DRK math for Media Tour information

[Zayatani]

Hello, I've been a lot on DRK now that we've got the new tooltips from the media tour. Most people seem to think DRK is rather good. I'm here thinking its actually not very good. And this is not only because PLD appears to be 30% ahead of DRK in potency with way more mitigation, but rather because the new changes seems to quite bad frankly. Let's start with the new abilities!

• Delirium

Delirium is a 120 second cooldown ability, which extends the duration of Blood Weapon and Blood Price with 8s and 16s respectively, generates 2400 mana and costs 50 gauge.
Blood Price being locked behind grit makes that part almost worthless outside of dungeons. The gain from extending Blood Weapon 8 seconds results in 7 extra hits in a normal scenario. This means 7*480+2400 (5760) mana gained and 21 blood gauge recovered. This is 2.4 Dark arts or 336 potency, the lost Blood Gauge is worth (29/50)*(380-250) (75.4) potency. This is equal to a 260.6 potency gain if you get full uptime on the extended BW. When all is said and done, it’s a convoluted, glorified 2 minute, 260.6 potency cooldown.

• Quietus

You would want to use this move you will be in a situation with trash mobs, and thus would be in grit and have access to Blood Price, which nets you 5 gauge per hit taken. The potency of the move in grit would be 128 without Dark arts and 168 with it. Due to Blood Price giving back 4800 mana for every 50 gauge, this is move will more or less always be used with Dark Arts, which makes this a good tool for extended periods of trash mobs, such as dungeons. Delirium is also significantly more powerful in this situation. It is also worth noting that incase one has 17 enemies aggroed, using Blood Weapon and tanking out of grit will result in unlimited casts of Dark Arted Quietus’. But for a raid scenario, the discussion about Quietus is mostly a footnote.

• Bloodspiller

Bloodspiller is a 380 potency Weapon Skill which increases to 475 while in grit. Dark Arts adds 140 potency, pushing base potency up to 520 potency, which increases to 650 potency while in grit. It costs 50 gauge.

To start off with, the grit bonuses just equals out to ignoring the penalty while in grit. While the move is your highest potency move and it is worth using when available in our rotation. However it’s hardly good compared to a move we lost: Scourge. Since they fill the same kind of function in our rotation, I do think it’s a fair comparison. Every 45 Seconds we will generate enough for 2 Bloodspillers. This means at 4:30 we’d have used 12 Bloodpillers in and 9 Scourges in 3.x. The former is worth 4560 potency, the latter is worth 4500. “But thats more potencies for the Bloodspillers!” I hear someone say. You also lose an entire Souleater combo, which is worth 750 potency, meaning the standing of the moves is actually 3710 vs 4500. Values with slashing up is 4191 vs 4590. The average Bloodspiller in this scenario is worth a total of 399 potency against the Scourges 510. It needs at least 30 extra base potency in order to break even with Scourge.

• The Blackest Night

The Blackest Night is an Ability with a 15 second CD that costs 2400 mana. If used on self it shields for 20% of your maximum HP and shields for 10% if used on an ally. When it expires it generates 50 gauge.
On a hasty first look, it looks rather good. A defensive utility which also grants a “free” Bloodspiller or Quietus. If one sits down and does the math, one is bound to be depressed. Due to the low potency of Bloodspiller, the shield is actually a potency loss on average. This is because for each use of The Blackest Night and useage of the consequtive Bloodspiller, one delays the combo one step. This means that every 3 Blackest Nights used is a lost Soul Eater combo, which is 750 potency, as previously established. In addition to this, we have lost 7200 mana from activating the ability, which in turn is worth 420 potency. This totals to a 1170 potency loss, compared to the three 380 potency moves gained, totaling on 1140 potency. Every 3 Blackest Nights used is thus a 30 potency loss on average. If one wants to do slightly more complex math each Hard Slash pushed out of a rotation this way is a 90 potency gain, every Syphon Strike a 80 potency lost and every Soul Eater 40 potency lost. Since weapon skills are lost in reverse order when pushed out of a rotation, assuming one would have ended on a souleater, you will never gain potency from using The Blackest Night. The only times The Blackest Night is a gain is if you would have ended up using a Hard Slash as last Weapon Skill on a boss or if you push a single Syphon Strike and a Hard Slash out of the rotation, in which case it would be a 90 potency gain for the former and a 10 potency gain for the latter. Any further Blackest Nights used than those two is a personal DPS loss. To never lose potency from utilizing the skill, Bloodspiller would need at least an extra 120 potency added to its base amount.
Due to these things, it is a defensive CD with a very situational upside which is mostly a problem which ties back into that the base potency for Bloodspiller is really bad. For generation of AoE damage, it is actually not quite as bad in that you need 3 or more enemies for it to be a gain in potency to use, not counting any effects grit might have.


