to Future DRK Players

[Lyth]

The problem in Stormblood wasn't identity. It was that it was uniquely bad.

DRK had the lowest damage output by a fairly large margin. It wasn't too bad at the start of the expansion when WAR and DRK were about at parity (but well behind PLD), but when WAR was buffed early on, all that changed. DRK was a sustained damage tank at a time when burst was king and had no drawbacks for doing so. Delirium was insipid and weak. Actions were either extremely situational (be sure to Sole Survivor that one rock add that shows up in the entire fight), or locked behind stance (Blood Price and the HP gain from Soul Eater were both Grit only). We were the only tank without a unique AoE mitigation skill at a time when Divine Veil and Shake it Off were being used specifically to cheese Limit Break gauge generation. Shadow Wall was on a 180 second recast at a time when Sentinel was 40% DR and Vengeance was just flat out better.

Heavensward was good, but players were willing to overlook a lot of faults and disadvantages because we could put out some competitive dps at a time tank damage output had a larger impact. Stormblood took a lot of Heavensward's strengths away while leaving behind the drawbacks. Certain expansion-specific issues, like Veil/Shake being obscenely powerful for generating bonus LB (mitigating critical damage generated LB) left DRK consistently warming the bench. Again, that's why I said that context matters. You have to take the job in the context of its expansion in order to understand why it was so bad. And that's why there was overwhelming support for change, both going into 4.3 and later in 5.0.

I think if you look at Shadowbringers as a whole, it does represent a significant improvement over what we previously had. We're still on the lower end of tank damage output and well behind the shield tank, but the overall balance is better than it's ever been. Outside of Living Dead, we're at least not seriously disadvantaged in any one area. And I would much rather take a Delirium that you can meme about than one which is ineffective.

I find it difficult to react to Endwalker's action trailer without having some context on what actions have been removed. I've created a list of the actions that are MIA across all tanks. On DRK, for example, we gain three new actions. We haven't seen any sign yet of Unmend, Shadow Wall, Dark Mind, Living Dead, or Dark Missionary. If I had to play odds, I'm going to guess that Dark Mind is going to be replaced by the new bubble. But what else is missing? Unmend and Shadow Wall are likely still around because Lightning Shot and Nebula showed up in the GNB trailer, but where does that leave us with the last two unaccounted for actions? None of the invulns showed up in the trailer, so if they're gone, tank gameplay is going to be significantly impacted by the change.

There are other questions that I have as well. A lot of players on other tanks have gone on about how powerful TBN is. WAR's new defensive probably replaces Thrill, so is it gaining a TBN-like action? (RPR has its own TBN-like action now which grants AoE lifesteal). Does PLD have a net gain of two single target defensive actions compared to the other tanks, given that they've never really had an analogue to Thrill/DM/Camo? Unless they've lost Sheltron, that's a possibility. Again, without understanding what relative differences will exist between the tanks, it's hard to gauge what the power balance will be.

[Benn]

DRK had the lowest damage output by a fairly large margin.

That is not true.

In aDPS merit he is usually second tank: https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...ps&class=Tanks

He is last only in rDPS merit.

Also your "By larg margin" is also false. The top dmg in rDPS is 56 mediana, the lowest 53. That is like 800 dps dmg difference between top and bottom.

9999 will be top, but if 99996 is the bottom then although statistically something has to be on top and bot: in the grand scheme of things difference is not really noticable at all, more even so for average player.

[Lyth]

????

Why are you citing Shadowbringers statistics in response to a discussion about tanks in Stormblood?

[bundythenoob]

I think if you look at Shadowbringers as a whole, it does represent a significant improvement over what we previously had. We're still on the lower end of tank damage output and well behind the shield tank, but the overall balance is better than it's ever been. Outside of Living Dead, we're at least not seriously disadvantaged in any one area. And I would much rather take a Delirium that you can meme about than one which is ineffective.

I suppose I will have to agree to disagree with you on this topic then. I cannot find any ways in which the SHB DRK is superior to STB DRK given the context of anything outside of balance at lv 80. I also cannot find any ways in which fixing the problems of STB DRK would be worse for the gameplay identity than what we were give in SHB. as you said, "context matters", and from what I've gathered, that means balancing a job for lv 80 gameplay is more important than any other criticisms that have been laid out over the last 2 years, whether they be criticisms towards the gameplay, disjointed kit, or anything else outside of Living Dead.

