Should Dark Arts Come Back in 6.0? If so, What Should the Skill Do?

[DaulBan]

I think they shouldn't because it looks confused on the part of the battle team. DA as it exists in the game right now is little more than a vestigial nipple that's migrated to behind an ear. Offensive and horrifying, but easy to ignore. I'd prefer they kept flood and edge and figured something else out than get even more twisted in their attempts to balance the old and new.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

I think they shouldn't because it looks confused on the part of the battle team. DA as it exists in the game right now is little more than a vestigial nipple that's migrated to behind an ear. Offensive and horrifying, but easy to ignore. I'd prefer they kept flood and edge and figured something else out than get even more twisted in their attempts to balance the old and new.

so.. your concern is that instead of just bringing back the old HW Dark Arts, that functioned fairly well, or the SB Dark Arts, with the spam issues that could have been fixed, either of which could be with ease remastered and adapted to fit into current Dark Knight schitt-design; that the dev team will just give us another insulting, dumb, and lousy idea that is like a mockery of the old Dark Arts?

[DaulBan]

so.. your concern is that instead of just bringing back the old HW Dark Arts, that functioned fairly well, or the SB Dark Arts, with the spam issues that could have been fixed, either of which could be with ease remastered and adapted to fit into current Dark Knight schitt-design; that the dev team will just give us another insulting, dumb, and lousy idea that is like a mockery of the old Dark Arts?

I mean, I wouldn't call it insulting because I find it more disappointing, but this sort of tail-chasing is what has been screwing up MNK for this long, right? And regardless of whether or not you're happy about how MNK is now, and I somehow doubt very many truly are, you only wind up at a jank version of where you started.

Even if you turn Flood and Slash back into DA and make it more like Stormblood DRK, they aren't going to give us Blood Weapon back, so it's just going to be 'Stormblood DRK but we have Bloodspiller spam instead of the old thing'. If you revert it to HW where it's used way less often, then it'll be 'Stormblood DRK, but you rarely use DA, and you have Bloodspiller spam instead of the old thing'. I have pie in the sky dreams of them just saying 'eh, maybe Stormblood was best' or 'eh, maybe HW was best' but that would never, ever happen.

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, I wouldn't call it insulting because I find it more disappointing, but this sort of tail-chasing is what has been screwing up MNK for this long, right?

No, not really, no. Their problems are almost entirely different.

Monk was an issue of "Well, we've already almost completely compensated for iconic weaknesses such that they're now just a playflow difference. Where do we go from here?" to which I guess someone answered, "Uhh... redundancies?" Those redundancies were then taken as sufficient excuse to gut the job to less depth than it had in 2.0, yes, but that intermediate step is important.

DRK's is an issue instead similar to the 2.0 WAR/PLD distinction, whereby a tangential element (source of strength) was conflated with the true issues (one unnecessarily scaling better than the other and the other unnecessarily having far more combined throughput). They've once again followed the idea that the only approach to parity is homogeneity, and the job was thus gutted to WAR-Lite-with-TBN.

The two paths are only as similar as any two causes of death would be in that they both end in, well, death.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

I mean, I wouldn't call it insulting because I find it more disappointing, but this sort of tail-chasing is what has been screwing up MNK for this long, right? And regardless of whether or not you're happy about how MNK is now, and I somehow doubt very many truly are, you only wind up at a jank version of where you started.

Even if you turn Flood and Slash back into DA and make it more like Stormblood DRK, they aren't going to give us Blood Weapon back, so it's just going to be 'Stormblood DRK but we have Bloodspiller spam instead of the old thing'. If you revert it to HW where it's used way less often, then it'll be 'Stormblood DRK, but you rarely use DA, and you have Bloodspiller spam instead of the old thing'. I have pie in the sky dreams of them just saying 'eh, maybe Stormblood was best' or 'eh, maybe HW was best' but that would never, ever happen.

my apologies, "insulting" was more my own feelings. I feel like although the "Dark Arts" thing from The Blackest Night being broken, along with the edge and flood of darkness/shadow, current design.. does technically do fundamentally the same thing as old Dark Arts, it feels to me like a mockery of the old Dark Arts, because I liked how Old Dark Arts functioned a lot more.
and I can agree that it is disappointing... to me.. heavily, severely, and irritatingly disappointing.

