We’ll start things off with my main class, the two-handed axe-wielding Marauder. I’m a tank at heart and I loved playing my Blood Death Knight in World of Warcraft, so playing a guy in plate armor with a giant axe as a tank works great for me. It’s not ideal for everyone though, since many players will look at someone with a two-handed weapon and assume he’s there to bring the pain as melee DPS. If we had a class built around another heavy weapon like a two-handed sword, they might have an alternative, but right now the only other option those players have is the Lancer/Dragoon. A perfectly valid option for melee DPS, but it’s not the same to go from picturing yourself swinging a heavy axe/sword in plate armor to poking at someone with a lance in chainmail. So how do we take an existing tank-focused Class like the Marauder and turn him into a damage-dealing machine? Enter the Dark Knight.
There have been various interpretations of the Dark Knight in the Final Fantasy series, but for the most part they focus around characters in heavy armor that specialize in dealing damage. The bulk of this damage is from their melee weapons, often two-handed, but they also mix in dark magic, allowing them to sacrifice their defenses and even health to further damage their opponents. To mitigate their self-damaging abilities, they typically also have some manner of life draining attacks to use on their foes as well. So that gives us a heavily armored, large weapon wielding warrior with attacks that regenerate their health. Sounds familiar, huh, Marauders? We already have part of that self-healing toolkit anyway – all we’re missing is the self-damaging attacks and some actual DPS.
So the Dark Knight Job is a mechanical and aesthetical match to the Marauder Class, but what about lore? How do we tie the Marauder to a class that’s got a rather unpleasant reputation in mostFF games? This one’s actually fairly simple given that Marauders already have the Warrior Job. Light spoilers ahead: the storyline for the Warrior Job focuses around the “inner beast” the Warriors must learn to control. This force grants them great power, but they must always strive to maintain control lest they slip into a berserker state, lashing out at anything they lay eyes on. By the time you finish your quest chain, you’ve essentially conquered your inner beast. A similar approach could be taken with the Dark Knight Job chain, though I’d say this quest chain should have more of an internal focus. You can still have the “go here and kill X monster for a piece of your armor set” quests, but given the solo-instance nature of the majority of these quests, they should take advantage of that and add in some internal struggle.
Those of you who played Final Fantasy IV (FF14 RMT) might remember Cecil’s fight against his inner dark self (I refuse to call this a spoiler – you’ve had two decades to play this). In that game the struggle was meant for Cecil to cast off his ties to the dark power to follow the path of the Paladin, but we can still use the same idea for the Dark Knight. Players could go somewhere and suddenly shift to a shadowy mindscape, where something inside your Soul Crystal tries to tempt you towards evil. Resisting the call of darkness would lead to the voice sending shadowy apparitions to overwhelm you so they could take over, but the player would rise triumphant and snap back to the real world. As you move further through the story, the spirit would push harder and harder with stronger shadows until finally you face him – a shade version of yourself. Striking down your shadow self would cause the Soul Crystal to stop pulling at you as you would have shown yourself to be immune to its call, leaving the player free to continue as a free Dark Knight.
