A (maybe) different outlook on the current DRK situation

...And I say "different" because I actually liked most changes and don't actually mind the fact it didn't get much "new" stuff, but I'll get to that.

I'll split this into 4 sections: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Suggestions. They'll also have to be split into 3 (possibly more) posts because 3000 characters is too few for any decent conversation on... almost anything that involves balancing systems.

But the TL;DR is: the changes are on the right direction, but the few things left unaddressed can essentially make the class useless in the perfect storm of situations. And that happens a bit too often for comfort. I've seen some of the same complaints around, but either too aimless, too simplistic, too angry and often without concrete suggestions. Also, I talk about more than just "DRK needs more self-healing".


The Good:
I think for the first time since the class's inception back in Heavensward, EVERY SINGLE BUTTON in our bar has a purpose and a semi-constant use (...except Living Dead, but we'll get to that). Quietus was a waste of Blood Bar / Delirium (and it was outclassed by Stalwart Soul + Flood of Shadow anyway), first-rework-Abyssal Drain had too long a cooldown to be reliable, Salted Earth's ground-targeting made many tanks forget to set it up, Delirium and Blood Weapon's mismatched cooldowns meant often DRK's delayed one's use so they could pop both together, etc etc.

Now everything has its use. The syncing of Delirium and Blood Weapon, plus potency changes, now mean Quietus weaved with Shadowbringer, Abyssal Drain and Flood of Shadow are our main AoE rotation, with an extremely powerful burst. Also, Delirium being changed to stacks rather than duration means we don't need to rely (...as much, I'll get to that too) on strict Skill Speed values to have optimal DPS.
Plus, the syncing means we have a reliable burst window that comes every 60 seconds, instead of "whenever the buffs' cooldowns align".
Also, removing the ground targeting from Salted Earth and giving it a secondary activation means we now use it far more easily and often (though I still think the cooldown is a tad too long).

Even though "the only two new things" we got from Endwalker was a two-charge "Super-Flood-of-Shadow" and a two-charge mini-Rampart, the under-the-hood refinements mean the entire kit is finally useful. We not only got the new skills, we also got the old ones that in the past weren't worth using.

The result is a versatile yet somewhat streamlined tank with lots of sustained damage, a big AoE burst and decent party utility.

The Bad:
But we also got a very big flaw, specially when compared to the reworks of the other tanks: we have almost no self-healing. Dark Knight. The class that, at its inception, was THE champion of self-healing in the heat of combat (WAR was having growing pains and Clemency's immense casting time meant PLD's self-healing was nearly useless inside heavy combat).

On the post-Heavenward expansions, Warriors and Paladins became the uncontested big champions of self-healing, and even more so with the Endwalker reworks. And with the new Heart of Condurum combined with two-charge Aurora and post-potency-rebalance Brutal Shell, even Gunbreaker (previously DRK's rival in "weak self-healing") can be essentially immortal in the right hands.

...Dark Knight, on the other hand? All we have now is Souleater (which heals less than ever, when in the distant past we had complete lifesteal parity with damage dealt) and Abyssal Drain (which in the past was a spammable spell that allowed DRKs to be immortal during heavy pulls, but now it's just an ability with a very long cooldown that only serves as a very occasional boost of damage during heavy pulls, plus a small breather to the healer's impending heart attack once we run out of defensive cooldowns.

Sure, we do have the best on-demand shield-based mitigation of all tanks, The Blackest Night. But as any good Scholar (and now Sage) knows, Shields are only as relevant as your ability to heal before the shield breaks.

And DRK cannot heal enough before that shield pops. Abyssal Drain and Souleater got nerfed, we lost Sole Survivor, and we got nothing to fill their places. Compared to the other 3 tanks, all of which able to solo-heal themselves during an entire bossfight, we DRKs can die during a simple wall-to-wall pull, depending on the healer matchup (...we'll get to that too).

This somewhat compounds with one of the oldest issues of the class: Living Dead still absolutely sucks. When you're popping Living Dead, you're probably in a panic situation, meaning your healer is probably already past their bursts. So they often will NOT have enough healing burst left to top you off and you will inevitably die. Doesn't help that your pitiful self-healing won't help a lot either.

The only other small issue that comes to mind is that while the balancing team did an excellent job converting most Tank Burst Buffs to stack-based, they forgot Dark Knight has two of those (Blood Weapon and Delirium), and they only converted one (Delirium). This means we still have some DRK's having to handpick gear and melds to hit Skill Speed thresholds, which I thought was the main cause of converting these things to stacks across all tanks in the first place (plus, setting up Skill Speed this way means the class behaves completely different when inside Synced content and Endgame content, and it might even be a meaningless effort past a certain ping -- which is my particular case in the current gear level). Blood Weapon needs to be stack-based too.

The Ugly:
And here's where the issues I mentioned above become far worse when combined with the current meta. It's one thing to look at a class in isolation, but when you put it alongside all other classes, issues will appear. And DRK has some ugly ones.

First, the obvious: as the tank with the weakest self-healing in the entire roster, endgame-level healers have to adjust their way of healing whenever they get matched up with a DRK. I've seen this multiple times. It's often no fault of the healer; they just spent the last 10 matchups healing immortal Paladins and Warriors, and suddenly now they're matched up with a DRK that can't heal self-heal to save her own life.

Second, and this is a particularly egregious "special case" of the first issue: DRKs match up HORRIBLY with Sages. Ponder with me for a second: what happens when you have a shield-based Tank with bad self-healing and match her with a Healer with the weakest panic burst of all current healers? Yeah. Not good.

DRK + SGE is a matchup made in hell. Most of the times I died in endgame dungeon pulls, I was matched up with a Sage. Often a Sage who complained that "maybe I didn't use enough cooldowns", all the while I stared at my hotbar, all icons definitely on cooldown.

...Well, all except for Living Dead, because if Sage has issues healing DRK in *normal* conditions, can you imagine one trying to top-off a DRK, from zero to full, before the counter reaches zero, after running out of their already tiny pool of panic burst healing?

Yeah. DRK + SGE brings the worst from both classes, and it showcases their worst aspects. Two AMAZING and INCREDIBLY FUN classes, mind you. They're my favorite tank and healer. But they have flaws, and they compound in a very, very bad way.

...Which makes me sad, because again, they're my favorite classes. And also singe Sage is a new class, I get matched up with them a lot. That gets annoying fast.

The Suggestions:
If you managed to read until this point, wow, thank you so much!

The suggestions can't be *too* specific without access to lots of playtesting, parsing and access to the the design team's balancing guidelines. I'm a game designer, so I know most player suggestions can't be taken at face value because we lack the proper information. But I can make some "educated suggestions":

1. More self-healing:
   By far the most urgent issue, and there are SO MANY different ways to attack this.
   For example, make Blood Weapon or Delirium also grant lifesteal.
   Or drastically reduce Abyssal Drain's cooldown and un-tie it from Carve & Spit.
   Or give Shadowbringer some life-steal.
   Or make it so the Dark Arts bonus attack have lifesteal.
   Or give some HP regen to Oblation.
   Or buff Souleater's lifesteal.
   
   ...Or, my favorite: a combination of some of the suggestions above. Whatever fixes the issue and matches DRK's self-healing with the other tanks.
   .
2. Make Blood Weapon stack-based as well
   This one is easy: instead of a 10s duration buff, just make it 3 or 4 stacks instead, just like Delirium, so we don't have to worry about melds, or about changing class behavior every time a synced dungeon removes our Materia buffs.
   .
3. Rework Living Dead
   For this I don't have the same direct ideas on how to fix, because Living Dead as a basic concept is so counter-intuitive and so detached from its actual purpose.
   
   But I do have some suggestions, or at least some "directions that might bring fruitful ideas":
   - During the Walking Dead stage, ALL DRK damage (or at least all weaponskills) has lifesteal. This means the burden of topping-off HP is at least a shared burden betweek DRK and Healer, rathen than roll of the dice hoping that you're matched with a White Mage that has Benediction off cooldown.
   - Living Dead makes DRK harder to kill but *unhealable* (as if they were zombified). Increased HP/defenses, etc, but they have to rely on lifesteal to survive the super damage. This won't make them outright immortal like HG/Holmgang/Superbolide, but... let's be frank, neither did the original Living Dead.
   - Do not make it a binary "100% healed or dead" situation. Give DRK a gradual debuff instead, that either has to go off over time or has to be Esuna'd or overhealed. But don't outright make it "Oh, I was off by 1% so now my tank is dead".
   - Similarly to the suggestion above but in a different direction, stack the damage taken above the maximum HP and, after Living Dead ends, give the DRK a proportional heavy debuff (to damage, mobility, etc) that can only be removed by healing it off, like Doom.

This should fix the main issues with DRK and bring it on-par with the other tanks. It still won't have the massive burst of GNB, or the massive utility of PLD, or the raw self-sufficiency and self-healing power of WAR.

But it will keep DRK unique, while also viable.

