Dark Knight

Overview

Dark Knight is the first custom class introduced on Trifecta RO. It's based on Ragnarok DS, Ragnarok Tactics(PSP), other various forms of media unrelated to RO, and my own ideas spun into the mix.

To learn any skill, you must learn the passive "From the Void", which disables natural SP regeneration. SP is regenerated by using Blood Crush, Drain, Creeping shadow, or consumables, and is meant to be used as a sort of special meter, similar to how AP functions on fourth job classes. After that one passive, all other skills are free to learn without a skill tree. This is to allow for highly customizable builds, and opens up the class to both simple and complex builds depending on what the user wants.

Dark Knight has multiple different builds and playstyles, which are shaped by the passive you choose to take.
Only one of the following passives may be utilized at the same time, picking multiple will negate all bonuses.

Dark Blade

The DPS passive.

Adds a portion of your MATK and magical damage multiplier to physical attacks. Also increases damage dealt to enemies with a status ailment (stuff like blind or poison)
This allows you to use magical damage equipment on top of the normal melee, range, physical and critical damage. Please note that this only applies to MAGICAL DAMAGE (stuff like spellcasting, or shadow magic +10% DO NOT APPLY).

Since you deal extra damage versus targets with status ailments, this means your best party members are ones that can apply status ailments like blind, poison, curse etc. A full list will be added later, but it covers nearly anything that can be considered a debuff.
Classes like Soul Linker, Dancer, some Monk builds and Assassins make great party members that highly compliment this playstyle.

Arcane Arts

The tank passive. Reduces damage taken from all size enemies depending on skill level. This passive synergizes with certain skills to allow for extreme survivability.

Shadow Mastery

The summon passive. Increases the amount of shadows you're allowed to have out. Increases control, and increases stats on your shadow lord.

Universally used buffs

• Chaos: Converts buffs gained through skills into the chaos version. Each effect would be listed in each applicable skill's description. If chaos is activated WITHOUT the specific buff active, grants the user the chaos buff, which alters the effect of Curse Spike, Dark Energy and Drain.
  

NOTE: ONLY ONE CHAOS EFFECT CAN BE ACTIVE AT ONCE!!

• Life Taker: Any time you auto-attack a target, heal (1% per skill level) of your maxHP per attack. If you use a skill, heal (2% per skill level) of damage dealt, then the buff is removed. | Chaos Life: drains the user's HP per second to increase damage dealt by 50%.
• Blood Crush: Any time you auto-attack a target, heal (1% per skill level) of your maxSP per attack. If you use a skill, heal (2% per skill level) of damage dealt, then the buff is removed. | Chaos Blood: drains the user's SP per second to increase damage dealt by 30%

How skills work

Some Dark Knight skills will grant the user a buff for 15 seconds. That buff is removed as soon as you use a skill or the duration has expired.

How chaos works

When a Dark Knight buff is active on the user (Punishment for example), it shifts that buff into chaos mode after using the Chaos skill (Chaos Punishment). The chaos version of the buff does not get removed after skill usage, and can be stacked with normal Dark Knight buffs, but NOT OTHER CHAOS BUFFS. Only one chaos buff can be active at a time. Please note each effect in the table below for a in depth look at what each buff does in both normal mode and chaos mode.

If Chaos is used without any buffs active, you gain the chaos buff. This buff does nothing on it's own. It will, however, change the effects of Curse Spike, Drain and Dark Energy. In the table below, it is mentioned what the changed skills do.

