5.3 patch complete note. Yes just keept upgrade WAR and forget about DRK

[Saix027]

I'll never understand how lazy an AST or SCH has to be to not be able to heal a DRK up from WD. Synastry is on a shorter CD than Bene, and it plus a single ED is more than enough to get 100% of a DRK's life back within 2-4 GCD's, depending on crits. Yes, that's 2-4 GCD's you aren't nuking, deal with it, you're a healer, you heal people. Sometimes as a tank you need to re-position and it means you clip or drop a GCD. You just deal with it because that's your job. Sometimes as a healer you just gotta heal. You just deal with it because it's your job. You don't bitch about it on the forums like a petulant child because the game expects you to do your primary role.

SCH isn't bad either. A Recitation Excog+Physick+Lustrate combo is perfect, and if Recitation isn't up you either toss out another Lustrate or an additional Physick or two. Yes, 1-3 GCD's and a CD or two, and the loss of a precious 300-450 potency because you can't ED due to having to actually heal with your AF charges. Cry me a river. I lose more potency when a mechanic forces me to maneuver a boss in the middle of my BW or Delirium windows, but I still move the boss. Because that's what a tank does, they put the needs of the group before themselves so as to make it as easy and streamlined as possible for the dps and healers.

I don't even play healer that seriously, but the couple of times I've been in the latest story trial, dealing with the white hole-lite mechanic at the beginning is child's play. Yet, as a tank, I've had healers let me die from it more times than I'd like to count. It's like the idea of overhealing being a bad thing has so infested people's minds that they'd rather let both tanks die then just top them off. Sure, try to avoid overhealing when possible, but when it's a matter of saving someone's life, just fucking do the overheal. Who gives a shit what your parse will say on FFlogs.

As for DRK, our survivability is fine. Great even. Yes, LD has it's limitations, but that's as much on some healers being lazy af as it is on skill design. The thing DRK needs more than anything else is something to do besides a single 1-2-3 combo when in single target. Our AoE feels great, with a pair of oGCD options and a mix of line, targeted circular and pbaoe to choose from. Our single target is just boring outside of an opener or re-opener.

The problem is, people panic becasue of the missconception of having to heal the DRK full instead of in reality only having to heal his max HP in total. SO WHM has it easier anyway due severall instant full or high heals, AST can do it easier but SCH can struggle if CD's are not avilable in rare cases simply, SCH can struggle sadly.

SCH needs a buff finally, lost its identity already so much and fairy glorified CD, i mean fairy autoheal does 7k crit at level 80 at best, that is pitiful by now, i understand they needed to nerf for low level due you literally could autofollow and let fairy heal but this is ridiclious in high level.

[Brandedblade]

The problem is, people panic becasue of the missconception of having to heal the DRK full instead of in reality only having to heal his max HP in total. SO WHM has it easier anyway due severall instant full or high heals, AST can do it easier but SCH can struggle if CD's are not avilable in rare cases simply, SCH can struggle sadly.

SCH needs a buff finally, lost its identity already so much and fairy glorified CD, i mean fairy autoheal does 7k crit at level 80 at best, that is pitiful by now, i understand they needed to nerf for low level due you literally could autofollow and let fairy heal but this is ridiclious in high level.

I can't remember the last time I struggled to heal a bad tank as a sch. when you're playing it properly you're actually playing it more like a tank, prempitively using its skills to smooth out the damage intake as opposed at trying to simply power through the damage.

[OdinelStarrei]

Reading through this thread a week after patch is interesting. WAR changes are pretty comfy, not gonna lie. I really expected +5 seconds to Eye and Eye application on Mythril Tempest. Making it into Darkside-lite was not on the radar for me. But it's QoL adjustments people were asking for, and it is the only major change any tank has gotten at all, so I'll take it where I can get it.

Apologies if I'm guilty of the "DRK complaint" wave that has become to take root as of late, I try to make my posts more constructive than angry. Unlike other jobs, DRK has been through so many reworks and adjustments over the years on top of fundamental tank role changes, I'm pretty sure everyone who has or is playing it has an ideal version of the job that they want to push for. Since our identity isn't speed tank anymore, there's a lot of division and fracturing of mindsets, and it makes it hard to form a coherent, consistent message outside of "Wow, I hate this!"

I've made a significant effort as of 5.3 to hate DRK less, because it's honestly incredibly exhausting hating on your main job for a such a long period of time, particularly when there's not too much battle content to learn. But I DID have some really incredible reclears this week that captured what I really like about DRK, that being mana stockpiling and burst dumping. Let me try to explain.

