With all this DRK feedback, can we get Scourge back please?

[SummerScorcher]

Yep, Bloodspiller is one of the coolest looking attacks in the whole game, you spiral through the air like something out of Metal Gear Rising and dunk the unfortunate target, on top of the black beam blasting into the air.

It's one of the most satisfying attacks in an MMO I've played, apart from needing to be stronger IMO.

Agreed, and, and, the impact sound NEEDS to be at the point of the animation where your sword would hit the enemy. Currently you can hear the slash sound as you fly through the air which makes no sense.

[Aana]

Thunder
Bio I/II/III
Miasma
Miasma II
Windbite/Stormbite
Venomous Bite/Caustic Bite
Aero III
Aero I/II
Higanbana
Circle of Scorn

No it won't kill the game, don't be dense.

Combo oriented classes that had 1 bitton, apply 30 sec dot got killed.

Which actually leaves.

Higanbana
Circle of Scorn

Higibana is not quite a 1 GCD dot in line with phleb/frac/scourge, but I think that would be pretty obvious. Scorn isn't even a gcd, has additional effects (enmity/aoe), and is the shortest duration dot in the game and incapable of having 100% uptime. So please,

don't be dense.

Dots that got the boot were non-combo dots on combo classes (why pld/nin kept their combo dots) and had no additional effect or nuance of any kind to make space for new jobs debuffs and lighten the load in 24/open world content. Just like they combined all 3 slashing debuffs to a single debuff. Removed healer dots. Removed any non-combo dots whos only purpose was damage on classes that centered around combos.

The deleted boring 1 off skills on combo classes to make space for all the new shiz (little things like new jobs). One of the #1 things when getting rid of bloat to make space for new skills on existing jobs and entirely new jobs is to delete the low hanging fruit skills that don't offer anything. fire and forget dots are the paragon of that fruit. They offer nothing except passive background damage.

[Chrono_Rising]

Circle of scorn could have had its effect front loaded, the bonus enmity doesn’t care if it is applied as a dot or in one hit. And, while not 100%, has a higher up time, in the realm of 60%. Whether or not this damage was upfront or applied as a dot is not a necessary to the function of the skill, and if it made room for a move that would help patch up a job it should be a consideration.

The point remains that bloodspiller doesn’t make up for the potency lost from scourge, not even getting into all the oGCD skills we lost. Considering that it would also help to break up the SE SE SE SE spamming that is the Dark Knight dps rotation, giving us a dot to maintain is still not the worst idea to bring back that missing potency.

How you personally feel about applying dots is not a reason to deny an entire class from it. I don’t enjoy spamming Fell cleave but I don’t argue with warriors who want it more, I just don’t play the class and let its player base work it out.

[Aana]

Ignoring new skills like BS, new delirium etc, Drkgot straight up damage boosts in other areas at 4.0. The increased darkside damage. The increased potency from combining SE with delirium. The increased damage from not draining MP.

You act as though scourge was deleted and nothing was gained. They deleted scourge, buffed a number of other fundamental pieces of Drk damage, then added new skills.

Scourge arguments since 4.0 have consistently been a combination of:
* "The animation is cool we wants it back". Good for you. That's nothing to do with balance, but just aesthetic preference. Not related to 'fixing' a broken class. Maybe it will come back some day. /shrug.

and mistakenly conflating low damage with loss of scourge
* "Sourge got taken and we got nothing back now our damage sucks" (see above). Drk got large boosts to their basic kit at the same time scourge was removed. 5% darkside. Delirium Potency on SE (which is now your primary combo). No MP drain (mp is still damage right?). Those things alone MORE than counter the DPS boosts Drk lost. Scourge+low blow are completely negated by 5% darkside alone. Buffing the 95% use combo, deleting MP drain over time.

