Half-baked Thoughts of a Filthy Casual DRK

[SyzzleSpark]

You think they're ill conceived, others do not. You just don't agree with them. There is a fine line between disagreeing with someone and pawning them off as dumb just because you feel they don't fit your profile of a worthy player.

I never called anyone dumb, but I will call out the weasel words and straw man reasoning of this post.

If people want to disregard advice about how to play a job better so that their perceived problems with a job will be less of an issue that's their choice.



Also I just went back and read my original response to the OP back the top of page 4. I was firm but I never called anyone dumb nor was I openly insulting. Sorry I tried to help people understand the job they're trying to main. =/

[Donjo]

I wouldn't be opposed to Blood Price being changed to give you MP even if you dodge an attack(as in gain MP when you're attacked instead of when you're hit) but I can also agree that it isn't really necessary as you can get the full mileage of Blood Price and the "God of Dodging" combo without stepping upon your ability to use either. When I got Dark Arts and saw that I could inflict Blind and increase my Evasion, I immediately knew that I shouldn't use those if Blood Price is up. There are better things to use Dark Arts on in a lot of fights anyway...

[Mattelot]

Your remarks are condescending and you want people to take you seriously. I don't agree with half of what you say but I won't tell you that your thoughts are ridiculous. I won't evade your questions.

[Donjo]

Maybe you should stop evading her answers then...

[Fluffernuff]

You seem to be fussing over details and missing the big picture. I'd recommend you readjust your perspective and priorities in different situations and see that DRK has a time and place for everything, and when you execute skills in conjunction at the proper time, you'll find them extremely effective.

That's just it. what big picture is there? Are theoretical dungeon pulls any less "details"? I'm looking at this from a toolkit perspective. By all means. enlighten me. out of all the PLD skills are there effects that "prevent" or reduce the abilities of other skills it has? I can think of Flash's blind causing "issues" with Sheltron. But im drawing a blank beyond that.

What about WAR? Berserk? I guess? because you cant cleanse pacification? I mean, you don't die from pacification though. and you just had 30s worth of +50% damage

Again, you try to direct this as lack of skill. you assume I just throw up BP when I'm already in "evasion mode". I'm not argueing or even downplaying the effectiveness of such, I simply disagree with having abilities that gate eachother rather than compliment.

DRGs can't maintain Blood of the Dragon while AoEing. Does that mean DRG is poorly designed? Just because you have a different list of priorities between a big dungeon trash pull and a single-target boss fight doesn't mean a job is poorly designed.

Apples and Oranges, really. Last I ever heard, DRG wasnt exactly "designed" for AoE in the first place. Even if they are/were, youre comparing a different situation anyway. last I checked BotD unlocked single target skills and buffed the damage of single target skills.the main ability it unlocks thats AoE, Gierskogul, even reduces the time on BotD. Sounds to me like the DESIGN of Botd actually DISCOURAGES AoE. I dunno. Using AoE with a skill that doesnt want you to AoE sounds like terrible design.

I'll try to summarize my feelings a bit more bluntly. this is regardless of "skill". this is regardless of "situation". this is regardless of "details".
DRK has skills that interact negatively with other skills in it's own kit. It has others that are EFFECTIVE, but still interact NEGATIVELY. The "potential" of DRK and it's "effectiveness" is gated behind avoiding using it's own abilities in tandem.

PLD does not have this problem.

WAR does not have this problem.

This is not to say what I want is a solution. Ultimately, what I'd like to see is more Abilities on DRK that actually play nice with eachother. I want to see a direction for DRK.
Lets go back to your example. BP is down, DADP+DADD is up. im mitigating upwards of 50% damage. im now 4400 MP down and only have 3 abilities to regain it... all being single target, one even requires something dies.
So I'm in an AoE situation. With little options to actually do my AoE abilities (I can do 2-3 unleashes, and 1-2 Abyssal drains without resorting to SS/CnS). I would have to start single-target to get a little bit of a foothold to AoE again anyway (yknow. because MP management). I might be "fine" but using my own tools just put me in a more negative situation, or at least a situation contrary to my desired goal.

If you want me to evade, give me more efficient tools to evade. if you want me to get hit, dont give me tools that prevent that. Sure, Parrying is worse than evasion, but why cant I have something like Raw Intuition to use WHILE under BP? still mitigating damage, still gaining MP, still giving me an oGCD to use.
If i'm supposed to evade, why cant BP restore MP per attack rather than per hit? Evading attacks and being able to still use my AoEs to better effect.

My main and only issue with DRK is that it seems confused. NOT that it's bad. NOT that is needs some overhaul. NOT that it's imbalanced. NOT that I just can't play it right.


Saw this after the post-

If people want to disregard advice about how to play a job better so that their perceived problems with a job will be less of an issue that's their choice.

