Your top 5 DRK Adjustment Requests: Sister thread to the Official Adjustment Topic

[Xaveron]

personally i had the crazy notion for fixing relics to give all relic ws a crit mod to go along with what they already have. lvl 90 apoc can push cata numbers up to 2500+ (for me personally i'm sure it can go higher) man if that could crit... then just give the occasionally deal double damage 30-50% like empy.

ANYWAY back to drk

The problem is how razed ruins completely changed the game. If your ws doesn't have a crit mod, its useless in abyssea compared to everyone else. You would need str+ something insane to get numbers close to crit based ws. A str/attack total that is pretty much unattainable, so crit based ws is the way to go. Drk needs one the end.

I agree entirely with you. I think that using a duel based modifier is worthless though. Tachi: Fudo uses a 60% STR based modifier and I personally have seen it hit for over 7k per ws and it's not a critical based weapon skill. I would like to see Quietus have a 50% STR modifier in a 3 hit weapon skill. It honestly angers me that Sqaure Enix is calling the game balanced when Tachi: Fudo does 7k a ws and Quietus does 2.5k. I remember @ lvl 75 Guillotine used to spank Sam's ws' and now it seems every job spanks all of Drk's ws'.

[Dart]

sam is in the same boat, even fudo can't compete, but the new dev team seems to actually listen to the playerbase. So i'm hopefully optimistic that things will be balanced. So i'm being patient and spamming ukko's fury until then lol

[Sedres]

1) Some form of Souleater that can't be exploited for zerging (It's our bread and butter, but outside of zerging we rarely get to use it without being scolded for all the enmity it generates along with the correlation of death due to HP down)
2) A native trait that works similar to the AF3 set, and the AF3 augment's this.
3) Sod improving Last Resort, I'd rather have something new to the job than just being a mock-WAR. Stances for melee/casting maybe, but the castign one shouldn't further hinder out DoT, instead simply work as a nice bonus when meleeing. Gives people the choice of using their magic or focus on melee
4) Again, forget a critical WS (Or maybe just give DRK Raging Rush) and becoming a Pseudo-WAR, something else just as good but different. A WS that "Augments" souleater, maybe. When used with it, it hinders the damage but gives less enmity/lowers recast significantly...
5) Changing Occult Acumen so TP gain is based on the time taken out of your DoT from meleeing (Casting time basically works as Weapon Delay when calculating TP). A bassive trait that gives quick cast for Dark Magic would help with this, and make Hasso/Seigan less annoying.

[Xsilver]

I made a nin edit on suggestions

[StingRay104]

top 5 suggestions that are incredibly thoughtless

1. Critcal hit ws, so lemme guess make it so everyone everywhere relies solely on RR, or perhaps we could have a ws that isn't crit based that can compete with these crit based ones so that when we do crit it does greater dmg, lets shot for makin drk the high dmg job it used to be.

2. Melee while casting. As annoyed as I am with the first one truth be told it would help, but this is ludicrus, and yes i mean the rapper this just sucks like he does, first off listen up, THIS WON'T EVER HAPPEN!!!!! plain and simple idk why all these ppl are askin for this, this has never been or never will be a good solution, and heres why, first our nukes are laughable and 2nd why are you wantin an obvious melee job who utilizes dark magic to hinder his opponents and improve his own capabilities. Also if your lucky enough you can move a lil and cancel the castin animation still get the spell and a hit in, so I know from experience this won't help balance drk.

3. Guillotine. No. No. No. Plz let old ws's die. If you increase guilotine you could ruin game balance at lower lvls, besides I went for 40 lvls on guillotine I'm tired of it gimme somethin better

4. Death spell. Remember how jacked up every mobs dark magic resist is? So how useful will this be, answer is not useful at all. Unfortunately this spell could go either way, it can be useless as in never lands no matter what, or it could be broken. Either situation I would rather them not waste time on this spell cuz it doesn't help us ultimately. Also for the person who posted they wanted impact naturally, the spell is drk capable as is, i have the cloak, i've casted it on drk, 666mp cost is tremendous, but the debuff is awesome, assuming it lasts long, which against most nms it doesn't

5. dark magic fast cast. Once again drk is about usin its limited spells to hinder opponents and increase our strength, so as much as I like the idea of lower recast times this won't magically fix drk, we need better spells first, and that brings conclusion of the bad ideas portion of my list


Now with the good

1. Last Resort time extended. Not enough yes in the world on this one. I for one say to hell with hasso gimme 25% haste with this for 2-3 mins and best of all it works well with what we drks already have.

