Quote Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark View Post
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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.