Quote Originally Posted by Sousoulsu View Post
DRK's niche is nonexistant. I think a good niche would be selfhealing with damage-shields at key moments. My Souleater redesign would allow for damage smoothing; and their cooldowns being changed to something less potent to compensate for Dark Arts Souleater; while being able to be augmented by Dark Arts to be made different (not just strictly better) would, to me, be a much more interesting design than "Dark PLD". Play into their MP management. Make MP management be a huge part of their mitigation. Something like your Dark Passenger suggestion is great; a huge MP sink to mitigate damage.
Any changes to DRK's mitigation focus would pretty much call for a redesign of the job. Granted, I don't think that's a bad thing, but as I suggested in my write up a couple of pages back, it would also require a redesign of WAR because WAR has the drains and self heals that would be characteristic to DRK.

Assuming it were to get a focus on drains and damage shield, DRK should take drains in a direction beyond "hits mob to recover HP", and regardless of what they do I'd like to see it get something similar to my suggested Dread Spike.
give PLD a defensive resource in 4.0.
PLD is actually very solidly designed, and doesn't really need much of anything as is. Adding more buttons for the sake of adding more buttons to push is not going to help the job nor make it fun.