Another Pal an War buff patch, another middle finger to Drks

[Shurrikhan]

Again, Shadowbringer is just an example of an improvement that can be made right now.
I don't care if you add a new skill or change an existing skill, but I'm asking you to rebalance the GCD and oGCD in 7.0 and add a finisher to the dark knight in the process.

Again, I don't disagree that Shadowbringer could be improved. I just disagree that Primal Rend, a GCD finisher from Delirium, or any other GCD-CD (Sonic Break, Goring Blade) is likely an improvement over it.

I personally would prefer a GCD or more in DRK's kit, too, though I don't want to see apm reduced in siphoning oGCDs into GCD skills. I like DRK being oGCD-heavy.

Insofar as the number of oGCDs go, I wish only to move 2-3 oGCDs from within the first 15s of DRK's 2-minute burst to instead between those 2-minute bursts (with some miniscule potency bump or further actions per two minutes to compensate for that potency falling outside of buffs, since aDPS --not rDPS-- is the measure of balance between jobs with no buffs), such as by having ShB and maybe CnS/AD spend MP while increasing DRK's active MP generation by a little over that 6000 MP/minute, making the lulls feel less empty.

If you don't want to copy warriors and paladins, I suggest you change Blood Delirium first.

It's not an either-or. You can change Delirium without forcing a copy of Primal Rend, and one can want more diversity (no Delirious Rage) for the one without being okay with a copy the other (Darker Rend).

For my part, I'd like to rework or replace Darkside, as it's currently just a waste of a gauge. From there, I'd probably make Delirium a sort of ramping risk-reward mechanic that plays on it or its replacement.

As for Shadowbringer itself, so long as a job is capable of having damage-amp windows (or even just non-permanent damage amps that occur outside of set ability bundles), interaction is inherent and unavoidable; the skill is already balanced around optimizing that amplifying window.

To my mind, that's all Shadowbringer needs. There's no need to arbitrarily restrict it behind an InnerDeliriumiescat combo... when the ceiling has already been put into place already there by some manner of conditionally ramping damage buff.

There are many jobs, so it is inevitable that there are similar styles, but I would like you to keep the image of the weapon in mind.
It is very unnatural for a large sword to have an attack style like a light weapon, so I would like it to have a heavy attack style like a heavy weapon.

It's unnatural for anyone to wield the likes of a Buster Sword. At all. It doesn't matter what the speed is. The thing would be easily 20+ kg, as compared to the usual 2-3 kg of an actual historical greatsword.

So long as DRK wields both random rectangles of tank plating and actual zweihanders/spadones/montantes, both, you're not going to get realism out of the job, either way... at least without magic.

With said magic, though, the difference between "hits slow but hard" and "hits fast (and also typically hard)" is... VFX -- an aura around the blade. And that's also precisely how DRK has handled this from the start. It's always been capable of going both fast and slow in it animations.

I'm all for bringing back more of those bigger, meatier hits a la Power Slash, but let's not pretend that Scourge, Carve and Spit, and Plunge left DRK without gravity-defying powers from the job's very start, or that we didn't see the same as far back as FF4.

________

Tl;dr: Again, I'm right there with you on job diversity. Do not, however, presume that unless I'm okay with "improving" the job through [Bad Option A] or [Bad Option B] that I must be okay with Delirium being an Inner Release clone. One can critique suggestions without being okay with things as they are (and merely not okay with something even more homogeneous / less iconic to DRK).

[Renathras]

I don't even hate the idea of Enhanced Unmend, the problem is with EW design it would basically have to give you a full charge of plunge for free to be worth using, we never disconnect from the boss anymore, let alone for so long that using Unmend 5 times is optimal.

Agree with all this post, but this part, in particular. The Enhanced Unmend trait to me reads like Freecure, something that MIGHT have made sense at one time long, long ago when the world was young and MMOs were named Everquest, but in the modern era, it just kinda doesn't. A full charge of Lunge makes more sense, as it would give you an option to disengage, Unmend, Lunge back in, instead of right now where you're sometimes better off stepping out, losing half a GCD to just walk back in and continue your melee combo instead since disengages are so short.

This is true of every Tank that isn't PLD (Holy Spirit is a DPS increase even if unbuffed as long as you aren't taxing your MP), and every Melee that isn't NIN (Raiton or Phantom).

Giving a free Lunge would double Unmend's effective potency while still making it a DPS loss vs the 1-2-3 combo, meaning you'd still prioritize the combo if you could, but having to move farther out and use one or even two Unmends (as long as you aren't overcapping Lunge) wouldn't be the end of the world and would actually be an interesting choice to optimize around in some fights or for added safety during prog.

[RyuDragnier]

Honestly I don't mind the oGCD focus and I think any version of DRK should have a lot of oGCDs present.
The existence of Edge/Flood is what made me like the job originally, having an attack you can throw out whenever you want really.