If Drk damage is still low, its not scourges fault. Its lackluster new skills. Bloodspiller, (new) delirium, etc. Drk was WELL compensated for the DPS tools it lost in buffs to its fundamental skills and actions. Scourge didn't put drk in the dumpster. Mediocre dilerium and BS mechanic did, though BS does do an excellent job of raising Grit damage, but no one cares about that. Pld and War did NOT receive broad damage buffs to their core <60 kit. Only drk did. War didn't get 5% damage because we lost frac, because frac was weak and did not need to be 'replaced'. Drk got a litany of pre 60 core buffs to account for scourge and its passive damage. TLDR: Scourge WAS replaced and then some. If you still had scourge you wouldn't have drkside buff. SE didn't just 'forget' about it. You aren't pointing out some oversight on their part.

And the dot thing. No single dot will break the game, but each one is a step in that direction. They deleted dots with no mechanics of any kind attached to them. Aero. Frac. Phleb. Scourge. Just push button do damage dots that don't interact with the job's kit in any way got the axe. Bringing it back to just have a 5% passive damage boost you might as well just buff darkside again if that's all you want. But No one wants to buff darkside, yet 30 sec dots are just that. Flat potency boosts over time. No kit interaction. Just 1 more dot to deal with on the back end. If you want damage flat dots are just the most uninspired, and technically straining way to do it. Its the worst possible way to add damage to a class.

[Crater]

Dots that got the boot were non-combo dots on combo classes (why pld/nin kept their combo dots) and had no additional effect or nuance of any kind to make space for new jobs debuffs and lighten the load in 24/open world content. Just like they combined all 3 slashing debuffs to a single debuff. Removed healer dots. Removed any non-combo dots whos only purpose was damage on classes that centered around combos.

Oh yes, how obvious your point was. When you said "they removed non-combo DoTs", what you meant to say was that they removed DoTs that:

- Belonged to classes that used combos
- But Machinist is exempt from that rule unless you're going to start trying to quibble and say that their combo isn't a "real" combo
- (And if you do that then you've got to backpedal again and explain why Touch of Death was removed even though Monk doesn't have "real" combos either)
- Were on the GCD
- Had no additional resource cost or trigger
- And also now there's some CYA bit in there about how additional effects can also potentially exempt a DoT from these rules


Do I really need to point out how stupidly arbitrary this laundry list of criteria is? How bleedingly obvious it is that it has absolutely nothing to do with design or balance, nothing to do with being a consistent or intuitive rule, and nothing to do with some imagined pearl-clutching sense of deep concern for poor DoT classes in 24+ person content? Can you give me one good reason why there would be a problem why adding "- Weren't on Dark Knight" would be any less valid of a removal criteria than the others that you've outlined?

The deleted boring 1 off skills on combo classes to make space for all the new shiz (little things like new jobs). One of the #1 things when getting rid of bloat to make space for new skills on existing jobs and entirely new jobs is to delete the low hanging fruit skills that don't offer anything. fire and forget dots are the paragon of that fruit. They offer nothing except passive background damage.

Absolutely wrong. They provide a rhythm to the class's gameplay, give you an intuitive onscreen way to keep track of encounter timing, provide an interesting middle-ground between single-target and AoE attacks in multi-target situations, and provide you with a source of damage that isn't affected by many instances of forced disengagement from the target.

Further than that, with the removal of many of these "non-combo, GCD-based DoT's on combo-based classes but only the ones that use standard combos and about half the classes that use pseudo-combos and have no additional resource cost*" skills, leaving one on DRK kind of automatically gets rid of the "ho-hum, how boring, so many classes have a skill that behaves vaguely similarly to this" aspect, and makes it a unique perk of the class - and "unique perks" are pretty much Dark Knight's #1 shortcoming in Stormblood.

*(This is, of course, ignoring the obvious possibility of simply giving Scourge a resource cost - at 20 Blood, otherwise unchanged from Heavensward, it would be just over 3x the Bloodotency return of Bloodspiller - which just so happens to be exactly how Upheaval compares to Fell Cleave)

The increased darkside damage.

The removal of Low Blow, Reprisal, and single-target Dark Passenger comprised an overall reduction in DRK's single-target damage of about 7%. Darkside increasing from a 1.15x multiplier to a 1.2x multiplier is only a ~4.35% damage increase. This is an overall damage reduction.

