Quote Originally Posted by Midareyukki View Post
No, not even Dark Passenger, quit lying, we only ever used that once a blue moon >w>;;
Figurative language and semantics and such but... Dark Passenger was only a 30s CD, and was your most efficient use of MP after DA-C&S. Compared against the likes of Shadowbringer or C&S, you used it pretty often.

But as I said, they're not the same. They are only similar in one aspect, they give MP. They weren't even both OGCDs, bc Abyssal Drain wasn't.
It didn't give MP until after it stopped being a GCD (and not for a long while even then).

Again, Abyssal Drain could not remain a GCD without killing Unleash.
Abyssal Drain could not remain at at-will AoE spender without killing Flood, which the ShB DRK dev(s) was/were apparently very attached to.

The only choice remaining was for AD to be on CD, whether as a GCD or an oGCD. Since it includes healing, they went with the more responsive option, an oGCD.

That's it. There was no confusion about what purpose it was primarily supposed to serve. Abyssal Drain itself did not heal. Dark Arts did. Most times you hit that skill was not for healing, but simply because AD dealt a third more damage than Unleash.

The closest parity in its situational niche would have been to...
  • Axe Flood and replace it directly with Abyssal Drain,
  • Axe Stalwart Soul, buff Unleash slightly in compensation (perhaps giving it half a Syphon of MP generation), and replace Soul with Abyssal Drain as an MP spender (not great, since it's still indirectly redundant with Flood, and would alternate target-centered AoEs with self-centered AoEs), or
  • Axe Quietus and replace it with Abyssal Drain.
But each of those would require DRK losing something more, whereas turning AD into a burst heal on a CD did not.

The answer was simple. Just make an equivalent. They made it for every other job (Shoha II, Ikishoten, Foul...). Why not for DRK? Especially now that we have Shadowbringer. Like, they could have just taken advantage of old discarded animations and reworked them into new stuff.
But no, they decided to do this, which ended up gimping DRK's sustainability.

The rest about Foul and Xenoglossy, that's a problem with BLM itself and should be addressed, sure... but for what's worth, for this conversation, it's important to note that they did make skills for stuff similar to our single-target combo but for AoE. So it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility.
I'm not actually sure what you intend to mean by "an equivalent". If combos are in the picture, we have an ST self-heal combo in Souleater. Else, if we wanted to equivalently allow MP spending to provide eHP as before, then the most direction would be to thus empower Edge and Flood while probably just axing AD outright.

Sure, we have old animations, but we still need them to have non-redundant purposes. Remember, that shift also gave us 3 new attack animations (Edge, Flood, Living Shadow) that also need their places, too.

Could the StB -> ShL shift have been handled far better? Absolutely. But I honestly think that if they just gave us a second charge on CnS/AD to offer it further flexibility in its self-healing and maybe buffed AD's just a bit, current Abyssal Drain would be totally fine.

Ideally, I'd keep AD on a shared CD but give CnS and AD each additional means of effect(iveness) that allow both to situationally be used in their opposite categories (AD in ST, CnS in AoE), with 2 charges on a 40s recharge (still syncs with 60 and 120s; 2 uses within full bursts, 1 totally flexible use between). But I imagine that'd be among the least impactful of what all changes I'd want.