g., faster terrors!) don't solve the real problem. The larger issue at hand is the ability to perform functions. Let's assume for a minute that shadowknights and paladins are equal "knights," in terms of suitability for offtanking or main tanking (which is mostly true - each class has some advantages over the other, but the differences are small enough where neither might be said to be struggling too much). Now, when not performing that role (because there aren't adds up atm, because it's not your turn in the MT rotation, because you have an overabundance of knights, or whatever else), paladins have a host of other possible contributions - splashing, main healing, curing, and shadowknights can DPS poorly. The crux is paladins and shadowknights are both knights. That isn't the flaw here. The problem is with the design document, where paladins are knights and priests (buffs, heals, cures, rezzes, etc.) and shadowknights are merely knights. Shadowknights need some creative love that gives a new Vision(tm) to the class to breathe life into raid aptitude. Faster terrors make you better at being a knight! (252) but don't make shadowknights any more worthy of raid spots. So long as shadowknights can only be knights, while warriors can perform their central duties (self-healing aside) and paladins can serve as one of the strongest healing classes in the game, the writing is on the wall. On-the-run terrors are great quality of life, and address the primary tanking balance in the area where shadowknights may struggle most, but don't begin to approach the fundamental problem. EverQuest has the following main roles: 1) Tanking, 2) Burst DPS, 3) Sustained DPS, 4) aDPS, 5) Debuffs, 6) Buffs, 7) Heals, 8) Crowd Control. Shadowknights are fine tanks, but that's all they are. The knight archetype is shared with paladins, who are equal tanks but bring incredibly heals and sought-after buffs. There's no easy place to slot in power increases for shadowknights, and why I continue to believe the requisite solution is an innovative one. How might shadowknights gain some utility (i.e., additional roles) that caters to the raid game without creating an imbalance in the group and solo games? Small debuffs were popular for the development team with the most recent release. Many classes got some new abilities, and though I would hate for shadowknights to take on a large role in this area, it does seem to be an area where shadowknights may see some gains (see Tyvol's). One of the big issues here is debuffs don't fix the issue of stacking shadowknights, unless, like Tyvol's they take on incredibly short duration, but it does ensure each raid will want one or two alongside their five paladins. I don't see this area alone serving as a panacea for all that ills the class, but there may be more inroads to be made here and it seems the devs are open to exploring this possibility. Shadowknights need a new class design document, and I don't envy the folks tasked with that incredible challenge.
This has been an ongoing discussion for at least 4 years now and every beta it is presented to the devs when design/aa/spells are being developed. One might call it a fruitless endeavor. The class remains divided on what will solve the issue. More/better/faster aggro only provides sk with an advantage of pulling aggro and bein the first tank to start getting heals giving the illusion of a role where the reality is actually just sk stealing aggro over other tanks and thereby tanking by default. Not a role just an illusion all things considered. Moar dps won't improve raid roles either because they aren't going to allow you into the first or second tier of dps so what's the point? It certainly won't land you a dps spot... Completely counterintuitive to the idea of a raid niche but oddly enough makes sk just that much stronger in non raid environments. Speaking of counterintuitive ... Better dots??? I mean that just hurts the brain. How will better dots improve raid roles, when there aren't even enough debuff slots for existing debuff classes with much better expertise here. Once again this only serves non raid environments just in a more lol kind of way. What you are looking for is genuine raid utility. Now the task is to come up with better ideas than the ones the devs have ignored for the last 4-5 years at least. Trying to piggyback more group/solo power onto a raid utility problem is likely why ideas are always getting ignored. Some of this is downright laughable.
Innovative Ideas for SKs huh, ways to make them irreplaceable in raids.... Given their selfish nature, I really like the unmezzable/unrootable idea. But why not take it a step further. Make them un-debuffable. Call it Bitter Hatred or something of the like, your bitter hatred and loathing of all makes you so awful that diseases, poisons, and curses want nothing to do with you. Certainly be a nice feather in their cap, although it would require special 'annoying' raid mobs to make SKs irreplaceable. Adps/debuffing is also a really good road, and it is certainly in our history to debuff the mob while helping ourselves/group. This isn't exactly as innovative, but helps the situation a lot. I don't know what Tyvol's refers to by the way, is this a new beta thing, I haven't kept up with that in awhile. If the debuff is enough to make say 10 dpsers seem more like say 11 dpsers (or more), then that makes SK pretty darn useful. Increase their survivability some, give them a fun ability that is essentially a reverse cleric group health balance. It sucks out everyone else's hp to give the SK a heal, keep the refresh pretty low, like 2-3 min range. If nothing else, will make the raid tool leader want SKs in the raid so they can put them with raiders they don't like! Finally another good ability, can be burst DPS/ADPS, call it something like 'Salt in the wound', make it an activated ability that applies debuffs while melee attacking, first it applies rank 1, then if rank 1 is already applied it can apply rank 2, etc etc up to maybe 10 ranks. The searing pain causes attack speed to lessen slightly (stacks with other slows), as well as take increased melee damage. Is others, but I was attempting to go for innovation here! Maybe this will inspire someone else to have even more innovative ones.