The increased potency from combining SE with delirium.

This is not increased potency. You did not - ever - use non-DA Souleater in Heavensward, so "buffing" it up to the level of the skill that you were using in its place 100% of the time anyway is not a buff.

The increased damage from not draining MP.

The MP you 'gain' from this is slightly less than the MP you gained from using Blood Price in Heavensward in a completely non-optimized way, meaning that this is a damage decrease to anybody who was using Blood Price properly.

Ignoring new skills like BS, new delirium etc

But why ignore them?

Scourge, in a single-target encounter, was a roughly 216 potency gain over a standard combo GCD, usable once every 30 seconds. Roughly 7.2 potency per second, averaged.

Bloodspiller is a roughly 134 potency gain over a standard combo GCD, usable roughly every 22 seconds (excluding Bloodspillers that come from TBN). That's an average of about 6 potency per second.

Bloodspiller is, despite being the replacement for Scourge, a damage decrease compared to Scourge.


That leaves Delirium. Which, as we know, is worth an absolutely pathetic 333 potency (Darkside/Slashing debuff normalized) every 120s, for a 62+ skill.


Besides that, there are exactly two other sources where Dark Knight actually got damage buffs from 3.x to 4.x.


The first is that Blood Weapon has gone from 30 MP potency per proc (ie: 265 MP at 60, 360 MP at 70) to 40 MP potency per proc (ie: 353 at 60, 480 at 70).

That amounts to (taking into account the lower number of oGCDs that can proc Blood Weapon, and excluding Delirium-BW time because that's already accounted for in the Delirium calculations) slightly less than 2 Dark Arts worth of MP over a 2-minute period.


The second is that the potency value of Dark Arts (and therefore MP) changed from 120 to 140 - however, note that this is also an effective 20 potency nerf to Carve and Spit (used to be worth 450-120 = 330 potency, is not 450-140 = 310 potency). So one DA per minute to use CnS, one more DA per minute to make up for the effective CnS loss, and then you're finally gaining 20 potency on every DA for the remainder of that minute.

That's gonna be somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-160 potency per minute (ie: one DA every 6-9 seconds, counting the initial two) - not nothing, but not exactly a gamechanger.


Ballpark estimate on the combined total of those three sources? Probably about the same as the ballpark estimate of the sum of the damage decreases from downgrading oGCDs->Darkside's 5%, Scourge->Bloodspiller, and HW Blood Price->SB Darkside MP.



So, no, DRK did not get buffs that "more than" countered what they lost.

[Chrono_Rising]

Ignoring new skills like BS, new delirium etc, Drkgot straight up damage boosts in other areas at 4.0. The increased darkside damage. The increased potency from combining SE with delirium. The increased damage from not draining MP.

You act as though scourge was deleted and nothing was gained. They deleted scourge, buffed a number of other fundamental pieces of Drk damage, then added new skills.

Scourge arguments since 4.0 have consistently been a combination of:
* "The animation is cool we wants it back". Good for you. That's nothing to do with balance, but just aesthetic preference. Not related to 'fixing' a broken class. Maybe it will come back some day. /shrug.

and mistakenly conflating low damage with loss of scourge
* "Sourge got taken and we got nothing back now our damage sucks" (see above). Drk got large boosts to their basic kit at the same time scourge was removed. 5% darkside. Delirium Potency on SE (which is now your primary combo). No MP drain (mp is still damage right?). Those things alone MORE than counter the DPS boosts Drk lost. Scourge+low blow are completely negated by 5% darkside alone. Buffing the 95% use combo, deleting MP drain over time.

If Drk damage is still low, its not scourges fault. Its lackluster new skills. Bloodspiller, (new) delirium, etc. Drk was WELL compensated for the DPS tools it lost in buffs to its fundamental skills and actions. Scourge didn't put drk in the dumpster. Mediocre dilerium and BS mechanic did, though BS does do an excellent job of raising Grit damage, but no one cares about that. Pld and War did NOT receive broad damage buffs to their core <60 kit. Only drk did. War didn't get 5% damage because we lost frac, because frac was weak and did not need to be 'replaced'. Drk got a litany of pre 60 core buffs to account for scourge and its passive damage. TLDR: Scourge WAS replaced and then some. If you still had scourge you wouldn't have drkside buff. SE didn't just 'forget' about it. You aren't pointing out some oversight on their part.

