Quote Originally Posted by Archwizard View Post
Is this the same as saying TBN is at fault for our kit as it is? No, you can't blame the piece of gum for holding back the dam. As has been pointed out many times, TBN itself was concurrent with several MP-based skills in Stormblood, though its practicality at the time is another matter entirely since it was a rather different skill back then and the devs clearly moved on from that design for one reason or another.
However, do I think preserving the current design of TBN provides an obstacle for designs to expand the kit further? Yes. Especially when points of contention include DRK's lack of sustainability or utility -- things taken away with the shift in MP skills in ShB -- or the blandness of its damage toolkit which hangs heavily on its pool of oGCDs. Any new MP skill has to be weighed against the DPS value of both TBN and the Darkside skills and, as we've already discussed, any shift in Dark Arts' interaction has to consider the potential to abuse TBN for damage gain beyond the scope of its intent as a defensive tool, which I believe was one of its failings in Stormblood when it provided Blood Gauge.

In short, as of right now, TBN is designed to only account for Edge and Flood. Forever. That's... pretty limiting.
I don't think it's TBN that's necessarily the limiting factor in this case, if we're talking about adding more MP spenders to spice up the kit then it's more how to make sure Edge and the new MP spender don't have a clear winner in every situation. Two ways I can think of is a) new spender does more damage but doesn't add Darkside and b) new spender has a CD. I think it'd be possible to add both of those with a 3K MP cost and they'd fit in perfectly fine with TBN. I can't think of a reason for them not to cost 3K MP but if they do need to then limit Dark Arts to only working on Edge/Flood.