WARs and DRKs

[Lyth]

I can't say that I've seen a more complete misreading of events.

DRK has always been a single combo job. There's a simple reason for this. The focus of the job has always been on your MP bar. Every GCD, you decide when to expend MP or hold on to it. Under the previous Dark Arts system, that wouldn't have worked on a job that has to follow a strict rotation.

But surely, Heavensward DRK had three combos? Well, two of those combos were fake. The decision was never between using a Delirium or DASE (Dark Arts Souleater) 'combo', it was whether or not you consumed MP or held onto it on the final step of your single combo. I know that aesthetically this made a difference for some players, but the decision tree didn't change. And Power Slash? As cool as it looked, let's not waste time discussing how much of a dps loss that was. This is why you'd just have a WAR pull for you. You can always voke off them after the first tankbuster. They were punished less for establishing enmity.

Stormblood was the first time that this resource focused playstyle was systematically criticized and mocked by a few well known but misinformed individuals and parroted more widely by others. The main thing that Stormblood got wrong was the MP generation/consumption balance. They removed the MP drain from Darkside, which was never all that difficult to manage, and expected that could be counterbalanced with more Dark Arts usage. But the part about DRK being a 'one combo job' was not a new development. Your decision each combo was where to use Dark Arts, not what preset combo comes next in your fixed rotation. There are plenty of other jobs that follow a strict rotation with no actual decision-making. But most of these 'one-combo' claims came from people who barely had a clue about the job at the time.

Actually, the main simplification in Stormblood was that in order to make room for the additional Dark Arts usage, they discarded a lot of our oGCDs, mainly through the cross-class system changes. This was probably the single worst development to affect us, and we've never fully recovered from it. I detest what Stormblood did to our job with a passion.

I don't think that Shadowbringers has changed all that much, aside from streamlining things and offering up Edge/Flood as a less irritating alternative to DA's boost sfx. There isn't really a point in adding in extra combos, outside of being able to brag to people about how many combos you have. What could break up the GCD flow in a more interesting way is if you introduced in a couple of variable recast GCDs that function similar to how Drill does on MCH or how The Rose of Destruction does on BLU. Bloodspiller and/or Scourge could do that here. I'd much rather see more diversity go into our oGCD usage, with a slight uptuning of our resource generation given that the balance swung to the other extreme this expansion. Most of DRK's gameplay happens on the oGCD.

Delirium is a bit of a side discussion. The meme response is that it's a budget IR, but the reality is that Stormblood Delirium was underwhelming and players both on these forums and the JP ones were constantly asking that it have a bigger impact than it did at the time. In Stormblood, it traded 50 blood for 1 DA + an additional 250 potency worth of MP if you got uninterrupted uptime on the 16 extra seconds. So while it's not terribly original and doesn't offer any unique job flavour, it's at least more impactful where Stormblood's Delirium was completely insipid.

I'd personally prefer it if they doubled down on Living Shadow as our main burst window and make it more interactive, but that's a discussion for later.

As for tank stance, there was probably no job that hated tank stance more than DRK. You simultaneously had some actions that required that you be in tank stance to benefit from them (Blood Price, self heal from Soul Eater, and the damage boost on Bloodspiller), and yet you simultaneously never wanted to be in tank stance and were actively punished for swapping stances. We repeatedly highlighted this as an issue across two expansions, and every time the retort was that WAR lost HP on cycling its tank stance, and it should be the only job entitled to fluent, oGCD stances that didn't cost you resources to swap. So what do you think PLD and DRK players did? Please do guess.

Who do you think asked for tank stances to be removed? Hmm?? The playerbase did. PLDs and DRKs did. Repeatedly. On this very forum. I'm glad they're gone. Because they really only benefitted one job. Good riddance. They were really just a crutch, and limited players' growth. A lot of newer players were unnecessarily scared to take it off because they were afraid of what would happen if they did. There are plenty other more interesting ways of creating a skill differential, uptime being the best example of one.

And if I were to pick one more thing to truly equalize the playing field, I'd ask for invulns to be removed on this coming expansion. Holmgang and Hallowed are miles ahead of their counterparts, and invulns collectively just trivialize mitigation in content. Just get rid of them and diversify the existing cooldown set to create job diversity. Force players to learn how much to mitigate and how to ration cooldowns.

