[Autumn]

Very much a simple thread where I don't wanna go into detail currently with what I think Black Knight needs, and instead listing its flaws and why it just doesn't feel right.

Black Knight is by no means a bad class at the current moment, its not exactly good in the light of mobility creep but I imagine that is one of its perceived weaknesses, they're not meant to move insanely fast and are restricted to the movement restrictions of heavy armor, which can limit them pretty severely. This isn't necessarily bad since castling can have a lot of range with black wind up so they can move and protect their allies efficiently, or at least that would be the case if protect functioned in a halfway reliable manner.

The largest issue I find with supportive black knights is that they just can't protect their allies as much as they want to, many basic attacks can straight up ignore protect, and there are a lot of abilities that are much more worth using on 2 targets instead of 1, so being next to your ally can often spell some disasterous things, like you being used as a 100% hittable sponge to trigger a knockdown from sonic shell or interference, while your dodgy friend might just be able to avoid that attack all together, something like metalaegis even prevents effects like this from getting out of hand with its absolutely insane version of protect, perhaps we could see that kind of mechanic implemented into Black Knight with a limitation.

Heavy armor doesn't feel terribly impactful to a Black Knight currently, many of its gimmicks can be utilized without it and the only reason you do use heavy armor is for a 10% DR which gets further mitigated by having more defense, this is an outdated mechanic from pre-GR I wager since we've learned that armor is terribly more impactful than %DR, this is the only suggestion I will make here, I'd much prefer it if Indomitable gave extra armor rating to Black Knights instead of %DR, I'd even go as far as to say this should probably be amplified as a main class benefit too.

Basic Attacking currently does not reward the Black Knight enough currently, where as some basic attack builds end up doing well, they're only doing well because of they're tailored to critically hit, Black Knight is not tailored towards critical hit checks so if you can't do that, you're better off spamming autohits, leaving a good portion of Black Knight's kit underutilized. Like in the case of a DH/BK destiny build you are very unlikely to ever basic attack. I personally like main class benefits for momentum efficiency, such as bloody shift, fleur and dagger dance. Chimera Stance is also one of my favorites but thats not main class.

Lastly, the autohits within Black Knight itself are all very niche and cannot be utilized effectively, Bright Bishop and Crescent Rook both scale from stats that a typical Black Knight wouldn't probably use ever, there's also the lack of a sword skill currently. I think that these sorts of elemental atk scaling skills should be dynamic similar to lift off, where say a venus badge would scale earth atk on crescent rook instead of wind atk.

In summary/tl;dr:

-Protecting an ally doesn't feel impactful, it is often a negative to be near them at all instead of by their side.
-Heavy armor doesn't feel crucial enough to a black knight, more incentive towards that may be required.
-Basic attacking without critically hitting should still reward a black knight somehow.
-Black Knight autohits scale from niche, non-used stats, board shaker is a good skill, but Bright Bishop and Crescent Rook are only good with specific builds.

Thanks for reading.