Quote Originally Posted by Ehayte View Post
- Dark Soul: Refer to math above, its actually weaker than Shield Oath on a net-HP basis, and I give DRK Soul Leech to compensate for that.
From an eHP standpoint, Dark Soul is weak as hell: decreasing damage taken by 25% increases eHP by 33%, which amounts to 93.33% of your previous eHP, though as soon as you get healed up, you're at 133% (which, given the propensity and probability to overheal, is entirely likely *very* quickly, especially since you're increasing healing as well). From a mean mitigation standpoint, it's broken as *hell*: 25% less damage taken and 5% increased healing received gives you 140% (1.05 / .75) of normal healing efficiency; PLD has 125%.

For incoming damage, I assume it equals constant Cure I/Physick casting with nothing else (no Regen, no Selene/Eos, etc.) for anything approaching end game content that you don't overgear. For a tank packing 6k hp, equivalent gear on the healer is going to get that heal up to 1k. You'll get 12 of those off over the course of Dark Soul's duration. PLD gets a 25% increase to effective healing from Shield Oath, which gives them 15000 effective healing (1.25 * 12 * 1000) in 4 man content; DRK gets a 140% increase, as previously indicated, and, after factoring in the 1800 loss, you're at 19200 (1.4 * 12 * 1000 - 1800). If you go up to 8 man content where you're dealing with 2 healers, those numbers go up to 30000 and 40200.

The only time that it seems balanced is when DPS is *really low*. As soon as you get to content that actually pressures the tank, Dark Soul becomes *insanely* powerful because the cost isn't scaling while the mitigation *is*. Basically, it's the inverse of the WAR's problem with self-healing being inferior. At the current numbers, it's marginally more pressure on the healer in easy content *where the healer isn't pressured anyway* and a crapload *less* pressure on hard content where the healer actually has to work.

35 - Rancor/Consuming Darkness
- Reduces hit points by 30%
- Lasts for 30s
- Increases attack potency by 80% (or whatever is appropriate)
If it deals damage to you when you use it, it should be comparatively low since it's supposed to be used while soloing and provide some kind of constant Bloodbath to have you recover over the duration. You also don't want it to provide too much increased damage, else it will end up with them doing *way* more damage than they should be able to.

It would work better to have it deal 2.5% of your max hp in damage every 3 seconds (so 30% overall), 50% damage into healing, and increase damage by 15%. The hp cost should roughly balance out with the hp regain so that it's actually useful while soloing and doesn't arbitrarily punish your healer for you being offtank when you're in group.

- Soul Leech: OK on the 24s, fair, I was only accounting for 24s of ticks, but giving it an extra second of lee-time to catch the server ticks.
The game already catches all server ticks. If you throw up a DoT after the server has ticked, you get one tick *instantly* and then it resumes the DoTs at the 3s server tick. You will *always* get at least time/3 ticks no matter when you apply it and, occasionally, one extra. For example, if the server ticks every 3 seconds and you apply a DoT at 1.5 seconds, you'd get the first tick immediately and the second tick at 3.0.

- Yup, its supposed to be HG on crack. You are saying you think the disadvantages don't balance with the extra 5s? The 10s of healing wasn't meant to cause a healer scramble, just another drawback.
The drawbacks *don't* balance with the extra 5 seconds. Remember, you're providing them with 15 seconds of taking *no damage whatsoever* and you're not going to be using it when there's a lot of AoE damage, mainly because tanks don't take much damage during those times. You use HG when the *only* person that at least 1 healer cares about is you and any healer can *easily* heal you for 100% of your max hp in under 10 seconds so the drop to 1% means nothing because they've got 10 seconds to top you off.

If you want to have an hp cost, you have one of two options to make the cost not be a joke: upfront damage comes reduction of all healing to 0% for the duration and backloaded damage that hits you as the debuff falls off. Using up 99% of your hp seems like a nice idea, but it doesn't work in practice since, unless you *expect* the tank to die when it fades (at which point you might as well just have it say "you die when it fades"), you have to provide some ability to recover from the cost; losing 99% of your hp forces you to provide a window that's too large to actually act as a legitimate cost.

Also, increasing the duration by 50% is a crapload, especially when you're talking about complete and utter immunity, which is why I suggested reducing the CD by 1 minute instead.

Honestly, I'd think you'd want to get rid of Hallowed Ground completely. The whole "immunity" schtick is a PLD thing. With this, you're not so much creating a DRK as a class that exists in and of itself, discretely separated from the other jobs, as much as you are creating an inverted PLD. The DRK job ability list should just look like a thematically swapped PLD job ability list. It can look like a *tank* ability list (stance at 30, other stance at 40, etc.) but just mimicking another job's doesn't really play well, especially since it's a job going off of the exact same class.