Why are abyssal drain and salted earth so weak?

I started leveling drk again since I want all jobs to 80, and it feels... gutted, but what mostly stood out to me was how weak the abyssal drain and salted earth were. salted earth stands on 90 second cd, with a cd like that it should be a powerful ability, but it's a 300 potency dot aoe, nothing else, I don't really understand how it deserves such a long cd. It should either be more powerful, or have some other effect tacked to it, like mp or blood restoration. Same with abyssal drain, it at least has 60 sec cd, but has a pitiful 200 potency, what is this? And a 200 potency heal? Why even bother? Would it really break the game for it to actually have a useful heal?

Now, I figured this probably has something to do with them being aoe, so buffing them would put drk on top of aoe damage in dungeons, but really, that's fine, tanks shouldn't be balanced around dungeon aoe damage anyway, gunbreaker is ahead of it in damage on dungeons, buffing those 2 cooldowns would probably put in on par with gunberaker, that's ok.

Dark Knight already has the lowest damage with warrior depending on the fight, I think it's completely reasonable to make those 2 abilities worthwhile, why not tie them to mp and make managing mp actually meaningful? Buff them up, lower their cd and make them cost mana, and make them not refresh darkside, I don't even understand why it's in the game anymore right now, it just automaintains itself.

They are preparing them for removal next expansion.

AB really should have been a 30 second with Charge CD

And Salted earth either becomes stronger, a defensive utility like healer bubbles or removed and replace with Scourge

you're not wrong that DRK feels gutted.
Quietus used to give MP after a hotfix in early stormblood. There used to be a trait for Salted that generated blood per server tic. Abyssal used to be the bread and butter dungeon GCD.

SE doesn't know how to make tanks. SE really doesn't know how to make DRK.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

AB really should have been a 30 second with Charge CD

And Salted earth either becomes stronger, a defensive utility like healer bubbles or removed and replace with Scourge

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Abyssal Drain should never have been given a cool down. I can’t think of one person who ever wanted to have a timer attached to that skill.

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Originally Posted by Rhais

They are preparing them for removal next expansion.

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It saddens me how blatant it is too.

Salted Earth was justified in being weak back when it gave you a bit of Blood Gauge per tick. On a bunch of mobs in a trash pull, it was extremely powerful.

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Originally Posted by Rhais

They are preparing them for removal next expansion.

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"We've decided to replace Abyssal Drain with this new self healing move instead to better support DRK's survival"
"Oh so you mean Equilibrium?"
"Yes"

Oh hey another "Fix Dark Knight" thread, basically... Not like we have like 3 or 5 pages of those already...

Salted Earth is right now just pathetically weak and it's current state is likely the result of one of two things.
First is that as many have supposed, the devs are scaling it back to potentially remove it in the next expansion as part of the expected ability culling to make way for new stuff.
Second is that Salted Earth was treated like an after-thought filler ability, where the rest of the kit and abilities were designed and then Salted Earth was tuned to "fill in" and bridge the dps gap from where DRK was and where they wanted it to be.
I personally feel it was a combination of the two above situations.

As for Abyssal Drain, it's heal is "balanced" around usage within large groups, requiring a group of 6+ enemies to provide the 1200 potency of the other tanks' equivalent abilities like Equilibrium. Here it is generally fine, as most large pulls will have around that many enemies and you will sometimes end up with slightly more or slightly less mobs in the pack.

In single-target the weaker heal from AD is supposed to be balanced out by Soul Eater's greater cure potency making up the difference and resulting in approximately the same amount of cure potency per minute from combo abilities and main self-heals (excluding Nascent Flash) as WAR.
The problem with this though is that it results in DRK's self-healing being more spread out in small increments over time as compared to the more bursty self-healing of the other tanks. While on paper they would seem fine since it is equivalent over time, the small and spread out heals of DRK's kit won't at any individual point be enough of a difference to result in saving a healer from having to cast a heal, whereas a larger burst of self-healing will potentially provide enough healing when it is used to give the healer a moment of respite.
The result being that on paper DRK's single-target self-heal potential seems equal but in practice not so much.