DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

[SyzzleSpark]

Quoting this here for how appropriate it is, originally from the tank balance thread:

With regards to TBN, I don't think the devs are specifically balancing around it. The value of TBN depends on the relative potency of Bloodspiller to that of your average combo action. Make Bloodspiller more powerful, and TBN becomes more powerful. Make combo actions more powerful, then TBN becomes less so. What happened over the past two patches is this: in 4.01, Bloodspiller was buffed out of Grit. This made it a dps gain on average. In 4.05, SE was buffed. This made it a dps loss on average. In both patches, it is never a consistent gain or loss, either, as it depends on which GCD combo action it replaces.

What probably happened was this. The devs created an ability which blocks an attack for either yourself or a friend. And when the shield shatters, you launch into a counterattack! That feels pretty fun! And they probably didn't think about it a whole lot further.

The problem is that most of DRK's new actions are interrelated, so flat potency gains just shift around your priorities, rather than giving you the needed dps boost. DRK's issues at the moment are resource related, rather than potency related.

DRK's rotation and damage dealing capabilities particularly when it comes to burst, feel the way they do because every action you make towards the job's priority system doesn't actually net you a gain of any kind, you're filling one cup and draining the other. Thus, we wind up with a job that looks like a meal on a plate that hasn't been touched, but its contents have been shuffled around to give the appearance of someone having actually eaten something. This is pretty much the entire dynamic of TBN-Bloodspiller, and it becomes the larger dynamic of DRK as a whole, since those two abilities were designed, almost single-handedly (a little help from Delirium) to replace a metric-fuckton of potency, utility, and mitigation that they removed, for reasons I still don't quite fathom.

Because they can't make up their damn minds what they want for us, its become an extremely frustrating job to optimize, as you're optimizing for pennies on the dollar. You're given the illusion of all these choices but in terms of DPS and even raid utility/mitigation, those choices make about as much difference as flavor response dialogue in most RPGs, and are similarly dissatisfying. Every time you pop a TBN and use Bloodspiller, the DRK next to you that didn't and simply DAed his Souleater is doing probably almost the exact same DPS, all other things being equal. Here's a resource. Use it. Doesn't matter how, just use it. Push buttons.

Right now, I use TBN any time I think it will pop, not because I know its a gain or a loss, but because if I don't I'm just ignoring that button outside of tankbusters, and then it feels like I'm not playing my full job. Having to participate in a zero-sum mechanic out of nothing greater than a personal obligation to use all of your job's tools even if it makes no difference to your performance is an awful feeling. And honestly, its this kind of banality that drives me up the wall, as it doesn't jump out as a problem in such a way that people will complain loudly about it.

In the spirit of that sentiment, us all keeping this thread on the front page until the next patch will hopefully go some distance towards getting the kind of changes we want to make the job satisfying on this level again.