Things We Lost

We lost a fair few skill in the ability pruning, most of them was actually quite bad to lose for us as the damage lost was never made up somewhere else even though the utility was. Much of these changes was made in the interests of raising the skill floor and lowering the ceiling too.

• Blood Price

Being gated behind grit is perhaps the worst thing to to the job and if it wasn’t for the fact that Darkside no longer continuously drains mana, it would have been devastating to the mana management of DRK. Sadly the removal of drain from Darkside removed the penalty for mismanaging mana other than being low on said resource when needed to pick up adds.
Dark Dance
It might have had one of the more disliked abilities on DRK amongst the general community, but it was still a very good one, not for its defenses but for the chances to parry which results in more low blows and reprisals.
Reprisal and Low Blow
While we did not lose the utility of the two skills, we lost the damage. Together they represented between 3.5%-5% of our total DPS in a normal scenario, which is made up by the increased damage Darkside.

• Delirium

Delirium was the other combo finisher which lowered the targets int with 10% for 20 seconds. It had its base potency moved to Soul Eater, which makes the difference in damage from the loss of the combo option 0. While the removal of 10% less int is a bit sad, these effects were removed across the board and not just removed from DRK.

• Dark Passenger

Due to the mana cost being increased to that of a Dark Arts and the potency being at 150 means that it is only worth using in burst windows where you cannot push more Dark Arts into weapon skills as slashing vulnerability will increase the worth of a Dark Arts to 154. Against multiple targets and in parties without slashing vulnerability it is still better than a Dark Arts.
Scourge
The dot with a 100 initial hit and 400 potency over 30 seconds. It is a skill which was incredibly powerful when managed right and was usually between 6 and 7% of our total DPS. The closest thing to a replacement we have is Bloodspiller, at a tiny bit below 4/5ths of the potency over the course of a fight.

Conclusion
DRK lost a fair bit of complexity, the new gauge is not a management aspect apart from using the new Delirium once every 2 minutes, which means that when you have have 45 seconds left on the CD you should not use a Bloodspiller unless you risk capping out at 100. The mana management aspect was also almost entirely removed as there is now no real downside to bottoming out on mana other than not being able to efficiently pick up adds whereas in the old world it would have lost the player 15% damage and locked them out of several abilities. While this was done in order to raise the skill floor so that newer players would have had an easier time to play, it also completely removed the DRKs mana management aspect as the drawbacks of mismanaging became entirely marginalized. The new Gauge also is entirely devoid of interesting decisions as the the three spenders have three very strict times when they are of use. The Blackest Night is an undesirable skill for two reasons, the first is that it already increases the already spammy environment of the DRK, which was one of the main complaints I heard in my circles, the second is related to Bloodspiller being bad which i sincerely hope is fixed by the release of SB.

Additional Notes
Average Potency Per GCD compared to the other tanks, this more or less translates to DPS once all is said and done, more is better. WAR has 458.7 potency/GCD, DRK has 430.6 and PLD has 562.5. That is 30% more potency for PLD than for DRK and 22.8% ahead of WAR. The difference between DRK and WAR is much smaller with WAR being 6.5% ahead of DRK. It is not quite the same % differences in practice for DPS, however unless formulas has changed a lot compared to now, they are good enough as ballpark numbers. This is a very clear disparity between them with the current numbers. The things I have brought up does not attempt to solve this disparity, but rather to solve the problems that exists within a vacuum. This disparity however is something which absolutely needs to be changed and that definitely needs to be looked over by square and confirm that it does not have damage disparities similar to the potency/GCD disparities.

