#BringBackHeavenswardReprisal

[Dualgunner]

It does frustrate me to no end that DPS roles can function completely independent of cross role, whereas Tanks (and I suppose healers although I have little insight there) cannot. If you left your cross role slots completely EMPTY on a DPS job, in many situations, you might not even notice. Kinda drives home my suspicions that SE's dev team is full of DPS mains with not a clue how to handle balance for other roles.

SMN needs addle for dps. All three casters need swiftcast: in fact as RDM I actively use swift in my rotation. Red Mage *needs* lucid dreaming. I personally need diversion as well for my opening burst or I'm the new tank.

Just clarifying that there are dps that don't function right without certain cross role.

[SyzzleSpark]

If I left my cross role slots empty, you'd be getting very angry at me for not dumping threat I'd wager.

Very true. However in most cases DPS don't have DPS cooldowns in CR, certainly nothing on the level of value of something like Rampart or Provoke. I know there's niche things such as Addle that the above poster mentioned, as well. Still not something of the kind of weight that you see abilities in tank/healer CR carrying, in my opinion.

[Crater]

The issue with the cross-role system, in my mind, is just that there's zero consistency in which "kind" of skills are supposed to be there.

You've got everything from essential, non-negotiable parts of every class's kit (Healers are particularly bad for this, with Protect, Lucid Dreaming, and Swiftcast all being part of it, but tanks also have Provoke, physical DPS have Invigorate) to skills that are technically not mandatory but so universally powerful/useful that they might as well be (Rampart, Convalescence, Shirk, Largesse, Diversion, Second Wind, True North, caster Swiftcast, Refresh and Tactitian), to skills that you either tend to be absolutely 100% mandatory for some content and absolutely 100% useless for other content (Low Blow, Leg Sweep, Interjection, Esuna). You have skills that are situationally useful (or at least fun) but not really what you'd call strong (Reprisal, Eye for an Eye, Rescue, Feint, Palisade, Addle, Apocatastasis), and then you have skills that are just plain weak (Anticipation, Awareness, Drain, Cleric Stance).

No real attempt seems to have been made to standardize how much different classes rely on particular cross-role abilities, or how essential cross-role abilities are to a class's ability to even function in their primary role; Warrior can survive quite comfortably even without a skill as powerful as Rampart, whereas for Paladin and especially Dark Knight that's basically their primary tool for traditional mitigation; White Magic and Scholar have potent MP management tools outside of Lucid Dreaming, while Astrologian basically depends on Lucid and their 'exclusive' MP management skill is just a skill that extends their own Lucid Dreaming; Diversion is Monk's only enmity tool, while Dragoon has an aggro dump on Elusive Jump and Ninja has Shadewalker; Healers basically have 4/5 of their skills eaten up by mandatory or pseudo-mandatory skills, to the point where a lot of people have a macro for the beginning of a dungeon that automatically casts Protect and then removes it just to make room for something else.

No real attempt seems to have been made to balance the skills versus one another. Just think about this: Rampart is essentially competing for the same skill slot as Anticipation. Goad is a strictly inferior version of Tactician, and sure enough, the presence of Tactician and Refresh on MCH and BRD are a huge part of why the current optimal/meta composition is just the exact same four DPS classes that were part of the speedrun composition in 3.4/3.5.

That's why I bristle a little bit at the idea that some cross-role skills are "doing it correctly" and some are "doing it wrong". There's just so little consistency between the skills that it's impossible to say for sure what the design priorities are on the whole cross-role system, whether a particular class/role function "should" be left to role actions, or be in-built to every class within that role, or to be doubled up on so you get an in-class option and a cross-role option, or whether some classes should have secondary options and some shouldn't, whether role actions are meant to function as weaker, barebones/baseline skills to perform a given function or whether they should be as strong or stronger than class-exclusive alternatives, or... Anything, really.

