Thread: Cutting number of abilities in 4.0

Originally Posted by Khalithar

Saying the permanent +15% damage is a buff is also misleading, you should be keeping Darkside up 100% of the time you're in combat, Drk should ALWAYS have the +15% damage. That being said, Darkside needed something to make it more interesting, folding Blood Weapon in to it is the best bet in my opinion.

I'm not saying that the 15% is a buff to Darkside, I'm saying that that, along with everything else on the Darkside buff, is rather excessive. Even if you made it a true stance and thus mutually exclusive with Grit that all combined is still far above anything Sword Oath or Deliverance provides.

As far resources go, good drk's manage their mp fine,

And the changes you suggest get rid of almost all of that management effort when every hit you make and take forever feed you MP.

I really don't think losing Awareness, Foresight, and Convalescence is that big a loss.

It would require considerable rebalancing of all existing content. Everything will have to hit harder baseline because there'd be no threat otherwise due to easier healing and no spikes beyond tank busters. Situations where crits are normally guaranteed are prevented by Awareness, so either the passive doesn't take priority and thus loses it's primary purpose or it utterly trivializes the only periods where crits are a threat.
The loss of these abilities also messes with enmity generation to an extent. As I recall every buff you use generates about 210 potency worth of enmity to everything in combat. 14/19.25 a second (those plus BP, BW, DD) lost to Dark Knight, 6.42 a second (those and Bulwark) for Paladin, 5.8 a second for Warrior. This is comparable to, or worse than, taking away Salted Earth (11.5 per second), Circle of Scorn's dot (6 per second), or requiring a stack of 10 Abandon (and permitting such a stack) to use Decimate (variable but roughly 1.3, 2.6 with the two Storms in a combo idea, per second on weaponskill combos alone). Unless I'm screwing my math up somewhere.