Thank you for your time.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

The Good:
I think for the first time since the class's inception back in Heavensward, EVERY SINGLE BUTTON in our bar has a purpose and a semi-constant use

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Dark Mind and Dark Missionary would like a word.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Dark Mind and Dark Missionary would like a word.

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Dark Mind was always useful against magic-based tankbusters, specially in raid scenarios (even before The Blackest Night was a thing), so it's still useful, albeit less so nowadays.

Dark Missionary is VERY useful for party utility to help healers during big arena-wide attacks or during stack moments (which again, are almost always magic-based, and almost all boss fights have them). The problem I have with Dark Missionary is that it has the same 15y radius as other similar skills, meaning if your party is scattered around (which is 90% of the time), they don't get the buff. Still, useful for reducing party-wide damage during stack moments.

Oh boy, you certainly have a long one. As a note, you can always post a comment with sub-3k words, and then edit it, and put in the rest of your comment afterwards. Like how I'm going to do with this response. I'll do it piece by piece if I find something objectionable, as you did. If what I'm saying is insufficient, I can provide elaboration if required, I'm just a stupid DRK player. I apologize if this seems nitpicky.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

The Good:snip snip

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Regarding Quietus - I have to disagree here. Quietus was never a waste of a button, in either SB or ShB. In SB, Quietus was the only reason we were able to upkeep the permanent Abyssal Drain spam. If you'd look back to those old tooltips, AD would only heal in significant portions if it was combined with DA, and you would only be able to have infinite spam if you used Quietus, since the MP regen from BW would work on Quietus per enemy hit. This is how you went from 0 MP to max MP in a single GCD in big pulls. This also served to make it markedly unique from Decimate, something that current Quietus does not do very well. In Shadowbringers, Quietus regen was nerfed, but is still a useful button. This is not only because it's a innate 60 potency gain over Stalwart Soul(can't remember if this was different in ShB itself), but because it doesn't need the prereq hit of Unleash.

You can't compare a combination of both a GCD and a oGCD, particularly one that costs resources, to a single GCD that mainly focuses on preventing gauge overcap. This is like if you said Souleater + EoS is stronger than Bloodspiller, therefore making Bloodspiller not worth using. You need a gauge dump in AoE that isn't LS, or it's a objective potency loss that scales up with more targets. And if your concern is Stalwart Soul provides both MP and Blood in a single GCD, consider that Quietus under Delirium, a cooldown that we are going to have every dungeon pull, will regenerate 500 MP compared to the standard 200 MP like Bloodspiller. With BW and passsive MP regen, that leads to around 1300~ MP per GCD, MP ticks skewing that a bit. Instead of looking at Delirium as "no cost gauge spenders" you could also think of it as "150 free Blood that I can't use on Living Shadow". Not perfect, I know. That enough justifies Quietus existence. I'm also surprised that you didn't mention that Unleash and Stalwart Soul are spells, and therefore are locked to 2.5 GCDs, making BW impossible to get the 5 hit with only their usage, and making SkS a dead stat for 2/3 of our AoE GCDs. That's a design issue, that's pretty awful.

Regarding Salted Earth and Blood Weapon -
There is a huge misconception about what happened with Salted Earth. SB Salted Earth is arguably the best version of Salted Earth to exist. With a cooldown of 45 seconds, decent potency, and passive Blood gauge accumulation(this is the best part), Salted Earth was a multi-purpose DoT that seriously syngerized well in the kit. Back in the day, while Salted was clunky with a <me> macro, it was still critical. When Shadowbringers rolled around, doubled the cooldown, removed the blood interaction, and took all of it's potency and moved it into I assume Living Shadow, there was a justifiable cry to delete the skill because it was almost button bloat. And I'm someone who actually defends the ability to move Salted Earth. Being able to place Salted Earth AHEAD of you and the boss you are moving made a lot of situations much easier to handle. Off the top of my head right now, I'm thinking of CC/BJ in TEA, Nael in UCOB right before divebombs, E8S after Mirrors, E7S add phase, E12S after certain Apocalypse casts, and I'm sure way more from HW (A7S) or SB (O8S trines, maybe O3S add cluster?) that I'm forgetting. The only thing Salt and Darkness is doing after they butchered Salted Earth in ShB is making the potency so high that it essentially equalizes to the damage we had in SB while being less interesting to use.

And frankly, if someone delayed the usage of Blood Weapon to match with Delirium, they didn't understand the tooltip. Blood Weapon is not a linear damage increase, it is a gauge accumulator and nothing more. If you didn't hold No Mercy to line up with Bloodfest, why would you hold Blood Weapon to line up with Delirium? Would MNKs in ShB hold Brotherhood to always line up with Riddle of Fire? Both being at a significant cost of usages to the skill per encounter? That is a skill issue, that's is a SE doesn't teach people how to play their own game issue, and not a design issue. The ease of use of a skill should never have any relationship to the number of actual usages the skill gets in content. That shouldn't be the case in general for anything, outside of fringe situations like the relationship we have with charged actions like Shadowbringer in certain killtimes or holding resources/CDs for cleave damage/phase pushing. Even now, you can't have BW and Delirium line up on the 1st usage, because of the mandate to have LS up by the 3rd GCD. They line up later (kinda) if you do an intentional 2-3 GCD delay, but that's obviously counter intuitive.

Regarding other skills and burst - No matter what version of the job we were in, the only button I would ever say was totally unused on DRK was Blood Price and maybe Unleash in HW/SB once you got good enough. And even then, if the DRK was pulling in a raid with no NIN, Blood Price would be used once pre-pull, disregarding anytime we would be forced into Grit during prog/emergencies. Everything on DRK was used within reason. And speaking of NINs, we always were a 1min/2min bursting job. That's what DRK is, an MP pooling job. All optimization breaks down to is, how many DA+SE/DA+anything/EoS+BS can we fit into raid buffs? That's always been the question, and how we arrived at our answer was different per expansion. This time around, in response to "feedback" we have had all the choice removed from us by making the MP regen 12K consistently, leading to only 4 MP spenders, and in EW specifically, a minimum of 3-4 Blood spenders after Delirium was changed. Our burst window was always reliable, but you had to actively set it up, much like how a NIN sets up Trick Attack 15-20 seconds in advance, we went in a different direction, by intentionally staying at near cap juggling MP regen before bursting all of it out at once. We do the same thing now, but the agency and failure state ranges from significantly reduced to no longer exists on DRK with the MP regeneration being as slow as it is, EW supplemented that by buffing LS to a frankly absurd level, and the addition of Shadowbringer. We essentially traded the ability to be invincible from SB into having one of, if not the biggest and easiest single target/AoE burst in the entire game.

And to double down on that, what even is a reliable burst window in FFXIV? It's in the 1 min. It's CERTAINLY on the 2min with the way buffs are. The game has been pigeonholed thoroughly in that regard. DRK is now the epitome of that. So much that I'd actually say our sustain damage is absolute trash. Take a look at this graph.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...12/unknown.png

As you can see, this isn't sustained at all. These are SUBSTANTIAL peaks with a middling sustain. The sustain has to be bad, otherwise DRK would be doing more damage that Ranged DPS jobs. DRK is not versatile. It doesn't heal itself very well. It adapts poorly in emergencies. It doesn't have interesting game mechanics. TBN is controversial at best. It has one undeniable trick. And that trick is huge damage in raid buffs.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

The Bad: snip snip

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I have to agree, even if I don't really care about sustain on DRK anymore, because there simply isn't enough damage for me to care. But even with that said, the additions we got for the expansion on the mitigation end have been incredibly underwhelming. Oblation is far too weak for an 82 skill. Now that we are relatively high geared, I can safely ignore Oblation, and no one except for me, the person who goes over VoDs and designs the entire tank/DPS section of our mitigation timeline would probably notice anything different. The removal of Abyssal Drain GCDs, the removal of Sole Survivor, the removal Blood Price for the casual player, and for those things to be replaced with nothing, or really underwhelming alternatives (like buffing TBN from 20% to 25% in ShB, like what are you doing) just really annoys me.

I'm not going to go into Living Dead. Living Dead alone proves to me there's some crucial logic behind the relationship between tanks and healers is totally missing in the development room. It's not even worth talking about in length.

I take issue with part, though.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

But as any good Scholar (and now Sage) knows, Shields are only as relevant as your ability to heal before the shield breaks.