There is also a picture in japanese (from Famitsu) of Sole Survivor gaining its PvP effect for PvE, which while it would be a good ability is extremely boring and once again adds nothing to the jobs playstyle. It also potentialy creates an undesirable situation where DRKs main selling point would be a large raid damage increase rather than the rest of the kit.

Finally, while I have done my best to guarantee accurate math, there is a chance that I have made errors, if you spot any, please tell me so that I can correct it.

[MiniPrinny]

Thank you for cross-posting this. I think this information really needs to be spread. And while its true that Dark Knights are by far the worst off considering the information we possess at the moment, I believe Warrior also needs to be looked at.

[aqskerorokero]

Just for clarification, Pld gets only skills that it deserves, and that war and drk already got.

To me the situation between 3 tanks now on info is like "rock paper scissors", no tank can be better than one and be better than other one. More fair compare to 3.x

[MiniPrinny]

Just for clarification, Pld gets only skills that it deserves, and that war and drk already got.

To me the situation between 3 tanks now on info is like "rock paper scissors", no tank can be better than one and be better than other one. More fair compare to 3.x

What exactly is this rock, paper, scissors relationship anyway? Because what I see is two pairs of scissors and a single rock. Dark Knight and Warrior are both offensive tanks, which should be fine. But, both Dark Knight and Warrior lack the two things that Paladin has: utility, and now damage, assuming these values remain mostly the same. (Never thought I'd say that.)

Both Dark Knight and Warrior currently have one confirmed utility ability each. Warriors have Maim, which is a slashing debuff. Maim is unfortunately not as valued, since only Dark Knight and Paladin benefit from it now, and only if there isn't a Samurai or Ninja in the party, since both Ninjas and Samurai apply slashing resistance debuffs in their main rotations now.

Dark Knights on the other end, have the Darkest Night as their sole confirmed form of support. The Darkest Night, for all intents and purposes, is an adloquium-type effect. This works considering Dark Knight's flavor, lore, and all that, it functions as a polar opposite of Clemency. However, this is far from an ideal ability, since it can be self-cast and is tied to the Dark Knight's damage output, reducing their strength as support and causing this move to be used on cooldown, as stated.

This leaves Paladin with a venerable monopoly on support abilities. They have Clemency, which functions as a "Cure II;" Divine Veil and Passage of Arms are both incredible party-wide mitigation abilities; Intervention in many ways is a better Cover, while Cover is nothing to laugh at either; and this is to say nothing of their remaining monopoly on GCD crowd control, which seems to find a home in every expansion.

Additionally, Paladins possess an iron wall of defensive tools. Passage of Arms functions as a second Sheltron, which is already now a second Rampart; Sentinel is still stronger than both Vengeance and Shadow Wall; Bulwark is stronger for burst damage than the "new" Anticipation, and always was stronger for burst damage than Dark Dance; and do I even have to mention how disgusting Hallowed Ground is when compared to Holmgang and Living Dead?

So please, inform the crowd, what exactly do Paladins not do that Dark Knights and Warriors do?

[eagledorf]

Sentinel is still stronger than both Vengeance and Shadow Wall [...] and do I even have to mention how disgusting Hallowed Ground is when compared to Holmgang and Living Dead?

To this point, I always felt the shorter CD on Vengeance made it superior or at least equal to Sentinel, though I agree that Shadow Wall is clearly substantially weaker that either of them. I feel similarly about the three invincibility skills.

Likewise, DRK really is the odd one out for mitigation in general. They lack the burst self-healing that WAR and PLD have as well. I've felt that DRK was poorly designed since 3.0 and PLD's woes in raids had largely to do with SE making them hit very weak and including a lot of magic to accommodate their flawed new tank. For example, the tank damage in A4S actually hit basically the same as T13 normal and was all magic. In dungeons and in DPS, PLD suffered it's own obvious design flaws, but that's another story.

[Mahono]

Just for clarification, Pld gets only skills that it deserves, and that war and drk already got.

