Dark Arts Idea

I'm with the majority here in that something needs to be done about the constant DA spam. It felt good in HW because it wasn't something you clicked every single GCD. I like the idea of DA being a stance, but I feel like they'd have to either tweak Darkside or somehow combine DA into the Darkside stance. Could bring back the mp drain of Darkside, but instead of having to press DA while under the effect of Darkside, just make weaponskills and oGCD have the potencies of DA while Darkside is up. This is just a spit-ball idea. They'd have to do a lot of other stuff to make that viable. But I still think it's better than spamming every single GCD.

Would prefer to see Dark Arts as a powerful skill, since that is what its MP cost, animation, and role in the class represents. +140 potency to weapon skill is causing the Dark Arts spam.
Outside potency buffs to weapon skills, Dark Arts does:

Increased hate on Power Slash
Increased defense to Dark Mind
Major Potency buff to C & S (and removing MP generation from it)
Blind on Dark Passenger.

Probably the best solution is to remove Dark Arts buffing potency on common weapon skills, and instead cause an effect which is unique and useful, but using the more niche abilities. This would come along with an increased cooldown on Dark Arts and (obviously) rebalanced MP management:

DA+Sole Survivor: Increases magic damage taken by target 5% for 10 seconds.
DA + Carve/Spit: Boost potency, causes all damage to be inflicted as magical for 15 seconds.

...etc etc. Flat potency of +140 is boring and stupid and it's what is causing the spam. If SE wants those GCD's to do more potency, then SE oughta just boost the potency, and make Dark Arts a more significant choice.

what they did in 4.0 was to remove the automatic mana drain from dark side and turned it into a manually mana drain with dark arts.

the idea was obviously to make playing DRK easier.

but this leads to the dark arts spam people dislike and to a balancing problem as well. plus it left dark side in a rather useless place: activate it once and then remove the button from the hotbar...

what can they do now to fix DRK? removing the constant mana drain will have a huge imcapt on the whole class gameplay and design. turning it back to the automatic drain will likely make the class again harder to play, something SE don't want. i guess we are stuck with the dark arts spam.

the problem is that dark arts, or rather mana, is used for damage AND mitigation. it wasn't that bad before, even with spending some mana for mitigation our dpsn wasn't that bad, because PLD was even worse. but now the PLD buffs we have to spend ALL our mana for dps to compete.

when our base damage was higher, so we could spare some mana for mitigation without falling behind, what would happen when we still would spend all the mana into dps?
but since DRK hasn't much utility this would not be too broken i guess. less utility = high dps is true for other classes as well, why not for DRK?

but to fix it actually they have either split dps and mitigation into two different sources, make the 140 potency gain baseline for every single time you press dark arts (maybe turn dark arts into an attack itself) or bring back dark side's mana drain and remove all the dark arts potencys, so the extra mana wich is not used to keep dark side up can be used solely for mitigation / other stuff wich isn't dps.

First, all DRK skills should have their potency bumped by 20% and Darkside should be removed. Now that the MP drain is gone, there's no reason to have it as a stance.

And then Dark Arts should be the new stance. While activated, skills would be receive their Dark Arts effect (and the MP cost too), without having to spam the Dark Arts skill. If you don't want to apply Dark Arts, you just deactivate it. Or, while Dark Arts is active, every WS receive a +100 Potency at the cost of 1600MP, while abilities would retain their current effect.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

First, all DRK skills should have their potency bumped by 20% and Darkside should be removed. Now that the MP drain is gone, there's no reason to have it as a stance.

And then Dark Arts should be the new stance. While activated, skills would be receive their Dark Arts effect (and the MP cost too), without having to spam the Dark Arts skill. If you don't want to apply Dark Arts, you just deactivate it. Or, while Dark Arts is active, every WS receive a +100 Potency at the cost of 1600MP, while abilities would retain their current effect.

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i fully agree with dark side. all what the skill does is making us ugly (with that aura...). make the skill worth something again or remove it!

however, dark arts stance sounds horrible. makes the mana management harder, except you just burn reckless through all the mana, but you can't use aoe and ranged skills then anymore or switch into tank stance. and to conserve mana you have to constantly activating and deactivating the stance, wich i would consider worse than spamming dark arts. so it either really reduces the buttons you press really to just 1-2-3, or it doubles the dark arts spam(?). i remember stance dancing on WHM really well, and that's nothing i want to have back!

i am long used to the new gameplay and i kinda like the dark arts / TBN mechanics :x

maybe they should increase the dark arts potencys and give us more options to spend mana for defense than just TBN. then DRK could actually decide to give up defense, but excell over the other tanks in dps. or give up damage, but excell at defense...