DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

[Jandor]

Ok, some changes I'd make .

Blood Price:
Delivers an attack with a potency of 30 every time you suffer damage.
Damage dealt by this attack is converted into MP.
Would still generate blood.
MP regen from it would probably still be rather lackluster but free damage is always nice, and it fits thematically.

Dark Mind:
10% damage reduction for 20s, 60s cooldown.
Dark Arts effect: Grants HP regen for the duration (roughly on par with WHM regen.)
10% DR with 33% uptime seems pretty nice, DRK could do with a decent self heal as well. Not sure it's worth losing a 30% magic damage CD for though. Maybe 15 or 20% with 90s cooldown?

Shadow Wall:
CD changed from 180s to 120s.
Would just be nice, especially when compared to Sentinel and Vengeance.

Sole Survivor:
Marks target with status ‘Another Victim’
A portion of damage dealt to the target is converted into HP & MP (everyone.)
If that target should be KO'd in battle, 20% of maximum HP and MP will be restored (DRK only.)
Gives DRK some light utility, cheaper DPS for casters and healers, plus a pseudo party heal provided in a way that's suitably *dark*.

Bloodspiller:
Scrap all the "Grit Potency: 475, Dark Arts+Grit Potency: 650" stuff. Why complicate matters, just give it a nice high potency, a nicer higher DA potency, and have it ignore grits penalty.
The weird tooltip just bugs me...

[Duelle]

Bloodspiller:
Scrap all the "Grit Potency: 475, Dark Arts+Grit Potency: 650" stuff. Why complicate matters, just give it a nice high potency, a nicer higher DA potency, and have it ignore grits penalty.
The weird tooltip just bugs me...

Probably because it's a way to say "use this in Grit" without locking the ability behind it. Kind of like how Holy Spirit generates 20 gauge when in Shield Oath.

If we're looking to simplify things, I'd remove the Dark Arts requirement and just make it 540 potency outside of Grit and 650 in Grit. That would remove some of the decision-making from using it since you'd pretty much use it whenever you have 50 blood gauge without MP being a factor at all, though.

[SyzzleSpark]

Probably because it's a way to say "use this in Grit" without locking the ability behind it. Kind of like how Holy Spirit generates 20 gauge when in Shield Oath.

If we're looking to simplify things, I'd remove the Dark Arts requirement and just make it 540 potency outside of Grit and 650 in Grit. That would remove some of the decision-making from using it since you'd pretty much use it whenever you have 50 blood gauge without MP being a factor at all, though.

DRK doesn't need simplification, what it needs is mechanics that are a net gain or a net loss, instead of things that simply break even. The job is PACKED with choices to make and priorities to manage, but no matter what you choose or prioritize, it barely effects your performance. Because of this, there's barely any incentive to optimize the job, because you're rewarded extremely poorly.

The reason Bloodspiller's tooltip is worded the way it is, I assume, is because unlike Inner Beast, it is not locked behind Grit. Also because of its buff, it no longer simply ignores the penalty, as Bloodspiller is now 400 potency out of Grit, so its baseline Grit potency would have to be 500 and the DA+Grit would have to be 675. The way they have it now they can adjust the potencies individually, whereas with something like Inner Beast they cannot. I'm not saying I'm a fan of this though, as I would rather they simply make up their minds and have Bloodspiller be a defined DPS gain regardless of how we build the Blood to use it.

Currently we have a ton of mana dumps and they all net almost the exact same potency increase with the sole exception being Carve and Spit. The reason for this is because they backed themselves into a corner by removing Delirium and making the changes to Darkside and Blood Weapon for their mana drain/recovery respectively, meaning that if we go through our rotation and only ever Dark Arts Souleater or Bloodspiller we will overflow constantly. So they made Syphon DA-able. Now, why they did this as opposed to simply keeping DP where it was (which would have achieved the same purpose more or less) escapes me. And it really just drives home the thing that a lot of DRK's have been complaining about since day 1 of SB: They didn't buff the job or improve it at ALL with the release of 4.0, they just rearranged a bunch of crap.

