Important Disclaimer:

Since Awakening Dark Knight has not seen any meaningful changes in over one entire year (last patch for Awakening skills on May 31, 2022) I would like to take this opportunity to propose some skill modifications to finally take it into 2023.

This document solely focuses on skills and how to improve them. There’s other things that need to be looked at but I think these deserve the highest priority so that’s the focus here.

All of these suggestions are not meant to be seen as a package deal. I am not asking that all of these are put into the game all at once. That would be insane.

Rather, the intention was to focus on individual skills, their purpose, how effective they are at their purpose and lastly, how fun they are. If Pearl Abyss decide they like or agree with any single one of the mentioned ideas, I would be happy.

That said, I tried to make some of my suggestions synergize (BSR removed from some abilities and added to others for example).

If you see “Increase Damage” in this document this is primarily meant in the context of capped PvP. Awakening in its current state does not perform well especially in Arena of Solare but also T1 - T3 node wars and capped conquest wars.

There is also one major point to consider: Dark Knight’s damage is wildly inconsistent between different classes and many receive too much while some receive too little. Therefore, these suggestions are in context of class damage ratios needing adjustments badly. And mostly downwards with some very notable exceptions.

Awakening Skills

Shattering Darkness

• Increase Damage

• Change protection type from Frontal Guard to Super Armor

• Change Area of Effect into a Circle around the Character roughly the size of Prime: Wheel of Fortune

• Possibly re-use part of the animation for Black Spirit: Seed of Catastrophe for the base skill

• Replace the 50% with a 200% Black Spirit skill

• Keep current Core skill (added Stiffness crowd control)

Flow: Bombardment

• Increase Damage

• Change protection type from Frontal Guard to Super Armor with a gap at the end

• Add Core: Flow: Bombardment with the effect of closing the gap in the Super Armor protection at the end of the skill

• Change Area of Effect into a Circle around the Character roughly the size of Prime: Wheel of Fortune

• Possibly re-use part of the animation for Black Spirit: Seed of Catastrophe

Flow: Darkness Outpouring

• Increase Damage

• Change protection type to Invincible while Moving, Unprotected on Hit

• Remove Character Collision

• Change Area of Effect into a Circle around the Character roughly the size of Prime: Wheel of Fortune

• Possibly re-use part of the animation for Black Spirit: Seed of Catastrophe

Shattering Darkness and its flows can be thought of as one single skill.

The version that is currently on live servers fulfills too many different functions at the same time. In total it is used as ranged poke damage, kiting movement, combo damage and as crowd control.

The dilemma here is that once an opponent is under the effect of crowd control, Shattering Darkness is rarely off cooldown and thus cannot be used as part of a combo.

Flow: Bombardment in particular stands out as the only portion that is used as mid ranged poke damage and while it hits reasonably hard it can be somewhat inconsistent on moving targets due to its small hitbox paired with latency-related issues.

I honestly think that the range of this skill is extremely overrated and that it should be removed in favor of added damage and improved capability in its other functions.

Another thing that is influenced by latency is the perceived extension of the hitbox of the skill, seemingly enabling enemies to hit the air at the point where Shattering Darkness was casted and then successfully getting a crowd control effect off, usually followed by the Dark Knight rubberbanding back.

Changing the protection to Super Armor would alleviate this at least partially, though grapples would likely still show the same behavior.

To offset the gained damage and add some risk to using the skill too openly, I think a gap at the end of Flow: Bombardment would be fine. Especially if a Core skill can close that gap.

Seed of Catastrophe

• Remove the 200% Black Spirit ability

Flow: Root of Catastrophe

• Remove Super Armor protection on this skill

• Increase Damage drastically

• Add Frontal Guard Damage

This Flow skill currently serves as low poke damage and to stay protected while either retreating from or moving a step toward enemies. While useful, it perpetuates a playstyle that prioritizes staying protected while chipping at an enemy, which is not very engaging.

Instead I think it would simply be more fun to make the skill impactful by increasing both risk and reward. It can then serve as a tool to punish unsuspecting / out of position enemies while needing to be used tactically to avoid getting hit by crowd control.

Soul Snatch

• Speed up this skill

• Add Core: Soul Snatch with the effect of adding a Stiffness crowd control effect

This is just a fun suggestion to make a skill useful in pvp that had no use in it previously. With the added benefit that it would bring jumps of shame to Dark Knight PvP.

Spirit Blaze and Flow: Spirit Blaze

• Delete current Spirit Blaze and make Flow: Spirit Blaze the main skill

• Add Knockdown crowd control effect

• Add 50% Black Spirit ability with massively increased damage and decent speed so it can be used to apply follow-up crowd control

Flow: Spirit Blaze used to be one of Dark Knights staple combo skills back when it still had the Knockdown crowd control effect. When that was replaced by a Downsmash the skill lost most of its utility in PvP. This has also diminished combo potential in Awakening greatly and thus should be reverted.