DRK's skill floor is insanely low. You can feasibly no-brain the job and perform adequately in a majority of content. I personally did not like this, because I like being engaged with the game at all times, regardless of content level. What I got during 5.3 progression learning parties, and my one of a kind pug team this week, were teams that actually used raid buffs correctly, on-time, and I could TRUST them to use them on time. As a result, I was SIGNIFICANTLY less bored than usual. On progression content, I was focused on finding out what attacks would break TBN for that one Dark Arts I needed for burst dumping each minute, 3rd GCD vs 5th GCD Delirium, optimal Dark Missionary placements, etc etc. Which leads me to believe a lot of recent malaise I was feeling (like unsub from game level) was due to content becoming VERY stale after, what, six months?

On farm content, while I still had the "123" spam after burst complaint, I was laser-focused on getting as many natural Bloodspillers in raid buffs as possible instead of just no-braining Blood until 20 seconds before LS like I usually do. I had a RDM, so Plunges need to wait for Embolden. I had an AST, DNC, and SCH so Edges every two minutes needed to wait for both Technical and Divination buffs and Chain Stratagem before dumping with as many BS as possible. BRD Battle Voice every 3 minutes, so that's another spot I needed to make sure I had mana for, at least the mana and blood from Blood Weapon should be dumped there. Brotherhood lined up with Delirium like it always does, no brain that. And this was while doing the standard E8S song and dance. I was GREATLY rewarded by feeling really in-tune with my kit, and despite having a near wipe during Icelit Dragonsong due to DPS greed, no add buff, and a party-wide damage down, I would still consider it my personal best since the start of the tier in terms of actual job performance. This of course doesn't absolve the complaints I have, Blood Weapon/Delirium, kit interactivity, all those things we've been talking about before. Maybe I just tried for once instead of shrugging my shoulders and saying "whatever"?

Which brings me to a few questions I'd like to ask.

For those people who still play DRK, do you play it in a static environment that coordinates buffs well? When I was checking all the buff timers and trying to maximize my personal output doing them, there were a few times where I was getting a LITTLE overwhelmed, and that hasn't happened on DRK in over a year now. I was really enjoying myself this week.

And if you're playing DRK, do you feel more engaged with it in Ultimate or newer content in comparison to things you have on farm? The answer is obviously "yes", but I'm trying to come at it from a more broad perspective. Is Ultimate or newer content the only way to truly feel something while tanking on DRK after reaching what feels like a personal skill ceiling? I could feasibly do Living Liquid in pugs for weeks if it meant I wouldn't be constantly complaining about how HW/SB DRK were better.

[InfiniDragon]

If SE is taking simple, to the point changes to heart maybe they'll give us this one.

Make Abyssal Drain 30 second CD with 2 stacks, and make it heal big on the first target (like, "closer to Equilibrium but not quite" big) and fall off for subsequent targets like AOEs so it's still useful on single enemies but still can provide a good heal in big packs. I don't need anything fancy, just that.

[ReiMakoto]

Snip

Ex DRK main here, I used to optimise around raid buff windows on SB drk and in this sense shb drk falls down as well. The shear amound of mana generation on SB combined with how much more often you dumped your mana and blood made optimising for raid buffs more engaging than it is now. Fundamentally DRK hasn't changed much in the fact that it is a flexible mana dumping class with a fairly low skill floor, the difference is with SB drk, I could reasonable pool and distribute rescources between a 60s and 90s raidbuff window, and maximising both made for much more skillful mana management due to how much more rescource you generated, the issue was that the impact of dumping mana was a lot less than it is now, simply because mana generation was so much more plentiful that each mana was worth less damage as it were. With how slow shb drks rescource generation is comparitevely, it makes it less fun for me to try and optimise around these buff windows, as more often than not it becomes pool blood/mana for the 60s lineup, then dump, then use what scraps youve got left blood wise for the 90s lineup while you pool mana for the 120s lineup, which is a lot less engaging than having mana and blood dumps at both these intervals if you played effectively.

[Sqwall]

I don't main DRK enough to realize this, but does your shadows HP drain skills funnel into you? I never even noticed or took the time to look.

Because if it doesn't then that would be a perfect opportunity to have your shadow - Souleater, Siphon strike, blood weapon, abyssal drain, carve and spit, Bloodgauge would also funnel to the DRK as well as TBN breaks would funnel to the DRK for free MP.

