Aye, though the self-healing of Souleater was generally negligible, what we have now is a nerf to its flexibility.
Reposting a part of an earlier minimum wishlist as regards that issue:
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That suggestion is juicy, I like it.
Enhanced unmend should turn your next shadowstride into plunge if they arent going to allow you to target allies with shadowstride.
I still wonder why they even left this trait.
In Endwalker this trait was extremely situational.
But now it's more of a joke how useless it is.
It may be one, if not the worst trait in existence at the moment.
I still wonder why didn't go unto the path of reworking enhanced unmend and keeping plunge.
Like "enhanced unmend make so that your next unmend unlock a free proc of plunge, cooldown of 30 sec"
This way they could have kept plunge and you could still dash when needed when the boss is away.
(Not the best solution of course, but in my mind it's always better than always butchering class identity and replacing it weird abilities that have nothing to do with the class, thematically and visually, only for the sake of being "functional")
Freecure is honestly more useful. At least it has a rare use case for having died right after popping Lucid Dreaming. 5s CDR on a damage-less ability that is already available far more often than it's needed/useful has none.
If it was an entire charge of Shadowstride granted, then it'd work in further fool-proofing a braindead movement skill, which would be worse for the job but at least impactful. Short of reliably making a charge available, though, it's not going to matter even in 1 in 100 typical fights, only at most 1 in 100 runs of specific encounters.
If its going to keep the design that it is it really should just refund a full charge of shadowstride, but honestly what fight is going to require 3+ gap close moments in a 30s window
Reading forums I feel like I'm being gaslit into believing DRK is somehow way worse than it actually is.
The only thing I'm missing on DRK is some way to mitigate or recover from autos in 8man content. You can use TBN for that, but you pretty much have to memorize at which point what boss does how many autos to know when to do it optimally, most of the time it's not worth the effort and I just pump MP into Edge instead. Something as basic as some regen on Oblation would be more than sufficient I reckon. Doing extremes now or savage last expansion I never felt like other tanks are particularly better or worse at tanking than DRK. I have yet to see a tank buster in this game where I'd have issues where other tanks don't. The only outlier when it comes to actual tank mechanics is WAR solely due to Holmgang being on shorter cooldown than other immunes, but that's another topic altogether.
I'd personally hate it if TBN was changed to be more like other tanks short CDs where it doesn't interact with your dps rotation at all. TBN is fun, it feels good to use, and the shorter cooldown comes in handy (stuff like Mountain of Fire you can TBN 2/3 busters). TBN is also the only thing that's mechanically interesting on DRK, everything else is just pressing buttons on cooldown. You can literally remove blood gauge and darkside trackers from your UI and still play near optimally. Let's not make tanks even more homogeneous than they already are?
I don't particularly care about dungeons, I can do W2W pulls on expert just fine, but if we really care about it you could easily make DRK competitive by giving Abyssal Drain a shorter cooldown. If that makes a problem with Carve and Spit just delete CnS altogether and give Drain a bit more damage and healing, and MP regen on the first target hit and call it a day.