The Ultimate DRK Rework

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

I don't quite understand why so many players are so ready to dismiss DRK threads created by their fellow DRK players with potential ideas to change how the job plays. most of these threads only came about because the older DRK players are unsatisfied with the SHB "rework" in the first place. if you just think about it for a second, despite the job having "more people playing it than ever" why is it that there are so many ideas floating around on how to make the class play better? why are there so many opinions on what makes DRK fun and not fun? why are there so many DRKs complaining on the forums?

its not as if DRK players want the job to be some elitist experience that only the top 1% can minmax, we just want the job to return to its unique playstyle roots, and not to feel like a WAR clone, which also does injustice to WAR mains. is that too much to ask?

Think most players myself included at this point, typically dismiss DRK threads, simply because we're fed up with yet another DRK rework thread, if they were less abundant and let's be honest, a lot have terrible suggestions included within said posts, people might be a bit more amenable to these sort of threads. Thing is most people are not gonna be happy unless it goes back to HW DRK, but unfortunately that probably won't work with how the current tanks are designed.

[bundythenoob]

Think most players myself included at this point, typically dismiss DRK threads, simply because we're fed up with yet another DRK rework thread, if they were less abundant and let's be honest, a lot have terrible suggestions included within said posts, people might be a bit more amenable to these sort of threads. Thing is most people are not gonna be happy unless it goes back to HW DRK, but unfortunately that probably won't work with how the current tanks are designed.

from my point of view, most of these threads exist because the people who plays these jobs have ideas on how to make the job they are passionate about a little more fun. most of the ideas might be terrible to some players, a few might be good to others, but I think the fact that so many people just want the job to be fun over being balanced shows that square enix took a huge step backwards with the current design. the STB and HW designs for certain jobs might not have been "balanced", but if they're more fun to play than the current SHB iteration, then why bother playing them at all?

I've been playing this game since ARR, and although i occasionally lurked here, the only time i ever came to complain on the forums was during SHB when I realised that after a year of the expac being out, square had made NO changes aside from a WAR QOL (which was an oversight that they should have just implemented on release)

I just hope that people aren't too blinded by loyalty or something to realise that square really messed up this expac, and that the criticisms and complaints come from a place of love, and from people who want the game to be both fun and rewarding to play, which atm it is not, (if you're a tank or healer player from the past) despite what "the numbers" would say. i'm not even sure why more people aren't pointing out the fact that only 4 devs are working on the battle systems for all of the 17 or so jobs in the game, and that those devs even admitted they dont like playing tanks or healers.... hell' I'd give them advice for free if it meant that the game could see a return to form.

[TouchandFeel]

snip

Many of the rest of us have also been playing since the beginning of ARR or even before with beta or 1.0, and a decent amount of us have been active on the forums and have been engaging in tank discussions since the very beginning.

Since the very beginning discussions on balance and whether things were fun or not, and lets not forget lot and lots of complaints, have been a constant thing. Players complaining about tank jobs is not something new and honestly, I recall there being far more complaint threads on DRK during Stormblood compared to what we have seen so far in Shadowbringers. There were also plenty of complaint threads during Heavensward as well, for example there were quite a few threads that complained that DRK being a tank wasn't "true to the job's identity in the series" and that DRK should be made a DPS instead, and of course a bunch of DRK complaint and "the job needs fixes/needs to be reworked' threads. Seriously, just go back and look at the tank forum threads during Heavensward and Stormblood and it becomes quite clear that many players did not have the rosy outlook on DRK during those times that some like to espouse these days.

As for the devs "not listening" and "doing nothing", what exactly are they supposed to do when so much of player feedback and recommendations are all over the place, often contradictory and just as often plain bad ideas. The few times that some of us have stepped up and tried to create an understandable consensus among DRK players on what the big problems were and what sort of things we wanted, we actually tended to get good results and saw changes that reflected what we said. Except for Living Dead, seriously SE just fix that damn ability already.
Anyways, if you look back on a lot of the complaint and rework threads for DRK through HW and StB you can actually see a direct correlation between them and the reworks that we would end up getting later. Sure sometimes we didn't get exactly what we wanted or the changes didn't go as far as we would have liked, but we talked, a lot, and the devs did listen. It only seems to some like they don't listen because people like to live in their own head-space where the way they want things to be is "the consensus" and the way things should be done, and if the devs do something different they obviously aren't listening. Not to mention people also tend to suffer from a heavy dose of rosy retrospection.

So just because some of us disagree that "Square really messed up this expac", although many of us do agree that mistakes were made and some fixes should happen, and that we disagree with some of the complaints or ideas presented, guess what we have our own complaints and ideas, that doesn't mean we are "blinded by loyalty", "balance obsessed elitists" or whatever other negative labels that tend to get leveled in situations like this. We just simply have our own thoughts and feelings on things based on our own experiences and fueled by our own passion for the game and the job.