fixed for you
Printable View
The majority of that drop in APM is from the removal of Dark Arts spam, which was pretty much the most repeated gripe with DRK in Stormblood. If you remove the repeated pressing, or spamming, of a button, you tend to end up not pressing buttons as much. It's a pretty logical conclusion to draw and is to be expected.
Now if you want more APM, then ask specifically for that and provide solutions like shorter recasts on oGCD abilities instead of continuing to repeat nebulous complaints like "DRK is so slow now, I hate it".
APM is also fight specific. A fight with a relatively high amount of downtime is going to have lower APM across all jobs. You also see a rise in APM with gear, as you can eat mechanics that you're not really supposed to for extra uptime.
You're much better off looking at relative APM values between two jobs (such as NIN) in the same fight than you are comparing the same job on different fights. If NIN APM is 40, then you're probably not going to be playing at a higher APM.
It's pretty clear that DRK and GNB are the faster tanks in this expansion. The difference is that GNB follows a rigid rotation much like PLD and doesn't have any real resource management, while DRK is much more fluid and punishes you for not being at correct thresholds at correct times. LS appears to be particularly important to get out as soon as you can, as it looks like it accounts for around 10% of our dps.
Which is one reason I've always been iffy about hearing how a job "flows". Not only is every fight going to mess up/change your flow but each person has their own feelings about how the flow should feel. Now I've only tried DRK on dummies and Overworld mobs but it doesn't seem to flow right to me. Maybe it works better in dungeons but I just can't bring myself to give it a try.
To quote an old Disney move, Square guys; "You threw off my GROOVE"
Therein lies the problem. Measure the job by content that requires zero thought and it will unsurprisingly feel mindless. This is nothing new to this incarnation of DRK. HW and SB DRK were also boring on open-world mobs and dummies. You are comparing your memory of what DRK used to play like, which is formed of your entire experience of DRK in all the different content you played it in, against DRK participating in the least engaging and interactive content possible. It's like only doing FATEs with a job and then saying it feels boring, well of course it does you're grinding FATEs.