I hope that PLD has a good expansion ahead. There are plenty of areas that the job can be improved on and fleshed out. I want to see an equal playing field where we have four diverse and equally interesting jobs, rather than seeing everyone run the same two tanks for an expansion. There were about three jobs that were near guaranteed lock-ins for raid spots from ARR to Stormblood, and the game was worse for it.

[ArianeEwah]

DRK has always been a single combo job. [...]The decision was never between using a Delirium or DASE (Dark Arts Souleater) 'combo', it was whether or not you consumed MP or held onto it on the final step of your single combo. I know that aesthetically this made a difference for some players, but the decision tree didn't change. [...]

I partly disagree here; Delirium WAS worth a combo of making the decision "when to use", just not solely within the combos themselves (damage could've been adjusted), but rather when to use a "stored" DA. Souleater always consumed DA, but if you wanted to use DA for e.g. Carve and Spit - and your only combo finisher would've been Souleater - you lose the option to actually store it until your choosen action was ready, and still save MP for your burst...

And well, we did lose it. In fact, it got even worse since Sython Strike consumed DA, too, and we got Bloodspiller which ALSO consumed DA - 3/4 of DRKs most used GCDs consumed DA, it made DA usage a pain, and I am not talking about the spam!

Tho, since Dark Arts is no more, I guess DRK has become a single combo job, simply because they removed the reason for using another combo. Yes, Delirium was kinda niche, but it still had a purpose other than the INT down debuff. I guess it just wasn't worth it since Sython Strike also got the DA consume.

For the rest of your post, I have nothing to add, I agree with everything else. I am sick of playing the same role without any diversity while I have plenty when playing melee or caster DPS. Gimme my haste tank, g'dammit!

[Vyrerus]

DRK always a one combo job. Other combos "fake."

Just like, not empirically true. Yes, you always wanted the Souleater combo to go through with a buff, but you couldn't always, and that was the point. No matter how good you were at managing things and communicating/having your co-tank build enmity prior to swaps, you were going to have to do the very cool Power Slash combo to not impinge raid DPS(and to hopefully get you some more Low Blow procs back when those existed) and also so the DRG's face wouldn't get eaten.

Ariane talked of why you would do the Delirium combo, so you could hold Dark Arts, and that was also true.

But really, your eyes on key presses instead of what's happening in game is what's wrong here. People don't want more combos just to vary up button presses a little bit. They want to see different things happen on the screen. The combos that have been eliminated also eliminated part of the video in this video game. You can set your combos to whatever button combination that you want, whether your combo is, "4-3-9" or "1-2-3" is irrelevant to what players like to see play out on screen. That's what people care about and why they complain about combos.

Just like glamours, people care way more about form over function. There are tons of people who also just use the, "fake" combo to see the animation.

Variable GCD is a nice idea, and jobs like MCH/BRD do make use of those, but they are not any less of, "tapping out a drum beat" than a full combo. They're just easier to execute, because when they come off of cooldown, you use them, sometimes needing to buff them before hand. Which is related to timers, which is what most old combos that were eliminated were tied to anyway.

The most interactive, not drum beat combos, that the game ever had were enmity combos. Their use(or not) depended entirely upon who you were playing with in addition to crit RNG, both your Crit RNG and the players lobbying against you for enmity's. And most people hated that, because it meant paying extra attention. If my memory is not mistaken, you and your sexy blindfolded avatar are one such individual.

[AziraSyuren]

As for tank stance, there was probably no job that hated tank stance more than DRK. You simultaneously had some actions that required that you be in tank stance to benefit from them (Blood Price, self heal from Soul Eater, and the damage boost on Bloodspiller), and yet you simultaneously never wanted to be in tank stance and were actively punished for swapping stances. We repeatedly highlighted this as an issue across two expansions, and every time the retort was that WAR lost HP on cycling its tank stance, and it should be the only job entitled to fluent, oGCD stances that didn't cost you resources to swap. So what do you think PLD and DRK players did? Please do guess.

Who do you think asked for tank stances to be removed? Hmm?? The playerbase did. PLDs and DRKs did. Repeatedly. On this very forum. I'm glad they're gone. Because they really only benefitted one job. Good riddance. They were really just a crutch, and limited players' growth. A lot of newer players were unnecessarily scared to take it off because they were afraid of what would happen if they did. There are plenty other more interesting ways of creating a skill differential, uptime being the best example of one.

quietly adds this to my long list of reasons why tank stances were awful