Yoshi P./Dev team/Job balance team Please Say Something About DRK

[WhyAmIHere]

Well judging from my research.... you neither player DRK nor have been to any recorded savage content (Shinryu however is fun)

So lets go from here then. Back in 3.x PLD was trash for Alex as almost all tank busters/autos were Magic. Twist this around for 3.x... imagine if all the tank busters were now physical with little-no need for magic defensives. Guess who would have gotten the 4.x buff instead.

All in all, when people stop bringing a job to savage all together the team investigates. Currently in every savage fight I've seen on fflogs so far... PLD/WAR is overtaking DRK in terms of usage & popularity. What Yoshida is implying is that "Well players must not understand how beneficial TBN is, it's less visibly apparently than Shake It Off". This statement is just straight wrong, it's an Apples - Oranges comparison.

TBN is a single target 20%(self) or 10%(another person) hp shield that costs a hefty amount of personal resources on a 15 second cooldown

Shake It Off costs nothing, shields the whole group up to 24% (most people only use the base 8% since its free) at the cost of all your personal defensives if going for the 24%. HOWEVER it costs nothing if you only need the base 8%... which is only 2% less than TBN and has a 90 second cooldown.

TL;DR - What does a DRK bring that a WAR or a PLD can't? The answer is nothing, so people won't bring it. With people not bringing it, it will lead to more exposure by the dev team.

Problem is, even by totally screwing Savage balance, if would never kill the game...in fact, if Savage didn't exist, it wouldn't kill the game, considering the very small part of the playerbase that actually is interested in Savage.

Agree with Reynhart. A bigger problem is this over-focusing on the end game, savage raiding scene. The casual player won't give a fruit about savage content. To them, the game is fun to play as much as they choose to do so, and in that regard DRK is just fine. Which, on that level, it is, and it's still playable... but the enjoyment has gone down since HW, and people can see and feel that. But it's still a fun class. You've got a big sword to smack things around with, and you can do "magic" too!
From a baseline DRK is overshadowed in terms of how much damage it can soak up until you hit 70 with it. I think that's a terrible design philosophy, but that's just me.

So, I see where YoshiP is standing based on how I interpreted the translation, but I'd love to see what he had said to that question in his native tongue. From there a lot of insight could be gleamed.

[CaTi]

Agreed, this is a good way of looking at it!
And it's always a good point regarding translation, who knows what little nuance his original answer had?

[DRKoftheAzure]

To CaTi; Remember the guys that are behind the creation of Final Fantasy as well as Dragon Quest also made not 1 but multiple awful movies which include Final Fantasy: Spirits Within... first 5 minutes of that movie couldn't even keep me interested because I was asking "Where the hell is the magicks, the moogles, the chocobos? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CHOCOBOS?!?!!!?" Then Advent Children was probably just as bad but for me FF6 had best story, FF4 had best moral and characters, and FF5 had best job System ESPECIALLY the GBA remake that had 4 more optional jobs you could unlock... Only we; the fans are the only ones that actually care... Naoki Yoshida might just as much as a fan but I doubt he gets much say in when things get released or if things need more time to be released for better marketing... but FF15 had a ridiculously long development period and Tetsuya Nomura is JUST NOW WORKING ON KINGDOM HEARTS 3!!!! So yeah... Though I think Yoshi-P might be IRL equivalent of Nanamo....

[DaulBan]

As I posted in another thread, if yoship is basing how good DRK is off of usage numbers then he's not wrong to say 'Shake it Off is pretty good, DRK doesn't have that' and not say anything more. DRK is about average for its savage participation compared to WAR (which has fewer people playing it) and PLD (which has more). My that metric while yoship probably knows that people want some changes there isn't the same impetus to change things as there was with SMN and MCH to get people playing the jobs.

[CaTi]

For DRKoftheAzure: I can see what you're saying and definitely agree with you in terms of say lack of funding for content design and such like. Don't think it's quite the case for a lack of DRK buffs though!

I think something to consider personally is that a fair few of the more significant job changes (looking at you SMN and DRG) we've had including and since 4.0 have been aimed at reducing the gap between the skill floor and ceiling of players in that Job. That seems to be the immediate concern for patching for the most part. As I understand it (do correct me if I'm wrong of course) DRK in it's current iteration (as opposed to the 3.x version) is considered a pretty simple job to get to grips with. Offence is pretty straightforward mostly, mitigation is pretty straightforward for what it is. So that might also be part of the reason the job isn't being looked at (to our knowledge)?

[WhyAmIHere]

For DRKoftheAzure: I can see what you're saying and definitely agree with you in terms of say lack of funding for content design and such like. Don't think it's quite the case for a lack of DRK buffs though!

I think something to consider personally is that a fair few of the more significant job changes (looking at you SMN and DRG) we've had including and since 4.0 have been aimed at reducing the gap between the skill floor and ceiling of players in that Job. That seems to be the immediate concern for patching for the most part. As I understand it (do correct me if I'm wrong of course) DRK in it's current iteration (as opposed to the 3.x version) is considered a pretty simple job to get to grips with. Offence is pretty straightforward mostly, mitigation is pretty straightforward for what it is. So that might also be part of the reason the job isn't being looked at (to our knowledge)?