2. Stances. I was the first person to post a thread dedicated to fixing drk and I introduced the stances that could fix the job, they focused on drks damage capabilities in both physical and magical capacities, and they could still stack with hasso, or god willing new LR and make the job shine as a dd again.

3. Spells. Again I mentioned this in my previous post Absorb att being our flagship spell, it would make us cap attack so easily and at the same time hinder our opponents to nothin. Absorb def also a good one and absorb spd well this could be great if it stacks with haste and slow respectedly which I say it does so another great spell, but we are forgetting en aspir en 2 spells, rdm is wastin them and they fit drk a lil better than t3 nukes also perhaps some nukes that hinder associated stats kinda like a less powerful impact, also abs spells need to lose the decay effect, increase the stat drain with drk skill and stack with abyssea buffs.

4. New traits. War is supposed to be a job that can use all weapons effectively and not be the best dd but a very effective dd with any weapon. Yet war has been given way too much love, when the ability restraint came out my first impression was, why does war get a drk ability, seriously, knockin out ones crit ability to increase ws dmg as you accumulate hits is textbook drk. Then they took off the crit limitations and made it slightly broken. On top of that war already has 2 tiers of crit damage boost and their full af gives more dmg to every double attack proc. OK SE ENOUGH TOYS FOR WAR NOW TIME TO SHARE. First of all drk should have a occ deals double damage native trait like war's double attack, 2nd our af3 set should increase its dmg like wars then we can at least enjoy something. Also we should get crit tiers higher than war and faster, we are supposed to be the Heavy dd's our hits were supposed to be slow but massive, and right now we are the laughing stock of the dd community.

5. JA. One of niches is we are good stunners with 2 native ways to stun. Unfortunately our recast timers for both are long, but I suggest we get stun 2 and weapon bash 2 to make up for this. Its ok to just give us one of these and personally i prefer ja stun to spell, but if we got one more natural stun we could almost be a one man stunning machine which would give us a purpose in endgame shells, that and increased dd capabilites, but shiny dmg gets old after awhile. Also I read some others wantin a new ja so i suggest Deathblow, you can make it a straight up high damage ability or you can make it a increases damage to next hit ability, personally i like the latter, make it automatic crit with increased crit damage, but give it a 1min to 1:30 min recast so thfs don't cry foul on it.

and theres my thoughts on the matter, I'm sure some of you are upset about my first part but plz remember I'm tryin to help fix drk and someone has to call out the stupid ideas.

[Xsilver]

So you are suggesting drk waste time casting spells while meleeing cutting its dmg? unless you are just starting the fight noone is gonna really use cast abs att and def, maybe spd pending on if it stacks with spells but they will prolly end up like just like en dark. Also considering we still have around 9 levels more before cap our att with a longer last resort, endark and food could cap it easily.

For the casting while meleeing, the reason I thought this was a good addition is with enough tiers of acumen a tier 3 thunder spell could give us enough tp for a 5 hit build

[Armangetto]

I agree with desprate blows being left at 25% ja haste, We woudlnt need hasso anymore, which could open up more subjobs for us. Also less increassed spell times from hasso, wich means more spell casting. I also suggested impact, I forgot it was 666mp to cast, so they should reduce it to how much it costs to cast dread spikes or 100 to 150ish mp.

[Quetzacoatl]

1. Last Resort Duration at 1-minute, Last Resort Recast at 4 minutes This makes it so Last Resort isn't so overpowered with Desperate Blows and Last Resort Recast Merits- I can live with re-using last resort every 2-3 minutes, unlike a lot of people who are forgetting that full-timing 25% Job Ability Haste would be pretty damn overpowering.

2. Overhaul in Stat Modifiers for Scythe-based Weapon Skills. I don't care if the secondary modifiers are DEX, VIT, INT, Crit-Hit or nothing but a bigger STR modifier at this point, as long as damage is consistent and viable enough to be consider the job to be a useful DD- DRK Cannot use MND for Weapon Skills effectively, god-dammit!

