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

[WhyAmIHere]

To summerize trolls will be trolls. For those that like the job they will hate it's the same people.I love the new drk. I love the direction all the tanks are going if I were to rate them in my opinion I would do PLD(easy to play but mitigation is still godly) DRK, WAR tied for me( DPS) and last GNB which is fun for me nice addition.

>Agree with me that DRK is good or you're a troll

Wow. Very strong case you've made.

EDIT::
This is juicy.

Exactly what I been saying since media tour and after playing WAR. WAR 5.0 is extremely boring all do is wait for inner realese To then get the more powerful fell cleave that's it! I do plan to fully lvl WAR fully since I'm about done DRK.

>WAR and DRK are basically clones of each other
>you agree to the person you've quoted's statement
>you dislike WAR for the same reasons you like DRK

We really must have travelled to another world, because that makes no lick of sense.

[Eliroth-Kaminari]

I would say im quite neutral about what DRK is now.

If i forget what DRK was in ARR then Drk IN shadow is defently improvmenet what it was in Storm.

I wild keep last points of critisism off untill i can dest DPS and some surviviablity in raid.

allso yeh its alot like WAR clone atm what is only salty thing.

[Barachim]

I'm only level 74 right now. It definitely doesn't feel as engaging as it used to be. For the most part though, I do not hate the skill changes, except for Delirium. It's just boring. It's just spamming Bloodspiller or Quietus 5-7 times in a row. Just kills the fun immediately.

[Agner]

Another one said we use only one combo SMH if you tank period you would know NO ONE uses there enmity combo unless your a bad tank I'm sorry the game evolved from that and you can blame WAR 3.0 and 4.0 for that so get with the times....

People upset about that are more upset with the loss of good animations than they actually are with the purpose of an emnity combo itself; some would also wish for another combo to switch up what we do and to prevent things from getting visually stale. That much can be ascertained by reading various feedback threads. Personally, I'm tired as hell of the souleater animation by now having played this job since HW launch.

I am actually playing the job and they worked the timers on the ogcds on purpose the more I play the job the more I understand the rework more and more the Main purpose of edge on flood is to keep darkside spamming that will lead to a dps loss. Not to mention TBN which helps get free blood for else or flood so that's always in your opener for me it's within the first pull.Next managing blackblood which will accumulate alot with the soul eater combo which must not stay full since that will be a dps loss(that statement alone tells you DRK can't be a 123 tank) you are constantly rotating bloodspiller carve and spit and eldge or flood as you unspecified rotation but must be mastered to properly pull off great DPS.

How are you coming to understand the rework more? This is basically the same thing we did before, but simplified further (and it was already simple before), slowed down, and then beaten to death. This is a basic thing that could've been understood just by reading the tooltips.

You also have 2 burst windows your delirum which now everyone loves(people I play with that play the job)and blood weapon.

OK? I know people who are playing the job as well and they don't like the rework. Guess this leaves us at odds, then!

[TheForce]

I'm only level 74 right now. It definitely doesn't feel as engaging as it used to be. For the most part though, I do not hate the skill changes, except for Delirium. It's just boring. It's just spamming Bloodspiller or Quietus 5-7 times in a row. Just kills the fun immediately.

See man, and if we're getting bored liyerally days after the expansion dropped, how do they expect people to want to stick with the class for all the months or years until the next rework?

[WhyAmIHere]

See man, and if we're getting bored liyerally days after the expansion dropped, how do they expect people to want to stick with the class for all the months or years until the next rework?

please look forward to it

[TheForce]

>Agree with me that DRK is good or you're a troll

Wow. Very strong case you've made.

EDIT::
This is juicy.


>WAR and DRK are basically clones of each other
>you agree to the person you've quoted's statement
>you dislike WAR for the same reasons you like DRK

We really must have travelled to another world, because that makes no lick of sense.

What is logic.

@WhyAmIHere, thanks for taking the time to show just how silly that was and even provide proof lol. But be prepared to hear how you're still somehow wrong about everything and how DRK is top tier and the funnest Tank in the game.

[Mortex]

Drk has the weakest self dmg from all tanks atm and the same utilit as gnb. So now the normal time for trick if I saw that correct in balance discord will be after 15 sec so that’s we’re you want to use all cds and all mana as drk the same with gnb with no mercy every minute . Gnb feels like a nin were you wanna prep for ur Brust phase with catrigdes and then Brust every 60 seconds all you have with a ice break in the middle and blasting some on cd. But yes you have a lot of things you need to keep a eye out for and that’s the reason it’s fun.

[Lyth]

I've finished with the MSQ on DRK and have had the chance to recover with some sleep, so I thought that I'd pop in and share my views.

First, if you're reading this and you haven't finished the MSQ, close the browser and finish the game. It's probably the best storyline that we've had out of any FFXIV expansion to date, and could give at least a couple of the other main FF titles a run for their money.

With regards to DRK: it's surprisingly good.