The only consistent goal that role actions definitely fulfill is that you don't have to level more than one class in order to play that specific class to its fullest, and so as far as I'm concerned, that's the only rule that they need to follow, and classes should just be balanced based around what's currently a part of this terrible failure of a system.

Which I think is kind of the end of how much the general concept of "role actions" needs to have to do with this thread. Assumedly, nothing is going to happen with the role action version of Reprisal, save for hopefully a name change as they bring back the 3.x DRK-exclusive Reprisal. The current design issues that face DRK (and tanks in general) all have to do with DRK's exclusive job-specific skills, and that's where we need a new skill to fill in the numerous severe gaps that exist between DRK and the other two tanks in terms of performance in just about every aspect of being a tank.

[SyzzleSpark]

So I had an interesting idea that could maybe be tacked on to the OP, but I don't necessarily want to fix something that isn't broken. Nevertheless, here it is:

First off: 210 potency every 30s is a nice DPS boost, but as I pointed out in an earlier post here, I don't think it will actually take us off the bottom. Browsing through some old logs, Reprisal was about a 1.17% DPS gain. Assuming that it is a similar or slightly greater percentage (say a 2.17% boost...) it would still leave us weaker than PLD and of course WAR.

I think we can safely buff a reinstituted Reprisal to 300 potency without imbalancing anything. This puts it on par with Shield Swipe.

Additionally, and this shakes things up a bit, but I think to make the Blood Gauge more interesting, I propose some additional changes related to this one.

1. New Reprisal costs 20 BG.
2. TBN returns 30 BG instead of 50.
3. DP now also returns 30 BG, putting it at roughly the same Mana-to-potency efficiency as it was in 3.x without actually changing its current potency or MP cost.
4. Cut Delirium's recast to 60s, have it increase BW by 4s instead of 8s and BP by 8s instead of 16s.
5. Delirium, Bloodspiller, and Quietus now cost 25 BG instead of 50.

Feel free to dismantle/harshly critique these ideas. I'm tired and spinning my wheels, although I'm sure many DRKs can relate. Just trying to keep the juggernaut of discussion moving even if I have to get out and push.

[WhyAmIHere]

1. New Reprisal costs 20 BG.
2. TBN returns 25 BG instead of 50.
3. 25 BG taken from TBN is given to DP, putting it at roughly the same Mana-to-potency efficiency as it was in 3.x without actually changing its current potency or MP cost.
4. Cut Delirium's recast to 60s, have it increase BW by 4s instead of 8s and BP by 8s instead of 16s.
5. Delirium, Bloodspiller, and Quietus now cost 30 BG instead of 50.

Feel free to dismantle/harshly critique these ideas. I'm tired and spinning my wheels, although I'm sure many DRKs can relate.

as far as #3, are you suggesting that DP cost MP, but also drain blood to use it? the wording confuses me a tad.
in the same vein as (this should be its own thread as well, really, dealing with the new DRK blood gauge) #5, why not just give delirium an added "cost to use blood-using skills is reduced by half for 5 seconds," and make the BW/BP extensions 5/10s respectively?

[Eyvhokan]

as far as #3, are you suggesting that DP cost MP, but also drain blood to use it? the wording confuses me a tad.
in the same vein as (this should be its own thread as well, really, dealing with the new DRK blood gauge) #5, why not just give delirium an added "cost to use blood-using skills is reduced by half for 5 seconds," and make the BW/BP extensions 5/10s respectively?

It's suggesting DP grants 25 blood (taken from TBN going from 50 -> 25)

[WhyAmIHere]

It's suggesting DP grants 25 blood (taken from TBN going from 50 -> 25)

I musta quoted/responded faster than they could edit. =P

[SyzzleSpark]

I tweaked the numbers slightly since my original post, but the effect is pretty much the same. Anyway...

as far as #3, are you suggesting that DP cost MP, but also drain blood to use it? the wording confuses me a tad.