For your sake, and for the sake of those who believe your stance on LD, I hope the devs fix the skill so that SHB DRK will once again regain its gameplay identity.

[Shin96]

Seems a bit... hyperbolic.

How so?

Continuously disrespected as a tank main = check.
Makes the game easier in a braindead fashion = check.
Dungeons are corridors and hallways for the most part = check.
"Don't forget your roots" Complete lie at this point = check.
"Never back down, aim to amaze" muh male viera tho! = check.
"Fun comes first! 1-2-3.. 1-2-3... 1-2-3.. TOO MANY ONE TWO THREES! = check.
Asmongold, trashes the game, made fun of it.. gets invited = check.
Money money money new players.. salivating.. = check.

Anyhow, I do wish the most sincere of joy with their new playerbase. I heard they are a bit.. unforgiving? Given the pressure they exude on the developers for every little thing they don't like. The only thing I hated was spamming 1-2-3 and Bloodspiller. May they all enjoy catering to the lowest common denominator.

[Jandor]

I'm just popping in to say I loved running dungeons as Dark Knight in Stormblood, when you got that AoE loop just right it was so damn satisfying.

I also still have dark arts on my bars

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

firstly, if DRK was a "bad job" like you said in the context of STB, then why did they not fix the problems with the job for the next expansion.

I mean, they did fix the issues many people were complaining about the job. Just not the fixes you personally wanted.
People complained delirium was an ineffectual burst button in a meta that was all about burst. So they -made- it a proper burst button.
People complained dark Arts was too spammy. So they streamlined it by replacing it with a new system that serves the exact same purpose in function, only you aren't spamming it as crazy as much as you were spamming DA in SB.

but neither of these versions have as much problems as the current SHB DRK kit.

and this is when we start heading into subjective territory, but IMO HW's kit had way more problems than SHB's does, my personal opinion is people look at it with way too rose tinted glasses. Functionally, SHB's kit works. It may not personally appeal to people, but everything works as it should both MT & OT wise. It's only flaw really is LD but thats been a constant across every iteration of DRK. HW DRK had serious issues about being OT between losing dps, the party losing a powerful mitigation tool in the form of Reprisal, two of its DA effects fighting against itself (Why would you ever give Dark Passenger a blind or Dark Dance evasion on a job that -wants- to get hit between blood price & reprisal? Not to mention the hilarity that was hitting blood price and then the WHM chain stunning the pack for 8s.) or several DA effects being basically worthless in raid (DA-DP, DA-DD, DA-AD.)

finally, in the context of SHB to EW, why were absolutely no changes made to fix the myriad of valid criticisms of SHB DRK laid out by DRK players for the last 2 years?
the issue of our resource generation abilities lacking impact could be solved many ways, such as the removal of mana regen ticks which would allow power to return to said abilities.
the issue of delirium feeling like a cheap clone of another ability, rather than being a unique resource tool for the resource generation tank
the issue of the disjointed kit because of the lack of interplay between said resources
the issue of Living Dead being a poorly designed skill (something which people seem to be adamant is the PRIORITY to fix, and not something that should be fixed ALONGSIDE the above problems)

To be fair, we have literally only animations and anything related to blood to go off of from the job action trailer, and several skills were not shown. LD could be fully fixed, Carve and Spit has a hidden visual effect to its animation that's been datamined in the benchmark indicating an upgrade, any of the various OGCDs could have new effects added to them. Delirium could have a secondary side effect that isn't visually shown. Saying 'no changes' is extremely disingenuous when you have literally no tooltips available.

As far as Delirium point, I'm going to give you a little lesson in game design and how the devs are applying it to FF14. People by large -love- flashy things. People -love- to feel immediate tactile feedback from interacting with something. Take a look at the job designs as a whole in SHB & EW. They have been streamlining systems that make very little visual impact (DoTs, resource generations, etc) In favor of grandiose visual flair. Look at Living Shadow. In form, it is effectively a reskinned DoT. But it is far more visually interesting than hitting Scourge and seeing a small tick animation pop up for the next 30s. Same thing with Queen. Lead shot was uninteresting visually. But summoning a huge ass robot to punch, kick and drill targets is far more visually interesting.