I do miss the speed buff from Blood Weapon. But let's put that aside for a moment. One of the most important parts of DRK's gameplay is the flow. In Heavensward, at least part of the appeal came from how smoothly each GCD rolled into an oGCD, and vice versa. This at least partially comes down to animation locks. The problem with Dark Arts, as I've said previously, is that it's one of the longer oGCDs due to the animation. Edge and Flood feel much snappier. And as far as potencies are concerned, these might as well be GCDs between your GCDs.

The design of DRK's resource generation has to be built around some sort of balance. Heavensward had a fairly tight balance between Darkside and Syphon. Outside of Blood Weapon, you had a Dark Arts every three combos/20-22 seconds (hence the 2:1 Delirium to DASE ratio).

Stormblood removed Darkside and hoped that Dark Arts would take care of the rest. I think if MP generation stayed the same, you'd have the same gameplay as before, except with a snappier animation. This actually seems surprisingly similar to the rate that we had in Heavensward after factoring in the Darkside MP drain.

One fairly commonly raised point about Delirium in Stormblood was that it didn't really have a whole lot of impact, as far as potency vs. cost was concerned. Was there a more creative way of doing things? Probably. There are only so many ways of doing damage buffs, though. If not Inner Release, it could have been Fight or Flight. Or Wildfire.

If DRK turns out to need a potency boost somewhere, I think the best way of doing it would be to give Bloodspiller/Quietus a small amount of baseline MP generation, and then have Delirium enhance that. I think that they're playing it safe at the moment, though, in order to avoid having any large Stormblood era MP dumps.

Making Blood Weapon proc off of spells is a welcome change. It always seemed strange that we were penalised for having a mix of weaponskills and spells. I wish that they would just merge Skill Speed and Spell Speed, though. I think we're the only tank with different recasts on single target and AoE.

As people correctly surmised, Darkside is our Eye/Goring equivalent. The meter was a smart move, though. Because Darkside is tied to our burst resource, you're going to want to hold on to it. But TA doesn't necessarily happen on the minute in mechanics-heavy fights. Hoarding for too long can be costly, and I suspect that we're going to see more uptime errors here than you think, at lower to mid levels of play. Either way, it's an improvement over Stormblood, where it was just a buff that you clicked off during phase changes for extra MP, for otherwise perfect uptime.

Defensively, DRK is pretty rock solid. The permanent self-heal on Souleater is a welcome addition. Abyssal Drain is a nice way to refill yourself in mass pulls, but I kind of wish that the effect was standardised for single target the same way that Bloodspiller was. TBN feels amazing. I like how there are little damage spikes even in AoE pulls (with some mobs having mini-tankbuster cast bars). The healer feedback that I'm getting is that PLDs and well-played DRKs make for very smooth healing.

TBN also feels vaguely reminiscent of post-2.1 ARR WAR and Inner Beast. Do you go all in now for more burst, or do you hold off for an upcoming tankbuster? This is the sort of mitigation decision making that I can get behind.

My only issue with this is that TBN does depend very much on content tuning, because it's built to break even when the shield breaks. If you're overgeared, that's potentially going to be an issue. Granted, if an attack is hitting you for less than 25% of your health, it probably didn't need to be mitigated with TBN in the first place.

Partial reimbursement might be a solution. I'm not sure.

I do wish that they would copy over the shield gauge from the party bars and make it visible on your character's main HP bar as well. If you could see how much shielding you had left (and how much was due to TBN), it would be pretty handy.

Speaking of UI elements, I wish that they would just make an indicator for your personal and party HP bar which showed exactly how much healing you had left on Living Dead. Just as a funny aside, the NPC trust system doesn't really know how to handle the ability. They just give you enough healing to bring you up a bit and then relaxes as your timer ticks down to your doom.

I had my worries about Living Shadow going into this, but it also turns out to be pretty good in practice. It's quite easy to weave, and there's no real animation lock on the player side. It pops up wherever you were standing when you summoned it, so you can use that 6 second delay to anticipate where you want it to be when it starts attacking.

It may be functionally a dot, but the AoE attacks are, in fact, AoE attacks which hit all targets in range. It's also a dot that can switch targets to another when the original dies. You do need to be careful if the boss is in the middle of a movement heavy phase, though , as you get the most out of it when it keeps its movement to a minimum.

Thankfully, it doesn't feel like a pet at all. I think that they just need to play around with the AI some, especially with regards to re-orientating to target movement.

All in all, I think that this is a much better starting point than Stormblood. It always feels like there's something different happening, without relying on a whack-a-mole mechanic to do so. It's streamlined, but in a surprisingly nuanced way. There are some small tweaks here and there that I'd like to see, but nothing on the scale of last expansion.

We'll have to see how tank dps pans out as people get gear, do more math, and optimise in real content. Hopefully, the damage difference between tanks turns out to be small relative to the gap between tanks and dps. If this is truly the case, I have the ever so slightest suspicion that DRK is going to be a tank that you're going to want to have levelled and practised when the first tier hits.

I'm looking forward to taking GNB for a spin as well.

[therpgfanatic]

I agree with you Lyth.

I also agree that some people are exaggerating the changes without having really played DRK post-ShB enough to provide an opinion.