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

[Reynhart]

The problem with Dark Arts, as I've said previously, is that it's one of the longer oGCDs due to the animation.

Animation could have been reduced if it was an issue. They did it for other skills, including mudras.

Edge and Flood feel much snappier.

I'm still only 73 so I don't have the enhanced version, but I feel those skills lack impact in their animation. It doesn't really feel that you're unleashing your Darkside, but more than you're puffing a purple smoke.

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.

It could have been Dark Arts where each WS is enhanced but cost a part of your MP. Or, Blood skills could have been tweaked so that unlimited Blood would not result is simply spamming the same skill. For example, a three step 50-Blood Combo.

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.

Yes, Darkside is akin to Eye/Goring, but those two are granted by a full combo. And one complain what saturaiton of SoulEater combo over and over. As I've posted elsewhere, you could have another combo where the finisher would grant/extend Dark Side and keep the Dark Arts skills that would cost some second of Dark Side. It's a mechanic close to DRG in HW, but frankly, I'd be more okay if they copy a DPS gameplay into a tank instead of a tank gameplay into another tank.

[Kreyd]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

[Valic]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

TBN, LD will never change, and that's okay, it's unique. Could make it so you only need to be healed for half your hp maybe but anyways.... Technically GNB's 80 is just an upgraded version of the same ability they get at level 18 that perfectly weaves between GCD's. DRK's.... just doesn't make sense. Quietus doesn't make sense to use for aoe'ing either and feels awkward to pop at points. MAJOR agree on your stance with TBN, I feel that way too. you should NEVER feel afraid to save your teammate because you think you'll be giving up your buff or dps. It jut feels like a game of chance sometimes.

[jetfire117]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

Quietus really needs mp regain on every enemy hit instead of one, if they thought it was OP then just make it "reduced MP gained on 3rd,4th, enemy" etc. It's just so bad right now to use because it literally doesn't do anything for you, besides damage of course.

[TheForce]

I appreciate the in depth response. I can tell that you put a lot of effort into, first, making sure that you know what you're talking about, and second, conveying all of your views clearly and coherently. However, I do strongly disagree with your opinion that DRK is an overall good class.

Firstly, I have no doubts that DRK performs sufficiently. I mean, I really hope the devs wouldn't release an update without making sure each and every class was able to clear content as well as all of their counterparts. As I read through your response, I felt like this was the main point you were trying to make, and if it is, then yes I agree with you on it. 5.0 DRK is definitely able to clear content without much hassle (performance-wise). Also, I do agree about DRK's defensive capabilities, they still have pretty good (non-healing) mitigation tools, resulting in their defense being pretty solid.

However, the main issue with this class imo is that the small, albeit existing, amount of depth and choice it had was just butchered. As well as its overall combat and mp regen speed. To me, this results in the class being very, VERY boring and unenjoyable to play. I'm stuck spamming one single target combo, spending my MP on one thing most of the time, popping Delirium to spam the same two moves, and having my "self heal" only usable once a minute.

Whereas in Stormblood (even though it definitely wasn't perfect) I had
c h o i c e.
If I popped Delirium, there were many different things to spend MP on, this engaged me in the gameplay. (The infamous but still innovative) Dark Arts let me pick and choose which skill I wanted to power up depending on the situation and what I just plain felt like doing at the time, TBN breaking would grant me meter which I could then use to activate resource gainers like Delirium or Quietus to net me tons of MP, which would once again, give me choices on how to spend it. And the best part about all of this? There were so many ways to rapidly restore MP that I would never feel like I had to spend more than a few moments desperately trying to get my MP back. The class was constantly interesting, it was always on the move.


And also, I'm sorry but the Level 80 skill is just a big waste of potential imo. It's nice that it does decent damage, but the fact that it has no secondary effect or special perk is so uninteresting. It is truly just a D.O.T. It could've helped you regain MP in some way, acted as another mitigation tool, gave you some sort of buff while it was present, but no...it's a flashy D.O.T that costs half your meter.

So, in short, I agree that DRK's overall performance is satisfactory. But, it's overall gameplay and playstyle is extremely uninspired and very poorly designed...resulting in a class that feels like a chore to play.

[TheForce]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

Sorry but one thing in particular in your lists really glared out to me. Why are you glad that Sole Survivor is gone? You didn't even get anything to replace it. Having it literally only helped you, it was even buffed to still be effective in boss fights.

[Kreyd]

Technically GNB's 80 is just an upgraded version of the same ability they get at level 18 that perfectly weaves between GCD's. DRK's.... just doesn't make sense. Quietus doesn't make sense to use for aoe'ing either and feels awkward to pop at points. <AJOR agree on your stance with TBN, I feel that way too. you should NEVER feel afraid to save your teammate because you think you'll be giving up your buff or dps. It jut feels like a game of chance sometimes.

