Perma shelved my DRK: No role, no idenity, no lore, no worthwhile skills, no fun

[Absimiliard]

Making all of them close to breaindead is, IMO, a bad move because your hardcore players don't have a class that fit their need anymore.
It's the same move as replacing Savage by a few more expert dungeons.

Agreed. And luckily for us, the only tanks that are really brain dead right now are DRK and WAR. They should all be readily accessible, but DRK right now is uh... special.

[Shurrikhan]

Agreed. And luckily for us, the only tanks that are really brain dead right now are DRK and WAR. They should all be readily accessible, but DRK right now is uh... special.

Oddly enough I'm finding DRK a lot more annoying to play than GNB and PLD (which I leveled on my Tank alt; just made DRK rq for Ex roulettes on Healer alt) if only because I keep... falling asleep when playing it. That and the MP bar being effectively a gauge bar but unintuitively bound to the parameter bar that only 5 jobs really even need to track, instead of being freely moveable to beside my Blood gauge...

Until recent latency from ISP conflicts with the SE servers since 5.05, GNB was smooth as butter to play and it's always been incredibly easy to keep track of everything. DRK just feels so lazy by comparison that it can get kinda easy to slip up at times.

[Absimiliard]

DRK just feels so lazy by comparison that it can get kinda easy to slip up at times.

That is a problem that I have been experiencing as well. It's so easy even in spite of its clunk that you'll make mistakes as your attention begins to wander. S'why I've mostly been sticking to PLD and GNB lately. The two are technically mechanically stronger (PLD for its defense and utility, GNB for its raw damage and utility) in some ways, but that takes a backseat to the fact that they are actually still enjoyable to play.

[Dragonkat]

So after playing more with gunbreaker to 68 and having just gotten heart of stone.... I'm finding myself still way too salty about this. A thought I had I'd like opinions on.

maybe an unfair comparison, but in terms of mini cooldowns i'll take a solid 15% cut to damage for a full seven seconds that can also double as a shield over the contradiction for paltry dps buffs. Minus the 1/3 of my total resource cost on top as the extra insult to me.

Hmmm I wonder if thats another difference that needs looking into, the fact GNB can pretty much bring it's full kit to bear whenever it wants without being hamstrung by insane mp costs that take far too long the recoup now for the gain you get? I mean the biggest attacks you have that would benifit from the increase either can't be used (flood) because of the cost. Or are limited to specific burst windows with warrior light cooldowns ahem, I mean Delirium. And your choice is get back MP with Q or or just take the free five hits for the joke of an mp gain with BS.

Could that be one other issue? The fact DRK's kit has been so cut there's nothing to really use while darkside is up? And it still feels to me like GNB puts out bigger numbers with more utility. I mean no mercy is double darkside's increase for a full 20 seconds. no cost. And is up 1/3 of the time anyway. But a darkside spender would need a solid 20-30 seconds of 123 combos and mp regen to get back the 3000 mp used. . . .

Of course this is also where unlike no mercy dark arts can be stored, but that takes again getting TBN to break, so we're back to the contradiction of choosing between either shield or overpowering damage without the sustain or the dps for it the way GNB can with it's 12-boom aoe + burst strike. Or the gnashing fang combo chain. and again you're either using it for dps, or you're using it to keep darkside up when needed... Provided you can egt TBN to even break in the window, which is an issue if you're overgeared to the point where even tank busters have issues.

Ugh maybe i'm just salty but it still feels like new DRK works too hard against itself to be effective.

[Shurrikhan]

Ugh maybe i'm just salty but it still feels like new DRK works too hard against itself to be effective.

In many ways, DRK fought itself hardest back in HW, and I kind of loved it for that. But yes, TBN does seem unfortunately... unintuitive, to be euphemistic, just as Living Dead will likely forever remain...
...Is it weird, though, that the non-mechanicness of Darkside kind of pisses me off even more than either of those equally glaring flaws?

And, let's be fair: You'd have to take what would have been 112% of your HP for HoS's mitigation to equal TBN's, despite TBN being available every 15 seconds, often able to intercept skills between the skills all other tanks can mitigate, while everyone else's is roughly 25 seconds. It's both far better, and more frequent... as long as you take enough damage.

[Nedkel]

Nothing wrong with current DRK.