I just think it needs more to fill in the gaps, and more to do as a whole outside of the burst window. I also think the job needs to play around with the idea of skills lowering the CDs of other oGCDs more. Like imagine if Edge/flood reduced Shadowbringer's CD or something. I think the idea of an heavy oGCD centric tank could work, it just needs more thought to it.

I don't even hate the idea of Enhanced Unmend, the problem is with EW design it would basically have to give you a full charge of plunge for free to be worth using, we never disconnect from the boss anymore, let alone for so long that using Unmend 5 times is optimal.

What made DRK for me originally was the resource management. You had to manage your MP because it was constantly degenerating, manage your defensive cooldowns during this, and manage your rotation all at once. You basically had to watch your MP to see if you had enough for Dark Arts without bottoming out before your next Syphon Strike. That is what DRK should be, the resource management tank.

Make it so Darkside's timer loses 15s duration when you use Bloodspiller/Quietus (except under Delirium) and 30s when you use Shadowbringer, move AD onto MP costs (swapping it with Flood, which would then be linked to CnS), take TBN off MP cost (make it 25s cooldown), bring back DA and make it have an MP cost (buffs next GCD).

Boom, DRK becomes a unique tank again, gets some of its sustain issue for dungeons fixed, and just feels better overall.

[Shurrikhan]

What made DRK for me originally was the resource management. You had to manage your MP because it was constantly degenerating, manage your defensive cooldowns during this, and manage your rotation all at once. You basically had to watch your MP to see if you had enough for Dark Arts without bottoming out before your next Syphon Strike. That is what DRK should be, the resource management tank.

Make it so Darkside's timer loses 15s duration when you use Bloodspiller/Quietus (except under Delirium) and 30s when you use Shadowbringer, move AD onto MP costs (swapping it with Flood, which would then be linked to CnS), take TBN off MP cost (make it 25s cooldown), bring back DA and make it have an MP cost (buffs next GCD).

Boom, DRK becomes a unique tank again, gets some of its sustain issue for dungeons fixed, and just feels better overall.

We do 2 natural Bloodspillers per 17 GCDs, costing us 30s of Darkside per 42.5s at a 2.5s GCD, with SkS then punishing us further under your model. Per minute, those 2.82 natural Bloodspillers mean 42.4 seconds of Darkside lost to using Bloodspillers, or an upkeep cost of 1.42 Edges per minute.

We do 2 Shadowbringers per 2 minutes. As noted before, the only cost of attaching a 30s Darkside cost to each is that you use your 2nd and 3rd Edge before your 1st and 2nd Shadowbringer, respectively, in your 4th and 6th GCDs' gaps. You'll have swapped their positions by a whole 0.5 seconds' time.

Per minute, we generate 4000 MP naturally, roughly 4200 MP from Syphon Strike, 1800 from Delirium, and 1000 from Blood Weapon, for a total of roughly 11000 MP per minute. It costs only 4240 MP per minute to meet the upkeep costs of your 2.8 natural Bloodspillers per minute. We'd have 62% of our MP to spare.

Net result:

• Switch the oGCD-gap order of Edge and Shadowbringer in your 4th and 6th GCDs.
• Skill Speed is worse now.

That's it. You don't even need to delay your first natural Bloodspiller... nor any of the others, as even despite the Darkside costs of Shadowbringers and nat Bloodspillers combined, there's more than enough Edges by the time either occurs.

That is to say, nothing about our rotation would change except as an awkward inconvenience following lengthy downtime (e.g., over 25s at a time).

The only time we'd really feel this is if someone happened to start a dungeon pull with high Blood but low MP (since it takes 150 seconds to fully regenerate one's MP naturally but only 60 seconds to lose all one's Darkside -- or, the 60 seconds over which Darkside is lost would only net one enough for 1.33 Edges, which could then only survive a single Bloodspiller, likely causing Blood to overcap before one can avoid losing their damage buff... all for... what exactly?).



Again, I just have to recommend actually plotting these things out and putting them into practice.

Gating resources behind other resources isn't necessarily a good thing, or even a thing at all, in practice. For it to make anything like "interesting" resource "management", it has to actually be interesting... in practice.

If you're not actually building in any alternatives anyways, the only difference between [A produces B] and [A sources B which sources C which sources D which can then produce E] is that you end up with tools that look like they should be individually usable... but are instead as locked-in as our 1-2-3 combo and must be delayed accordingly. (Which even then only affects our opener, since the basic rhythm of the job takes care of everything thereafter.)

In this case, you'll have jankily raised the floor (mostly just in odd situations) but will have done nothing for the ceiling.