To that end, finishers &/or abilities that let you spam a big powerful button feel great to a ton of people. It gives a lot of immediate power and satisfaction, you -know- you're doing a ton of damage for Delirium's duration. Contrast SB's Delirium. You extended your BW or BP. Unless someone calculates how much extra MP they receive and then converts it to raw potency from Dark Arts, they don't know how much damage they just got from it. That's even before considering you hit the button then go back to doing your normal rotation, there's no immediate tactile feedback that you did anything with it. With SHB, you -know- you are doing 600 potency a hit, AND you get to do BloodSpiller's incredibly powerful, weighted animation multiple times in a row compared to just another hard slash.

Which also extends to interplay between resources - it's much easier to feel the tactile feedback of straight potency than to have to worry about math or think about how your resources are shifting to maximize damage. Hence why every job with any sort of complexity with resource generation has been steadily streamlined over the expansions in favor of grandiose visual flair.

what context justifies breaking a unique playstyle in an MMO which is inherently supposed to allow for multiple playstyles to suit the multiple people that play the game?

Many reasons. internal statistics showing the job is suffering from a drought of players. Wanting to make the job easier to balance in the future. Wanting to streamline the game in general. Take your pick of hundreds of possible reasons. Also being blunt, FF14 might offer many playstyles, but the reality is aesthetic flair plays a huge role in the jobs people choose. People might like the gameplay of WAR but despise its aesthetic and want to be the dark, edgy boi wielding a giant bigass greatsword. So then they give their thoughts on social media/fourms/in-game/etc, and it adds to the collective pool of data Square uses to make decisions.

the ONLY context I can think of is that Square decided that pandering to people who are unwilling to put in the work required to become proficient at a job far outweighed the option to continue to make improvements to jobs that their core playerbase would enjoy;

Bingo; and they outnumber you at least 10 to 1 when it comes time to pay the monthly bills. Possibly even way more, depending on how much you purchase off the mogstation vs them.

however, the big problem with this """context""" is that they showed that they can continue to make jobs evolve without destroying their unique playstyle

*Looks at AST's cards, SCH in general, MNK getting rework after rework*

Yeah...not always. Even history itself has shown they'll tear apart a job's identity to make parity with other jobs in its role. Exhibit A: Bowmage in 3.0.

why was the posterboy for the expansion shown no love compared to others like WAR, NIN, or AST? why was DRK shown no love in the next expansion, where they could have drawn upon MULTIPLE sources of feedback?

Ask that to MNK & SAM, the posterboys of SB. Because giving MNK an ability that intentionally went against its core identity of going fast fast fast by slowing it down and a rainbow of various tackles really wasn't really showing it much love. Not to mention poor SAM. A job meant to be a selfish dps when the meta was stacking so many buffs that the extra damage everyone did outweighed SAM's personal damage. Just because a job is a posterboy doesn't mean it gets preferential treatment. it just means its the job that's most in line with the theme of the expansion for marketing purposes, nothing more.

Also DRK was shown plenty of love in SHB. It got a rework of its jobkit. Just because you hate it doesn't discredit the time the DRk job designer spent having to create a brand new system that filled the same purpose of DA and then take meticulous amounts of hours balancing potency with the other tanks. Look at something like WAR, which effectively only got a bigger badder fell cleave & decimate. Or how many jobs in SHB just got heavily streamlined and lost more than they gained (SCH, AST's cards in SHB, AST AGAIN in EW losing half its identity with the loss of Noct).

and again, as I highlighted earlier, they did draw on feedback. They just listened to feedback you didn't like is all. But they listened.

This is just the opinion of someone who was told to look elsewhere, despite years of nothing but love and support for the game which showed me there was an MMO worth investing time into

I mean, let's be blunt here. You're just a single person, we all are, which is why Square doesn't listen to individuals. But they do listen to trends and a large majority...which isn't the case here. As I linked in the homogenization topic, there's been fan polls done across the 5.0 series on reddit that give a glimpse into the picture that the large majority are at least satisfied with DRK's changes in SHB. No doubt to me Square's internal statistics likely show a major uptick in DRK players this expansion compared to SB, but that's my speculation.

Streamlining and visuals is the name of the game now in FF14. Resource management across every job is basically 'build resource, spend it'. They're not going to be introducing or re-introducing interplaying resources at this point; the initial removal of Hagakure from SAM (and its return as a severely nerfed ability only useful for managing Sens in extremely niche scenarios) & DRK's design in 5.0 both indicate the devs have little interest in interplaying resources. Even RPR with its two gauges literally comes down to 'build one gauge to use attacks which build a second gauge which you spend to enter reaper mode.'