[Jandor]

Dark arts was fine in stormblood just too spammy. Flood/edge and shadow are less spammy but still repetitive imo and if you use tbn you want to break it and avoid loosing 1 flood/edge of shadow.

Dark Arts in StB wasn't that spammy in general, what made it feel bad to me was when you had to squeeze it onto oGCDs between a set of GCDs that also used it.

If they'd dropped the DA oGCD skills it would have felt fine IMHO.

[Xenosan]

Dark Arts in StB wasn't that spammy in general, what made it feel bad to me was when you had to squeeze it onto oGCDs between a set of GCDs that also used it.

If they'd dropped the DA oGCD skills it would have felt fine IMHO.

Agreed also it just didn't seem right for DADM DADD and DADP to be necessary since they already have recast associated with them and the gains felt baseline necessity (risk vs reward analysis). In HW DP was a DPS gain over DA for single target, but I think that was nerfed in SB, making DP/DADP DPS neutral since we could DAQ, if anything DP/DADP in SB was to prevent over-capping before a Delirium/C&S->Syphon. I didn't mind DACS tho it felt worthy of MP economy

Pity the DM improvement didn't come sooner

[Marxam]

Fitting DA + C&S in between a Hard Slash and DA + Siphon Strike while blood weapon was active with haste was mildly annoying and probably even worse for players with bad ping. DA only really needed to buff combo enders and Dark Mind and the ogcd skills could have just have their effects tied to either which stance was active or just built right into the skill. The concept of DA is excellent, buffing offensive and defensive skills when you need it, but no lets get rid of that nonsense and make the job a poor mans WAR with only one combo. Noticing a trend when it comes to great ideas but poor execution so it gets removed rather than take criticism and improving on it. Real shame newer players won't get to see some of the awesome animations DRK lost.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

Fitting DA + C&S in between a Hard Slash and DA + Siphon Strike while blood weapon was active with haste was mildly annoying and probably even worse for players with bad ping. DA only really needed to buff combo enders and Dark Mind and the ogcd skills could have just have their effects tied to either which stance was active or just built right into the skill. The concept of DA is excellent, buffing offensive and defensive skills when you need it.

in this case, what if Dark Arts was brought back but Blood Weapon's "haste" not brought back? Dark Arts would at least give us more oGCD to play with than, for the most part, just Edge/Flood of Darkness/Shadow spam. I have mentioned it in other threads... I had a idea that makes DarkSide less mindless, and maintaining it more interesting, by putting Edge/Flood of Darkness/Shadow on a short CD(no more spam), reduce how much time they grant and extend DarkSide down to 15 seconds, and make other oGCDs also grant and/or only extend the effect of DarkSide.
with this done, bringing back old Dark Arts could make current Dark Knight more fun and interactive, as we could juggle various oGCD, instead of just spamming the same oGCD, to keep DarkSide active, while Dark Arts would either not be connected to DarkSide and only act as granting buffs and/or bonuses to GCDs and oGCDs, or some the Dark Arts bonuses to oGCDs could even be what makes those oGCDs extend DarkSide by only a little bit.
(like, say.. 10 or 15 seconds).

current DarkSide is boring and dull. for the most part, it will only wear off if the Dark Knight either allows it to, or does not maintain it on purpose.

[Shurrikhan]

Fitting DA + C&S in between a Hard Slash and DA + Siphon Strike while blood weapon was active with haste was mildly annoying and probably even worse for players with bad ping.

Such was only necessary if/when relative MP generation was excessive. You may remember we had little to no forced double-weaves in HW. Such occurred only if we had to Souleater (for its trivial self-heal) or Power Slash (for enmity that should already have been margined plenty high) immediately after prepping a DA for a defensive ability, which was next to never.