Quietus really needs mp regain on every enemy hit instead of one, if they thought it was OP then just make it "reduced MP gained on 3rd,4th, enemy" etc. It's just so bad right now to use because it literally doesn't do anything for you, besides damage of course.

This.

Sorry but one thing in particular in your lists really glared out to me. Why are you glad that Sole Survivor is gone? You didn't even get anything to replace it. Having it literally only helped you, it was even buffed to still be effective in boss fights.

I dunno...It was a straight gain, but it just somehow tweaked me, that we could never use it to it's full potential in a boss fight and it was just a press on demand like bloodprice. I always thought it would've been cool as an "Places an debuff on an enemy. Everyone hitting that enemy gets HP/MP back." ability. But in the end I just didn't care for it anymore.

[Tranquilmelody7]

TBN, LD will never change, and that's okay, it's unique. Could make it so you only need to be healed for half your hp maybe but anyways....

Just tweak living dead so Full MP is required to remove the debuff.

That way we can manage the death debuff on our own, while healers will still have to keep us alive afterwards.

[Lyth]

...

There are plenty of directions that they could have theoretically taken the job.

Likewise, there are plenty of jobs out there already that are based around strict rotations. PLD is one of them. There's an upfront commitment that you make to learning the steps, but once you have them practised, very little changes.

DRK has always represented the other end of this extreme. It's a resource-driven job. There isn't really a "rotation". There's a set of rules and breakpoints that you use to make decisions on the fly. Locked rotations limit your ability to adapt to variations in resources. If you wanted a more elaborate combo system on DRK, it would have to be something more along the lines of what MNK has, where you can choose from a number of first, second, and third steps. But there's nothing to say that this wouldn't have panned out significantly differently than the present system as far as decision making logic is concerned.

Even in Heavensward, there really was just one dps combo. You never used Souleater without DA. I know that a couple of content creators have fixated on this point, but it demonstrates a near complete ignorance of what makes the job design work. Some people, unfortunately, are better off popularising game knowledge than they are at contributing to it.

I think this is always going to be an issue with jobs like DRK. People look at it from the outside, and say "this can't be that difficult." Actual player performance rarely reflects this, though. In Heavensward, everyone knew what the job was like from the outset because there was a lot of interest in levelling it. In Stormblood, it really wasn't until later in the expansion, when people started to try it out for themselves, that people started to actually recognise that it was still the most complex tank job by a long shot (not that it had much competition, let's be real).

If your goal is to maximise the number of combos you have, PLD is probably more your jam.

...

Dark Arts, as it was introduced in Heavensward, was an interesting idea. The original function, namely, to augment an attack, was an interesting one. There were still problems, namely, the instant you tie Dark Arts (and MP) to potency, you become limited by whether something is a dps loss or not. DADD and DADM were fun, but you dropped them when you were trying to optimise. Even in a fight like A12S, where using DA on DM could allow you to solo tank more of the fight, it was preferential to just swap and avoid the potency loss altogether.

That's also the reason why PLD has moved to a completely dps neutral gauge.

When Stormblood substituted Dark Arts for Darkside's MP drain, Dark Arts was already dead. There was no 'nuanced' enhancement effect, it was a straight up 2400 MP = 140 potency. Delirium was just plain awful. You didn't even see a net benefit until you had at least 15 seconds of continuous Blood Weapon uptime. Anything less and it was just a reverse TBN on a 120 second (and later 80 second) recast. You were treading water. They could just have easily removed the cost, letting you use that blood towards an extra Bloodspiller in place of an extra DA, and just extend the duration of BW by 8 seconds to produce the same effect.

I'm not sure if this is a level-based issue, but I'm not seeing an issue of not having things to do. It feels like there's always either something else coming off cooldown, or some MP or blood threshold to be adjusted for. Those rare moments where there's a bit of downtime, you're either making decisions about mitigating something with TBN or having to deal with a raidwide. And with three major offensive cooldowns syncing and unsyncing at different times across a four minute period, there's definitely a lot of variations in how things play out.

Pure off-tanking might be a bit different, but if the expectation is that we take an active role in helping our co-tank mitigate, I think we're going to be pretty busy anyways. Generally speaking, if you ever find yourself just waiting around pressing the one combo, there are probably five different things that have come off cooldown without you noticing.

If you liked watching your MP slingshot around while you hammered the DA key between every GCD, you probably won't like this iteration of DRK. That being said, having played all three iterations of the job, this version seems a lot more faithful to the original than Stormblood ever was.

[Valic]

Just tweak living dead so Full MP is required to remove the debuff.

That way we can manage the death debuff on our own, while healers will still have to keep us alive afterwards.

Can you imagine being so low on MP and using this and actually having some way to get back to full MP right now? Our MP regain is pretty slow atm so, that'd basically count us out 95% of the time.