Dark Knight QOL V.2

[OdinelStarrei]

You made another thread? Couldn't you have just updated your previous one with an edit and bumped it instead of consigning all those posts to the void by making a new thread and pushing another thread off the 1st page?
Oh well, let's tackle this.

There is no reason to clutter the DRK buff/debuff UI with LD, WD, and a Doom. If you wanted change, you just need to add your healing buffs onto WD. Buffs and debuffs don't necessarily need to locked into beneficial or harmful effects. Take Riddle of Fire in SB for example as a Slow, but still being on the buff bar or Surge Protection/Beyond Death as a "detrimental effect" that is beneficial despite being a debuff. Healers who don't understand WD, probably don't understand Doom either, and we have like FOUR versions of it. All it needs is "Infirmity" added to it with the healing value going from a negative to a positive, or Convalescence. I could support 50% HP though. We've done this before guys, we're not going anywhere on this anytime soon.

I don't mind Sole Survivor coming back, but you've removed the MP from it, so now I care a lot less. What you've essentially done with these two skills is made it so that with planning, you can grab a 45% HP boost to coincide with a LD usage, which is a little interesting, but too strong. I personally find this clunky, as it would at that point be mandatory to hold usages of Sole Survivor purely to save healer actions. With only 5% remaining to be restored, you could easily make that up yourself with 3 GCDs of Souleater and your new Abyssal Drain. So since the intent was for DRKs to solo heal themselves after WD, you sure accomplished it, but I don't know how I feel about LD being solo'd like that, it almost seems over complicated to have so many skills that exist just to mitigate one invuln skill when no other tank has such concessions, please compare this to Nascent Flash/Equilibrium not necessarily being mandatory for Holmgang. Should probably just have the entire skill reworked at that point rather than reworking Sole Survivor, and propping up Abyssal Drain.

Speaking of which, Abyssal Drain. You've made it so that an AoE skill is now a single-target and an AoE skill, a homogenization not even WAR has to deal with. I get to think even less! Per minute, you get around 6-7 Souleater combos after factoring in gauge dumps. This adds up to 2450 minimum healing potency with an extra 200 out of Abyssal Drain. In terms of healing, changing Abyssal Drain and deleting Bloodspiller, but keeping the self-healing has now added a minimum of 1000 healing potency per minute from Delirium and an additional 400-800 from passive gauge accumulation that requires dumping. This boosts the healing potency of the job per minute to around 4K per minute, not even counting in the 30% HP Sole Survivor change every two minutes, which is frankly absurd self-healing potential that you accomplish entirely passively, no input or trade offs from the player needed. Think Clemency having a big disadvantage, NF being a CD, Storm's Path being 250 cure potency compared to Souleater's 300 as an equalization for free Equilibriums, or Aurora being a HoT. On top of TBN and other passive regens, with this, I think you've made DRK way, way, way too hard to kill.

In terms of deleting Bloodspiller/Quietus, I don't think that's a good idea, not only because I think it's visually uninteresting for Abyssal Drain to be a spammable outside of an AoE situation like in HW/SB, but because the damage potency you've given it, combined with Delirium CD decrease, you've actually inflated DRK's damage above GNB and made it incredibly easy for it to be used, not even requiring melee range or any real consideration for it's usage. (Yes, I know E5S add and E6S fire tornados are boring, but I don't think THIS is the answer, DRK is NOT a caster.)

Over ten minutes, the numbers break down like this.
New:10 usages = 500 potency each = 2500 potency per use = 25K potency total
Current: Around 7 depending on killtime = 600 potency each = 3000 potency per usage = 21K potency total

That discrepancy will only increase the longer you make the encounter, and by having it perfectly line up with raid buffs again, you're again indirectly buffing the damage of DRK, something I think a lot of people don't really care about.

And you only remove ~2K potency over ten minutes in single target, that scales up linearly per enemy because of no damage fall off by deleting Salted Earth. I don't really understand that either. You've deleted THREE skills off DRK, and replaced them with one restorative oGCD that does nothing for the mana economy, so you've also lowered the actions per minute, and haven't actually tackled most of the playstyle issues that plague the job. You've also managed to over-centralize one skill over all others in the kit, Abyssal Drain is your GCD Single Target gauge dump, your GCD AoE gauge dump, a good portion of your healing, your burst GCD via Delirium, and your job's primary raid buff skill, because you better believe 3 (+1) Edges at 500 potency aren't going to the center focus, when Delirium will do way more than that once a minute with no concessions or planning whatsoever. This last one is a problem in and of itself, it has to do with the gap and the lack of playstyle differences between good and great DRKs becoming even smaller, happens on most tanks actually, but I won't get into that here.

(Small note: You can't change damage potency to only become 210 at 2+ targets, you need to have it have damage fall off. The initial value on the first target will always be 500 because of how the game determines damage values, calculations are done per enemy, not per group.)
(Another Small note: Please consider the amount of visual clutter occuring on the screen during your buff windows now. +200 Delirium mana per Abyssal GCD, +600 per GCD from Blood Weapon, +HP from Abyssal GCD, +600 MP from CnS, I don't know, might seem annoying to some, and not the clean, consistent HW/SB BW mana updates.)
EDIT: And something I didn't realize until I walked away, was that you didn't write anything about the difference between Delirium when used for Bloodspiller and when used for Quietus, because you combined the skills, you only have one MP regen value, so you've either buffed DRK's damage EVEN MORE in single target at +500 MP each and more frequent Deliriums without a corresponding Edge/Flood potency nerf, or you've nerfed it at +200 MP in AoE, reducing TBNs in big pulls and lowering AoE damage ceilings.

I do not currently support a nerf to TBN. It's DRK now. Punishment for misuse at 25% will still happen at 20%. Under almost all situations where TBN is being used during progression at lower gear levels, it WILL break. If you decrease it's power by 5%, you're just removing 5%, you're not actually helping anyone use it more optimally, in my opinion, particularly in large mob pulls in dungeons, later floors of Savage encounters and Ultimate.

Please consult this post I made on TBN this tier for more information and numbers regarding that.

Giving buffs stacks like Bunshin if they are not going to be reworked (which is what I would want) are fine for a band-aid fix to broken skills.
Unleash and Stalwart Soul should be weaponskills as well, I support that 100%, SkS should not be a dead stat for any weaponskill combo on a melee job.

The fact that there are no words on the DRK mana economy or ease of Darkside upkeep in either direction is also disappointing.
/shrug