If they want to make these DA potencies the same, then the abilities need additional DA effects (Bloodspiller could have a DoT, Souleater could see a greatly increased self-healing effect, Syphon could lower the cooldown on one of our oGCDs or perhaps simply restore more mana, etc.). These abilities need to have some form of parity but they also need a reason to DA one over the other so that the job can have something resembling satisfaction for optimiztation.

On a side note, I'd like to point out that in HW, SE released a fairly substantial job adjustment patch after the launch of Gordias savage but before 3.1, in August of that year: http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...7aff5b99d9fb32 ...so if we continue to provide this level of feedback we may see some of these fixes we're suggesting this month.

[Duelle]

The job is PACKED with choices to make and priorities to manage, but no matter what you choose or prioritize, it barely effects your performance. Because of this, there's barely any incentive to optimize the job, because you're rewarded extremely poorly.

While I agree the job lacks feedback in how well you're doing, most of the choices are no brainers because the bulk of DA effects are potency increases. It'd be a different story if every ability that interacted with Dark Arts was like Carve and Spit, where it serves two different purposes depending on DA (though I think that would go against the approach the devs have taken with Stormblood).

Currently we have a ton of mana dumps and they all net almost the exact same potency increase with the sole exception being Carve and Spit. The reason for this is because they backed themselves into a corner by removing Delirium and making the changes to Darkside and Blood Weapon for their mana drain/recovery respectively, meaning that if we go through our rotation and only ever Dark Arts Souleater or Bloodspiller we will overflow constantly.

I'd blame that on their abandoning the original intent for Dark Arts and the MP management minigame that was DRK through all of last expansion, because if the concern was the lack of a non-DA combo finisher, Souleater could have been buffed to 400 potency baseline, DA increase the potency to 440 and add a weak drain out of Grit that becomes very powerful in Grit (the way the current MP recovery works for Syphon Strike).

Non-sequitur:

What I'd like is for the devs to make up their mind on what is the DRK resource. The blood gauge currently exists only because of Delirium, Bloodspiller and Quietus, and the only one that adds anything to that gameplay-wise is Delirium because of how it affects Blood Weapon (arguably Blood Price, though in its current state it's not as big a benefit). TBN was designed in such a way to further justify the gauge's existence.

Here's some bullet points with ideas:

- Darkside entirely removes the MP bar when activated, replacing it with the Blood Gauge. Adjust Darkside to enter the leveling scheme of DRK as a lv2 ability for level synch purposes.
- Dark Arts no longer costs MP, but has a 15-second cooldown. Clicking on Dark Arts while it is on cooldown allows you to activate it again, but it restarts the cooldown and consumes 50 Blood Gauge.
- Syphon Strike, Souleater, Blood Weapon, Carve & Spit (non-DA), Blood Price and Quietus generate blood. Maybe add a trait where auto-attacks have a 30% chance to generate 1 blood; incidentally, Blood Price and Blood Weapon are no longer tied together, but one cannot be used while the other is active.
- Unmend generates 2 Blood per use, costs no MP.
- Unleash costs no MP, has a 10s cooldown and generates 2 Blood.
- The above combined with Salted Earth means you have extra sources of blood. We can thus nerf the gauge generated by TBN from 50 to 10-15 (the intent here being that the mitigation provided by TBN outweighs the resources it generates).
- TBN would follow the same rule as Dark Arts, where the first one is free but using it before the cooldown is done restarts the cooldown and consumes 50 gauge.
- Defensive cooldowns (Dark Mind, Shadow Wall) have a baseline level of mitigation that grows with accumulated blood. They don't consume blood, but are stronger when your gauge is above 20-30.
- Blood spenders: Dark Passenger, Abyssal Drain, Bloodspiller, Quietus.
- Delirium changed into a cooldown that increases blood accumulation and reduces the on-cooldown cost of Dark Arts and TBN by 80% for 20s. (fun fact: the JP name of Delirium is "Blood Delirium", so the name even fits in this case)
- Grit changed to a toggle. Increased mitigation (40%~) with no damage penalties, but damage taken consumes 35 blood gauge per hit; if you hit blood levels below 35, Grit instantly deactivates. This is meant to be a last resort for mitigation, assuming you've run out of cooldowns during a fight. Yes, this means DRK would no longer have a tank stance.

This is me spit-balling ideas, but yeah.