Something hopefully not intended with the DRK changes.

[Kyni]

So I was thinking about the not so great DRK rework and how it might play. This was when i stumbled upon something interesting and imo rather bad. Warning long text incoming TLDR at the end.^^

You know in a raid setting you should optimise your stuff around raid cooldowns, most famously around trick attack. A lot of you might now realize what the problem is going to be.

So let's look at the start of a boss fight:

Disclaimer: I'm not going math out 100% exact mp numbers, but it's still going to speak for itself. 1 Edge more or less is not really going to change anything. And yes I'm obviously going of media tour tooltips.

So we start with unmend and a soul eater combo on contact we use edge of shadow on the enemy, to get darkside running and immediately use blood weapon to start to regen back the mp just spend and to get blood for the shadow, also pit down salted earth. So far so good.

Then trick attack hits and the „fun“ begins.

We have an almost full mp bar all our ogcds are rdy, delirium is also good to go, so let's do some bursting. The now following gcds are gonna look something like this:

- bloodspiller + edge of shadow + carve and spit
- bloodspiller + edge of shadow + living shadow
- bloodspiller + plunge + Abyssal drain
- bloodspiller + edge of shadow + plunge

yes those are 4 gcds with double weaving and yes this is a mess, but the worst is yet to come. Now let's look at where we stand:

3k mp roughly (started at 10k used 12k generated 5k by means of blood weapon, delirium, 1 syphon strike and natural regen)
20 Blood
still 1 bloodspiller left from delirium, which is gonna be our next gcd (without an ogcd even)
all ogcds are on cooldown

Ignoring the double weaving mess above we still have enough mp for tbn so we aren't sitting ducks, so not too shabby.

But let us continue. Next gcds is the last delirium bloodspiller. Then Soul eater combo it's not like we can do anything else and mp needs to be build up again. Next up is another soul eater combo, followed by a bloodspiller, neat. Then soul eater again, after this another soul eater combo and after this one you might think hey bloodspiller time again but nope, let's start saving up blood for later, so another soul eater combo it is. Followed by, you guess it another soul eater combo. After this one you might use a bloodspiller, so you wont overcap, but only one don't be greedy, we should be halfway there, so keep on smiling and using that soul eater combo. Oh and don't think about that plunge we are going to need both charges so better save it. Also I'm just going to jump ahead in time now to the next trick attack, the mp is probably enough to use edge once before the next trick attack without endangering the window, but I'm not bored enough to completely math it out( hard to believe after this paragraph, I know but it's true^^)
So the next trick attack window. It's basicly the same as the opener, just the initial edge gets moves inside the window, there is no shadow and only 2 bloodpillers (pooled blood). I think everybody can guess the other 2 gcd skills used.

This cycle repeats somewhat similar the whole fight, every 2nd trick living shadow gets used, every third Delirium, also every second in between window has a delirium to make it at least a bit less tedious.

Darkside is not going to fall off, because between the last one used in trick attack and the first one in the next are roughly 50 seconds, so no danger there.

I really don't think this is the intended way to play the new DRK, but it seems to be the optimal one in a raid setting with raid wide dmg cds. On longer raid cd windows at least abyssal drain and carve and spit unsync from the burst window and you do get 1 charge of plunge, if you don't let it overcap on charges.

TL.DR.: optimized DRK gameplay in high end content with raid buffs, is going to be 10 seconds of double weaving and 50 seconds of almost exclusively using soul eater combos. Repeated every minute.

I do have a few minor ideas to mitigate the long dry spell, but nothing that would fix the double weaving.

If someone can prove me wrong , outside of just don't play optimal then, I would really be happy, because if this is the way DRK is gonna play in savage, I'm not going to play DRK in savage, because this is simply not fun.

[Danelo]

I'm struggling to remember why DRK was my favorite job and the one that convinced me to switch from dps to tank in 3.x. This "rework" seems badly botched.

[Vulcann]

so much hope to main dark knight in the next expac ... and we get this.

*sigh*

[Freyyy]

We need a second combo. We need something else to spend MP on so that managing Darkside is actually a thing. We need a faster-paced gameplay. We need job identity. They've fixed nothing, they've just made the job look flashier while making it extensively slower and even more repetitive.

At this point I'm just hoping for them to pull off another rework after ShB release (kinda like WAR got shortly after SB). I don't see how they could fix that before release.

[Bhearil]

so much hope to main dark knight in the next expac ... and we get this.

*sigh*

Honestly im starting to think that being on a cinematic equals to suck for that expansion so they get eyecandy cinematics to shut them up. Happened the same on Monk and Samurai (it does had a better kit than Monk and the fault was more due to the raid dps support meta aka -DRG/BRD/NIN/FILLER, but usually a SMN- being the best setup for efficiency though) and now seems its happening as well once again

[Derio]

IDK, will the trick attack adjust to dancer buff? So arent we looking at 7GCDs in instead of 4GCDs in. But if no dancer then yea its pretty bad.

It seems to me they reworked DRK only to make it more complicated and way more punishing if you mess up compared to the other tanks.

[Bhearil]

Actually now is super simple: just spam Souleater combo and use Edge/Flood once per 30 seconds. The rest are tied by cds or gauge resources, having burst windows with shadow (glorified dot) and Delirium for Warrior wannabe Blodspiller spam, and Blood Weapon to recover some extra mp

Is kinda hard to screw up such simple rotation