The addition of a Black Spirit ability further boosting its combo damage, much like Sorceresses Black Spirit: Grim Reaper’s Judgment, would aid in making Awakening Dark Knight a class with great combo potential.

Spirit Hunt

• Increase Black Spirit: Spirit Hunt speed

• Double distance moved by Black Spirit: Spirit Hunt

The Black Spirit portion of Spirit Hunt suffers from its low activation speed and doesn’t see much use in PvP other than dismounting cannons. This would give it some added utility and might make it worthwhile to use in regular combat.

Spirit Legacy

• Lower Cooldown from 11 to 9 seconds

Please. I beg…

Jokes aside, this having a different Cooldown than Dark Nebula and only being available every other pack of mobs in PvE feels terrible.

Touch of Exploitation

• Increase Area of Effect to roughly the size of Cluster of Despair

• Increase PvE Damage

• Delete Core: Touch of Exploitation

This can stay a pure PvE skill but needs to be more effective because currently it doesn’t feel good to use. With hugely increased range the core skill (bound on last hit) might become a problem so just get rid of it.

Grip of Grudge

• Increase PvE damage

• Increase Area of Effect of Black Spirit: Grip of Grudge to match the regular skill

• Speed up Black Spirit: Grip of Grudge

This is already useful for PvE but could be better with more damage. And Black Spirit: Grip of Grudge barely sees any use and could get some improvements to at least make it good at dismounting opponents.

Trap of Vedir

• Either slightly extend Frontal Guard duration after skill usage or improve connection to other Awakening skills

As is, the end of this skill is susceptible to crowd control due to its protection ending exactly on landing and other skills not chaining well. Adding either of the two options would make it more reliable when retreating during combat.

Imperious Command

• Move this skill into the Awakening kit

• Make Awakening skills mark targets

• Upon activation of the skill 6 phantom blades appear in a circle around the character and one after another fly towards the closest marked target

• If no target was marked the phantom blades fly pointing outward from the character from their current location

This is an idea I had after seeing what Pearl Abyss came up with for Awakening Woosa. It could make an otherwise very rarely used ability more interesting.

Main Skills

Absolute Skills

Damage on Absolute skills should be adjusted upward to a point where they are not quite as powerful as Prime skills to prevent Succession players from using them instead of their kit alternative.

A big reason why playing Awakening Dark Knight in capped PvP content feels bad is the difficulty to execute a combo and kill opponents by yourself. This comes down to many Awakening skills having multiple uses which makes managing their cooldowns difficult and the added fact that main skills do considerably less damage.

This change alone would alter the class completely and would make it much more viable for capped content as it would gain more tools to deal with opponents that are already caught with crowd control.

Vedir’s Dogma

• Delete this skill

This is only used by people that are taking screenshots, it has no practical use. I also don’t think it can be salvaged as it doesn’t fit into the current version of Black Desert. Mana attrition simply isn’t a thing since infinite potions were introduced and this is based on that concept.

Phantasmal Snare

• Add the ability to go backwards in the non-Prime version as well

• Improve skill connection with Wheel of Fortune, Lunacy of Vedir, Corrupt Ground and their Skill Enhancements

This skill currently can only be used in Succession because it doesn’t connect to any main skills and leaves a huge opening for crowd control. To help remedy that, at least make it connect to stationary skills so protection can be maintained. Having it go backward would also be beneficial and give it an actual use as protected movement that covers a slightly increased distance compared to Dusk, which cooldown it uses.

Corrupt Ground

• Lower Cooldown to 10 seconds

• Increase Area of Effect for damage to roughly Prime: Wheel of Fortune size (crowd control area of effect stays the same)

Corrupt Ground has the potential to be an incredible PvE skill (it has T3 addons) but is currently only available every other pack of mobs due to its 20 second long cooldown. A lower cooldown paired with some more damage and increased AoE would improve the skill greatly. It has a niche use for pvp as well but I don’t really see a need to change it for that (other than increased damage but that’s all main skills).

Obsidian Ashes

• Increase activation speed of Black Spirit: Obsidian Ashes

• Drastically increase damage of Black Spirit: Obsidian Ashes

This has an ultimate ability that does not see any use whatsoever.

Blooming Black Rose

• Increase PvE damage

The nature of this skills’ input (rmb with activation after a lot of skills that easily triggers unintentionally) and it being unprotected makes it not very suitable for pvp. It does however have a place in PvE and could be improved with damage.

Spirit Satiation

• Change this skill to instantly recover a fixed percentage of HP and Mana

This skill currently has no use in PvE nor in PvP. Making it recover HP and Mana instantly would enable disengaging from combat to recover some resources and returning to the fight much faster.

