Dark Knight moving forward: Job change ideas for 6.0

[DRKoftheAzure]

For a second combo they could give us Scourge back and stick it at the end of the combo ala Goring Blade.

I would rather them bring back Spinning Slash and Power Slash as a re-worked combo path than have to be an horrible amalgamation of current WAR and current PLD...

I personally feel that trying to add an additional combo-ender or trying to force in more GCD based rotational aspects into DRK is not really the way to go with evolving the job.
There is only so much more that can be done in those regards and most of the ways to implement them has already been covered by the other jobs, so it would just be pushing DRK more into the game-play territory of the other tanks resulting in both of them feeling less unique.

I think that DRK should differentiate itself more through its oGCD kit and providing greater variation and complexity there. By providing more oGCD based game-play it should make the simple GCD rotation of DRK fade into the background and refocus players' active engagement into the oGCDs and properly executing them.

This would of course then require two things to really be doubled down on for DRK.

First is that the frequency of oGCDs available for use would need to increase so that there will always be an oGCD coming up that the player has to plan for so that they remain actively engaged instead of oGCDs just being something that they press every ~20s-30s.

Second is that there needs to be more interaction between oGCDs so that there is some level of thought and strategy into how you use them instead of what we currently have which is basically "use them if they are available". A fairly good example of such interaction already exists on DRK in Dark Arts, one oGCD provides the Dark Arts resource while another uses it up. Simple, straight forward and effective.

So how could this concept be expanded utilizing what is already in place for DRK? I would say, and other have also suggested, by simply expanding upon the resources/meters/timers that they already added to DRK with ShB.
Off the top of my head, here are some ways to do that which fit into the "resource management" game-play niche of DRK.

Expand Dark Arts so that it becomes more of another resource to manage and utilize by doing stuff like I suggested earlier such as expanding it so you can hold up to 2 Dark Arts and add more abilities or ability interactions that provide and use up Dark Arts.

Riffing off of a suggestion I saw in this or another DRK thread, make the Darkside timer into a resource. We already have Edge and Flood providing time to Darkside in excess, why not add an ability or abilities that actually remove time from Darkside when used? That way you have to be constantly balancing the trade-off of keeping enough time on Darkside to keep it from falling off with squeezing out as many other abilities that eat up that time. It would be very similar to the old Darkside upkeep mechanic that we used to have in Heavensward, just a little more encapsulated and detached from your primary resource of MP.

Those are only two examples of how to increase the complexity of oGCD game-play on DRK and I'm sure that others could think of many more ways, which just goes to show that it is not a hard direction to steer the job towards.

Also, just one caveat to all this. I do think that there is one place that DRK does need more GCD based complexity and that is in their Delirium burst period. Spamming 5 buttons in a row for their burst is lacking in the engagement factor and mixing that up, like with the suggestions I presented at the beginning of this thread, I feel are a must.

Honestly I would rather have more focus on attack based GCDs with Living Shadow basically making up for the fact DRK doesn't have attack based oGCDs. But mostly more GCDs in general...