There's not much unique-ness when it comes to tank jobs, are there?

[EpicOverlord85]

At least Edge / Shadow do damage directly instead of just buffing potencies, which IMO has a much better gameplay feel (i.e. you can see the results without staring at numbers / a parser). Maybe I missed some hidden depth in 4.X DRK (as I said I didn't really like it) but to me 4.X Dark Arts didn't feel like a 'bonus', or a 'reward', or even a well-designed class mechanic, it just felt like a bunch of busy work, a button you had to press so your abilities would do their 'real' damage.

Which is not to say 5.X DRK is a shining example of class design, it definitely has its issues, and feels like it is missing a few things, but IMO it's s solid base on which a solid class can be built (hopefully before 6.0).

Dark Arts wasn’t just a potency buff though!

[jetfire117]

Dark Arts wasn’t just a potency buff though!

In heavensward yea it was more than that and interesting to use, but in stormblood it was reduced to a potency buff that had no further thought put into it. From what I can remember the only skills that kept their dark arts changes were abyssal drain/dark passenger, but they were only usable in dungeons anyway. Honestly I think the changes to dark arts+abyssal drain spam was just a pure nerf since we had strong self-sustain in dungeons (remember yall only healers are allowed to heal). Of course they tried it in stormblood by making blood price actually useless because of the nerfs to its mana income, but after they added mana regain to quietus we just turned off grit and flipped on blood weapon to gain absurd amounts of mana to spam dark arts+abyssal drain like in heavensward. That was probably my favorite part of stormblood drk, it was risky but rewarding as heck.

They could've easily made dark arts usage go back to HW levels to address the senseless spamming, but I guess they really just got tired of making changes around it so they just decided to throw it away all together. I still feel that ShB DRK is in a good spot to be built on again. And to me spamming Edge/flood is more impactful than spamming dark arts. I will miss the dark arts jokes, we never got skill where we dark arts dark arts for a stronger dark arts move.