[DRK] Wanna know why Unleashed & Abyssal Drain are both needed?

[Ladon]

It's also usually when you have blood price available, so it's not great by any means. And if your group threat pull is supposed to be abyssal, it becomes even more niche/not terribly useful @60.

How often are you effectively pulling groups with Abyssal Drain? Most groups are still clustered well beyond 5y to hit them all and even then I wouldn't really want to spend 970 mana to hit 3 or so enemies. A few well placed Unmends and a well timed Unleashed or two is going to almost always give better results when pulling.

[Giantbane]

How often are you effectively pulling groups with Abyssal Drain? Most groups are still clustered well beyond 5y to hit them all and even then I wouldn't really want to spend 970 mana to hit 3 or so enemies. A few well placed Unmends and a well timed Unleashed or two is going to almost always give better results when pulling.

Yes, it does "something" sometimes. But because you have blood price and we're talking AoE (where you get a lot of mp back) it usually doesn't really matter much anyway. It's pretty lackluster @ 60.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

How often are you effectively pulling groups with Abyssal Drain? Most groups are still clustered well beyond 5y to hit them all and even then I wouldn't really want to spend 970 mana to hit 3 or so enemies. A few well placed Unmends and a well timed Unleashed or two is going to almost always give better results when pulling.

Abyssal Drain is 15y.

[Cooperal]

I barely use it but I sure know what it's for. Big pulls. Not for bosses. Not for dungeons where more than 5 trash will push you into a reasonably serious risk. Places that you're very well geared for like Fractal/Neverreap trash.

If you use it where you're supposed to be using it, the self-heal will actually be significant (gaining hate from one enemy for every extra enemy that's hit) and blood price will be at its most effective, erasing the cost of DA and AD in pretty short order. I'll typically use it near the front-end of a battle with the weaklings, before a single one has fallen. In a lower gear case it's helping you when the hoard of enemies is at its strongest, in a higher gear case it's allowing a healer to branch further out of healing.

There's really nothing critical about it. It makes larger groups more bearable where someone would be a little worse off if unleash was their only instant AoE and a time-consuming soul-eater combo was their best self-heal. It's like it was designed to be awful in serious content, while it's true purpose lies in making speed runs accessible slightly earlier.

It's just one of those things. Every job has a few abilities that just shouldn't used for comparisons when facing elite content, because they're openly tailored to something other than that. I am saddened to have stained my eyes with such a discussion.

[Agrieus]

Unleash is a moderately low cost effective way to generate initial aggro. Abyssal Drain is a High cost but effective way to recover HP against many enemies. This is the purpose of the two moves and how they're supposed to be used. Do they both build aggro? Sure....but abyssal drain is used more for the HP recovery and not so much for the aggro. CAN you use abyssal drain to start a pull? Sure...most don't, however, because most would rather save the difference in MP to use to DA boost Soul Eater or another ability. When running Dark Knight, you don't really wanna use more mp than what you really need to use since the job as a whole revolves around MP management. You also shouldn't be using blood price until after you've already established aggro on your target(s) since if you use it before you pull, you're wasting several seconds on BP's timer just to get all the target(s) in order.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

On the topic of WAR DPS in A2S:



I've seen some other WARs pull similar numbers. This was with i200 weapon and i150 crafted accessories, by the way (2nd clear). I could see pulling 1300 maybe (with that gear) if packs were fully optimized. Any more than that would probably require Goad, but I'm not sure.

[LordHousewife]

Unleash is a moderately low cost effective way to generate initial aggro. Abyssal Drain is a High cost but effective way to recover HP against many enemies. This is the purpose of the two moves and how they're supposed to be used.

There is a difference in mana cost of 177 at level 60. That's pretty negligible. They don't need two abilities that do the exact same thing. The only real difference between the two is that one is ranged.

Do they both build aggro? Sure....but abyssal drain is used more for the HP recovery and not so much for the aggro.

I am going to have to stop you right here. The drain is far too costly. In reality, the only time you should be using it is when you would otherwise overheal your mana via Blood Price if you didn't use Dark Arts AND the enemies you are fighting cannot be evaded/blinded. If enemies can be evaded/blinded, you should always prioritize Dark Dance or Dark Passenger over Abyssal Drain as they will always mitigate more damage than what Abyssal Drain could heal you for and they'll do it for a lesser cost. Abyssal Drain is not used for the HP recovery except on rare occasions. It's used for the damage and threat leading me back to my original point that Unleash and Abyssal Drain, can and should be merged into one ability. There are scenarios where both are used, but in reality only one of them is needed.

[Agrieus]

There is a difference in mana cost of 177 at level 60. That's pretty negligible. They don't need two abilities that do the exact same thing. The only real difference between the two is that one is ranged.

This is true, but you have to keep in mind of repeated use of the abilities. 177 becomes 354 then 354 becomes 531 and so on and so forth. And the two abilities don't do the same thing. They're very similar, but not the same. God, have you never spammed Abyssal drain with Dark Arts in A2 or Neverreap in big pulls while blood price is going? It's glorious. The more enemies there are, the better abyssal drain is.

The drain is far too costly.

While I do agree with you that the cost of using Dark Arts with Abyssal Drain is too high, having blood price up while getting hit by multiple enemies makes this negligible as, just as you said, your mp is constantly going to be over healed through BP. Your HP will also probably be over healed with Abyssal Drain while still receiving heals from the healer. You CAN use Dark Dance with Dark Passenger IF YOU WANT but you can easily just use Dark Arts with Abyssal Drain too, as both work well. Abyssal Drain just hits all your enemies constantly which increases dps, heals you for several hundred per hit, and is a lot of fun to watch. I'm not saying you're wrong, but from a dps stand point, you're better off with spamming abyssal drain when BP is up with enough enemies around.

[Giantbane]

They're very similar.

That's really big gripe though, they're TOO similar. If they just flat out removed unleash I wouldn't feel like I'd lost very much.

And if they reduced the abyssal cost to unleash or made it so abyssal didn't break combos, I don't think it would be terribly overpowered or anything.

[SpecialKK]

Anyway back to the Unleashed & Abyssal Drain topic...

If some people still don't understand that Abyssal Drain can't solve every situations and that every tanks needs at least 2 different AoE in this game, there is nothing we can do about it, experience will teach them.
Now I also believe that SE could've done things slightly differently to prevent these skills from being so redundant, but as of today I've yet to see a good suggestion that isn't gamebreaking. DRK doesn't need to be "better".


Radius is 5y.

It is not that there isn't usage variance, it's that is negligible that both can be done by combining the skill into one.

As phonecia has said, blood bath doesn't work with these aoes since they are magical.

A TP aoe would work well with bath, but we already have our own issues with tp.