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That's not true. Shields are relevant because they zero out damage and because they don't have a deprecating effect when you stack them like mitigation. If anything, mitigation combined with shields makes the shields stronger by extension, since the shield itself is being drained slower. This was probably the justification for making Oblation as trash as it is. The ability to heal before shields doesn't matter if you've gotten enough percentage mitigation to survive regardless, and when that's not an option, the massive amount of SGE regens are crazy, and Zoe+Pnuema is a great burst heal. With two healers, even a SCH co-heal, it's even less of a problem. Anyone who was progging Firestorms of Asphodelos or Decollation with only full HP and shields will testify about how dead you are if you try that. It doesn't even need to go that far either, in big pulls in dungeons, TBN can work just fine, but it needs to have mitigation paired with it to make it worthwhile, or it's just going to break instantly and leave you with nothing. In fact, as someone who plays SCH/SGE as my primary healers, I made a post specifically about the SGE+DRK relationship. I've already typed up a storm, so please forgive me for regurgitating something I said about SGE specifically in a different topic.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

SGE
I'm pretty sure a good SGE and a good DRK combination is absolutely busted. You get the DRK damage, you get the SGE damage, and you get the sturdiest TBNs. With the massive amount of oGCD, self-reapplying shields SGE brings, things like Kerachole, Holos, and Taurochole combine with Oblation, all of those oGCDs having short recasts that further amplify Haima, Panhaima, and TBN. The only thing I would ever have to alternate between pulls were Panhaima and Haima, everything else was easily handled by these other incredibly powerful oGCDs, with me spamming AoE the entire time, applying Soteria once the Panhaima/Haima shields fell off. Even on first pull where I would use the weaker Panhaima, it was more than made up for by a Krasis+Physis II and Zoe+Pneuma combo once I let the DRK get a little bit low after I had used the initial suite of damage mitigation. It's not like I needed weave slots, or that any of these had particularly long cooldowns. SGE is a true maverick in this department, and I not only performed the best using it, I had the most fun working together with general tank mitigation for mutual benefit. Seriously, this comp is brutally good if both players are playing at their peaks, I cannot recommend it enough.

You know what the problem is? I had to use my entire kit on all healers to heal a DRK in a way I thought was comfortable for both sides. Since I'm of the mindset, "Perfect practice makes perfect" I would play dungeon pulls like I'd be in an extreme trial or something. Use your entire kit, ABC, space out mitigation properly, do as much damage as possible, eat food (since it's so easy to make now/EXP), etc etc etc. This was MANDATORY. The same thing was demanded of the DRK, even when I play it. Reprisal, AL, doing actual damage, the works. It was actually quite enjoyable and easy when I found the right tank.

But when I healed the other tanks? I still did all those things, but it didn't feel nearly as needed, and if the DPS were slacking, as long as the tank pressed even a handful of mitigations, I don't think I'd be any the wiser. The high skill floor for basic adequacy on dungeon DRKing is not conducive to players who are not willing to put forth the effort to not be at a bare minimum competent in their dungeons on each party slot. If you get a Cure Iing WHM, or a Diagnosis-only SGE, or a single-targeting anything, you as a DRK are going to die, painfully, there is nothing you can do about it. Just take the penalty, it will be a lot less annoying. (Addendum, the other way around is also applicable, a TBN only DRK with no CDs or a kitchen sinking one who can't spread CDs properly is similarly a disaster.)

When I had good DRKs, DRKs that would play like I would in dungeons, it was easier to heal them than all of these bandwagoning WARs who think that 1 Bloodwhetting is the only CD they need to press in an entire dungeon pull. For the casual player who doesn't press all of their buttons, healing DRKs or tanking as a DRK must be an absolute nightmare, which would explain the discrepancy in experiences. I've never had any problems healing DRKs or being healed as DRK if both parties were capable of playing at even an acceptable level. But you need all parts of the team to be doing that to really get the most out of it in dungeons, while other tanks are running around soloing things all day, carrying people with literally nothing inside of their skulls, no problem.

So that once leaves us with the tried and true DRK problem that we are all familiar with. Noticeably more effort for the same overall result as other jobs in the role, now extended to the entire light party. I don't really care if they adjust this, since I like being challenged, I'm just pointing out what I've observed now that all my tanks and healers are at 90. BiS DRK is going to shred Smileton and Sigma pulls to pieces though. With damage CDs, I'm already slicing some packs down in less than twenty-five seconds with a decent group, the damage is already pretty obscene with a i600 greatsword. I'm not justifying this, I'm just saying Living Shadow and two Shadowbringers/SaD/Floods are enhanced multi-enemy deletion devices.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

The Suggestions:snip sip

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No Dark Mind fix? Guess that means you actually understand what it's used for then, and I don't need to go into how useful Dark Mind is in savage. However, if I may make a suggestion of my own, maybe bring back Dark Dance and have it share a cooldown with Dark Mind? Or maybe just make more magic-attacking mobs in big pulls? I'm sure someone will question," Why isn't Dark Mind all damage reduction?" (addendum: Actually, can you just make magic damage actually visible to the player. Did you know Shining Cells is magic, while Warden's Wrath is physical? WHY?)

You know what needs to be fixed? The developers should actually talk about what they want DRK to be, and ask for people who actually have an inkling how DRK is, and was played for feedback to make a version that doesn't cause everyone to hate each other and the job they are playing. These suggestions are all things that are no-brainers. You shouldn't have to be "educated" to ask for your own invulnerability skill to not kill you. You shouldn't have to be "educated" to know that deleting entire sections of a job kit and replacing them with nothing is ridiculous. You should have to be "educated" to know that Blood Weapon should be on the stack system.

This is a unjustifiable botch job, plain and simple. We are STILL in Shadowbringers, a version of the job a lot of people were not happy with because of what it did to the systems, even if you liked it, what we had was so much better. And it needed tweaking, it needed adjustments, but it didn't need to be deleted for worse, less interesting systems in Shadowbrigners. And I started to like ShB DRK by 5.5! For the systems to remain in this abysmal state in Endwalker is a complete failure of the game design, regardless of the fact that we are META tanks right now. We're more than viable, we're on the top. We're the top dogs in a way we never were during SB or ShB. Almost HW level. But the design is so infuriating, there is no joy in being at the top. There's only frustration from the players and silence from the developers.

And that's the true failure of DRK. A landmark example of the total disconnect we've been struggling against for years, in it's peak form. Shattering the playerbase's faith in the job design as a result.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

Dark Mind was always useful against magic-based tankbusters, specially in raid scenarios (even before The Blackest Night was a thing), so it's still useful, albeit less so nowadays.

Dark Missionary is VERY useful for party utility to help healers during big arena-wide attacks or during stack moments (which again, are almost always magic-based, and almost all boss fights have them). The problem I have with Dark Missionary is that it has the same 15y radius as other similar skills, meaning if your party is scattered around (which is 90% of the time), they don't get the buff. Still, useful for reducing party-wide damage during stack moments.

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Now tell me how to differentiate between physical attacks and magical attacks on the fly (without having to use 3rd party tools or an external website) because the game sure as hell doesn't.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Now tell me how to differentiate between physical attacks and magical attacks on the fly?

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Oh my god, seriously Square Enix what is your problem with this. I don't care that the UI designer came on and said "It's impossible!" It isn't, you just don't want to. "It'll take more QA time! Our internal processes aren't built for checking the DAMAGE TYPES on the abilities we DESIGN before implementation!"

Are you kidding me? I don't care. I shouldn't have to utilize an external repository to find out what damage types are. Full stop, end of discussion. This literally only punishes DRK, less so GNB, and maybe SCH now. If you're going to make Addle and Feint both damage types, you have to do something to or with Dark Mind or the way damage is dealt to keep parity, and I LIKE Dark Mind.

Change something in the battle log. God this makes me so mad.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Oh boy, you certainly have a long one. As a note, you can always post a comment with sub-3k words, and then edit it, and put in the rest of your comment afterwards. Like how I'm going to do with this response. I'll do it piece by piece if I find something objectionable, as you did. If what I'm saying is insufficient, I can provide elaboration if required, I'm just a stupid DRK player. I apologize if this seems nitpicky.

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I know about that workaround, but the end result tends to be a huge wall of text that often scares away all but the most dedicated, and frankly it ends up being an accessibility issue for a lot of non-neurotypical people. Thus why I prefer the topic breakdowns and post breakdowns, even if the excuse is kinda weak.

(Also I'm a game designer by craft; writing a lot and trying to make it readable kinda becomes a constant habit)

And oh, don't worry, we're just two different kinds of DRK player. You're a Savage raider (probably in a static, I assume) who uses parsers to optimize every tidbit of your rotation. I'm a more casual player that sometimes does Savage content with friends, and never ever touches a parser because I've been a WoW player (that started playing during Cataclysm, experienced all content there was at the time, and just jumped ship months before Pandaria hit, never really looking back) and I know the toxic hellhole that comes with obsessing with Recount.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Re: The Good, Regarding Quietus et al [snip snip]

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See, this is an example of what I said above. At the level I experience the game (I rotate between all 4 tanks, with DRK being the most fun for me), that being mostly roulette content and the occasional Extreme/Savage with friends when they're on a break from their static, that's where I bump into the issues you mentioned; not necessarily the lack of raw damage, but "somebody somewhere in the balancing team ran the numbers and found out that this is the damage potential of DRK -- except it'll only be experienced in Savage by spherical chickens in a vacuum", and the tooltips aren't exactly intuitive in pointing towards that direction.