If youre referring to me, simply disregarding my reasoning as false and telling me to "change" is far from advice. if that is your definition, I'm not the only one who needs to shift their perspective.

[Violette]

@Above: No, at this point your issue is you refuse to listen to those who are explaining the class to clear up your confusion. And telling people they need to change their play habits can be good advice. I listen to all comments, test all of them and make my mind up. It's how people tend to learn.


So here I go. Again.

Dark Knight is a high risk, high reward, high skill ceiling class.

Dark Knight has many tools to deal with a variety of situations.

Dark Knight gets these breadth of options due to its ability to empower its abilities via spending its resources. (MP).

By spending resources Dark Knight can allocate whether it wants to focus on defense or offense, without stance dancing like WAR or PLD would have to.

A lot of Dark Knight abilities revolve around getting hit and parrying them (or not). Blood Price, Living Dead, Reprisal, Lower Blows. This ties into the high risk, high reward aspect of the class.

By managing cooldowns and rotation to manage MP levels, you can keep up this high powered playstyle in both single and multi-target situations.

By using the 2 skills that don't play nicely together at the same time, you will have a bad time. But this is only a design flaw if this was forced to happen. It's not. Using Geirskogul on Dragoon negatively affects your BotD, but you still use it. It's resource and cooldown management rolled into one. But the dragoons embraced it, instead of fighting it every step of the way. Same with Enochian. Dark Arts is this on hard mode.

In order to maximize your dark knight play, you need to manage ogcds and cooldowns in order to get the most gain from them.

And if you are this upset about a little bit of self synergy, how do you feel about using bp then having a white mage spam holy? That's far more of a mp loss than the blind will ever cause.

@off topic: fair warning to everyone, if you use ad honiem or w/e as part of your argument I'm assuming you don't know how to play the class at this point/you're a philosophy major.

[SyzzleSpark]

snip

If the only issue is that it seems somewhat confused then I would counter that, once someone knows "hey, I shouldn't use these two abilities together, I should use them separately so can benefit from them, separately" whence come the confusion? It would seem that that clears it up. Sure the abilities will degrade eachother if used in conjunction but it is solely the player's choice whether or not to do so. I could gladly understand the argument if Blood Price was a passive that was always on, but its not. Its the player's actions that cause the problem of synergy, not the job itself.

In your scenario that you outlined I would have guessed that you had already secured enmity and it was not a problem.

For example, I do all my AoEing first while Blood Price is up, and then, by the time it wears off, I have an iron grip on hate and I'm free to single target even if I am tanking 12 mobs. That's when I DADD/DADP. And I ususally stop AoEing 3-4 seconds before Blood Price falls to make sure that I have MP to DADD/DADP. I also weave in those abilities across two Delirium combos as opposed to cramming them all in over 1-2 GCDs, so I actually lose very little MP overall. Although I really don't even need to do that, I'm still left with over 2K MP, and I don't have anything that I really need to DA that point and I've already done all my AoEing so it doesn't really matter if I'm at 5K or 2K MP. I figured out an effective way to execute an AoE DPS and mitigation rotation all in one convenient string of abilities. And it works wonders. You should try it, because the scenario you described NEVER happens to me.

In smaller pulls of like 3 mobs, I STILL do this. I just stop AoEing a bit sooner. There is more than enough time to recoup MP through Syphon combos, and I generally just don't use DASE too much in an AoE scenario cause its just not an efficient use of MP on that many targets. If stuff still isn't dead by the time BP is off cooldown I rinse and repeat with another AoE burst. AoE is also the only time when an unbuffed C&S is a good idea. When something is about to die I Sole Survivor it. The lowest I ever come out of a dungeon pull is around 3K MP and that's if I was being sloppy.

The bottom line is its all player choice. You don't like the word skill apparently (even though I used it as a reference to a "weapon"skill or ability in the context you quoted) so I won't use it, I'll use "choice". You can choose to put yourself in a precarious situation as far as enmity, DPS, mitigation and MP like you described (Blinding and boosting evasion on everything before you've secured aggro), or you can choose not to.

I'm just here to tell you as objectively as possible what the wiser choice is and if you don't like that I know my job extremely well and I'm trying to share that with you so the job isn't as "confusing" I'm.... sorry I guess? o.O

[AI_wass]

I don't know what the hell's so confusing about this. You have the best defensive cooldown rotation for full-pulling dungeons, on recasts that virtually guarantee they'll be up for every pull, even multiple times a pull; and you're complaining that it doesn't do anything in single-target? Or that you can actually screw up and press the wrong buttons? Is it because that your oGCD combos aren't clearly labeled for you? That's not an issue with a job, that's pebkac. That's wholly on you. It's not counter-intuitive, it's good common sense. The DADD/DADP/BP interaction virtually speaks for itself. "Stack us together," "Push me before or after, but not during those," read their tooltips, if you stopped for a second and actually thought about how to play the damn job.