DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

[SyzzleSpark]

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Nothing personal, but I aggressively disagree with most of this post.

I'll start off just by saying that what you suggest could work with massive buffs to our resource generation as you said, but this doesn't actually fix the core problem. You give the job more resources, then there's just that much more incentive to use as small a portion of those resources on mitigation as possible. If we go from generating an average of 1000 MPS to 2000 MPS it still just means we'll want that much more of that mana to go to DA or AoEs instead of mitigation.

Resource based mitigation isn't a playstyle, its a handicap, particularly when our DPS is resource based as well. Paying for DA-DM and TBN is already an obnoxious cost, so making the entirety of our kit like this will doubtlessly not be a popular change. Its akin to making FoF or Berserk or Requiescat share recast timers with Sentinel or Vengeance or ToB. I can only imagine the rage changes like that would cause, and rightfully so. Making defensive skills and offensive skills share recasts with one another is almost exactly the same concept and effect as making our entire kit resource based.

Our DPS is resource based, and that is fine, but in a sense, almost every job in this game is resource based in one way or another, and to varying extents, so I submit that this is not an identity or a playstyle in any real sense of either term.

I once again have to agree with Crater's analysis in the thread/post I linked above, which is that DRK is about active DPS, and active mitigation. If there's anything that SE has done successfully with DRK its giving it this identity. You don't push Berserk and get a 30% boost for 20s, you push actively push DA and get an on-demand, Berserk-style boost on a per-GCD basis. TBN works in almost the exact same way, but for defensive merit rather than offensive. Resources are the problem, not the solution.

Now that I think of it, its kinda funny that people complain about PLD's gauge being used only for defense, because this actually works in the job's favor. It pulls from TP and MP for DPS and its gauge for defense. There's no conflict of interest in that design, such as it is (there could be more uses for the gauge altogether other than the mere 2 that currently exist, but I digress). This is not to say I would want Blood Gauge usage to be purely defensive/offensive, and Mana usage to be purely the other, but its interesting to note.

An interesting mechanic SE seems to be testing the waters with is the exchange of these resources, which is what needs to be expanded on. TBN is already a little pass-fail game mechanic of its own. If you use it properly, it pops, it gives you something back for your investment. Currently however, you don't cut a profit from this. 2400 Mana that can be spent OFF the GCD > 50 Blood Gauge that, outside of Delirium, can only be spent ON the GCD. 4.0 DRK is old enough now that timing TBN is not as daunting as it was at first, but that still doesn't fix the problem. A popped TBN is only a gain in Grit, which means overall, its a loss. You put all of our defensives on this same price-cost markup, and you've just made a tank that literally never wants to tank.

SE has already committed to an active tanking playstyle with DRK and this was true in 3.x as well. There's not a problem with this design, and again, as stated in that link I posted earlier, I have to agree that this is pretty much DRK's entire reason for existing in the game. We go your route and we end up with just a really expensive WAR/PLD clone that can't DPS and mitigate in harmony. The problem isn't in the design of the job, honestly, but in its tuning. Costs are too high and benefits are too paltry. The best way to remedy this is to expand on TBN as a resource converter, possibly add more resource conversion into the job's toolkit, and reward us more concretely for mastering it on a fight-by-fight basis. TBN is already such a large proportion of our total mitigation now that there isn't any need to design our other CDs in this same fashion, and DM already is a middle ground between the two in terms of resource usage (or it should be, if they can simply have it work on physical damage.)

There's other design choices in DRK that really don't make sense or jive with this active playstyle, but are just tacked-on. TBN works mechanically for what it is, but things like Living Dead and Sole Survivor are just overly-conditional, meandering, convoluted "if/if not-then" nonsense and frankly just need to be simplified. Simple solutions and simplification in general were supposed to be a defining motif for this expansion. LD could just be a 12s Holmgang with a longer recast. Sole Survivor could just be an instant 20% HP/MP restore and it frankly wouldn't be broken given its recast compared to the accessibility of Equilibrium and Clemency. These have nothing to do with a resource-based or active playstyle, and are just messy and needless.

They just need to fix DP, make TBN a significant DPS gain when used properly, and either cut Shadow Wall's recast and increase its duration, or (preferably) make DM work on all damage types. There's other tweaks here and there that could be made (LD, Sole Survivor, etc...) but if they could just fix these 3 things, everyone's life would be so much easier.