Blood Price feels underwhemling

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Originally Posted by VasilissaXylonez

My biggest gripe with BP is probably the fact that it doesn't scale with the amount of damage you received, which makes it indeed useless vs single targets.

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{ I mistimed the boss Autos and my TBN will falloff instead of getting broken. Damn, I just blew a TBN for a DPS loss.. Oh hey there's a flashing-red AOE telegraph next to me. I know, I'll STAND IN IT }

If Blood Price returns increased with the amount of damage DRK received per hit, then DRK would be incentivized to take more damage, instead of mitigating it. DPS > life.

At least these are the concerns I imagine SE has, and why BP is where it's at, and why LB/Reprisal are gone. They created TBN, then felt it really could provide the wrong incentives, so they took out BP,LB,Reprisal to make room for TBN. They want DRK to be a counter-attacker & have increased throughput & APM when being attacked, they are however very tepid in how significant or gainful they want that element to be. They don't want to encourage any tank to actively seek out more damage received to too high an extent.

This is what I assume their rational is, that is. And if it is true, than DRK has something of a conflict in design/identity.

Blood Price needs Bloodbath effect built into it for 1v1 encounters so we actually get rewarded for being in tank stance.

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Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark

Because it puts shields including our own in direct conflict with the ability - even with a minimum limit imposed, if you want more mana, you'll want less shielding. And with TBN now a core mechanic of our job, there's a definite conflict of interest there.

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We already have particular damage types that ignore shielding and/or percentile mitigation. White Hole, for example, which deals damage based on missing HP and petrifies if it hits for greater than 0, won't care if you have shielding that would nullify whatever damage would have been taken from the missing HP.

One need only direct the value in two directions: towards the normal order of mitigating circumstances and, separately, towards Blood Price's MP calculation, rather than leaving BP as post-mitigated additional effect.

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Originally Posted by Xenosan

{ I mistimed the boss Autos and my TBN will falloff instead of getting broken. Damn, I just blew a TBN for a DPS loss.. Oh hey there's a flashing-red AOE telegraph next to me. I know, I'll STAND IN IT }

If Blood Price returns increased with the amount of damage DRK received per hit, then DRK would be incentivized to take more damage, instead of mitigating it.

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To be fair, one could also go the other way, absorbing only the portion of damage mitigated as mana. That's some, what, 14% (?) basic mitigation from one's armor, another 17% from Grit, 20% from Shadow Wall, etc...

Part of why Bloodprice is where it is now is that SE is avoiding incentives for any tank to be the "Default MT" or "Default OT".

Back in HW, DRK was the default tank. Not 'only' because of its superior magical mitigation, as we know it was/is barely ahead of WAR while miles ahead of PLD who couldn't block magic at the time. But because of the massive DPS it gained from nigh infinite MP from BP + BW access along Reprisal and Low Blows procs which DRK completely loses access to in the OT position.

Now each tank has a negligible DPS increase that barely offsets the DPS loss risks of being a MT, PLD has Shield Swipes, WAR has Vengeance counters, and DRK has TBN.

For PLD, swipes are barely 3.5 (210 potency / 30 seconds iirc?) potency a minute which can still be fished for by blocking AoE magics from the OT spot, which, to be fair, is a very good use for that gauge that fills faster in Sword Oath than Shield Oath.
DRK can use TBN on others for an even easier shield to break (5k instead of 10k at current gear levels) for more Bloodspillers which are possible DPS gains.
For WAR, Vengeance isn't much of an incentive to trade off Deliverance for enmity.

Now you just stick the tank "player" that is more comfy with MT to the MT spot. If anything, PLD and DRK have as much incentives, if not more, to OT as it is than to MT now.

~ Phoenicia ~

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Originally Posted by Phoenicia

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Most of this is historically inaccurate. You didn't take DRK into raid in HW because of mitigation. You took it because WAR/DRK offered higher raid dps than WAR/PLD or DRK/PLD. You'd still generally take it into a fight where DRK was at a mitigation disadvantage (i.e. any physical fight), as long as you could compensate with smart use of defensive cooldowns, because it offered higher raid dps than PLD. The exception was on fights like A7S prog, where PLD's defensive advantages and the fact that LD is a liability in that fight tipped the balance in favour of PLD/WAR.

Now that PLD does more dps than DRK, it's a complete non-issue. DRK has never been the 'default tank', and likely never will be.

TBN is never a simple dps gain or loss. Even in Grit, where it has fairly consistently been a dps gain on average, it's always a dps loss whenever the resultant Bloodspiller replaces Siphon Strike. This is kind of hard to predict without mapping out your GCD usage for the entire fight, so you're really only going to see definite net gains after using it in Grit at least six times. (For example, if the first GCD that you replace is SpS, then TBN is a net loss in Grit on the first, second, and fourth uses, and becomes a consistent gain after. But this also implies that you've either spent 75 seconds in Grit or about 4 DA worth of MP/672 potency on Grit stance swaps. Which is pretty gross.)

You also have to consider the fact that DRK has never had access to Blood Weapon in Grit. It's basically like what would happen if FoF or Berserk were only available out of tank stance, and if tank stance cancelled the buff. If Blood Price is to be the Grit equivalent, it needs to provide something equivalent to BW, both in terms of rate of resource generation and in terms of effect.

The biggest issue is that it's nearly useless in single target. It really needs something along the lines of reducing the damage penalty of tank stance, and/or lifting the MP regen penalty when it's active, in order to ever justify using Delirium on it. Even there, forcing the player to stay in tank stance for 30 seconds just to get the full effect is a pretty tall order.

Normal mode content makes sense but in come EX and Savage and that goes out the window... Especially for people who just getting into Savage and EX fights since there will be issues with how certain jobs work or worked in the past... If they add a trait that cut MP costs in half while removing that annoying Dark Arts fades upon use effect then that will justify MP nerf on Blood Price slightly... but I I'm not keeping my hopes up on them fixing DRK this expansion or 5.0 launch... because we will get nerfed even more when we already suck...

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Originally Posted by cjparmen

I feel like DRK are in a pretty good spot, however i feel like they should just get rid of blood price and just make blood weapon usable on tank stance. I mean blood weapon has higher mana returns, blood gain and it gives atk speed and reduced tp cost on your hate combo and heal combo.
They could also make BP work like vengance does on the WAR.

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Blood Weapon seriously makes no sense to me and dropping Grit is super clumsy and awkward. Meanwhile on my Warrior I'm just stance switching, without a care in the world because it's so seamless and easy. It's pretty bullshit how I have to waste a GCD to drop Grit, and then another to bring it back up again (in addition to the dumb MP cost). Grit is kind of stupid. I have no idea why it costs MP or wastes a Global. It just makes me NOT want to use Blood Weapon, because it's such a hassle.

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Originally Posted by RaizeGraymalkin

Blood Weapon seriously makes no sense to me and dropping Grit is super clumsy and awkward. Meanwhile on my Warrior I'm just stance switching, without a care in the world because it's so seamless and easy. It's pretty bullshit how I have to waste a GCD to drop Grit, and then another to bring it back up again (in addition to the dumb MP cost). Grit is kind of stupid. I have no idea why it costs MP or wastes a Global. It just makes me NOT want to use Blood Weapon, because it's such a hassle.

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The MP cost exists because DRK has something no other tank has, a 100% uptime 20% damage buff. It's a tradeoff.

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Originally Posted by Tegernako

The MP cost exists because DRK has something no other tank has, a 100% uptime 20% damage buff. It's a tradeoff.

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You mean like Storm's Eye?