Quote Originally Posted by bundythenoob View Post
how would we go about balancing BW then? there are some questions we have to ask for the greater scheme of things.

-do we make it a 60 sec cooldown that gives you 5 stacks of "blood weapon" that generate 600mp/10 blood per weaponskill/spell?
Yes. 12s duration for the buff itself. There's parity with Requiescat for that matter, and the parallel in Infuriate is 60s recast but each gauge-spender shortens the recast by 5s per. Sounds fine with me.
-how long would the stacks last? would they last up to 30 seconds in case you need to multi weave or pause your weaponskills due to disengage? or would they last 15 seconds so that they wont be so grossly spread out in terms of BW cooldown vs duration?
Mentioned above but 12s is more than generous for 5 actions.
-would 5 stacks totaling 3000/50 be enough for a skill on a minute long cooldown? what if mana consumption is increased because abyssal drain is brought back as a spender?
An irrelevant-to-Shadowbringers hypothetical. As it stands now this is a non issue. In 6.0 and beyond if that's a potential rework however? I doubt SE'd revert a change to that extent but I'll humor. In the case that it is indeed added back as an MP spender then what'd be it's cost, adjusted for the now percentage-based MP pool? Would it cost the same as EoS/TNB? Or would it cost less? This is a can of worms. Let's say it costs 1500 MP, per AD. In BW windows that'd reduce it to 900 MP per use, as I'd say in fairness AD itself wouldn't proc multiple instance of resource generation but BW itself. Any more on this I feel I'd start to open my mouth and insert my foot, but suffice to say if AD were to be reverted to being an MP spender, then I think it'd be fine as long as AD itself doesn't regenerate MP on hit, and instead would rely on BW to instead reduce the end-cost of AD by refunding of MP.
-would Stalwart being moved to lv 40 and CnS having its mana generation buffed (or cooldown cut in half) generate enough mana to allow for BW to be a 60 sec cooldown?
. . .wat??? How would stalwart soul being moved to level 40, and CnS being touched at all impact the recast on BW? If anything we can look to the analogue in WAR, and WAR's parallel skill Infuriate functions just fine as a 60s recast ability that also gets a shorter recast for every fell cleave used and WAR's DPS isn't such that it breaks the balance of the tank meta. I get the concern of "DRK would just have too much MP generation! They'd be overpowered!!" But would they really? You'd still be lining up CnS for raid buffs, and without doing the long-math if you use BW in an AoE situation and timed it to hit 3 stalwarts, that's what, (600*5)+(600*3) right? so the full 5 hits of BW would net you a TBN/EoS, and the 3 stalwart uses net you 1800, for 4800 total MP. You'd not even gain another F/EoS out of it. But math isn't my strongest area, so I'll take input on if I mucked that up.
-would delirium being reworked into a resource generation skill allow for BW to be balanced at 60s? or if the current inner delirium stays, would we have to make BW cooldown 45s instead?
Delirium only'd net you a ((200+600[BW])*5=x) MP increase. So, ideally you'd gain another cast of TBN/EoS by having both skills active at once... but that's not how it's done now. Youd have to address the initial 50 gauge needed in the opener for Esteem, and address the animation lock on Del/BW and if they could even be double weaved together, if you wanted to go down that route of "use both at once." I personally wouldn't want to adjust the animation lock for this case. Over the course of the fight however that'd be what, every other or every third Del you'd also be entering into another nigh-simultaneous BW window right? Which again, you'd still not even generate enough from both to really net you more than the extra TBN/EoS from BW alone, and it'd just increase your mana flow to shorten how long you'd need to wait to next use EoS/TBN as you'd now have a bit more resource to manage... something DRK is sorely lacking in my bias.

lastly, does this mean it falls on us to tell square's devs how to balance the tank they don't like playing? its these sort of questions (and many more im sure) that would have to be answered by a dedicated tank developer, something that is integral to the longevity of tank job design. having a reluctant DPS dev answer our questions won't be good for the next expansion or 2 coming up im sure.
Bolded responses save for your last one.
YES. We as players need to tell the devs, IN CLEAR, CONCISE, AND DIRECT AND MEANINGFUL LANGUAGE, what we, as players, do not like, and what we want as improvements. There needs to be unity and cohesion in "What is the problem? How can it be fixed?" before we'll see any sort of improvements. Don't think so?

Nascent no longer needs a target to use.
Ninja as a whole was reworked.
AST now has more MP generation through their cards.
WHM lilies were redesigned from the ground up.
SCH got Energy Drain back around what, 5.01? 5.05? 5.1?
Monk is getting some kinda big overhaul in 5.4.
Bard.

It doesn't matter that it's a "dedicated tank dev" or not, but as long as SOMETHING is conveyed LOUDLY and in an organized manner enough, then eventually change will happen. The developers are not lazy, but they are slow to react, but they do listen. In hindsight it makes sense why DRK turned out the way it did in 5.0, because a lot of the comparisons for SB DRK were made to WAR, as "wow WAR can do all this why cant we do all that?" So of course the development team would've been lead to think "oh the DRK players just want to have WAR's style of gameplay? okay!"