And the dot thing. No single dot will break the game, but each one is a step in that direction. They deleted dots with no mechanics of any kind attached to them. Aero. Frac. Phleb. Scourge. Just push button do damage dots that don't interact with the job's kit in any way got the axe. Bringing it back to just have a 5% passive damage boost you might as well just buff darkside again if that's all you want. But No one wants to buff darkside, yet 30 sec dots are just that. Flat potency boosts over time. No kit interaction. Just 1 more dot to deal with on the back end. If you want damage flat dots are just the most uninspired, and technically straining way to do it. Its the worst possible way to add damage to a class.

Yet you are ignoring that we lost single target dark passenger, low blow, low blow procs, and twice a minute reprisal, as well as scourge. We also took hits to our kit like blood price becoming unusable outside grit lowering our mana generation as well as lowering our tick. And at 70 yes, our damage is behind, so yes something is missing. People’s question is how to put it back. You don’t like dots, we got it.

Do we need to continue derailing this thread with debates about the exact number of dots the server can handle, theoretical slippery slope arguments that all classes will get their dots back, other classes rotations whose potency was gained back and then some, misinformation about our combo, and level 60 buffs without mention of half the nerfs? Or can we let other people enter the discussion about if they even want scourge back to even try and gain consensus on how we want our class to be put up to par with the others?

[Valdegarde]

Whoooooah, wait a second, did we just forget about the incredible Blood Price nerf? I'm not going to crunch every little bit of numbers to see if 5% darkside damage makes up for Blood Price being horribly, well...horrible, but I reaaally don't think it does.

I'm very much not on the DoT removal side of the fence because I encounter situations daily where I'd see them as incredibly useful, on demand ways of doing damage while you're not present. Some classes make a more meaningful use out of them, but that doesn't mean in their base form they're just buttons to push. That being said I do understand the counter argument, yet Dark Knight WAS NOT COMPENSATED. Pre or post 60, by any means. God, especially pre 60. Unleash as AoE! Ha! Can't just Scourge packs of 4 or less anymore. Bloodspiller and Delirium are already questionable boosts to damage as it is, there is no way in hell they and some magical 5% darkside make up for Scourge, Low Blow, Reprisal, Dark Passenger, and Blood Price.

5% darkside...jesus, I think that's many of our worst fears, is that's an acceptable way to compensate Dark Knight, and if we're complaining the answer is to just boost it by another 5% or so. Threads like this trying to outline why Scourge is important is a way of fighting THAT scenario. I'm not sure everyone is married to the idea of Scourge being back, but there's a reason we're not seeing "let's make Darkside have more % on it!" threads.

[Launched]

Whoooooah, wait a second, did we just forget about the incredible Blood Price nerf? I'm not going to crunch every little bit of numbers to see if 5% darkside damage makes up for Blood Price being horribly, well...horrible, but I reaaally don't think it does.

It was more of a rework to how you gain resources in Grit than a nerf. In single target you get double MP from Syphon Strike compared to no Grit to make up for less MP from Blood Price, and in aoe you gain Blood that goes towards Quietus.

[Valdegarde]

It was more of a rework to how you gain resources in Grit than a nerf. In single target you get double MP from Syphon Strike compared to no Grit to make up for less MP from Blood Price, and in aoe you gain Blood that goes towards Quietus.

What about single target, gritless situations? The ones where...Dark Knight is trying to actually focus on damage?

[Launched]

What about single target, gritless situations? The ones where...Dark Knight is trying to actually focus on damage?

Single target Blood Price didn't give a huge amount of MP. Now you're getting Blood from Souleater for Bloodspiller. Edit: and Blood from Blood Weapon too.