My issue with DRK in 5.0: Remember how PLD was the "1-2-3" Job in 2.0? Yeah. This is DRK in 5.0. Only has one combo, and a handful of oGCDs it can spam. If anything, I think the devs decided to do a hard reset on this since DRK was getting to the point where "Dark Arts Treadmill" was bad and they didn't want to convolute anything with HW DRK(imo still the best DRK iteration I remember). As many DRKs know, DRK right now plays too damn similar to WAR. The Delirium rework was complete garbage from the start and we also need to talk about DRK's AoE Weaponskills, as well as stuff going forward. Also, Living Dead is still convoluted and is not new player friendly in describing its effects.

My issue with DRK in 5.0: Remember how PLD was the "1-2-3" Job in 2.0? Yeah. This is DRK in 5.0. Only has one combo, and a handful of oGCDs it can spam. If anything, I think the devs decided to do a hard reset on this since DRK was getting to the point where "Dark Arts Treadmill" was bad and they didn't want to convolute anything with HW DRK(imo still the best DRK iteration I remember). As many DRKs know, DRK right now plays too damn similar to WAR. The Delirium rework was complete garbage from the start and we also need to talk about DRK's AoE Weaponskills, as well as stuff going forward. Also, Living Dead is still convoluted and is not new player friendly in describing its effects.


Fixing the problems I have with DRK:

1) Restructure Leveling for DRK. Yoshida and Combat Devs, I implore you. Take a good look at GNB, WAR, and PLD. What do they all have in common? All their AoEs have a combo at Lv 40! DRK has to wait until Lv 72 to even get their AoE combo, so until then they're either sitting there spamming Unleash when they have no MP for Flood, or waiting on oGCDs. Considering this job starts at Lv 30, we definitely need to fix this so it's more streamlined.

2) Delirium. Good lord. Old Delirium was a debuff we could cause on the boss, but ever since they changed it to be like WAR's Inner Release, it really hasn't done DRK any favors. One thing that this game tends to do best is making certain to differentiate the jobs' functionality so that they retain their own identity. When things like this overlap and you notice that two jobs are literally doing the same thing and the buttons they use for it are the same action essentially, that's where we need to reconsider. Putting it in this perspective, we have two options: One, it can be made functionally like WAR in terms of generating resources, which defeats the purpose of differentiation of jobs. Two, we rework the Gauge itself and how resource is generated. If we want to keep current Blood Gauge for sake of familiarity, then we need to just rework the button, which would be Three.

If we had to rework Three, I'd honestly just have it halve all MP Costs(TBN, Edge, Flood) on DRK for a set time since oGCDs can be used faster and more reliably than GCDs. Compared to the other three tanks we only really have one Tank that operates on that kind of burst power alone for opener: GNB. If we make Delirium recover 6000 MP on top of that, it perfectly sets up for a window where you're at 4000 MP(i.e. in the middle of raid opener) since normally it costs 3000 MP to use Edge/Flood/TBN and adds more burst power into the rotation. I don't think we've had anyone that manipulates MP cost either for burst; and it's not like DRK would have any weird MP problems like in the past since MP is more rounded now. I also did the calculation at base with Darkside 5x Bloodspiller(full 10s) vs. 8x Edges(Darkside after first Edge), and it winds up to being an additional 1,050 potency. I don't know if it'd need tweaking, but the burst would feel better than trying to deal with Skill Speed or Latency issues trying to get your 5th Bloodspiller within that 10s window.

3) Living Dead. Yes. We've beat a dead horse on this over and over, but I'm not going to stop until SE actually makes the ability make sense instead of a jumble of words. Simply put: There's too much wording happening for a simple skill. Healers(I being one of them nowadays) have complained about DRK's Living Dead being extremely draining to heal for healers, and for some(SCH in particular sticks out) impossible to if they are in a situation where they've already used resources before for this. The only one that has always reliably 100% kept DRK alive is WHM for its Benediction since it's only 1 CD they use compared to about 3 for AST and sometimes 4 for SCH. To make it easier, DRK's Living Dead should work as such: When HP is reduced to 0, your status will change to Walking Dead. Walking Dead prevents HP from dropping below 1 and recovers HP equivalent to damage dealt by Weaponskills for the duration. This would allow DRK to be able to sustain itself in the Overworld when leveling, as it would not have to worry about dying afterward if they procced Walking Dead on the Overworld for some reason or another.

4) Blood Weapon. I feel like this needs to be fixed in some way. Blood Weapon as it is used to have that fast effect, but they took it away because of how old DRK worked(plus the DA Treadmill, and weird MP Maxes). Since MP has been made static at 10,000, I think Blood Weapon should have that haste effect back; it'd give that same feel like back in Heavensward, but with the MP values it gives currently so DRK doesn't get to Full MP on an entire trash pack and can spam Flood.

5) Dark Mind. This is given to DRK early on in its leveling process. However, most dungeons frontload Physical Damage compared to magical a majority of the time. While it's still good stand-alone as a magic mitigation tool, it could have that slight bit of survivability added to it so that the leveling process is a bit smoother up to 70, where TBN is. Adding 10% Physical resistance would work similar to Camouflage in this sense so that each job has proper ways to mitigate evenly across the spectrum going up to that point.

That's...really all I have to say on my piece in regards to DRK's issues. The rest of its kit seems to stay to its theme, and allows it to stand out as a job.

As for previous iterations, it's literally Heavensward DRK that was the best. You had all sorts of things to play with, and it was a very interesting job. A lot of people liked both the aesthetic and the gameplay. I can't really say much else since HW DRK has been a thing of the past forever ago, but I just remember it being really fun to play with.

For how DRK caught my interest, it was for one the writing, the way it was written to evoke certain emotions and feelings, as well as convey that darkness isn't necessarily bad all the time; just if you dig too deep.