That's why I'll take your word for it and just point out that it's not what's perceived by me in the level of content I run, by reasons you already explained yourself.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Re: The Bad [snip snip] The shield part

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Hmmmmm that depends, and I think we're seeing it from different angles.

You're looking at the question from a Tank + Healer pairing, and that's fair, I agree with all of your points.

But my point was from the PoV of a tank, relying on her own skills. Because, say, the healer screwed up and died, or because they don't have enough healing output to balance out the incoming damage even with all mitigations on (....the fact some Sages I've encountered seem to expect me to have ALL mitigations on at ALL times instead of spreading them over the course of the very long Endwalker pulls is a whoooooole different can of worms).

From that point of view, it becomes a very simple matter: your only "reliable" source of healing is yourself. You pop your mitigations and your TBN. ...And now what? Granted, you won't take real HP damage for a long time, and during that time your Souleater will heal a few chips of health, and maybe you'll sacrifice single-target damage from Carve to use Abyssal Drain to get a tiny bit more health, but.... Then what? The shield will be gone and your overall HP delta was still negative. Unlike PLDs, WARs and GLDs that can heal far more than they shield, your humongous TBN shield only delays your inevitable death.

And that's the gripe I have with this particular shield-to-healing ratio.

As for your quoted post on DRK x Sage and the experience of trying to put effort vs playing very casually, that very much lines up with my experience, yes. To the point that one of the Sages that let me die in [First lvl90 dungeon, spoilerydoo] recently told me "Yeah, I'm way too used to healing Warriors that basically heal themselves".

And like... I don't tend to bring food for Roulettes or anything, but I do gear up and overmeld as if I were preparing to Savage, and I do try to use my defensive kit to the fullest, so I should be no slouch to any competent healer.
...And yet, almost every time I die, it's because a Sage expected me to just TBN everything to the face without taking damage, and their burst wasn't enough to prevent me from dying.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

No Dark Mind fix? Guess that means you actually understand what it's used for then, and I don't need to go into how useful Dark Mind is in savage.

---

Yeah, actually I transitioned from PLD to DRK back in 3.1~3.3 when I was trying some Savage runs with friends, and a friend from a static mentored me into the basics of DRK. So I learned pretty fast about how important Dark Mind was for surviving mechanics (specially since TBN didn't exist back then to wallpaper over the role with less skill required).

As for Dark Dance, well, only if they reworked it for the new damage model (as that was a regalia from the Parry days), and that would demand a new button to the bar, so I doubt it.

And I don't even ask for the classic "Wah, Dark Mind should apply to everything". We have plenty universal damage mitigation already. I just ask them to keep improving the QoL stuff that visually differentiates kinds of damage (like we have visual markers for tankbusters, penetrating tankbusters, stacks, numbered stacks, individual stacking, area buster, etc etc). Some people do catch up pretty quickly what kinds of damage are magical and which ones are physical (some are indeed obvious by context), but having some kind of color coding on the casting bar or something more explicit on the battle log would be nice.

At least that would make people whine less about Dark Mind and Dark Missionary.

And lastly, yes, I do agree that we need more direct information on the direction they want for jobs/classes. And I do mean in general. I could write an essay on how bad it felt to play 6.0 Astrologian when compared to back when I played it in 3.0. I could summarize it as "Trying to play with a Texas Instruments calculator with RNG issues" but that's a looooot of simplification on the table.

But what I think they want for DRK, by comparing it from 3.0 to 6.0 DRK, is a "tank that can feel like a DPS on-demand, but by spending limited resources". Back in 3.0 this manifested as having to pop Dark Arts to empower stuff. Nowadays this manifests as weaving Shadowbringer/Flood/Edge. A lot has changed and I know a fair share of people who miss the 3.0 "complex mana-and-TP-management when-should-I-DA" Dark Knight of old times, while I particularly appreciate the flawed-yet-seemingly-well-meaning streamlined version we have now.

I just think they haven't hit the mark yet, and they could at least make the class far more comfortable with VERY PUNCTUAL changes. But so far, we'll have to wait. And as someone who knows how hectic things are on the behind-the-scenes of game development and production, this is not mere laziness or even pride or people just sitting on their asses. If I could risk a guess, I'd say it's akin to what happened to WAR between 2.0 and 3.0: keep it functional, test a few things here and there, but our hands are too full for a proper rework right now, so until the next window of opportunity, this will have to do.

A response! I love this, let's continue this discussion.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

(Also I'm a game designer by craft; writing a lot and trying to make it readable kinda becomes a constant habit)

And oh, don't worry, we're just two different kinds of DRK player...

---

I'm a bit of a software lad myself, nothing professional though, big respect for the stuff you put yourself through.
Yeah, we are two different types of player coming to a similar conclusion that our job is unsatisfactory. That's the exact opposite of what SE intends when they do reworks. Usually, your side of the fence gets what's needed to lower the skill floor to an acceptable point for entry, and my side gets to keep a diminished, but still observable skill ceiling, with mastery being a goal with equivalent results. DRK is unique in that it fails at both of these things. Compare this to WHM, where casually, it's A-OK, super solid. Under mastery, the entire MP economy of the job falls apart. Compare this to AST, as you've stated where casually, it's an actual nightmare, there are so many buttons and bloat over the job with a card system that changes all over the place per expansion, but under mastery, some of the highest skill expression any job can have in the entire game.

We have angry casual players, both the DRK and the pug group, and angry hardcore players, both the DRK and the static. Confused newcomers and unsatisfied veterans. People straight ask me if they're griefing if they are playing DRK. How is that even something that happens in this game? That's not good when ALL SIDES can universally come to a consensus that something is badly designed when our goals are so diametrically opposed most of the time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

Hmmmmm that depends, and I think we're seeing it from different angles...

And that's the gripe I have with this particular shield-to-healing ratio....

---

I certainly agree here. I am definitely seeing it as a healer-tank relationship, or more specifically rather how the base of the holy trinitiy in tanks/heals support the peak of the triangle, the DPS. If you are a tank, and your entire team is dead on a boss with 60% left, is it really suitable design for the one tank to solo the entire boss? Is there something wrong with an negative HP delta on tanks? I feel that tanks are that are not DRK are starting to seriously erode away healer agency both in casual and hardcore content(once it's on farm.) There is sub 1 month period of time every content release where healers can really flex their kits before gear creep and experience make the entire role trivial to it's own playerbase, but with how absolutely invincible tanks are with their sustains, and how non-punishing any damage intake is, I feel healers are being made increasingly irrelevant in their primary objective (healing). This is seriously evident on WHM, who doesn't have mechanics to distract from the nuke spam. Right now, it feels like tanks that are not DRK, especially WAR, are fulfilling all parts of the trinity at the same time, which doesn't feel right to me. I don't want to advocate for nerfs, those don't feel good at all, but something isn't right here. I could be wrong on this bit, and it might be too big of a issue for any single post to handle.

And I honestly think they aren't designing some things in a total vacuum. Things like Death's Toll were definitely designed in direct opposition to skills like Macrocosmos. Intemperances happen during 2 mins. Limit Cuts happen right before a pot window. Act 2 ends right on the two minutes as everyone comes in for raid buffs. DRK's damage is certainly scaled to utilize the team's damage increases, otherwise there would have been no reason to change the cooldown of things like Blood Weapon from 40s to 60s, Delirium from 80s to 90s, even if the design of those skills were different. Just, somethings don't seem to be thoroughly thought through before implementation, like Oblation. Or the quintuple-down that is Living Dead. It's feels like, the person who is designing DRK itself is given a note about what the team is trying to do overall this expansion with jobs, the damage dealt by players and mobs is, and then got shut in the Square Enix server basement where he can get consistent 5 hit Blood Weapons, and everything he did was implemented into live versions of the game with no oversight. That obviously isn't what happened, but that means that multiple people had to sign off on the Spell Speed thing, Living Dead, Blood Weapon, etc etc. Which is honestly worse.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

But what I think they want for DRK, by comparing it from 3.0 to 6.0 DRK...

I just think they haven't hit the mark yet...

---

I think that's a significant part of why things are so tumultuous. I think a lot of us are tired of them trying to hit the mark while simultaneously wearing earplugs and a blindfold. As I said before, I firmly believe that we need a conversation. We're chalking in at almost six years of questionable design choices of varying severity and 3 vastly different versions of the same job. An open letter, a community representative, someone to say "Yeah, this is under review." We haven't had that for a really long time, so people are getting out of control, which just perpetuates this non-stop negative feedback loop, emboldened by soundbites and really awful play experiences. Players should not have the responsibility of designing jobs or fixing very obvious mistakes when you have the design documentation, the feedback, the data and a test environment right there as the staff. I know there are people who can do this job justice. And if you can't get to it right now, let us know. Just tell us, and we're going to understand, we dealt with delays/cancellations for ultimate, delays for Eureka, delays for Endwalker itself, I'm sure we can handle a "We're working on DRK, give us until 6.3." We need something from them soon. Otherwise, we're just going to continue this death spiral, until people leave the job/game, or just continue to make themselves very visibly miserable because they have stockholm syndrome for greatswords and dark magic. I don't think I can deal with another one of my strats getting ruined because Living Dead makes it significantly harder to execute or having xivanalysis yell at me for the billionth time about a missed BW hit because I had to unmend once with that stupid 2.5 GCD.