I didn't say that dots were intended for a specific raid role shifte. Don't put words in my mouth. Your brain hurts because it needs work with comprehension. I said making dots and life-taps better is what makes sense improving. Then I stated that wouldn't make people happy because they are looking for a role to fill or a "specialty". I think the only other thing is then is debuffs..
We aren't ever going to have an everyday unique raid role that some other class can't do either, have we ever in EQ's history? Telling the community to consensus pick one out of a hat is just as laughable.
We used to be crowd control, but that has been reduced to kiting for us. If we ae agro to many on a raid without deflection up, even with unholy its a death warrant. We used to be able to agro 6 and take a round or 2 of dmg while the other CC got them locked down. Now that is not really possible, we kite them while others get them locked down, and when the devs don't want that they just put mechanics in place to make them un kite-able. then raids just use deflection rotations which is fine, but it something that can be done without any sk's on the raid. to shifty: We don't need faster casting agro, we already have terrors at .5 sec, they just need to do more agro in a cast. currently war/pal can lock down a raid mob in about 2 seconds, where if you have an SK for the initial tank melee have to hold off a couple more seconds before they can start their burn or they can/will pull agro. Even then the dps has to use silent/fades to keep off the top, where this is not necessary with our counterparts. This mainly only shows in events where the tank can be thrown around, and the dps starts dieing off because they grabbed agro while the tank was thrown, this doesn't happen to the pal/wars that I have seen but does to the SK's As for DPS, there is no reason that they couldn't limit our tanking in some way while running a disc like 2h prof that wars just got to bring us up to other hybrid dps (ranger, bst) for a secondary role. with DOT's not all guilds fill up the debuff bar, so yes dots can be useful for some SK on raids. the problem is anything you give to one area (group or raid), 95% of the time, transitions to the other. The only boosts in the group game I could see we need is more agro, not faster, in the raid game we need something bad. I personally would like to see a revamp to our aura/theft lines for ac/atk/resists to give us some utility. we can also attach the agro to them to solve the agro issue.
Some form of ADPS / Defensive form of ADPS is probably the most realistic for implementation. Ideal world would allow more design to go in... but we don't play there. Increased DPS via dots would also serve some form of balance
However you choose to categorize it, I'd still rather have an illusion of a role versus no role at all, and that's what we had prior to others catching up. It wasn't unique, but we were the "best" at it. Just like warriors (rightly) needed love after knights were catching them in mitigation, imo sks can use some love now in hate generation. Is it a class role? No, but it's better than what has happened and may be the closest we'll ever get to one.
Dev1: Okay here you go, you now have 100% more hate then everyone and as an added bonus I made your charisma 1,000,000. Enjoy! Player1:Great! Thanks for all that aggro, all our problems are solved. Dev1: Ahh Good! Player1: Umm so I noticed that aggro really doesn't do anything for my class other then make mobs really mad at me, and I'm actually not typically a main raid tank. So aggro isn't helping me really you know, fill a role so to speak. So uhh is there any possibility we could improve our DPS or life-taps or something to help our class? Maybe even along the lines of debuffs or oh oh I got it raise a hoard of demons to kill all mobs in a raid so every one can sit back and watch? Dev1: Nice try on the demons, but NO. See your class was in agreement you just needed more aggro and that's what you got. Maybe next year. (I bet they'll ask for more aggro..lol) Stop going mad for more aggro all the time..
Actually, shadowknight aggro is behind where Devs said they want it to be, so people complaining about it isn't such a terrible broken record as you may think. A problem with that is we only get the one single terror and one AE per 5 level upgrades, whereas paladins and warriors get several. That's something needing to be addressed, relying on so many previous expansion spells every 5 level cycle increase isn't good design. Our lifetaps and dots are in the same boat, maybe they should be linked so that they can all gain power and balance without breaking us one way or the other. Kiting isn't always an intended mechanic, and that as a raid role is probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard because most everyone can aggro a mob in some way, and run in circles. . Buffs for us have always been rather short duration boosts that affect the mob in same way, which I wish we had more of. Debuffing has been dabbled in several times but never committed to, which is the closest we're likely to come to raid utility (atk, ac, resists, HP [lol Curse of Frailty]). T'vyl's Resolve was a step in the right direction, but for such a short duration a 75% chance every 15 minutes is absolutely absurd. But if it were decreased to just 2-3 minutes, along with different short timer debuffs we could trigger for increased meelee, increased spell damage, decreasing enemy mitigation, or healing effectiveness, etc. Is the most likely raid utility we can get, making the monster take more damage from the rest of the raid, and maybe buffing our abilities in the process at the same time.