This would fix quite a large portion of what DRK is lacking on a 2 min cooldown.

This would make delirium and Living Shadow be very powerful to offset, offer choice, and this would ultimately increase DPS if your living shadow is giving you heals and bloodgauge. More flood and edges, more MP, more bloodspillers or quietus. But if it already does then i'm DRK ignorant. I main pld and war for tanks.

[OdinelStarrei]

Snip snip.

Oh, I remember you. You were optimizing during Alphascape too right? Naturally, I agree with everything you're saying. Shame what's happened to the MP economy, that's another major component of the old styles that are completely butchered nowadays. I'd hazard a guess that our 90s burst doesn't even really exist from an optimization perspective, because it's all GCD Delirium Bloodspillers, and the 60/120/180 edge bursts matter more overall, since those are actually able to be influenced with Dark Arts, and if you're not paying attention, you can miss them. But you're right, it pales in comparison to"scheduled mana demolition" from back in the day. I've always thought if they just took DA off of Syphon Strike, maybe increased the cost to what Edge is now relative to SB's mana amounts, we could've had the ideal compromise.

On top of that, we're also missing that +50 Blood thing from TBN. This is actually a huge deal, because GCD manipulation on DRK doesn't exist at all now. This all falls under the bigger umbrella of "lack of kit interactivity", but ending phases on Bloodspillers/DASE after planning GCDs was not only a gain, it was a gain that was easily presentable, separated good DRKs from GREAT DRKs, and could be simply explained to even casual players. "You ended on Syphon Strike? Oh, just find some place to throw in two TBNs, and get rid of the Syphon and Hard, end on the previous combo's Souleater instead, you don't break combo and it's an overall potency gain."

Too many things were removed off DRK at once and not replaced with anything to compensate, which is why I'm wondering if compensation needs to come from fight design than the job itself if SE is unwilling to even explain what DRK is supposed to be at this point.

I'm trying to be optimistic here. When I was in a group where 6/8 members all had raid buffs I needed to account for, compared to the two that I usually get, I had more fun. I'm literally grasping at straws here dude, I know.

I don't main DRK enough to realize this, but does your shadows HP drain skills funnel into you? I never even noticed or took the time to look.

Because if it doesn't then that would be a perfect opportunity to have your shadow - Souleater, Siphon strike, blood weapon, abyssal drain, carve and spit, Bloodgauge would also funnel to the DRK as well as TBN breaks would funnel to the DRK for free MP.

This would fix quite a large portion of what DRK is lacking on a 2 min cooldown.

This would make delirium and Living Shadow be very powerful to offset, offer choice, and this would ultimately increase DPS if your living shadow is giving you heals and bloodgauge. More flood and edges, more MP, more bloodspillers or quietus. But if it already does then i'm DRK ignorant. I main pld and war for tanks.

Like I said, kit interactivity doesn't exist on DRK. There's really no worse offender to this than LS. Give it 50 Blood, and off it goes. LS hits are 400 pet potency each, hitting seven times. Abyssal > Plunge > Quietus > Flood > Edge > Bloodspliller > CnS. Doesn't change. AoE attacks still function as AoE with no damage fall off, so it's powerful. But it's boring. It really is just a pretty DoT that makes people think you're not standing in the right place for mechanics. Should've been around in the theorizing part of pre-ShB, people had all sorts of fascinating ideas, like Delirium snapshotting your GCDs/oGCDs and having LS replicate them on usage. Remember, ShB DRK is designed in a way that there is functionally no choices that need to be made anymore. If a button lights up, you need to press it, preferably within raid buffs, but probably immediately.

More MP would be nice, but then you've trivialized Darkside even more than it already is. More Bloodspillers is debatable, because we already have a large majority of our damage coming from Bloodspiller already, and I'm not entirely sure I like having high potency attacks have even more prominence on tanks. Example, you play PLD, you know how on PLD you can 100% tell if your Confiteors direct crit or not, especially in openers? The amount of variance between a crit Confiteor and a normal one are absolutely insane, and that effect is replicated on DRK with current Delirium. There's too much potency jammed in single skills, but that's just my opinion.

And let's be honest, you play WAR too? Offensively, all WAR players are DRK players, and vice versa, whether they realize it or not.

[Sqwall]

And let's be honest, you play WAR too? Offensively, all WAR players are DRK players, and vice versa, whether they realize it or not.