While Odinel has respond to basically all the main points i want to add something more to the useless stuff.
DRK never had useless skill, in fact DRK never had anything useless until SHB and the actual EW version of the job and is Darkside, Darkside and his Darkside + Living shadow gauge is basically a useless mechanic on the job, they could secretly delete it tomorrow and nobody would tell the entire thing has gone, it's basically a huge waste of code and UI space right now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Change something in the battle log. God this makes me so mad.

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Check the PvP actions. They have no problem making Dark Missionary reduce all damage taken. Hilarious.

I made a suggestion for a rework to address the complain of Dark Knight community over the years here https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...on-Full-Detail. I have already tried calculated a potency and tested how the gauge build up. If you don't mind doing an analysis you can check it out. A solution might be in there.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

A response! I love this, let's continue this discussion.

[Snip snip]

---

This time I won't do a point-by-point to your post (not out of disrespect, but for the sake of simplicity) because most of it boils down to some frequent points that sadly seem to be exceedingly common here in the forums.

Actually, coming here to the forums after all these years (last time I came here was during the 2nd month after Stormblood, when Square Enix hiked the sub prices in some countries, and I was among the affected, after they tripled my sub and I came to the forums to start a peaceful protest thread. I got a forum ban, and never came back) finally reminded me of some of the reasons why I don't really like to interact here very much.

But back to the subject in hand, I want to use a word you brought to the table: "communication".

Communication in the way you seem to want to happen is, frankly, impossible considering the scale of this game, this player base, and more importantly, its diversity.
Diversity of playstyles, diversity of platforms, diversity of focus content and even cultural and geographic differences; feedback from the Japanese community playing on PS5s on Toberry will often look different from what you see on the raid-heavy Excalibur, or the laid-back social-heavy Faerie, or the rather toxic raid-heavy and BR-influenced Behemoth, or people at the meme-heavy Twitter community, or the hardcore and often hyperfocused folks here on the Forums.

Also keep in mind that FFXIV is not a raid-focused game. It is, in no particular order (because said importance varies from person to person), a JRPG, an MMORPG, a virtual social community and a true-to-roots role-playing game.

So keeping all parts satisfied is almost a losing proposition, yet Division 3 nevertheless takes the ordeal.

[Sidenote: do note that I pick names deliberately: I call the *company*, the corporate entity dictating financial decisions, "Square Enix" or "SE", while I call the *developers*, the group led by Yoshi-P and responsible for the actual game we play, "Creative Business Unit III" or simply "CBU3" or "Division 3"]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

I'm a bit of a software lad myself, nothing professional though, big respect for the stuff you put yourself through.

---

I will take this comment earnestly, but will say outright that this oversimplifies the issue.

Game development is not an individual, monolithic thing. Back when I was a producer and lead game designer, I led a team of 12, and it was hell. Tight deadlines, bosses that had no idea of what they were asking from us (and often contradicting the wishes of our own player base). It drained me to the point of mental breakdowns during online meetings. It's *not* easy, specially if you're like me and you like to micromanage the other teams while your bosses seemingly have no idea what a "videogame" is since back in the Atari era.

I don't have a (functional) crystal ball, but Yoshi-P might as well be on a similar ordeal, as he's also a producer who loves to micromanage his teams, and he loves his players far more than I did (and I really cared about mine). Except he leads *two* teams numbering on the hundreds, his player base numbers on the millions rather than tens-to-hundreds of thousands, and his direct bosses are one of the biggest gaming companies of the modern age, with executives so out of touch they might as well be taking satellite rides.

...And yet people seem to think everything wrong with the game is the result of "laziness", "blindness", "people sitting on their hands" or whatever. Believe me, as somebody who worked on game design and game production before multiple times, it's never that simple.

So what do they do? Well, they juggle priorities. They take feedback from all places, but they have to filter what's earnest and what's frankly just white noise, and then organize what to tackle first. What to prioritize.

[Sidenote number 2: When I posted my thread here, I took a quick glance at the Tank subforum and out of the first 10 threads, not counting mine, 4 were just elitist whining, 2 were from people with no idea what they were talking about, a megathread that's so huge and so full of salt that it would actually make MORE difficult for a developer to read useful feedback from, one was about Gunbreaker's sounds (?!?!) and one was the classic "will DRK be in the next live letter?".
Not exactly the reliable well of feedback a developer would wish for.]

And in prioritizing, they take into account not just what the players ask, but what the players *do*. They analyze the metrics, which tell them the most used classes, most used skills, most played content, what social hubs are the hottest at any point of the day, how many whacks people are giving on the machines at the Gold Saucer. Heck, they even analyze the memes we make. A lot.

Then they also see what content is being played (MSQ? Dungeons? Sidequests? Alliance Raids? Progression Raids? PvP?) and then prioritize them, but trying not to *starve* any of those (PvP is still using essentially using Shadowbringers skills and at least some of the balancing team is probably busy reworking that right now).

And then some of the team is working on future content. Female Hrothgar. New dungeons. The new Alliance Raids. *The next expansion*, which yes, is always already in the works. And much much more.

Players, specially the ones that complain the most, and even the ones who have very deep knowledge of their own class and gameplay style, very often lack the understanding of scale that comes with developing and balancing an MMORPG like FFXIV.

This is not to tell people "shut up and wait", but "rethink the way you express your feedback, you're not talking with a lazy bunch of dullards doing what they please, you're talking with a big development team doing their best with very chaotic feedback".

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

I am definitely seeing it as a healer-tank relationship, or more specifically rather how the base of the holy trinitiy in tanks/heals support the peak of the triangle, the DPS. [snip snip]

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Ok, I'm gonna break my pattern and actually start to bring this to an end by pointing towards a very specific point of your argument.

You're right. Supertanks are breaking the balance of the "holy trinity of roles".

...But whether that's a bad thing or not, that's not set in stone. Because that "golden standard" is not really in the essence of FFXIV.

First of all, the scenario you described normally only tends to happen either when the supertank is at least a reasonably skilled player, or when the bored healer is at least a reasonably skilled healer. More likely when both are skilled.
...Plus, the DPSs won't really complain that they're getting a third or even a fourth buddy to push big numbers.

...In the real world, you'll see a lot of sprouts, or in-learning players, or people playing with a new class, or people who aren't really skilled but still like the game.

And when rest of the party wipes, and a talented tank, or a talented Red Mage, or a talented Sage stands their ground and solo's the boss, that's... awesome! That sparks an awesome social moment, they exchange a few compliments, somebody gets triple commendations, and they get a good story to tell.

This, to me, is far more important than balancing the trinity. I don't care about numbers if the alternative brings a more fun and relevant experience to more people.


And to wrap it up, you also kinda misjudged me when you put us in a binary of "you're hardcore, I'm pug-casual". This is never a binary, but a spectrum.

I'm an omniclass player (currently working on my last 2 classes to lvl90); I just happen to like tanking more, and DRK is my favorite (in gameplay and story). I'm also an omnicrafter and omnigatherer, who crafts her own gear. I play Savage raids when it fancies me, and I play Normal raids blind day one to figure out the mechanics. I play PvP. I decorate my house. I obsess for HOURS on what glams I'm gonna wear at any given day.

It would be unfair to call me a "casual" player. But I'm not your typical "parsing every fight, polishing every rotation, optimizing all damage, hardcore progression raider". And this kind of player is proportionally far less common than a lot of people seem to think.

And again. I'm not telling you, nor anyone, to stop voicing your wishes. Just do so with the knowledge that things aren't as simple, or as malicious, as some seem to think it is.

Yay, another one. You know rare this is, that I get to engage with someone somewhat properly on the forums? Everyone at each other's throats all the time, I can't ever get a good conversation. I'm pressed for time, but you deserve good responses.


Some of the things I said were a bit off, so I apologize for those things.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

This time I won't do a point-by-point to your post (not out of disrespect, but for the sake of simplicity) because most of it boils down to some frequent points that sadly seem to be exceedingly common here in the forums.

Actually, coming here to the forums after all these years (last time I came here was during the 2nd month after Stormblood, when Square Enix hiked the sub prices in some countries, and I was among the affected, after they tripled my sub and I came to the forums to start a peaceful protest thread. I got a forum ban, and never came back) finally reminded of some of the reasons why I don't really like to interact here very much.

But back to the subject in hand, I want to use a word you brought to the table: "communication".