3. DP now also returns 30 BG

i.e. you pay 2400 mana, get 100 potency, and also 30 BG.

why not just give delirium an added "cost to use blood-using skills is reduced by half for 5 seconds," and make the BW/BP extensions 5/10s respectively?

Because 50 gauge is honestly too much for attacks that are nowhere near the PPGCD gain of, say, Fell Cleave. Nowhere near as much of our total potency per second is invested in Bloodspiller as it is something like FC for WAR. So yeah. I think 50 gauge is too much. I don't really think it should be 50 gauge period, Delirium or not, and I didn't want to make it a carbon-copy of Inner Release. That being said, the "how" is a matter of opinion and your suggestion works equally well.

As for the BP/BW extentions, I cut the recast exactly in half, and so in turn I cut the effects exactly in half.

[Crater]

snip

Just doing some math here, probably without drawing any real conclusions for now:


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Bloodspiller is still your tool for dumping Blood here, so that's still the standard we use to determine how much potency each point of Blood is 'worth'.

You do that by setting [Bloodspiller potency and Blood cost] - [average Souleater combo GCD potency + MP + Blood] = 0 and then solving for x pot = 1 Blood, so:

[400pot - 25B] - [700pot + 1200MP + 10B]/3 = [400pot - 25B] - [770pot + 10B]/3 = 400pot - 25B - ~256.6pot - ~3.33B = ~143.4pot - ~28.33B = 0

And so ~143.4pot = 28.33B, or 1 Blood = ~5.05 potency.

- For reference, the current cost of 50 Blood makes 1 point of Blood worth roughly 2.69 potency, so this is a substantial buff per point of Blood. However, doing similar calculations for Warrior gives you roughly 5 potency for each point of Beast Gauge, which can almost all be spent under Berserk for a 1.3x multiplier, so this is definitely not an obscene buff.


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1. At 20BG for 300 potency, Reprisal offers a 15 potency per BG return, in addition to its mitigation effects. That's substantially higher than the Bloodspiller returns, which would mean that Reprisal just becomes an 'upkeep' skill, where you're expected to set aside 20 Blood for it and use it as often as possible.

Again, this is the same Gauge:Potency return that Warrior gets on Upheaval, however: Upheaval is always available every 30s, whereas Reprisal would have to be procced via a Parry or TBN, every second Upheaval is buffed by Berserk for a 1.3x multiplier, and every fourth Upheaval is further buffed by Thrill of Battle (the exact percentage buff escapes me at the moment). So I don't think that this is an unreasonable addition.


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2. TBN returning 30 Blood every time means that trading 2400 MP (140 potency) would return 30 Blood (~150 potency). Depending on how you feel about whether TBN should always be a DPS gain to encourage use, always be a slight loss to discourage using purely for DPS, or a break-even skill to avoid upsetting the balance, that may or may not be a good thing. Personally, I'm pretty ambivalent.


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3. Dark Passenger returning 30 BG (~150 potency) puts its single-target potency up from 100 (unaffected by Slashing debuff) to an effective 250 (240 if you divide out the slashing bonus), at a cost of 140 potency worth of MP - it can be looked at as an effective gain of 110 (~100 of slashing) potency every 30 seconds, and would become an MP 'upkeep' skill.

In a 2-target situation this becomes a really good skill - DADP on two targets would cost you 280 potency worth of MP, but would deal 480 potency in direct damage, and return an additional ~150 effective potency via Blood, so a gain of 350 potency compared to using the MP on two single-target DAs. Very powerful, but I think that's fine - PLD gets an extra 250 potency for hitting a second target with Circle of Scorn, Warrior gains about 80 potency for every Berserked Fell Cleave they can replace with a Berserked Decimate in a 2-target situation, etc.

In true AoE situations, though, I think it might be a touch too good for it to do as much damage as it does, and give you a free Quietus and change... But I haven't done math on that, and that's an easy problem to solve, if it is a big problem, by simply making Quietus cost more Blood than Bloodspiller, which I think would also be fine, if necessary.


