But we could simply say "not using blood weapon when its up is a dps loss because your cooldowns are not counting down when you hold them". There is no reason to take Delirum into account.
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I guess i'll chime in. I started when Shadowbringers launched, so the only DRK i've experienced is 5.0 one. This probably has been said by many other people, but anyway here are my thoughts on the class from 30 to 70.
So, low level dungeons. Unleash and your 1, 2, 3. That's it, and a lot of jobs are not fun to play at low levels, but spamming one button gets old. Then you get Edge and Flood. Which is still kinda depends on your 1,2,3, and occasionally Blood Weapon.
50+. Salted Earth and Abyssal Drain needs some rework, i thik. Those recast timers are atrocious.
Salted Earth - 300 potency over 15 seconds AoE DoT on 90 seconds recast timer. What a steal. I understand, that it's thematically an inverse Asylum, but that does not really makes it better. Abysal Drain is simply undertuned. It's an instant get some health back, but the amount healed is kinda small and that 1 minute recast is terrible.
I quite like TBN and when timed properly it is amazing. What i noticed that it seems there's some delay before i see the shield icon on myself and it actually taking effect. I.e. i see tank buster being cast, i pop TBN, but for some reason even tho i see TBN icon on me, it does not absorb the damage and i eat full damage. So i kinda has to pre-cast it at times.
Delirium. This is more or less your short burst window and that's more or less it.
Living Dead. Eeeeeeeeh.
I think there are some things that could be improved, but overall it gets job done.
Except that it does end up syncing. You'd now that if you actually played the job in relevant content. BW usually comes back at an awkward time during your GCD so you have to use it on the next one if you don't want to clip your GCD, you don't hit BW exactly once every 60sec. And since in the opener you use Del right after BW ends, Del ends up coming back during BW more and more, and since there are quite a lot of fights with a bit of downtimes you'll delay it a bit more sometimes to prevent wasting BW/Del GCDs while out of melee range, which will definitely affect the way everything aligns. Raid bosses aren't full-on dummy fights, even if you try your hardest to keep close to 100% uptime.
With four separate jobs in the role, there's no reason to cater them all to that same playerbase though. We've got enough tanks to share.
There's absolutely no problem with having some jobs be more straight-forward and relaxed. It becomes an issue when - like you said - it's all of them.
So, now that I've played DRK at level 80 for a little while, I think I have a grasp on why the job doesn't feel quite right. This is mostly about the feel of the class, rather than any hard numbers, but I have an idea on how to make things better without fundamentally altering anything.
Basically, the main problem is the total lack of any internal synergy. None of your skills affect each other, so you don't care when you press them. This leads to you just playing whack-a-mole with your cooldowns. I think the best place to add in some synergy isn't with the cooldowns, but with the Darkside buff. Currently it's just a flat 10% damage increase with 100% uptime, and you never have to care about it unless things have gone very wrong. I think it'd be better served as a more powerful buff with less uptime. Say (just throwing some numbers out here) every time you use Edge/Flood, you get +30% damage for 5 seconds. Then you have incentive to use your good stuff during your small Darkside windows. You can leave the duration stacking up to double so you can chain them effectively and use it for all of Delirium. This also has a small bonus effect of introducing MP management as a concept at level 30 rather than level 70. You don't wanna just spam them, because the duration only goes up to 10s max.
Now, the biggest problem with this kind of system that I see is that if your TBN doesn't break, it goes from being a moderate DPS loss to a devastating one. There are a couple ways you could address this. The easiest one would just be to make it really easy to break. Increase the duration so that it's almost certainly going to be broken just from auto-attacks. More interestingly, you could double down on the mechanic of timing the shield right, and have casting TBN give you a Darkside buff on its own, in addition to the current Dark Arts proc. This way, properly using the shield would actually be a DPS gain, rather than DPS neutral, and not breaking it would only be the same loss you currently have (relative to just casting Edge/Flood instead). You'd also be encouraged to toss it around while offtanking so you can get a nice boost out of it.