Closing Thoughts

Many other classes have received changes over the last year that improved their gameplay, both for PvE and PvP. Completely new classes have since been added and from an early stage outperformed big parts of the existing roster especially in PvE. The game saw the addition of Magnus skills and a huge portion of Skill Enhancements otherwise known as Rabam skills were improved.

Despite all of this, Awakening Dark Knight has largely remained the same, with marginal impact from its additions and literally no changes to its Awakening kit. It deserves an update.

Whether you agree with my suggestions or not, if you feel the same about Awakened DKs state in the game right now, please interact with this post and discuss what you feel would be an impactful change. Pearl Abyss needs to see there are still people that care about  this class!

Here is main problem, 99% of playerbase don't  see difference between awa and succ DK, they think that awa DK as strong as succ DK,  while all charts listing awa DK as an T - trash tier class.

While Awa DK need some changes i personally think the first step PA need to do  with awa DK its to match skills descriptions with reality, if PA can't fix skills (mostly because they was designed to have SA on them and w/o they just flopping) - PA should change description of skills to remove fake protections and hits. 

Sadly 99% of players will suggest to play succ DK and git gut, while succ DK basically completelly different class.

Awaken dk being full SA would kill the class js  if you think ops suggestion would help her it would make it 10x worse just with them changes. I dont get op changing her to having so much SA knowing its only anti cc...not protected against damage which would mean her already limited lifespan in pvp would be worse. Also awaken dk isnt in a bad spot exception of mass pvp cause of the below.

The issue for her is the same other mid range and melee classes there is classes with so much range + damage she just cant do anything in mass pvp scenes since her fg just gets blown up instantly. But thats a PA issue for overtunning range damage on specific classes

Edit: i should mention i only agree with the pve damage buffs-

That's what i'm saying, originally DK was made to have full SA on every skills, which she had, problems with DK is that majority skills "have gaps"  (lots of flexing animations)where skills got interupted and do nothing beside going cd. Having CC immunity is the key element of being good class, DK don't need AP/DP buffs, if you have permament SA you  can't die and your skills don't get interupted - just look at any perma SA class right now.

Realistically DK's only problem is very small AOE and problems to register hit ( there already was 2 patches in attempt to fix this), on survivability part DK's "Iframes" to short to properly dodge damage so you still can/will get hit by same skill you dodged.

As right now, on  awa DK i'm sending ~monthly tickets where i'm getting CCed  while have protection  either SA or FG, that's why i think that first step to improve awa DK is actually change skills description to match reality. For example Air strike say "Iframe while flying" and you instantly die on the moment you touched land aka damage you "took" while you was Iframed just got queued not removed.

Two things could be causing this the exploit thats been now community wide if someone uses it on the right skills it completely ignores protections. But from what i can tell it isnt guranteed but it does happen. Desync also can cause it in general 

If your latency is high enough to miss the "tick" on when the server accepts your actions an processes it can cause the same issue happens on most of the classes i have played when the servers have abit more load than normal,  the worst ones i have had it happen on are awaken kuno, awaken dk , awaken sorc(this one isnt as big of a issue but it does extend gaps on her) , succ nova and maegu pre nerf i have had the same issue other classes i have played dont seem to be as common to have it happen but i assume that its all classes. Since alot of the combat is client side things like damage missing without evasion being the trigger point or being cced out of protections, ccing others oh of protections or other randomness is because of this especially since the way the ticks are processed server side.

Can we get some love for succession too? Mostly just pve damage. It sucks sweating for 18-19k trash at hexe when I hear maegus hit 22k easily

Desync caused by exploiting, nothing else nothing more, there is no cure for it at the current state of game, i'm not sure if PA capable to fix it.

If you slow move DK's skills you can clearly see unprocted segment mid skill where you take all CC's and damage while skill say "protection during the skill"- like is that part not a part of skill ?  maybe PA expect me to have ~500+FPS, but i'm sure any class  is a godlike with ~500+ FPS.

That like BDO's curse, instead of asking to fix broken FOTM people asking to buff others to state of broken FOTM. FOTM especially made that way for you to reroll into it.

OP made many valid points and I also want to add something from my perspective:

While playing with Awa DK for a long time I always had the impressions that there were several skills that appear to do good amount of damage in PvE on paper. But in reality they are weak. I believe the numbers are a lie. I would want to mention for example Cluster of Despair. Frequently this skill disapoints me with pve damage despite the numbers it has. Dark Nebula too.

The most impactful skills to this day are Spirit Legacy III, Shattering Darkness III and the flows of it. Those skills are the only effective damage dealers in PvE. The rest have questionable numbers and/or acc. levels.

Now here comes the question: Wouldn't it be better to keep Forward Guard on Shattering darkness and it's flows instead? Do not worry. I've read the entire post from OP and I am asking out of curiousity.

maegu should be nerfed tho. but devs are playing dumb.