Could very well be. It's overall a simple job, but there's plenty of fat that can be trimmed away, and other parts that just need some tenderizing. MP costs, blood gauge and it's associated uses, potencies, comparisons to the alternatives w/ regards to damage and mitigation, the over reliance on dark arts, tanking with / without grit on, etc etc.

[DaulBan]

So that might also be part of the reason the job isn't being looked at (to our knowledge)?

It's hard to know. I went back through the major buffs of HW and a couple of the SB ones and it looks like there are roughly two different types of buffs.

1. Usage-balancing buffs.

2. Internal recommendations / Player feedback.

The first set I'm guessing is based off of SE's internal metrics. Notable HW buffs include MCH and AST which were at the beginning of the expansion (Gordias) they were both hideously under-represented in content. AST would go on to get buffed three more times (Noct buffs twice, as well as the balance buff) while MCH didn't actually wind up changing much after the initial changes to how Gauss Barrel worked.

In SB the most noticeable change is SMN so far, which was another case of incredible under-representation. As of right now SMN has some of the most insane combined rDPS in the game excluding the golden trio (DRG/BRD/NIN) and is probably going to see continued usage growth in the future.

There are of course other examples of low-usage jobs receiving minor buffs, but the common thread for major improvements (MCH became a mandatory part of the Speedkill Comp into SB, AST is still a powerhouse, SMN is looking like it might out-place MCH now) is a dearth of usage, particularly in the early stages of an expansion.

Buffs that don't fit the trend I assume are their actual responses to player feedback or their own internal review. DRG changes to positional damage penalties being changed to improve the skill floor, same with the eyes, and were essentially a net neutral at the top and a net gain in the middle and bottom bands of players (I'm guessing based on what the change means, I've not analyzed fflogs trends). The WAR changes probably are a combination of changing the skill floor (a newbie tank might assume that because Eye is more potency than path they should spam eye instead despite the beast gauge) and player feedback (removing the beast penalty on stances as well as IR and Unchained). WAR also suffers from being under-represented in Savage content, being below DRK (which is sitting at a rough average). WAR is unlikely to receive any changes though.

Based on those two different sets I'd say DRK is looking at more maintenance buffs than anything if yoship decides to have the balance team look at the class and buff it in one way or another. DRK is essentially in the same class as BLM or MNK in HW. Good enough that buffing them won't necessarily affect usage rates (the data says that people are already playing it), even if it doesn't have the same level of utility as other jobs. This might seem cynical but if SB BLM made it into the game and has made it through roughly unchanged it doesn't bode well for anyone hoping that there are any massive changes for DRK. Reason-being is that no matter how much people might complain DRK is in no way in the same position as HW PLD, and not anywhere near as bad as SB BLM vs NIN/DRG/ or BRD.

[DRKoftheAzure]

For DRKoftheAzure: I can see what you're saying and definitely agree with you in terms of say lack of funding for content design and such like. Don't think it's quite the case for a lack of DRK buffs though!

I think something to consider personally is that a fair few of the more significant job changes (looking at you SMN and DRG) we've had including and since 4.0 have been aimed at reducing the gap between the skill floor and ceiling of players in that Job. That seems to be the immediate concern for patching for the most part. As I understand it (do correct me if I'm wrong of course) DRK in it's current iteration (as opposed to the 3.x version) is considered a pretty simple job to get to grips with. Offence is pretty straightforward mostly, mitigation is pretty straightforward for what it is. So that might also be part of the reason the job isn't being looked at (to our knowledge)?

Could very well be. It's overall a simple job, but there's plenty of fat that can be trimmed away, and other parts that just need some tenderizing. MP costs, blood gauge and it's associated uses, potencies, comparisons to the alternatives w/ regards to damage and mitigation, the over reliance on dark arts, tanking with / without grit on, etc etc.

Too simple for a job you get to unlock as soon as you gain access to Foundation in Ishgard in this expansion which starts as a level 30 job... YOU NEVER MAKE A CLASS/JOB THAT DOES NOT START AT LEVEL 30 SIMPLE TO LEARN!!! It assumes you already have knowledge of tanking with the other 2 tank jobs! Might as well make Ishgard a starting city for the HW jobs and make Ul'dah basically the new Mor Dhona! Or we could have everyone just start in Mor Dhorna and go from there!!!(Sarcasm for those last 2 sentences but serious with the first 3 sentences...)

[WhyAmIHere]

It assumes you already have knowledge of tanking with the other 2 tank jobs!

aaaaand ima stop you here.
I started playing as a DRG, and DRK was my first tank. I am willing to bet i'm not the only one that picked up tanking only because the appeal of DRK was enough to make me/them want to learn how to tank.

[DRKoftheAzure]

aaaaand ima stop you here.
I started playing as a DRG, and DRK was my first tank. I am willing to bet i'm not the only one that picked up tanking only because the appeal of DRK was enough to make me/them want to learn how to tank.

Did you get all cross-class stuff from both MRD and GLA classes or was this after Stormblood launched?