Stun makes sense and can be played around if the LB user used Purify beforehand. Miracle of Nature not so much.
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Hopefully Salted Earth gets changed too.
Instead of being an AOE Pull - Make it apply a debuff to enemies inside it that makes them deal say 15% reduced damage and 15% less healing received for 5 seconds.
It'll also put a stop to DRK DRG combos.
Warrior's Blota can stay as it is, it's single target.
Miracle of Nature needs to be purifiable, then it's ok.
The problem with Salted Earth is escaping the draw-in. The only way to counter the draw-in is to Guard, and Guarding further limits escape opportunities. Some jobs have an easier time of escaping than others, PCT's Smudge can get out of it pretty quickly.
The solution is to add Arm's Length as a PvP action and put it on a lower cooldown than Purify, say 20s.
That provides an opportunity to counter Salted Earth cheese while still allowing DRKs to punish teams that are bunched up too closely together. It also stops the issue where multiple DRKs use Salted Earth and you're bounced between them like a pinball. Team synergy should be rewarded, but the opposing team should be given opportunities to escape.
You only need simple coordination to kill a DK before he triggers Eventide (against normal DK that don't script hack)
Focus fire DK to 45% with Bard Salience and follow with Ninja's Seiton Tenchu or Monk's Meteodrive to lock DK in animation follow with Ninja's Seiton Tenchu
There are multiple ways but only God knows why NA/EU players are not doing that
I'd suggest it's because it's easier and more effective to form a DRK+ premade than an anti-DRK premade. Plus an oft-mentioned FL guide only covers DRK premades, not the anti-DRK balance.
Anti-DRK premades do occur on Aether, with the odd quality that their members communicate in party chat like nobody else is there. As far as I can make out, they are carrying out a targeted vendetta against specific players. Ironically, these antics do very little to help their team, but because they do plenty of damage I guess they are immune from being called out on the ToS violation they are arguably committing. Mostly I wish they'd invest in a CWLS. They're free, guys!
This is also why I really don't like PvP guide that intrusively preaching a specific tactic
It is creating so called "meta" and kills people's creativity.
When entire FL is balance around counter and EU/NA is trapped with single mindset of DK vs DK and see which group overpower other.
I have DK and I probably would be most annoying one yet I am disgusted by the concept of this job.
It will be interesting to see if they do decide to change DRK for JP/KOR/CHN players because NA/EU couldn't evolve
They could sidestep the problem through crude matchmaking. I'd suggest the lack of evolution on NA specifically arises because a fair chunk of every team has a trough of DRK fodder. Hence the DRKs feed. The XPers have no interest in evolving, they're simply leveling jobs. Separate the rabbits from the foxes, and the foxes will develop more interesting strategies.
Hahaha, sorry that I advertise! XD
It just so happens that a drk premade is a pretty good counter to a dark premade. I've also said before that this style of burst and positioning is something that pugs should be striving towards as well. There are stronger strategies that could be employed, but they require more coordination, and at the time of writing the guide I didn't actually know about them. Not much point to updating with 7.1 around the corner. I don't really consider anti-Drk premades a long term solution to them either. The way it scales is just strange. The more optimal the enemy team is playing, the worst these groups preform. Locking down 1 or 2 targets in a premade with a monk stack isn't very helpful if there's other darks going ahead with the engage as usual. It's strong when there's only 4 decent players on the enemy team. Locking them out of an engage is effectively crippling their team. I'm obviously a bit to optimistic seeing as it's rare to have any "meta" jobs outside who you bring, who are also on top of what needs to be done, but I still see these parties as short-term and ill advised solutions. (And side note, what they do would be just as if not easier if they just ran a dark stack since they'd be more effective in more situations while still able to effectively counter a dark stack.)
As for the targeting... it's just hard to prove, and it's not like any action is taken quickly if at all.