Aggro is an issue as Denyu accurately pointed out in that we do not have enough tools per expansion that are strong enough to lock aggro as quickly as the other tank classes. The perception that SK aggro is strong is because it has been strong in the past. The reality is however currently we are a quite distant third in single target aggro, and now a distant second in AE aggro and only slightly ahead of Pallys in that role and only under certain conditions. If pallys are able to generate heal aggro they also pull ahead in AE aggro putting us again in the back of the tank pack. Kiting as a role is just inconsequential. All classes have the ability to run around in circles while mobs chase you. Pallys, Monks, and Rangers in all reality would be able to fill this role much better as they have better run speed and are able to heal themselves if they take a hit. SK's do it solely because we are the least valuable class to actually have in the raid, so we "get" to be the kite class. Another perception issue is that SK DPS is above the other tank classes DPS, this hasn't been true for several years now. We are pretty close to Pallys DPS wise; unless the mob is undead, or they have 7th up, under both cases we are well behind. Warriors in a DPS stance are ahead now of both knights, other than again Pally vs undead, or Pally with 7th up; in which case Pallys are still quite far ahead. While DPS is not really a "role" we should fill as a non DPS class, as forever thought of as the "DPS tank", it would be nice if we were at least level on that front, if not slightly ahead. As utility the only role I see open without breaking everything is aDPS. Increases anywhere else will infringe on other class roles. T'vyl's Resolve is the type of thing we need, but at it's current level of a 12s buff that only has a 75% chance to be up once every 15 minutes, it's not strong enough to offer any truly worthwhile utility. The issue with getting some sort of utility and balance is to somehow show the devs that they are still balancing us on our perceived strength and not our actual reality.
I've been thinking about this, even though I rarely raid anything. Largely because I'm a lorehound and love SKs. Old-school design of the classes (which seems to be getting some attention again - like how rangers are starting to get spells that closely resemble some druid spells, paladins are getting clericy stuff again, wars are starting to head back towards their old 'masters of armed combat, providing someone heals them' state) gives some possibilities. First - Shadowknight is the only arcane hybrid. All the others are priest-based. So that's a place to start with. Of course, it's necromancy, specifically, so it wouldn't be appropriate to delve into chanter/wizard/mage abilities to look for clues. Secondly - Shadowknights are notoriously vindictive, cruel, selfish, and in a way, vain. Just talk to Tatalros the Cruel for evidence of all of that. They are the 'survival' tank in a lot of ways. FD, all those taps, Invis and IVU, Harmshield...SK's seem to have, as a core trait, a refusal to surrender their life if they can avoid it. At least from the design perspective. So, we've got that stuff as a baseline to look at. One thing that could help make them more desired, would be a raid-wide or groupwide version of Leechcurse. Likely on the same timer, with a long cooldown. But that's close to stepping on the toes of paladins, in the form of group healing. Another option, on the DPS side (which has already been mentioned to be one of the historic roles of SKs) would be something that hits the target based on how much damage is currently on the SK's group, with dead people making for large damage. But I'd say long refresh, so that people don't assign a group with an SK where everyone's job other than the SK is to die, in order to cause insane DPS. Perhaps a buff where whenever a groupmate other than the SK takes damage, the SK procs a nuke or tap based on the damage taken, and if someone other than the SK dies, it's more severe, or incorporates some kind of cruel debuff. I like to think of that idea as 'Gleeful Vengeance'. A possibility from the necro side of the equation would be SK's developing a way to use EEs or something similar. For example, a 'Cruel Mercy' spell, that consumes EEs to use, but produces a vicious swarmpet as the SK gives the soul in a gem a chance at freedom, but only if it tries to destroy his foe first. Some kind of ghost, rather than a skeleton. Another EE-based option would be a short-duration buff that provides a very powerful self-only, always triggers lifetap proc, but eats an EE every time it goes off. (Yes, that one might cause a whole lot of corpses in PoK.) The final idea in my head right now that could be good for the class, especially on raids, would be a disc that immediately clears rez effects, and restores the SK to 20% mana, while giving them a shortish duration buff (a minute or two) in the short-duration buff window (so as to not screw up rebuffing them) that seriously increases their tanking ability for that moment. Making SK's the 'OOPS' tank that jumps in when things climb into the handbasket, buying time to get the wars back into fighting condition. (Of course, the buff and mana replenishment would only work if you had rez effects when you clicked it.) Easily justified as the SK, with their necromancy training, turning into undead things, manipulating life energy, and emulation of death, combined with their physical and mental durability, can be considered so familiar with it that they can shrug off it's effects when anyone else would still be shaking and weakened.