Skills

Physical Skills
Skill Name	Effect	Self Buff	Chaos Effect	Cost
Hard Slash	No additional effect	None	None	None
Massacre	No additional effect, deals more damage than Hard Slash	None	None	10% current HP
Black Out	Deal area damage and has a chance to cause the blind status. If a target is already blind, auto-cast dark surge. (dark surge is a high damage area attack)	None	None	5% current HP
Punishment	Deal damage to a target. If the target's HP is 30% or lower, increase damage dealt by 20x.	Increases damage dealt to any target below 30% HP.	When YOUR HP is below 30%, increase damage dealt by 100%.	5% current HP
Guillotine	This skill will always critically strike. If the target is 10 or more levels below the user, instantly kill the target (does not apply to bosses).	Critical + 100	Critical damage +50%	30% max SP
Death Blade	Deals damage to a target.	The next Dark Knight skill will hit 3 times.	Has a chance to cause coma on a target when auto-attacking.	5% current HP
Curse Spike	Deal low damage to a target. Inflicts a status on the target depending on which passive is learned. If Dark Blade is learned, reduce the target's DEF to 0. If Arcane Arts is leveled, reduce damage dealt by 70%.	None	If Chaos is active before casting this skill, grant the user a buff that reduces damage dealt and damage taken by 70%.	10% current HP
Dark Energy	Deal damage to a target and has a high chance to inflict the Curse status.	None	If Chaos is active before casting this skill, it becomes a multi-hit attack that will bounce between nearby enemies. Each enemy hit has a chance to be inflicted with the rebound status.	5% current HP
Dark Wave	Deal area damage.	Any Dark Knight area skill has a chance to inflict the fear status.	Auto-cast Chaos Wave when auto-attacking a target or hitting an enemy with a Dark Knight area skill.	5% current HP
Hell Impact	Jump to an enemy, dealing single target damage, then immediately inflict area damage to surrounding enemies.	Any Dark Knight area skill has a chance to inflict the burning or bleeding status.	Increase area damage dealt.	5% current HP
Death Embrace	Causes all enemies within range to attack the user. (This depends on enemies' sight range, otherwise it is map-wide.)	None	None	5% current HP
Minus Strike	Deal damage depending on how low your current HP is compared to your maxHP.	None	None	25% current HP
Drain	Deal area damage to a target and enemies around it. Heal HP based on a portion of the damage dealt.	None	If Chaos is active before casting this skill, heal SP instead.	None
Dark Nebula	Deal area damage to a target and enemies around it. Deals more damage depending on the combined levels of Dark Blade and all other physical Dark Knight skills.	None	None	20% current HP

Shadow Summon skills
Skill Name	Effect	Shadow Veil Effect	Cost
Summon Shadow	Summons a shadow. The type depends on the level used. STR will increase a shadow's ATK and INT will increase a shadow's MATK.	Doubles the amount of summons able to be used.	10% MaxHP
Creeping Shadow	Deals low damage based on the user's CONTROL stat and heal HP and SP depending on the damage dealt. If a Shadow Lord is active, commands it to use it's attack on the target.	Healing is doubled.	No cost
Genocide	Deals low shadow element magic damage to a target and enemies around it and inflict the genocide status on enemies hit. Genocide status increases damage taken from Dark Knight summons' skills.	Doubles the damage increase.	20% MaxHP
Promotion	This skill can only target your own shadow summons (NOT LORD). Promotes the unit into a stronger version with increased stats and more/better skills.	None	20% MaxHP
Shadow Veil	Gives additional effects, improves buffs/debuff and allows you to summon more shadows.	None	50% MaxSP
Shadow Lord	REQUIRES LEVEL 100 OR HIGHER TO USE. Summons a powerful shadow, that has their own attacks and buffs that is SEMI-CONTROLABLE. Please check the summon list for info.	None	30% MaxHP
Shadow Assault	Places your Shadow Lord into attack mode. It will attack nearby enemies with their basic attack. Please check the summon list for info.	None	None
Shadow Action	Changes your Shadow Lord into action mode. When cast it will use it's action ONCE (due to how skill queueing works, it may whiff, I'm working on the issue). Please check the summon list for info.	None	10% MaxHP and 10% MaxSP
Shadow Assist	Changes your Shadow Lord into assist mode. When cast it will use it's assist ONCE (due to how skill queueing works, it may whiff, I'm working on the issue). Please check the summon list for info.	None	10% MaxHP and 10% MaxSP