Yeah like I said i'm kind of DRK ignorant. I'm trying to stay out of the DRK debates as much as I want to. But it can be difficult watching a fellow tank class struggle after a major rework.

[Lyth]

I think trying to correspondingly buff DRK's lifesteal, especially after the Nascent Flash change, doesn't make a lot of sense. If you have one tank that focuses on HP boosts and lifesteal, then let that be their theme. And whichever tank takes that on should be the one to deal with a Living Dead style invuln, because they're the ones actually capable of dealing with it themselves. There's more than one way to develop a tank's self-sustain without making them all identical. What DRK needs to do now is double down on the bubble/revenge mechanics.

[TouchandFeel]

snip

While I support there being better and more defined personalities for the tank jobs, I firmly believe that putting all your eggs in one basket, so to say, and doubling down on types of mitigation will likely result in problematic situations.

In 2.0 WAR design did just that, doubling down on the self-heal HP sponge tank design and it ultimately didn't work since self-healing, being reactive mitigation that happens after the damage is taken, doesn't prevent getting one-shot by a buster. So going in too deep with self-healing as a mitigation niche potentially leaves WAR at a disadvantage when dealing with content that has a lot of hard-hitting busters, leaving them either unable to prevent getting one-shot or at least with far fewer ways to deal with large damage spikes compared to other tanks. Not to mention that self-healing can be intensely difficult to balance against other more straight-forward methods of mitigation; often being either too ineffectual, way overpowered, or some odd combination of both at the same time.

As for DRK doubling down on the bubble/shield mitigation, that potentially introduces it's own unique sets of problems. If DRK were to have multiple shield-based defensive abilities, how would they stack and interact? Would they just add to each other or would each shield be independent? If each shield is separate how would you determine priority as to which shield takes damage over the other and how would this potentially affect TBN's ability to break, especially if you are tying more "revenge" mechanics to these other shields? If the shields just "add together" towards a singular shield, such as adding HP and maybe duration to the TBN shield, again how would this work and how would it affect the mechanics of TBN itself? Why would you want shield stacking as opposed to stacking shields with %-down mitigation, where the shields get greater benefit?
I could keep going with questions that would need to be answered, but I think the point has been made. Going all in on DRK with shield and revenge mechanics isn't as simple as that, there are a lot more considerations and things that need to be worked around.
Also, going all in on shields at the cost of equitable self-healing leaves DRK at a heavy disadvantage in certain situations and for certain content, such as wanting to do solo-based content.

I am of the opinion that there needs to be a base foundation of balanced coverage for the tank jobs in terms of how they can mitigate damage, being made up of reactively compensating for damage taken like with self-heals and proactively preventing damage taken like with shields or %-down mitigation. From there tanks can then layer in a bit more of this or that type to provide a distinct style or flavor to how they play; but never to the point of disrupting balance, since not all modes of mitigation are created equal, and never to the detriment of that base foundation of defense. This doesn't mean lean into the Role Actions more than we are already, and honestly I would still prefer if Rampart was removed from role actions and the unique job based variations came back. It just simply means that at their core, each tank job should have enough self-healing and enough direct mitigation as part of their kit as to not be discernibly behind all the other tanks in any such aspect.
It's the difference between a tank job being noticeably weaker than all the others in an aspect, as opposed to a tank job job being a little bit stronger in an aspect compared to the others.

Also, a good way to make even similar or the same mitigation type abilities feel different is to put additional little effects with them similar to the damage on Vengeance. Say we did like I mentioned above and removed Rampart from the Role Actions and gave DRK back Shadowskin but then rolled a Blood Price type of effect into it or even just an MP refresh. What if Rampart, now a PLD only ability also had a slight HP regen on it?
Never discount how light bits of extra variance and flavor can make something seem or feel drastically different.

EDIT:
However I will add that one place that I wished they had leaned a bit more into unique mitigation that mirrored other aspects of the kit is in the party-wide support abilities.
I would have liked to see PLD have a group heal, perhaps instead of Divine Veil, that doesn't cost MP like Clemency does. I would have liked DRK to have a "mass TBN" like ability that puts a shield on each party member instead of WAR having that, maybe even with a little MP boost for each shield that pops. WAR could have a mass % HP recovered from healing actions increase like the additional effect on Thrill of Battle. GNB could have a mass Heart of Stone that has direct % mitigation but then also puts a small shield on each party member with the strength based on their own Brutal Shell shield.
Something more like that since the support abilities seem a tad arbitrary in regards to what type of mitigation goes in what kit.