Question for fellow DRK's who have played its new Shb iteration.

[Arsthan]

snip

While DRK definitely is no where near as interesting, don't get discouraged to at least try/play it. My post was mainly meant for Nedkel. That being said, it's true that both PLD and WAR are in a very good place. And GNB is definitely the most fun tank along with PLD in my opinion. If you want to get into tanking, definitely try all tanks - you never know, you might like another job a lot more. As for SE needing to work fast to fix DRK... I sure hope they do something, not just potency adjustments. However I'm not expecting anything from them after what happened in SB.

This whole situation slightly reminds me of WHM's liles before SB released. They told us to wait and see and the people complaining before the release were pretty spot on on their criticism. Same thing happening here (except SE didn't respond this time, to my knowledge), while I don't really like saying anything about a company I don't work in, this just tells me they learned nothing from the last time. People are able to predict how things turn out accurately with the informations floating around before the release. After all, it's not rocket science.

Either way, I hope you enjoy DRK or any other tank.

[Dalmacus]

Alright i managed to reach lvl 75 drk as of this moment and this are some of concerns that is troubling me.
Tanking
I feel like the tanking mechanic of tanks seems to be dumbed way down too much. You literally just press all your action/dps button and the aggro is not of a concern anymore. I thought tanks was suppose to be aggro generate priority first then DPS. Now, it's just full on ahead DPS and don't have to even worry about the aggro gauge at all. I mean if this is the state that tanks will become then i think the holy trinity of roles should be removed so all jobs are viable and fun for everyone. Don't have to suffer from anxiety or whatnot.

Dark knight flow/playstyle
I don't get the new job playstyle at all. It doesn't flow right to me IMO, is the playstyle to spam as much MP as you have and after you exhausted everything go back to souleater combo? The delirium skill is so weird and empty..? i can't explain this it feels like playing a knock off warrior without the satisfaction of crit and direct hit crit.

[LegolasT]

73 drk at the moment and I like it. In terms of rotation all the tanks have dumbed down to be honest they are all very easy with WAR you waiting for inner realese with some infuriate here and there and PLD just applying a dot and switch to your other combo, GNB on the other hand has many moves. Which can.be confusing at first but cool the only thing for me is its the weakest dps tank imo out of the four so we will see how that goes come engame raiding content. But don't trust my opinion try it out and see for yourself which play style matches you

[KatsuraJun]

The new "style" is not to dump all your mp like it was before where you had to keep it low enough that you don't cap but saving a bit whenever you knew a shield or CnS was coming up. MP generation is so slow now you have no danger of capping it or even needing to think about it like you did in SB.

The new style is effectively to always hold 3000mp in case you need to TBN because you can no longer generate enough mp to TBN quickly due to the mp generation reduction and use edge or flood whenever you hit 6000mp or are running low on darkside. That's literally all there is to it. They tried to reduce the speed of the class because people memed about dark arts spam and that's more or less what they did, lowered the amount of buttons you can press by putting a stranglehold on our mp gain and increased the potency of our mana dumps (DA used to be about 140, now its like three times that almost on edge).

It's pretty awful.

[TheForce]

The new "style" is not to dump all your mp like it was before where you had to keep it low enough that you don't cap but saving a bit whenever you knew a shield or CnS was coming up. MP generation is so slow now you have no danger of capping it or even needing to think about it like you did in SB.

The new style is effectively to always hold 3000mp in case you need to TBN because you can no longer generate enough mp to TBN quickly due to the mp generation reduction and use edge or flood whenever you hit 6000mp or are running low on darkside. That's literally all there is to it. They tried to reduce the speed of the class because people memed about dark arts spam and that's more or less what they did, lowered the amount of buttons you can press by putting a stranglehold on our mp gain and increased the potency of our mana dumps (DA used to be about 140, now its like three times that almost on edge).

It's pretty awful.

Yep, you summed it up pretty well. DRK is ruined.

[KatsuraJun]

Yep, you summed it up pretty well. DRK is ruined.

To go into greater detail about it, since SB was actually my favorite iteration of DRK, there were three primary abillities you had to worry about in terms of resource management:
1. Blood Weapon would would generate a large amount of of MP and Blood whenever it was up
2. TBN would generate half your blood bar whenever you used it
3. Delirium would cost half your blood bar but generate more mp than your actual max mp bar in conjunction with Blood Weapon.

