The Blackest Night: What's good about it, and what's bad

[NobleWinter]

I always thought the relationship between TBN and Edge/Flood felt backwards. In my mind using Edge/Flood should proc a free use of TBN. So everytime you spend 3k MP to do damage you have the option to use your Blackest Night Shield as well unless Blackest Night is on Cooldown already. Then if the shield breaks you should be rewarded with a HoT. You would still need to save 3k MP to use Blackest Night but the damage would never be optional. Only the Heal over Time from the Shield Breaking would be in question and if the shield didn't break you clearly wouldn't need the HoT anyway.

[Aegis_Harvey]

I always thought the relationship between TBN and Edge/Flood felt backwards. In my mind using Edge/Flood should proc a free use of TBN.

Nobody would ever spend MP on TBN in this case, the correct play would be to always favor damage and be rewarded with a free shield that will always have benefit, even if you're OT you can just put it on MT and have it soak a little bit of free damage. There is no opportunity cost here. If anything, people would start complaining that they can't line up their free TBNs with busters and such so you end up giving DRK one of GNB's grievances on top of all the others it has.

As it currently stands, the design behind TBN is to force you to weigh the opportunity cost of not breaking the shield against the cost of not soaking the damage. In my opinion, the reason this doesn't feel good is because the gain equals the cost: if I get a broken shield and a free edge that's 3000MP, or if I just ignored the shield and used edge that's also 3000MP for the exact same damage and a consequence (damage not absorbed) that might not even be all that relevant. If TBN were free, it would become a no brainer, just mash the button. I think the answer is right inbetween, TBN costs 1500MP so that a successful break is a 1500MP net for the same damage instead of 0MP and an unsuccessful break is -1500MP net instead of -3000.