Quote Originally Posted by SyzzleSpark View Post
snip
You have touched on the current design flaw with DRK in 4.0, "choice without meaning".

With the redesign of DRK for Stormblood we saw an increase of "choice" with DA usage becoming a greater and more frequent aspect of our game-play. However, as has been pointed out, while more options and choices were given the results are all virtually the same with being a standardized potency boost and therefore the choices feel meaningless because no matter what choice you make it ends up pretty much the same or with such slight differences that it doesn't really matter. Strangely enough, this is what I believe lead to or at least contributed to the feeling for some that DRK had been "dumbed down". While technically the job had complexity added to it by providing more options, it felt more simple because the choices provided little variance in result so it was easy to get consistent results no matter what you did.

To put it more simply, in 3.X DRK had less DA options and frequency of use which resulted in more relative value for each DA option and use. So far in 4.X there was an increase in options and frequency of use while not having differing returns on those options and so the relative value of the greater number of options decreased greatly.
It's like walking into an ice cream shop that serves only vanilla and your only options are what color cup the vanilla ice cream is served in.

As you, myself and others have brought up, this should be solved by attaching differing and meaningful additional effects to abilities based on whether or not they are being DAed and/or whether or not Grit is active.

For example, let's take Soul Eater and Syphon Strike.
Pretty straightforward abilities. SE does more damage when DAed and provides a small heal in Grit. Syphon has the same DA potency boost and returns some MP. Really not much difference in which to DA except a little more HP returned from SE. A very lackluster choice that just defaults to DAing SE for miniscule gains.

Now what if Soul Eater instead did the following: an increased % of damage returned as HP when DAed in Grit along with the current potency boost, when DAed out of Grit gives a small amount of Black Blood (20?).

And Syphon did the following: when DAed provides the existing potency boost and an increase to MP gained (25% the cost of a dark arts?).

These abilities are now much more complex and interesting in their usages and interactions with other abilities and resources. You actually have a choice that seems more worthwhile; do you want more HP to soften incoming damage, do you want more resources by trading mp for blood or by slowing mp burn by increasing regain while retaining the potency boost, etc.

I strongly feel it is this conceptual approach that the devs need to take when looking at fixing DRK's issues.