Talk:Dark Knight (5e Class)

For this class to be fixed some minor changes need to be made to the abilities. At this point, the class is an action economy nightmare and clunky beyond imagination. Every ability uses your action or bonus action that should instead be bonus and free actions.

For starters the main first level ability Bloody Hands "Dark power threatens to overwhelm you, and drives you to kill in the most horrific, violent way possible. As an action, you are able to attack with damage equal to 2 x your dark knight level. When you use this feature, you lose HP equal to half of the total damage you deal upon landing a successful hit, rounded down. If you miss with this feature, you and the targeted creature take no damage."

This ability should instead be a bonus action as its class ability it pays homage to in Bloodhunter Crimson Rite lets you attack and use it adding extra damage at a cost to yourself. It and Blood Hands are balanced enough to not be spammed 24/7 the damage you should deal, should be befitting the cost and should let you take your attack action normally on top of this. (It should also not be 5x level damage. If it is, change it to an action and lower the damage. Maybe make it an increasing die amount and make it con mod uses instead of taking hp. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nonenz (talk • contribs) . Please sign your posts.)

Secondly, the ability Dark Bane Staring at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one spell slot as a bonus action to deal necrotic damage to the target, in addition to the weapon's damage. The extra damage is 2d8 for a 1st-level spell slot, plus 1d8 for each spell-level higher than 1st, to a maximum of 5d8.

This above ability is literally divine smite re-flavored so it should also be free to use at the cost of a spell, the costs once again befit the benefits, and it's not a spammable ability you will run out of it.

Thirdly, abilities from the Path of Violence's level 3 feature Dark Arts

Evil Reach: No enemy is beyond your reach. As an action, you are able to increase the reach of your melee attacks by 5 feet for 1 minute. Additionally, the normal and long range your ranged weapon attacks increase by 20 feet.

No Escape: Your wrath follows quickly. As an action, you are able to increase your base walking speed by 10 feet for 1 minute. For every dark knight level you gain upon learning this feature, your base walking speed increases an additional 5 feet when this feature is activated.

All the other subclasses have them as either bonus actions or are befitting an action worth, these two are utter wastes of an action. Both of these abilities are actions that make you unable to act in any combat setting, I feel these two should also be bonus actions, or else it would be a waste of a turn to get a 5 foot reach next round since you get no attack if you use it. Making this as bad as True Strike. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ShadyZ (talk • contribs) . Please sign your posts.

Hey all! We have a player in our fresh campaign that is really interested in this sort of class fantasy. I think that there's plenty of fantastic ideas here. The 3 subclass choices for the Dark Knight are suited for a ranged DEX build, a hefty STR frontliner, and a DEX/STR rogue, respectively, giving it a lot of leeway with how the end result looks.

That said, there's quite a few features I'd say are a little overtuned, undertuned, and/or worded vaguely. I'm going to stay faithful to 99% of the original abilities, but fix things up in terms of dice rolled and wording. I know this page hasn't been touched in about a year, so I apologize if people are enjoying the current setup. If you'd like me to take these revisions into a completely separate Dark Knight, Variant page, let me know and I'd be happy to oblige!

--Grass (talk) 16:49, 13 October 2022 (MDT)

Just finished finalizing the changes. I haven't touched the Dark Knight spell list, and I haven't thoroughly gone through to proofread and check for consistencies in grammar and syntax, but I'll get around to that soon. The reason I made 3 big edits back-to-back-to-back is because my session expired and signed me out when I tried to do it in one go, so I wanted to be safe and make sure things saved properly!

Let me know what your thoughts on the changes are. I think aside from the small changes to limiting amount of uses/damage outputs, the two serious changes I made were completely redoing Aura of Confusion to Mark of Exhaustion and moving the description/limitations of Dark Arts abilities to each subclass' section versus a little below the Spellcasting section. When I had first gone through the rules of the class, I didn't know there was a cap to Dark Arts' usages. I figured moving them to each subclass makes that rule more visible. Thanks, and take care!

--Grass (talk) 19:17, 13 October 2022 (MDT)