Shadow Lords
Type	Assault mode	Action Mode	Assist mode
Lich Lord	Twin Sword Strike: single target damage	Sword of demise: area damage, then inflicts the genocide debuff on enemies hit.	Sword of Vigor: grants both the user and the master a buff that has a 50% chance to heal 10% of damage dealt as HP and SP. Heals 10% of the user's MaxHP and MaxSP.
Knight	Sunder: single target damage	Lightspeed: area damage and inflicts a debuff on all enemies hit. Any player that uses Creeping Shadow on those debuffed targets have the cooldown of Creeping Shadow reduced to 0.5 seconds.	Dark Lightning: Buffs the summon. Using Sunder will auto-cast Dark Energy on the target.
Gorgon	Leech: area damage, heals the MASTER's HP and SP equal to the damage dealt. If the targets are stone cursed, doubles the heal.	Pain Split: Gorgon takes damage in place of the master.	Gaze: Has a very high chance to inflict stone curse on nearby enemies.
Witch	Blaster: moderate area damage	Curse of Agony: area damage and if the target has a status ailment, double the damage dealt.	Styx: Has an extremely high chance to cause many different status effects on enemies.
Dark Dragon	Dark Fire: inflicts NEUTRAL element area damage that deals increased damage against earth and undead monsters and reduced damage against water monsters. If the target has the ash debuff, increases damage dealt.	Hell Inferno: high area damage that deals more damage to earth, undead and holy element targets. If the target has the ash debuff, damage is further increased.	Dark Ashes: inflicts the ash debuff on all enemies hit.
Dain	Sweep: area damage	World Eater: Screen-wide AOE damage	Sword of the King: grants the Dark Knight a buff that will increase auto-attack damage, ATK and ASPD significantly based on the Dark Knight's control stat. When the Dark Knight auto-attacks, there is a 20% chance to auto-cast Creeping Shadow.

Example builds

Summoner build:

Max the stat that matches your Shadow Lord. (STR, INT or DEX)
If you plan to use an ATK based Shadow Summon, max STR. If you plan to use a MATK based Shadow Summon, max INT. If you want both, max both.
Put the rest into VIT.

Here is an example of a skill build:



Life Taker and Blood Crush DO NOT GET REMOVED when using Creeping Shadow. So you can use those to help heal up.
Drain will be weak, but the heal will be needed.
Chaos can swap Drain to an SP heal if needed.
Death Blade will triple the effect of Drain, but the trade-off is that it's a bit unsafe.
Curse Spike affects summons, as they hit the DEF/MDEF of the target. Removing those will make them deal more damage.
Death Embrace is a filler move, but it can prove handy in some scenarios.

The full summon tree is necessary for a full summon build to work. So there isn't much explaining needed for that. Make sure to read all the skills CAREFULLY. Then decide what you want to use.
There are a lot of options, so it's up to the user to decide what they want, which is why I'm not putting much emphasis here. Every Shadow Lord and Shadow Summon has a use case.

If you still want some direction, Lich Lord is good for single target, Witch is good for area, if you want screen-wide damage then Dainn is the option. The screen-wide damage is SLOW TO CAST so make sure you're safe when using it.

For Shadow Summons, Marksman is good single target damage, Arcanist is good area damage. Use promote on the summon that has the damage type you need most.

Currently, it is most beneficial to walk when fighting mobs rather than teleporting. Mobs can not target summons currently, which may or may not cause some mobs to detect a rude attack and teleport away.

The combo is super simple in theory, but keeping your HP and SP high is where the difficulty of this class comes into play. You will want to summon all 3 shadows, use shadow veil, summon 3 more, use promotion on 1, then summon your shadow lord. All this can be done in town, so you can heal between usage.
When fighting, buff using action and assist IF NEEDED, then use shadow assault.
From here, you will want to cast Genocide when you're able to, otherwise you use Creeping Shadow to keep your HP and SP as high as possible. Consumables may be needed.