[RyuDragnier]

Because I don't do the napkin math, that's beyond me (I forget details all the time). I don't like current DRK, it's the worst it has ever been since its inception into the game, and has far too many problems that need fixing. I'm wanting the devs to put serious work into this job, and give ideas towards it because I don't want it to remain this bad. At the same time I expect it to be worse next expansion, because DRK has gotten worse every expansion since SB's start, and the devs have no idea what the hell they want from the job.

[Shurrikhan]

Because I don't do the napkin math, that's beyond me (I forget details all the time). I don't like current DRK, it's the worst it has ever been since its inception into the game, and has far too many problems that need fixing. I'm wanting the devs to put serious work into this job, and give ideas towards it because I don't want it to remain this bad. At the same time I expect it to be worse next expansion, because DRK has gotten worse every expansion since SB's start, and the devs have no idea what the hell they want from the job.

If you don't want to work with the math at all then start from the end instead. What are the actual gameplay considerations you want to add?

And what are you willing to give up for them? (That's not to say that we need to balance around some difficulty ceiling; I ask the latter question only because in those trained resource-hitched-to-resource design suggestions thus far, at least as much room for optimization seems like it'd be lost.)

________

Just as a heads-up, I really doubt you're going to get anything compelling, though, out of resource-hitching, so long as we continue not to have choices / significantly branching paths around them.

If the resources can only convert into each other in a single direction... it's all transitive anyways. There'd still be, for instance, zero reason to have your Darkside gauge on screen, so long as you replace the muscle memory of your faintly revised opener... because once first wave of CDs are spent, it just follows churns forward unchangeably anyways.

It's for that reason that any attempt to make Darkside not bloat when you don't actually have to choose between it and something else anyways is doomed to fail. Darkside, as it's designed right now, is not something worth salvaging.

[whiskeybravo]

One can only hope SE regrets finally caving in on the backlog of community demands around tanks.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I want Dark Arts and Speed Weapon's 47.5% uptime back

[Malthir]

Personally I would like to see something like this as a rework:

Remove the auto darkside and turn it into an OGCD toggle

When not in darkside all moves give mana back

When in darkside mana is constantly drained, the weaponskill combo and all OGCD all cost mana but deal more damage and minor healing (weaponskill combo continues through the change so you could do 1 and 2 in non darkside, toggle 3 ogcd, untoggle 1,2 etc)
Obviously numbers for this need balancing to not make it OP but ideally keep the cost of the abilities low but keep the constant mana drain moderate, allowing for at least one full darkside weaponskill combo with 2 OGCD weaved in which then leaves you zero mana and kicked from darkside. Realistically you would never want to use the whole of darkside and be zero on mana because you have no health regen moves outside of darkside, so the aim would be to balance the mana gain outside of darkside with mana cost of being in darkside, similar to the original design.

Take quietus and bloodspiller off the blood meter

Unlink C&S and Abysall drain

Remove the current delirium and bring back the old weaponskill

Remove Living Dead

New move Overwhelming Darkness to replace living dead so same cooldown time. Fills all darknight resources mana, blood and darkside meter, resources and health regen increased massively overtime for 15 seconds after 15seconds all meters excpet health are zero'd regardless of state when the ability ends and all gain for these meters are blocked for 5 seconds.

Weaponskills:
Weaponskills to reflect what stance you're in. When in none darkside you're effectively just using a greatsword, once in darkside you start using some of the more darkness themed moves.

None Darkside weaponskill combo
1 Hard slash
2 Syphon strike
3 Delirum

Aoe: Unleash

In Darkside weaponskill combo
1 Powerslash (our old combo finisher where we shot the blast from the hand)
2 Soul eater
3 BloodSpiller

Aoe: Stalwart Soul

OGCD non darkside
1. Unmend is now a OGCD
2. Scourge (bring it back)
3. Spinning slash (now aoe and a OCGD)
4: Carve and slice reduce cooldown to 18 seconds reduce damage
5: Plunge no change

OGCD darkside
1. Unmend becomes Abyssal drain
2. Scouge becomes Quietus
3. Spinning slash becomes Flood of Shadow
4. Carve and slice becomes Edge of Shadow
5. Plunge no change
6. Shadow bringer unchanged

Current UI elements

The counter for darkside is now the darkest night counter, instead of counting down it counts up while you're in darkside for however long you were in darkside. This is the resource pool for TBN

Keep the blood gauge add dark arts to Blood gauge, using dark arts adds an effect to certain moves, blinds, damage down or shields for the DRK.
New move Consume: Absorbs a portion of the blood gauge to heal the Drk

Thrown away the shadow because honestly I feel it sucks, it's just a bad version of the Mach mech, button bloat would also be reduced as the darkside moves would take the place of the non darkside versions.

[baklava151]

I want Dark Arts and Speed Weapon's 47.5% uptime back

I always thought SB Delirium looked lame at first but when I realized you spent nearly half your rotation going fast I was sold.