Issues:
1. Pacing feels off. In Heavensward/Stormblood, tanking in Grit locked you out of Blood Weapon. It felt wrong. DRK feels permanently slow.

2. Living Dead is badly designed from the outset. Its weaknesses are even more glaring following the Holmgang rework this expansion.

3. The job just generally seems to have a weaker moveset compared to other tanks. This might be a function of it being the lowest dps output tank for the past two expansions running. But if you match up similar actions (i.e. IR vs. Delirium) they consistently seem weaker and less versatile.

The one exception is TBN, but the short recast defensives are all completely overshadowed by how easy it is to invuln swap out of any significant tank damage.

4. We use both weaponskills and spells, but skill speed only benefits weaponskills. These two stats should have been merged into a common haste stat a long time ago.

5. We previously had a lot of unique animations, many of which were removed or turned into generic actions as part of the role action system. It would be nice to have some of them back.

Solutions:
1. Darkside: While active, reduces weaponskill cast time and recast time, spell cast time and recast time, and auto-attack delay by 15%.

2.
i) Shadowform: For the next 10 seconds, any incoming damage and healing is negated. Damage and healing prevented this way is converted into a temporary shield of up to X% of max HP.
Replaces Living Dead.
or
ii) Remove heal or die penalty from Living Dead (shouldn't this should be on a tank that actually can put out massive amounts of self-healing?)
or
iii) Remove invulnerabilities altogether.

3. Offensive cooldown rework. I've made some suggestions on this elsewhere. I'd like to see DRK move back towards being a sustain focused tank.

4. Either merge skill speed/spell speed into a single haste stat, or reclassify DRK spells as weaponskills.

5. Consider implementing a glamour system for actions. Warcraft has a really good one with their glyph system. It would be great to be able to do a job specific reskin of Rampart with Shadowskin.

Thoughts on previous iterations:
Heavensward: Between Blood Weapon's speed buff and the variety of offensive oGCDs (some of which had proc-based resets), it felt very active. Animations were great (Delirium added a bit of variety, and Reprisal felt very visceral). You could do some respectable damage.
Stormblood: Dark Arts ping test.

Why play this job: I really love the aesthetic and weapon choice. The new voidsent Avatar looks really great, and DPS have far outstripped tanks and healers in terms of pure raid value and carry potential. I'm really excited to... oh wait, were we not talking about Reaper?

See you on the other side.