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

[Shurrikhan]

I like Heavensward's take on Dark Arts as an idea. Dark Arts expands your action list out to give them new, situational functionality. But players here vocally dislike situational abilities. The expectation is that every action be versatile in every situation. Take an ability like Inner Release for example:
- Removes resource costs from actions
- All attacks are critical and direct hit
- Nullifies stun, sleep, bind, heavy, knockback, and draw-in effects
- Extends Storm's Eye

Seems to have only gotten more dull with each addition. Admittedly, swapping the chance to Crit, DHit, or both for, effectively, a higher base potency didn't cost much enjoyment, but it did make certain raid buffs less rewarding, if only due to obvious oversights (no converted effectiveness for chance in excess of 100%, just as with the likes of Bootshine and Life Surge since ARR).

Tangential:

Personally, I like having to know a fight or its present contexts well enough to determine what my best spender is, so long as those spenders aren't just spenders (Senei vs. Guren, for instance) and the best choice isn't painfully lopsided or predictable.

It's just a matter of in-practice balance (which is of course easier spoken of than made), really.
If it's always worth using Dark Arts on Dark Dance, for instance, it just makes Dark Dance feel unnecessarily unresponsive ("bloated") since it'd require precasts to reach what feels like the "normal" effect.
If it's almost never worth DAing, that feels vestigial (once again "bloated"), too.

...HW at least had the good sense never to offer DA as purely an offensive potency increase. Of course, back then we weren't also paranoid of compensatory offensive value for MTing. /shrug

[Lyth]

HW at least had the good sense never to offer DA as purely an offensive potency increase.

MP still translated to potency, even in Heavensward. Do you end your combo with Delirium, or DASE? All defensive uses of MP were dps losses. You could justify the use of DADM in a fight like A12S if it let you stay out of Grit. But you'd generally just solve that issue with a tank swap to avoid taking a dps hit.

[Shurrikhan]

All defensive uses of MP were dps losses.

rDPS not only exists, but is the only thing that ultimately matters.

If doubling (or better) the mitigation of a given skill could rope in an extra Stone III back then, that was worth significantly more than our own 140 bonus potency.

I'm not saying HW accomplished that often enough. I'm merely saying that there is obviously a balancing point above which spending MP on a defensive can be an rDPS gain and beneath which it will be an rDPS loss, which is a wee bit more complicated than "I sacrificed 140 of my own potency to cast this, so it's always necessarily an (r)DPS loss."