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4. I don't think that change really works for Delirium, because Delirium on a 60s timer compared with Blood Weapon (and Price, I guess) being on a 40s timer means that you're going to be holding every other Delirium until your next Blood Weapon anyway (meaning that you've halved the effect on Blood Weapon while only reducing the effective cooldown to 2/3rds the current one.

However... As outlined in a post I made a little ways back, Delirium is severely underpowered, and there's plenty of room to play with it.

I don't know if I have any real specific suggestions here, because I feel like these other changes probably make up for how bad Delirium is, and it could probably stay mediocre at 120s if Blood as a resource were brought up to par with Beast Gauge and DRK was given some beefing up via an improved Reprisal and Dark Passenger. If you were to drop the cooldown, though, I think it has to stay a multiple of Blood Weapon's cooldown - so 80s or 40s.


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5 Re: Blood costs, I think Bloodspiller would be fine at 25 Blood, and Delirium is probably also fine given that buffing Delirium doesn't need to be a priority with Reprisal/DP/Blood improvements. Quietus on the other hand probably needs to stay in the 40-50 Blood Range, if only because using Quietus under Blood Weapon on 8+ enemies would basically let you spam Quietus on every GCD, TBN and DADP on cooldown, DAAD any time your health started to dip, and still have enough leftover MP that you'd have to DA every Quietus for +50 potency just to keep from overcapping.


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Overall: Under an ideal scenario, where Reprisal and DP could be used on cooldown every time, this is a gain of 410 potency (400 of "slashing" potency) in oGCD damage every 30 seconds. A ballpark estimate of DRK's damage-per-potency in current gear is about 17.3, under just Darkside and Slashing Up. That's an increase of about 230-235 DPS over current DRK, from oGCDs alone - a little more than that once you factor in Direct Hits, Critical Hits, and raid buffs. That puts DRK at or above Warrior for total DPS (higher by about 50, highballing it) on every fight - which, again, I think is fine, because Warrior would still be dealing much, much more burst damage than DRK, and higher bursts should be balanced out with lower sustained DPS, and vice versa.

However, since we're already at that point just from looking at the oGCDs, the buff to Blood might put things a little bit over the top. A Souleater combo goes from an effective potency of ~797 to an effective potency of ~820 as Blood rises from 2.69 effective potency to 5. That's somewhere around a 55-60 DPS increase.

Blood Weapon produces 39-42 Blood per use, depending on Skill Speed. That's somewhere in the area of 40-45 DPS, given a 40s cooldown. And even Salted Earth is going to add somewhere in the zone of 6-10 DPS.


So all told, these changes would actually amount to about a 350-375 DPS boost to DRK. Given the absurd buffs that WAR has had since SB launched, my inclination is to say that the game would probably survive a world where DRK was 150-200 DPS above WAR, especially since reaching this DPS peak would require popping Reprisal like clockwork exactly every 30s, which wouldn't happen, especially because they still wouldn't be able to burst as high... But it would probably leave PLD dead in the water, Veil/Passage or no.


I think this is a good set of solutions (albeit probably a little too wide-reaching to hope for unless SE decides to give DRK a WAR/AST style mid-expansion makeover), but it's probably too big a cut to the Blood costs while also bolstering the oGCD damage by so much. I don't want to start from scratch rerunning the numbers, but just eyeballing it, it would probably come pretty close to hitting the sweet spot with the original 210 potency on Reprisal and a smaller Blood reduction on Bloodspiller to 35-40 or so.

[Chrono_Rising]

I like the suggestions overall, I think that one more change is in order however, if the delirium change were to take place. Right now your second blood weapon effect would end 5 seconds before delirium became active again. And this will continue to happen through out the fight. If a change like this happened I think it would be a good quality of life to have BW and BP be 30 second recasts to line up with delirium use.

Crater beat me to this lol