3. New DRK-related Stances. Zicdeh made the best ideas for this: One called "Malevolence" would be required standing in front of the mob to inhibit its Attack Speed, Casting Speed and Magic Evasion. The other, "Insidiousness," requires standing to the side of the mob outside "Breath Range" to ignore a mob's defense and evasion while gaining a boost to Weapon Skill Damage.

4. Magic-Related buffs being at least a Tier or two in Magic Attack Bonus and Fast Cast, as well as a big increase in TP Gain from Occult Acumen. As it stands, Occult Acumen is a worthless job trait thanks to its mechanics. How exactly is getting 12 TP from casting Thunder 3 after wasting 6 seconds of my time that could have been used meleeing beneficial? It's not. For every 600+ hit I could have done with my Twilight Scythe, I dealt a measly 300. I don't understand SE's logic, but this let me down when we first got a peek at it. First tier of Occult Acumen should start at 5%, improving up to 20% with Tier 4. I could then see this being a viable option to gain TP on mobs I shouldn't be TPing on, and once I've grabbed enough TP, I could run in and launch a Weapon Skill at it. Rinse and Repeat until MP is totaled.

5. I wouldn't mind some new Dark Magic, mainly Absorb-Attack, Absorb-Defense, Absorb-Evasion. We had a good start with Absorb-Accuracy, so why not these three as well?

[Returner]

I fail to see what's wrong with being able to melee while casting. You don't think it will help yet you are suggesting casting absorb attack, absorb def, absorb speed. You realize the biggest problem with DRK's magic side isn't about not having enough useful spells, drain drain 2 absorb tp dreadspike endark and in the future maybe absorb att absorb speed like you said, is that it takes "time" to cast, and in a high haste mob after mob situation where you won't be able to cast "before the mob reaches the camp", you are in some way hurting your melee output, reducing your tp gain, by casting the various spells. Enabling us to cast while still swinging not only encourage us to cast more, it also make our magic part an asset on top of our melee instead of an counter productive action during a fight.

It is obviously not going to be perfect since most of us use spellcast, and that our gear swap during casting might or might not destroy our hit build. But there is always way to wait til the last sec to swap to minimize the possibility of swinging in magic casting gears. But none the less it helps. Absorb tp is one of the most powerful spell "if" I don't have to worry about losing a swing during my cast in which I can gain tp and gain damage. Seriously, casting while meleeing opens up absorb tp in a way that you can cast it whenever it is up, making it a huge asset in our ability to gain tp.

In addition, like someone said it earlier, occult acumen could potentially be our 5th melee hit in our 5 hit build as long as spending time casting things like thunder III or blizzard III won't hurt our tp gain and melee damage. As of right now, spending 6 secs to cast something where I gain 15 tp isn't worth it when I can potentially net two swings getting 40 tp and more melee damage. If you can melee while casting however, that 15 tp and the tier III on top of my 40 tp and two swings are all icing on the cake. I lose nothing and gain potentially a hit (I assume occult acumen will have more tier, and I think alot of ppl who asked for more tier didn't know our occult acumen is already something like tier 4 as the JT starts at lvl 45. So it is not like we aren't getting more tp from our casting as the lvl cap goes up). Yes I will eventually need MP for all those casting, but if casting aspir and aspir II won't hurt my melee, then I can cast them all the time, which is also why meleeing while casting will be such a critical change for us. It just opens up so many possibilities especially if we gain more useful spells in the future.

If you think it is too overpowering then I can see why, but to say it is nonsense and won't change the way we play drk is just not knowing the job enough. I am a melee freak and I almost always neglect our magic side, not because not enough useful spells, not because not having elemental, enfeebling, or darkmagic gears, I have all that, but because I don't want to lose a swing or two cuz I spend time casting. I will stun, I will cast endark in between fights, but that's really about it. I don't even cast dread spike a whole lot because unless I am soloing, by the time I am done casting I don't have hate anymore. If i could melee during my cast, it will also encourage me to cast it more if not keeping it up whenever it is up.

[Ash]

1- increase last resort duration (2-3mins)
2- unnerf abs-tp
3- remove decay from asb spells
4- give a boost to scythe weaponskill modifiers
5- longer dread spike duration/lower delay