[bundythenoob]

snip

I'm well aware of both the butchering of SCH and MNK, having mained PLD/MNK/SCH in ARR and later DRK in HW. I'm also well aware of the game design lesson you chose to give me, but thank you for reiterating in case others who stumble upon this thread might not know about that aspect of FFXIV's direction of game design.

I'm not questioning the dev's decision to cater to the loudest demographic, I'm well aware of the shift in video game design over the last few years, as well as the overt money grubbing schemes that corporations have taken to maximise profits over the enjoyment of the medium, much to the chagrin of veterans who seek a challenge. I'm questioning the devs decision to come to no compromises in terms of restoring gameplay identity to the CURRENT DRK and the lack of any meaningful changes to the job in Endwalker after they specifically said they're BUILDING UP on the SHB jobs.

I concede that you are correct in saying that we don't have tooltips, but from the gameplay we saw, there was no difference between any old abilities generating blood or spending of the Darkside gauge, no difference in Living Shadow (they made it perform the same actions in the same order as in the SHB trailer), no difference to the stale 1-2-3 gameplay after the expenditure of your "burst" tool. even with these "new" skills added, there were still no changes to our kits overall disjointed design, nor were there any changes to the old skills' lack of meaningful interactions with the resources. despite how "subjective" my opinions are, you can objectively see which tank job got an actual evolution to its playstyle (WAR), and which tank was left in the dust to rot once all its mains switch to RPR.

as for your comment on the devs """hard work"""... they've stated in the past that they don't enjoy playing TANKS or HEALERS, so why should any of us be praising square enix for forcing the DPS orientated devs to rework a job they don't understand, rather than questioning why they don't just hire a dedicated dev for tanks and a dedicated dev for healers, so that the DPS devs can focus on further developing the DPS jobs that have been neglected, or do BRD and MCH not deserve the same amount of love as SAM or NIN?

I already came to terms with my future with FFXIV and the decision of its direction in the first post. the whole purpose of this thread is so that the new playerbase has at least one source to inform themselves of the problems with the job that they might have felt, but been unable to put into words due to missing context, and get a glimpse into what the past job was like so that they can see for themselves why certain abilities exist and why they feel so disjointed as opposed to interconnected with the kit. this thread is for FUTURE DRK players to know that there are job fixes they can fight for using the CURRENT DRK shell. you might think DRK doesn't """need""" these fixes because it's """functional""", but that doesn't mean that there isn't a loooong list of valid complaints about the jobs lackluster burst window, the lack of impact and interplay of your abilities, and the "fire and forget" nature of the jobs various tools. on top of that, the devs refusal to listen to feedback from both sides, not just from a "game design" perspective, but from a corporate decision to not hire a dedicated developer, despite all of the money this game is raking in, really shows which direction the game is heading.

[Benn]

I'm questioning the devs decision to come to no compromises in terms of restoring gameplay identity to the CURRENT DRK and the lack of any meaningful changes to the job in Endwalker after they specifically said they're BUILDING UP on the SHB jobs.

I mean, we only know about mechanic changes of Delirium, additional "Salted Earth" power and 2 powers added? We don't know if they will tweak potency, cooldowns, durations etc. of other abilities. There are so many jobs that they won't give full patch notes of every little change they will make in EW.

A major change on some job abilities would be changing duration from 5s to 7s or Potency from 200 to 250 etc. So we don't know yet the full scale of all the changes in EW. I think we should wait and then decide if there were major changes.

As far as reworking goes - I don't think DRK will get any for next 2 years at least. They are building on ShB job, so the core of kit remains the same. And I think core of the kit is fine. It just need little tweaks like for example making Blood Weapon having 1s timer delay after pushing button to get proper 10s duration would be a big change, but overall nothing major for the kit shape.

[bundythenoob]

top kek @ the new DRK """"""changes"""""". I hope you guys continue to fight for a better future, cuz the immediate future is looking extra dark.

If you truly wish to see change to DRK, it's time to drop the job and let the numbers do the talking. maybe they'll hint at a DRK a tweak or two in 6.1, come up with an excuse to wait till 6.3, promise to buff it in 6.5, and eventually tell you to wait for 7.0

hell, if you want to see change brought to the overall game's difficulty, encounter design, and job simplification, drop the game entirely and let your wallet do the voting.