Dark Knight

Welcome back to Class Design Diary! Today, we are giving a sneak preview of the third and final Explorer Warrior class: Dark Knight!

Before I jump right into the new Specialized Skill, there's a small detail that I haven't explicitly clarified, but I think it helps bring a more holistic appreciation of our class design philosophy.

Piercing Drive 2nd Job

All three Explorer Warrior classes at 2nd Job had the least visual distinctiveness and flavour amongst all the classes. Their 2nd Job consisted of gaining access to their specific party buffs, a final attack, and a shared, generic, lacklustre mobbing skill called Ground Smash. Hence, we made a point for every Warrior at 2nd Job to have their own version of an attacking skill, and this is Dark Knight's move that emphasizes its patented dark spear visual: Piercing Drive!

Evil Eye 2nd Job

Dark Knight's Specialized Skill is basically Evil Eye. It's renamed from its previous name "Beholder", because, well, we're all edgelords at heart, aren't we...

Evil Eye is your companion that looks completely innocent at first. At the start, during 2nd Job, it bestows one passive effect: a respectable 10% MaxMP recovery every 24 seconds. That should greatly ease your levelling journey, especially for those playing a Dark Knight as one of their first few in-game characters.

Indeed, this may not seem like much at the start. But as you advance further in the class, this little summon becomes more and more useful. However, its usefulness might eventually require you to sell your soul to the dark side, in a very literal way. We will talk more about this shortly.

Evil Eye Shock 3rd Job

Just to give you some lore about Dark Knight's class design: it took Nexon years to realise that there is not much logic behind why a Dragon Knight, the original 3rd Job class title, suddenly lost interest in his dragon fetish and embraced the dark side. So in later versions of MapleStory, Nexon shifted away from dragon-themed spearman tropes and realigned the class theme to its 4th Job Dark Knight archetype. We agree with the thematic shift as well, so we did a surface makeover across all existing 3rd Job skills, converting the dragon-themed features into dark-themed ones. Let's have a look at one such example: the classic Dragon Roar, now Evil Eye Shock.

La Mancha Spear 3rd Job

Similarly, Dragon Buster and Dragon Fury have no place on the dark side. In fact, they were a relic of pre-Big Bang MapleStory, where weapon stabbing or slashing had an impact on your damage output.

However, we still chose to keep Dark Knight's existing trait of being the best mobber of all three Explorer Warriors. So we made sure to choose and design attacking skills that hit slightly more mobs, with slightly larger hitboxes as well.

First is the main attacking skill, La Mancha Spear. Honestly, it'd be such a waste for a spear-wielding class not to launch its massive spear and take a stab (pun not intended) at its enemies.

Spear Sweep 3rd Job

The secondary attacking skill is Spear Sweep. It has a massive range for a 3rd Job attacking skill, but its purpose is less about dealing damage and more about pulling enemies closer to the player. It's not just form over function for the Dark Knight, eh?

Cross Surge

We also rethemed Dark Knight's main late-game damage booster from its signature Berserk skill to a new active buff that bears the rightful dark elements: Cross Surge.

Cross Surge introduces the unique concept of a "Conditional Bonus", whereby you gain damage based on your current HP ratio. Basically, the closer your current HP is to your MaxHP, the higher the bonus damage. This also synergises with Dark Knight's patented buff, Hyper Body, which increases MaxHP (and MaxMP) by a percentage. With a higher MaxHP, you have a bigger buffer to stay at a high HP ratio.

Gungnir's Descent 4th Job

And finally, we come to Dark Knight's 4th Job. It is in 4th Job that we are introducing novel changes that complete the synergy of the class's overall skillset. The first new change is the introduction of a much-needed single-target damaging skill, the flashy Gungnir's Descent.

This is a highly potent, multi-line damaging skill that comes with an innate 30% IED. However, such a powerful skill comes with its own restrictions: it has a short cooldown of 8 seconds, and it also costs a hefty 5% of your MaxHP. The most obvious consequence that immediately comes to mind is this: if you play Dark Knight without being aware of these HP-cost skills, you might be unknowingly lowering your DPS output (assuming you didn't set your auto-potion to 100%).

But what if I told you there is a way to bypass these restrictions on Gungnir's Descent? Wouldn't that be borderline overpowered? It is, but you'll find out shortly whether there is more than meets the eye, or should I say, the Evil Eye...? Muahahaha.

The Evil Eye's Price 3rd Job

Great segue back to the eye: remember we talked about your partner-in-crime? In the old Dark Knight, it had a very powerful 4th Job passive skill where the Evil Eye grants a plethora of high-impact buffs that silently skyrocket the Dark Knight's performance.

In this rework, we moved this skill earlier, to the 3rd Job phase, but added an HP cost to it: every 4 seconds, this dark dastard drains 1% of your MaxHP, which adds up pretty quickly if you are just standing around nonchalantly.

Darth Vader's famous quote sums this up well: "If you only knew the power of the Dark Side..."

Sacrifice 4th Job

You are probably starting to hate, or love-hate, this dark goofball of evil. So we created a way for you to get back at the Evil Eye: by literally gobbling it down with the reworked skill, Sacrifice.

Sacrifice is what we call a DPS cooldown: for a set duration after using it, you can potentially deal even more damage than usual. In the context of Sacrifice, you consume your ever-faithful companion and lose whatever passive effects it had. But in return, you restore back to full HP and unlock the game-changing ability to completely bypass the cooldown on Gungnir's Descent. We're even throwing in bonus Boss Damage and IED for the duration as well.

Final Pact 4th Job

Last but not least, enter the coup de grâce of Dark Knight's skills, representing the peak of sinister darkness: Final Pact.

Final Pact is a passive skill that triggers when you take any damage that drops you to 0 HP or below. Immediately upon activation, the Grim Reaper raises you back from the grave with full HP, granting you 25 seconds of immunity to basically everything: damage, debuffs, even insults from the living!

What's more, during this period of invincibility, you can use your badass single-target DPS skill, Gungnir's Descent, without the cooldown or the HP cost involved!

While that may sound completely unbalanced, great rewards come with great risk. The Grim Reaper forces you to sign a contract: you must kill 20 enemies, or hit a boss monster 20 times, within the 25-second invincibility period. Failing to do so will simply send you back to the grave. But should you succeed, you stake your foothold back in the realm of the living, reviving with full HP once again.

Of course, there's a whopping 600-second cooldown, but you already expected that, right?

The class fantasy

In conclusion, these are the highlights of the rework we brought to Dark Knight, a class that probably lives up to its class fantasy the most.

The warrior who made a pact with Darkness itself, who masterfully wields an absurd HP pool to deliver devastating spear skills and dark powers upon his enemies. Not even Death can overcome the Dark Knight... as long as you do not neglect the price you are paying to the Evil One, who hopes you'll never notice the blood he is siphoning away from you, slowly but surely.

That concludes our Class Design Diary for the Warrior classes. Up next, we will be taking a look at the redesign of our Warriors' trusty backline comrades: the Explorer Magicians!