Put the salt away, DRK was not supposed to be old DRK by any means, it was made for a sole purpose of doing tanking properly, thats why it had it complexity taken away.
Only lacking a little in party utility, but so is GNB.
Single target damage is fine, AOE damage is fine, mitigation is excellent since because of 1 ability that is really strong. MP generation is good enough to not be bothered by the overflow of MP.
Since there is little to no chance that SE will ever change their tanks to be more complex, the only thing i would like to ask for is the amount of MP generated by delirium skills, seriously it should generate 600 mp instead of 200, it feels like a waste of time to activate it and use it, does not feel good at all.

[Duskane]

There is a lot wrong with Dark but its not detrimental to the class Right now

Party utility is the least of GNB and DRK worries

[shao32]

snip

Being complex or not have nothing to do with tanking properly, idk what are you talking about but old DRK never have any problem fulfilling his dutys as a tank.

This kills the reasons we get new jobs in the first place, you don't add a new jobs while making the rest similar, you adds new jobs to bring diversity on gameplay aesthetics and difficulty, destroying DRK gameplay and complexity it's against any logic, for that don't add DRK in the game in the first place if you are going to do that, don't add new jobs at all if you are going to rip everything and make all of them play literally the same, just add skins like fornite or whatever game that abuse of this and move on.

[Nedkel]

Being complex or not have nothing to do with tanking properly, idk what are you talking about but old DRK never have any problem fulfilling his dutys as a tank.

This kills the reasons we get new jobs in the first place, you don't add a new jobs while making the rest similar, you adds new jobs to bring diversity on gameplay aesthetics and difficulty, destroying DRK gameplay and complexity it's against any logic, for that don't add DRK in the game in the first place if you are going to do that, don't add new jobs at all if you are going to rip everything and make all of them play literally the same, just add skins like fornite or whatever game that abuse of this and move on.

Complexity comes with balance problems if not done right, it is difficult thing to have all 4 tanks being completely different but performing similar to each other.

They cannot afford anymore risk of experimenting on the design, they gave us 4 tanks with the same core and flavoured it with some different extra abilities we use in between out combos and deffensives.

At least it is balanced as it was never been before, for a company of SE size its good enough since it does not require as much resources to put into, they could do a little tweaks here and there, does not have to bother that X is doing significantly less than Y.
If you want more ambitious games, then its time to change the mmorpg, this is the sad truth, big companies are not going to risk anything.

[shao32]

Complexity comes with balance problems if not done right, it is difficult thing to have all 4 tanks being completely different but performing similar to each other.

They cannot afford anymore risk of experimenting on the design, they gave us 4 tanks with the same core and flavoured it with some different extra abilities we use in between out combos and deffensives.

At least it is balanced as it was never been before, for a company of SE size its good enough since it does not require as much resources to put into, they could do a little tweaks here and there, does not have to bother that X is doing significantly less than Y.
If you want more ambitious games, then its time to change the mmorpg, this is the sad truth, big companies are not going to risk anything.

Surprisely they archive a good balance in terms of numbers in SB despite how different DRK works to the other tanks, or how balanced we are now despite GNB PLD and WAR having different and unique flows.

You don't really have an argument there specially since there is no experimenting, DRK flows already exist since 3.0, if they can't afford basic improvements to a already existing kit as they should they can't adds new jobs at all in the first place, GNB, DNC, SAM and RDM wouldn't see the light of the day and still here they are, and GNB is nothing like WAR or PLD at all so what is the excuse now?

You know I don't see they do the same with the DPS jobs the overpopulated role in the game, are you telling me they can afford diversity with 10 jobs and keep all of them relevant and fun, see the MCH and MNK rework keeping them unique and different to his counter parts but they can't do that with DRK? Betwen 4 jobs? Despite 3 of them being pretty different of each other excep one that has been gutted BCS reasons?

There is a difference of having basic or decent complexity and have cero complexity so a 3 years old kid could play it, and reducing complexity or adds quality of live stuff doesn't mean kill the flow of the job and copy paste one of the current ones as they did bcs they didn't care about the feedback.

Don't lie yourself, they didn't destroy DRK bcs they can't balance his kit since has been balanced in the past ad current DRK is still in the same place of SB.