Communication in the way you seem to want to happen is, frankly, impossible considering the scale of this game, this player base, and more importantly, its diversity.
Diversity of playstyles, diversity of platforms, diversity of focus content and even cultural and geographic differences; feedback from the Japanese community playing on PS5s on Toberry will often look different from what you see on the raid-heavy Excalibur, or the laid-back social-heavy Faerie, or the rather toxic raid-heavy and BR-influenced Behemoth, or people at the meme-heavy Twitter community, or the hardcore and often hyperfocused folks here on the Forums.

Also keep in mind that FFXIV is not a raid-focused game. It is, in no particular order (because said importance varies from person to person), a JRPG, an MMORPG, a virtual social community and a true-to-roots role-playing game.

So keeping all parts satisfied is almost a losing proposition, yet Division 3 nevertheless takes the ordeal.

[Sidenote: do note that I pick names deliberately: I call the *company*, the corporate entity dictating financial decisions, "Square Enix" or "SE", while I call the *developers*, the group led by Yoshi-P and responsible for the actual game we play, "Creative Business Unit III" or simply "CBU3" or "Division 3"]

---

I want to talk about the forum (or even the community at large, I have some takes on that, but I'll save that for later in this post.
As far as I know, Yoshida is now on the board of directors on top of being producer for the next mainline, and essentially has a blank check for FFXIV (within reason) now. I think he has more financial sway than you think, considering how well the construction of Oceania and the plans for data center expansion are proceeding in the middle of this dreadful tech product drought. And even when I say that, I still think the amount of pressure in that environment is unimaginable to your average person, even more so to ones who don't work in the field. I'm not privy to their internal machinations, even if I would like know some aspects of their development pipeline beyond what we see on the surface with consistent patch releases. This is why the development insights we get during fanfests, particularly with the encounter designers, were always my favorite part of the events, because it gave me a glimpse into the minds of obviously talented people. It's inspiring! And what they've managed to accomplish regarding the wide-reach of FFXIV is frankly, a total masterstroke, especially considering the codebase AND reputation they started with.

For the most part, I think they have by and large succeeded in their endeavors since late Heavensward, and a vast majority of people are really satisfied. I certainly have grievances, but I'd still put this game up there as one of my favorites, the only live service game to keep me around for this amount of time, and a very skilled, but sometimes misguided, development team. I know that I sound like a jaded, unappreciative player who will never be satisfied, but that really couldn't be further from the truth. I really think Dark Knight just brings out the worst in me.

I understand that my post-MSQ priorities (satisfying raid content, and Dark Knight being fun to play) are minuscule compared to the overarching design priority of the team, and it's really selfish of me to think otherwise. I know that, but I can't help but feel the way I do, and I really wish that wasn't the case.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

I will take this comment earnestly, but will say outright that this oversimplifies the issue.

Game development is not an individual, monolithic thing. Back when I was a producer and lead game designer, I led a team of 12, and it was hell. Tight deadlines, bosses that had no idea of what they were asking from us (and often contradicting the wishes of our own player base). It drained me to the point of mental breakdowns during online meetings. It's *not* easy, specially if you're like me and you like to micromanage the other teams while your bosses seemingly have no idea what a "videogame" is since back in the Atari era.

I don't have a (functional) crystal ball, but Yoshi-P might as well be on a similar ordeal, as he's also a producer who loves to micromanage his teams, and he loves his players far more than I did (and I really cared about mine). Except he leads *two* teams numbering on the hundreds, his player base numbers on the millions rather than tens-to-hundreds of thousands, and his direct bosses are one of the biggest gaming companies of the modern age, with executives so out of touch they might as well be taking satellite rides.

...And yet people seem to think everything wrong with the game is the result of "laziness", "blindness", "people sitting on their hands" or whatever. Believe me, as somebody who worked on game design and game production before multiple times, it's never that simple.

[Sidenote number 2: When I posted my thread here, I took a quick glance at the Tank subforum and out of the first 10 threads, not counting mine, 4 were just elitist whining, 2 were from people with no idea what they were talking about, a megathread that's so huge and so full of salt that it would actually make MORE difficult for a developer to read useful feedback from, one was about Gunbreaker's sounds (?!?!) and one was the classic "will DRK be in the next live letter?".
Not exactly the reliable well of feedback a developer would wish for.]

...This is not to tell people "shut up and wait", but "rethink the way you express your feedback, you're not talking with a lazy bunch of dullards doing what they please, you're talking with a big development team doing their best with very chaotic feedback".

---

This is a great section here, and adequately defends your points with a real-world anecdote that I can relate to, working in the government dealing with computer systems and policies designed by people with little oversight or long-term sustainability plans. This leads to my biggest concern with the feedback now, is that we're inundated with white noise and a complete fracturing of the what the DRK playerbase as a whole wants. The only thing people seem to agree on is that Blood Weapon is bad, Living Dead is bad, and SOMETHING with the mitigation kit is wrong with Dark Knightm, ranges from Oblation, to sustain, to TBN, etc etc. This is probably why like 40% of the topics regarding DRK also feature in-depth, complex reworks of the entire job kit, rather than fixing what we currently have, which I have pushed back on as "white noise". Which again, is not something that I'm disparaging on your end, I agree that this version should be tweaked versus reworked. Please understand that the forums didn't always used to be like this, I don't think we weren't nearly as angry or as divided as before, and I really hate how a lot of the discourse has broken down into rage or outright trolling. We're a ship with no captain, I don't even think we have anything to steer the boat right now.

A bit of history for us specifically, something critical broke when we got the Media Tour for this expansion. It feels like the floodgates were removed and a lot of grievances people had just exploded all at once, and we've been dealing with the aftermath ever since October. There is an ever growing, loud, but still tiny contingent of the playerbase that I don't think trusts the developers very much, mainly because of things like the odd interview answers, the ungarmax incident, the baldesion arsenal incident etc etc.

We were explicitly told to use Megathreads for DRK feedback to "get it seen more by the developers" just like how JP does it, even though our previous version of the megathread was deleted. Checking my post history, I was particularly mad after Yoshida said "We don't see any feedback regarding your Blood Weapon, please make topics on the official forums" when the issue was something I and others went to extreme lengths to conclusively prove in multiple threads on the official forums and off of them, it's not an unpopular take. That being said, I would totally understand if you don't want to surround yourself in this environment, it's not very good mentally, it must be worse for the devs, considering the common consensus internet-wide is that feedback from English Forums are never even acknowledged (ie: healers) Like, I've made what I think are in-depth, reasonable feedback posts that aren't just total whining or swipes at the dev(or at least I used to), and still nothing has changed. We don't really have anything to be happy about on the support role forums, because they keep removing things people like and replacing them with things people don't like on top of just constant arguing with each other or a general attitude of malaise.

I know there is no grand DRK conspiracy, I know the developers are not being actively malicious. But that's not my point. My point is that we've essentially lost the plot, we're in a really unfavorable situation, and I don't know exactly who is at fault, maybe it's no one and it's just the circumstances of the situation. I don't know why they reworked DRK so many times. I don't know why they do the things they do. Did somethings just fall through the cracks in the heat of development? Are there any plans to get us out of this miserable state? I don't know, and it drives me up the wall.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

...But whether that's a bad thing or not, that's not set in stone. Because that "golden standard" is not really in the essence of FFXIV.

First of all, the scenario you described normally only tends to happen either when the supertank is at least a reasonably skilled player, or when the bored healer is at least a reasonably skilled healer. More likely when both are skilled.
...Plus, the DPSs won't really complain that they're getting a third or even a fourth buddy to push big numbers.

...In the real world, you'll see a lot of sprouts, or in-learning players, or people playing with a new class, or people who aren't really skilled but still like the game.

And when rest of the party wipes, and a talented tank, or a talented Red Mage, or a talented Sage stands their ground and solo's the boss, that's... awesome! That sparks an awesome social moment, they exchange a few compliments, somebody gets triple commendations, and they get a good story to tell.

This, to me, is far more important than balancing the trinity. I don't care about numbers if the alternative brings a more fun and relevant experience to more people.

And to wrap it up, you also kinda misjudged me when you put us in a binary of "you're hardcore, I'm pug-casual". This is never a binary, but a spectrum.

I'm an omniclass player (currently working on my last 2 classes to lvl90); I just happen to like tanking more, and DRK is my favorite (in gameplay and story). I'm also an omnicrafter and omnigatherer, who crafts her own gear. I play Savage raids when it fancies me, and I play Normal raids blind day one to figure out the mechanics. I play PvP. I decorate my house. I obsess for HOURS on what glams I'm gonna wear at any given day.

It would be unfair to call me a "casual" player. But I'm not your typical "parsing every fight, polishing every rotation, optimizing all damage, hardcore progression raider". And this kind of player is proportionally far less common than a lot of people seem to think.

And again. I'm not telling you, nor anyone, to stop voicing your wishes. Just do so with the knowledge that things aren't as simple, or as malicious, as some seem to think it is.

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I have to split this up in two parts.