To me the situation between 3 tanks now on info is like "rock paper scissors", no tank can be better than one and be better than other one. More fair compare to 3.x

The issue is not what PLD got, "When something is not broken there is no need to fix it" DRK and WAR shouldve been left untouched if this is what they had in mind. Imo PLD got improved, kudos to that but there was no need to bring down the other 2 tanks while buffing PLD

[eagledorf]

Just a few thoughts.

First I want to be positive and say that I am very happy with the changes overall to tanks. War's new gauge mechanic feels much more natural than Abandon and they finally have a penalty for stance dancing. PLD also finally gets to juggle TP and MP for AoE pulls and even single target, something that thematically has been obvious and the design of FoF always had implied should be the case. A gauge for DRK is basically what I thought the job should have been for 3.0. In fact 4.0 WAR is similar to what I thought DRK should have been with MP instead of Inner Beast gauge. Just in general having not played them yet I think they've done a great job compared to 3.0

Second, I strongly suspect SE intends to make AoE a bigger mechanic in 4.0 based on the addition of an AoE provoke. For this The Blackest Knight and Quietus is very strong and PLD might still be under-tuned given hate must be generated with Flash. I share your fear that PLD might be over-tuned on single target, but we'll have wait to see based on if DRK does get vulnerability on Sole Survivor and how WAR still having the slashing debuff and the new skills (also how potions and all the burst-enhancing toys they're giving out factor in since PLD looks like it will remain fairly smooth in DPS) work out in actual contents. I did notice GB had already been adjusted down slightly in the JP tooltip.

Third I think the gauge mechanic is a bit of a tag-on for PLD and DRK and doesn't quite make sense yet. On PLD, making Sheltron on gauge is cool because it gives flexibility with the CD and I like it a lot (it almost has to be this way since IB is usable three times in a row now...), but making gauge generate on blocks means RNG could screw you on mitigation. That would be very annoying even if it was extremely rare. Gauge is also only for mitigation on PLD so it's basically a fancy and clunky cool down for utility skills as OT. This is even more true on DRK, but it's reversed. The gauge is basically just a fancy CD for new DPS skills and that's why it's so underwhelming for The Blackest Knight + Bloodspiller.

As a band-aid fix, I feel like TBK could have a slightly longer CD and cost less (no?) MP and PLD could generate gauge on damage taken (I like that on block makes bucklers a thing again, but still RNG on mitigation timing for only one hit is...)

As for Delirium and Blood Price, I think it's fine that BP is Grit only since they also adjusted Darkside. As one example why, I used to stand in WoTL in Titan HM to get MP (O:-) )and it was always stupid IMO that you could double dip on MP as OT, but not (theoretically, since we all did it) as MT. I don't like that the combo is just one combo + DA now, but I think the real problem is that the gauge is so unintegrated into the job because of it were more complex having one combo would be more than enough.

[SpookyGhost]

(it almost has to be this way since IB is usable six times in a row now...)

Just a slight correction here: You can only IB, at most, 3 times in a row. Inner Release (the ability that halves gauge cost) is locked to Deliverance. This would also cost you an Infuriate, which is pretty costly DPS-wise. That said I don't think there'll be a reason to IB 3 times in a row, let alone 6, so it doesn't really matter.

[eagledorf]

That's right, I forgot about that limitation. Let's pretend in my defense instead that I was confused by the typo in the tooltip.

(I'll fix my post)

[Falar]

But, but, PLD still does not have a gap closer!

I know DD was not loved by all but DA-DD was a go-to for me in dungeons on large pulls.

There is just so much to lament the loss of:

Scourge
Dark Dance. I don't care about anticipation, we can't DA it and there is no more Reprisal/Low Blow to proc.
Low Blow (that does damage)
Reprisal (that does damage and had a 30s recast and 4x duration)
Unleash why is this nerfed? Doesn't even make sense. At least let DA add some pot to AD
Dark Passenger why is this nerfed in both MP cost and DA potency
Blood Price now being locked to Grit

Compared to what we "gained"

Darkside now 20% and no drain, which I admit is nice
Bloodspiller, a strong single target attack we can occasionally use
Quietus, another AoE attack we can occasionally use
The Blackest Night stoneskin that restores "gage"