There was this frenetic resource management back and forth going on because both resources depended on each other, as well as a third resource most people don't consciously think about even if they're aware of it - their oGCD windows, meaning if you planned things poorly there wasn't a fast way to dump it no matter how fast you tried to mash that dark arts. Furthermore, TBN and Delirium put you in a spot where you generally didn't want to hold 50 or more blood ever (because you'd cap from TBN) *except* when you knew Delirium was coming up soon (because then you'd need 50 blood)

Now they systematically killed all three of these abilities in terms of depth (not power):
1. Blood Weapon loses the speed aspect and no longer generates on autoattacks, doubly reducing both blood and mp gain significantly.
2. TBN no longer gives 50 blood and instead gives a free cast of edge/flood. Balance wise, this is not a significant change in the context of all the job changes. But in terms of feel and playstyle, this removes the resource management aspect completely because you can't overcap with it anymore.
3. Delirium's mp gain aspect was completely gutted, I thought at first the mp gain on bloodspiller casts would be significant enough to warrant emptying your mp bar before it, effectively leaving it similar in usage to old delirium, but instead it restores like 200mp per cast. Not even worth thinking about it in terms of worrying about whether you'll cap or not.

So with that, where we stand now is that blood no longer needs to be managed because you're never at risk of overcapping from TBN. You don't need to worry about mana because delirium, blood weapon, and syphon all don't generate significant mp anymore. And needing to plan your oGCD windows ahead of time is no longer necessary, since you won't need to ever dump resources quickly anymore because you're never at any risk of overcapping.

All of this is no accident for sure, they heard people's complaints about DRK being "too spammy" so they decided to up the potency on the "new" Dark Arts and made it something you basically only need to do every 30 seconds.

[Nedkel]

SB DRK had his problems, but we still liked DRK in a way. That is just not the case anymore. It is also pretty likely that when raiding comes out, DRKs are going to be the least played job/tank. This will most likely cause SE to do something about it. Or they'll say that their DPS is fine and just ignore DRK for another expansion, who knows.

I am not going to argue with you going into the very small details of the drk skillset.
Drk is not going to be least played job, it was least played job due to its underperforming horribly in 4.0. Drk was competely reworked in 5.0 for a reason. If it will be able to pull out a decent dps it will be played and none of your complains will be remembered anymore. It does a ton of dps way more than it used to, if it will keep it for later patches i will guarantee you that it will be even more popular than war. Give it a month or two.
Perfomance of the job matters the most. If you wont find it fun there will be others who will find fun in doing big numbers. If you want a job with nice rotations and deep skillset you should look into dps, tanks are by definition more boring to play. Eot

[currentlemon]

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Thank you. I'll still give the job a try; however, SE needs to do something about DRK soon. We can't have the poster boy of this expansion be this weak.

[shao32]

i just literally powerleveling GNB now bcs after the first dungeon i can't stand with that mess, i will level up DRK after i complete the story, i wanna complete the story with the job like that.

[Renato]

Ok...DRK has been getting some unfair criticism from a lot of people. Many of these people who hopped on early access day, tried it at 70 and came to the conclusion that it sucks. I'm waiting for someone to give a critique at 80.

I've been playing all day basically for the last two days just making it too lv74 due to kind of taking my time and this is what I've come up with:

So yes, at lv70, DRK does feel kind of odd to play with all the changes. MP regen isn't difficult but isn't as quick as it used to be. You get a 200MP tick in between attacks with blood weapon, Quietus and siphon strike restoring 600mp per strike. With the use of Delerium, you get non-stop usage of Quietus or Bloodspiller for 10 seconds I believe. I can fit in 5 of each attack with 1300+ SkS. The new attacks, Flood and Edge of Darkness/Shadows are both oGCDs that cost 3000 along with TDN which grants a free EoD/FoS. At this point, it's very cut and dry and feels basic as hell. I almost ended up switching to PLD but DRK is and will always be my main.

At 72, things get interesting with Stalwart Soul which is an AoE combo attack from Unleash that also restores 600mp with a short cooldown. You can use this indefinitely due to the MP usage being removed from Unleash and it can be combo'd with blood weapon and Quietus for quick MP regen. Sure not as fast as before but it's useful.

From that point on (74 and up are a few more attacks and the Shadow Skill at 80) I have no problem with DRK. I do wish that Blood Weapon granted haste like it used to due to the job just feeling kind of slow...but again, I'm only at lv74. Fully geared at 80 could be a totally different story. I like the new changes...and no I'm not a newcomer, I've been playing since 3.0. On top of that HW was my least favorite version of DRK. I wish some skills remained but I'm ok with the direction they went personally. My advice is to try it yourself and see.