A few weeks ago, my and random PLD duo'd P2N, no one's first time or anything. The entire team died at 50%, after several previous wipes, me and PLD pretty much just looked at each other and silently agreed "Yeah we're doing this on our own.". While some parts of the team were cheering us own, there were two people who said we were "interrupting their play experience" by not wiping and allowing them to try for the 5th? time. Part of me said," Ha! Shouldn't have died to mechanics then!" but thinking about it, "Yeah, we kinda did just rip the agency away from them and killed it on our own." I certainly enjoyed my time killing the boss, but does my play experience override another person's who doesn't want to be dead for twenty minutes because I had the fortune of tank privilege on that raidwide that killed everyone else? It certainly wasn't awesome for those people, they were really angry about it. And I don't know how I feel about it in general, this is certainly something that I need to develop my feelings on, it's a constantly evolving issue that I don't think I'm going to get true handle on until I see if I can solo P1N on DRK and stew on it for awhile.

Next, this one is going to be a bit personal. I have to seriously apologize, I certainly did misjudge you and put you in a camp that is trivializing and honestly, marginalizing how important what the normal player does. After such much playtime, significantly over a year of actual time, at least 3/5ths of that being on DRK specifically, I have straight up forgotten what's like a have a normal relationship with DRK or FFXIV at large. There are so many players online, both in-game, forums, discord communities, that have been polarized pretty heavily. I got sick of dealing with a lot of certain things in the game, so people said," Stop talking in game, go make your own group, go play amongst your own kind, and stay away from us." So I did, and have been in this odd bubble of semi-closed communities for a long time that as someone has said to me on this forum previously "means you have no idea what it's like to be an ordinary player, nevermind a DRK player anymore."

I am mistaken. I've overestimated my own capabilities and diminished others, when I really need to practice more humility and objectivity in my discussions. In a past post, I said "No matter what someone's experience in FFXIV is, as long as their statements are backed up by verified facts or at least, solid logic, it shouldn't matter what that person says, it has just as much merit as mine." In this light, it makes my previous post quite hypocritical in retrospect, and I really apologize for that, even if I didn't mean any offense by it for the sake of proving an example. Seriously, this is a huge misstep of wording on my part, it's never been binary, and I should know better. You were accurate in saying it was unfair.

I know that when I peel away the layers of the graphs and the spreadsheets, I'm really just a player who wants to enjoy the gameplay of my job, not be a burden to my team, and experience the ride of learning in progression environments. I love the lore of DRK, I love the aesthetic, I love the feel of the job when things actually work properly, and my history and experiences I've had with the job I could write a book in, both in raid and more casual content. If I cared about damage so much, why didn't I switch to WAR in SB, or GNB in ShB? Could I have played Endwalker on any job but the one I've spent years being very intimate with? It's that burning passion for DRK, and to be totally transparent with you, "Odinel the hardcore raider" and Odinel the FFXIV enjoyer" have been at complete odds for almost the entire Endwalker release so far. I've literally asked myself, " How can you be enjoying Endwalker when your main job is in this state? Why are you leveling alts and doing random stuff when the DRK playerbase is in open revolt? Join them, traitor!" The thing that I appreciate the most about your posts is that you have a straightforward through-line with everything you've been saying, but meanwhile, I'm horrifically conflicted in more than one way with FFXIV.

In a way, I'm wondering if you have the right idea with leaving the forums. I don't dislike the game, or the developers, but there's a part of me that is harboring significant irrational, emotional resentment. Not anger, really, not complete dissatisfaction, but a deep resentment for the current situation, and how it's been handled. It's not reasonable, but it's what I'm feeling. Looking back on my post history, it's distressing to see how unhappy I sound in my own posts, and for that unhappiness to be reflected or amplified by my peers. So, I once again grapple with uncomfortable questions. Is this valid? Is what I'm thinking justified? Am I being too stubborn or unfair? Do I need to just touch grass? Are I and the community at large seriously off-base? Are the developers off-base and out of touch? Am I allowed to feel the way I do? Is that even appropriate when it's not something I had a hand in personally developing, even more so for something as minor as a job in an MMO? Is there even a point to what I'm writing?

I've spent a long time reading and digesting over your post, and trying to come up with answers for myself, and I'm not getting a whole lot of them. So I think you've actually given me a ton of things to think about, a lot more than I really gave to your topic, and I have to thank you for that, at a minimum.

Gah, I just want my job worked on. I know it probably is. I'm so tired, man. I know this is rambly, I'm in a rush right now, sorry!

PS: If you don't mind doxing yourself, what game did you develop? Now that the tier is finished, I've been going through my backlog, and I'd probably buy your game, my tastes are pretty varied, and it's so rare that I get to talk to an actual developer of anything 1:1 versus me and a sea of others in an official space.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Yay, another one. You know rare this is, that I get to engage with someone somewhat properly on the forums? Everyone at each other's throats all the time, I can't ever get a good conversation.

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Indeed, which is why I tend to avoid official forums in general. I learned my lesson with the Elite Dangerous forums years ago.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

As far as I know, Yoshida is now on the board of directors on top of being producer for the next mainline, and essentially has a blank check for FFXIV (within reason) now. [Snip snip]

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Oh, I know about Yoshi-P being in the board has been a while, which is what I believe is still keeping FFXIV mostly protected from the kind of predatory monetization Square Enix slaps everywhere else (now including NFTs apparently).

I mean, why do you think most of FFXIV's extra recurring revenue, aside from subs, comes from in-game cosmetics and lifestyle items that vary from plushies to luxury watches to electric guitars, and all of them sell like water in the Sahara? Heck, we even got the second edition of an Eorzean cooking book! (and I really want the whole collection) All of that without having to resort to lootboxes, battle passes, NFTs or other more scummy monetization methods.

Yoshida not only has an incredible talent as a producer, but he assembled a team of amazing specialists, and even a business management team that knows what they're doing. This is almost unprecedented in modern games industry. And they're doing this while understaffed, with lots of people working remotely, and without enough server equipment to deal with basic necessities; not to mention the database structure from 1.0 that still plagues the game's back-end to this day.

Yoshida is one of the few game producers in large scale games (potentially alongside folks like Yoko Taro, Hidetaka Miyazaki and Vince Zampella) that realize that a game has to be an entertainment-drive, cohesive experience for its audience, first and foremost. Otherwise you risk becoming the new Blizzard or BioWare.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

This leads to my biggest concern with the feedback now, is that we're inundated with white noise and a complete fracturing of the what the DRK playerbase as a whole wants. [Snip snip]

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Yeah, it's like what I said before, we have a vastly diverse player base that wants things that, when put together, often point in opposite directions. And somehow the development team has to not only figure out the right choice, but also prioritize what to figure out first.

...Which brings me to a personal theory of mine. You certainly realized how most classes (except AST) have been vastly streamlined, with many rotations flowing out of each other, things like DoT management being replaced by side-rotations or oGCDs, and most of the "new stuff" from Endwalker being in-place upgrades to things we already have -- I think most classes only got 1 or 2 new buttons at their bars at most, and some even kept the exact same amount.

...This, I believe, is groundwork so they can more easily tweak things together in the future. Remember: when they rebalance a class, they have to cross-check with every other class matchup in the game, and that's an exponentially growing work as more classes get added. So I believe this initial streamlining with 6.0 will be groundwork for easier, more punctual, smaller fixes (like, for example, "Give Blood Weapon stacks and lifesteal"), since the changes are part of a systemic issue, and that needs to be kept to a manageable size. But only time will tell.

As for the confusion and miscommunication you mention, it's like I said, I think a lot of it boils down to having to listen to vastly different "community cores" that communicate and behave in vastly different ways. Japanese megathreads are probably far different from the endless truckloads of salt that we have in the English-speaking ones, for example.

But again, only time will tell.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

A few weeks ago, my and random PLD duo'd P2N, no one's first time or anything. [Snip snip]

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Oh, believe me, I know there are bad experiences that also come from that same imbalance I mentioned. Though, speaking from my own experiences since A Realm Reborn, I've seen far more positive ones that negatives, and the negatives by their own nature tend to be quickly left behind and forgotten.

What stays in your memory the longest? A heroic last stand celebrated by the entire party, or just one more run where people were salty, ungrateful and annoying?

...Also, I do think this varies vastly between data centers. You're in Primal - Exodus (my very first World, coincidently), and its community is indeed usually more toxic, specially because of the strong focus on raiding and their seething rivalry with Excalibur and the even more toxic Behemoth.

...I, on the other hand, now play on Aether - Faerie, the unofficial LGBTQ+ World. We do have an active raid community (my FC has an active static), we have a SUPER active economy (them gays love decorating their homes and working on their glams, and I will admit I'm very guilty of both). But above all, the Aether data center seems to be more wholesome overall. We have far more duty runs where the players chat while mowing through dungeons. We joke and meme so much during Praetorium. We give stuff for free for Sprouts in Limsa's main plaza. Paladins and Red Mages help newbie Healers by using Clemency/Vercure to give some assistance. And overall... it feels like a lot of Aether players have "fun for everyone" as one of their core values; something I definitely didn't experience that often back when I was on Primal.

