[Autumn]

The real strength (lol) of dragon king is increasing your cap. It's not really about stat efficiency, the point of the item is to push damage a bit further than you're supposed to. So the gloves are comparable to crownbleeder but not outright worse. In many builds, they're better.

I agree that it could use a little buff though, especially in the set department. Even a handful of bonuses being given for having 2-3 pieces would push it to the forefront of the meta imo.

Mathematically, increasing your cap is actually not that impact full I hate to say. Like as a critter if you're going raw str you can go into cap and take 5 out of luck for crownbleeder and put that extra into str and get more than the soft cap increase gives. The breakpoint for this is like 25 into soft cap, which if you're doing that it's uh

It's bad

You can do the same with ten points of res from nullstone gauntlets and so on and so forth. 

There's rarely a case where anything outside of the accessory is worth it. I have the hands specifically as never use.

If you have an example where they give more stats I'd love to see it

I get what you're saying, but Dragon King isn't for crit builds, so you should never make it compete for Crownbleeder to a BK or a Ghost. Dragon King was always more geared towards cheesy STR builds or autohitting builds like Kensei or DH in the past, and even then it competed against Bloody Palms, the catch-all unbalanced glove slot that was even more interchangeable than Idol is now.

Not getting into the specifics of why Nullstone Gauntlet is not actually 10 RES, I think that Dragon King could get better in the following ways
-Increasing STR scaling with each additional piece, encouraging more stacking together, something like: 5%/10%/20%
Or
-Creating a 5 piece set effect for dragon king which enables new skills to play around with, perhaps counts the user as a dragon race and give them wings or fire or something.