...It's not always paradise, of course. Trolls and asshats exist everywhere. But the positive experiences are far more common (and memorable) than the bad ones. And the community fosters that.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Next, this one is going to be a bit personal. I have to seriously apologize, I certainly did misjudge you and put you in a camp that is trivializing and honestly, marginalizing how important what the normal player does.

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Oh, I'm far from being a "normal" player XD
I'm quite an odd gal when compared to the typical Eorzean dweller.

I'm an academic who uses FFXIV both for fun and as a tool of academic study, I occasionally give classes in Game Design (and used FFXIV's development cycle as theme and example in quite a few occasions) and I love to fiddle with every system in the game; sometimes I will obsess over something, sometimes I'll take it in a very casual manner, but my main takeaway in how I see FFXIV is "understand that this is a diverse game, with diverse players, and it's important to have enough empathy to realize that different people play differently".

...I guess that comes more easily to a professor and game designer than to the usual gamer, but it is a skill that I do believe absolutely every MMO player should develop at least just a little.

And by what you said, you do seem to be on the right track. I hold no grudge, I see no malice, all's forgiven.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

I am mistaken. I've overestimated my own capabilities and diminished others, when I really need to practice more humility and objectivity in my discussions. [Snip snip]

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An enormous slice of the hardcore raiding community is guilty of this and much more, to be honest. A lot of them seem to think FFXIV is as raid-focused as some other MMOs (like WoW, that basically funnels people into raiding as the true endgame), when in fact the "FFXIV endgame" doesn't have a single answer, and that's by design. You wanna be a fashion designer, a home decorator, an omnicrafter, wanna collect all mounts, get every single fish in the game, or... well, get World First in a raid? The choice is yours. But the important thing is that the devs need to maintain the existence of that choice. And that comes with some sacrifices and prioritizing that often frustrate the hardcore raiders.

Essentially the hardcore raiders pigeonhole themselves into insular communities that only care about their extremely limited slice of the game, to the detriment of all others. And guess what's the kind of player that will come to the forums to complain the most? XD

As for your own questions about how you see the forums and your place in the community, well... that's your own journey to trail. But keep an open mind, cultivate empathy, and you'll probably see far more than you used to. And then you'll find a path that makes you happier in this game.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

PS: If you don't mind doxing yourself, what game did you develop? Now that the tier is finished, I've been going through my backlog, and I'd probably buy your game, my tastes are pretty varied, and it's so rare that I get to talk to an actual developer of anything 1:1 versus me and a sea of others in an official space.

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Well, the answer is kinda disappointing: ...you can't buy the games XD

My only games that were published in actual digital storefronts were educational games made for a national project to enrich student learning (thus the "tens-to-hundreds of thousands of players" I mentioned, since the games were intended to be used in public schools nation-wide), and my team was assembled with the specific goal of "making actual games, not bullshit edugames that look like shit from the 90's". I was dead-serious in following that goal, but sadly my bosses had no idea what a proper game is (I think of games as an "experience" rather than "ooo, buttons you can play for a score"), so you can imagine my frustration during that contract (though I did accomplish my goal, at least).

...And also, while the games are available for free (it was a contract to supply games accessible to high-school students in public schools, after all), they're not available in English and potentially region-locked in the stores, so I'm not sure you'd be able to access them. I'm not even sure I'm properly credited as producer for the ones that got published after I was fired (for "the sake of my own mental health", they said with a straight face).

My other games are experimental, short games made during Game Jams (being producer and main game designer in a team of 20 making a 3D split-screen game in just 48 hours was probably the second hardest challenge I had in all my gamedev carreer), and also for fun on my own during some moments of my life. I'm still (eternally) working on hosting them somewhere, but that's sadly still far from ready XD

...All other games I worked one were inside academic projects, and thus not available to the public (something-something Sharlayan bureaucracy). Sorry XD

Anywho, I hope this answers your questions XD

For anyone who skipped the latest live letter, yes, they are going to rework Living Dead and Blood Weapon <3

We just don't know when specifically, but there will be further info in future patch-specific live letters.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

For anyone who skipped the latest live letter, yes, they are going to rework Living Dead and Blood Weapon <3

We just don't know when specifically, but there will be further info in future patch-specific live letters.

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Honestly really nice that they'll rework those 2 skills.

I know the job has plenty of other problems, but these are literally the only two I even remotely care about. Especially Blood Weapon; I play on the east coast on console and it is actually impossible for me to consistently hit 5 GCDs into that cursed skill.

From a DRK player gone GNB heres my thoughts on DRK in Endwalker



Besides the already known issues with Living Dead, Blood Weapon and TBN...


There's some less talked about issues with DRK which imo are:




1. AoE Combo being Spells and not Weaponskills.

This has to be an oversight.. Why would a job designed to be in Melee need "Spells"?.

This also means your skill speed has no effect on AoE and you cannot AoE during Blood Weapon or you'll miss the 5 GCD's needed.






2. AoE Combo not being fully unlocked until level 72.

Why... ?

Gunbreaker gets their basic AoE combo the moment they unlock the job.
Warrior gets it's basic AoE combo by level 54.
Paladin gets it's basic AoE combo by level 40.

Why does Dark Knight have to wait until level 72 to have it's basic AoE combo?


Yes I'm aware GNB gets a filler AoE spell at 72 but I'm referring to basic combo.

Stalwart Soul in my opinion is the basic part of DRK AoE and Quietus is the filler.




3. Dark Missionary not being unlocked until 76.

Another oversight to be honest.

Dark Missionary should be unlocked at level 70 which is the same level that Passage of Arms and Heart of Light get unlocked.

I also don't understand why Shake it Off is unlocked earlier when it's prob tied for the strongest with Passage of Arms.

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Originally Posted by DoppelShifter

The Ugly:
And here's where the issues I mentioned above become far worse when combined with the current meta. It's one thing to look at a class in isolation, but when you put it alongside all other classes, issues will appear. And DRK has some ugly ones.

First, the obvious: as the tank with the weakest self-healing in the entire roster, endgame-level healers have to adjust their way of healing whenever they get matched up with a DRK. I've seen this multiple times. It's often no fault of the healer; they just spent the last 10 matchups healing immortal Paladins and Warriors, and suddenly now they're matched up with a DRK that can't heal self-heal to save her own life.

Second, and this is a particularly egregious "special case" of the first issue: DRKs match up HORRIBLY with Sages. Ponder with me for a second: what happens when you have a shield-based Tank with bad self-healing and match her with a Healer with the weakest panic burst of all current healers? Yeah. Not good.

DRK + SGE is a matchup made in hell. Most of the times I died in endgame dungeon pulls, I was matched up with a Sage. Often a Sage who complained that "maybe I didn't use enough cooldowns", all the while I stared at my hotbar, all icons definitely on cooldown.

...Well, all except for Living Dead, because if Sage has issues healing DRK in *normal* conditions, can you imagine one trying to top-off a DRK, from zero to full, before the counter reaches zero, after running out of their already tiny pool of panic burst healing?

Yeah. DRK + SGE brings the worst from both classes, and it showcases their worst aspects. Two AMAZING and INCREDIBLY FUN classes, mind you. They're my favorite tank and healer. But they have flaws, and they compound in a very, very bad way.

...Which makes me sad, because again, they're my favorite classes. And also singe Sage is a new class, I get matched up with them a lot. That gets annoying fast.

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The Dark Knight historically has been a DPS class and a DPS focus but was changed in this game to get more people tanking. Historically Dark Knights do not have a self heal they have instead using their own HP to damage other people.

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Originally Posted by HisShadowX

The Dark Knight historically has been a DPS class and a DPS focus but was changed in this game to get more people tanking. Historically Dark Knights do not have a self heal they have instead using their own HP to damage other people.

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It's a Tank/DPS depending how FF set it. 10-2 had DRK as a Tank role, 11 based it hybrid DPS/Tank role it could do both.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

Oh my god, seriously Square Enix what is your problem with this. I don't care that the UI designer came on and said "It's impossible!" It isn't, you just don't want to. "It'll take more QA time! Our internal processes aren't built for checking the DAMAGE TYPES on the abilities we DESIGN before implementation!"

Are you kidding me? I don't care. I shouldn't have to utilize an external repository to find out what damage types are. Full stop, end of discussion. This literally only punishes DRK, less so GNB, and maybe SCH now. If you're going to make Addle and Feint both damage types, you have to do something to or with Dark Mind or the way damage is dealt to keep parity, and I LIKE Dark Mind.

Change something in the battle log. God this makes me so mad.

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I am so glad this isn't just me. I somehow convinced myself that all raid-wides were magic and that probably PLD and WAR--which I don't really use--worked identically, because why else would they limit my raid-wides to magic damage? But the fact that I had to make up a heuristic to justify DM/HoL has never sat well with me, because it was based on a presumption I really didn't have the patience to confirm.