DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

[347SPECTRE]

Nope, never try to rely on Soul Eater self heal, it's crap. It might help a little but it's not gonna get you too far.

[Galgarion]

Nope, never try to rely on Soul Eater self heal, it's crap. It might help a little but it's not gonna get you too far.

Ouuuuch. Thanks for the warning.

[Lyth]

...

I don't think that TBN is "designed" as a break-even skill; its value is dependent on several external variables (SE potency, BS potency, DA potency), which is why its value fluctuates with every minor patch. Even when it "breaks-even" on average, there are some multiples of TBN usage which will be a net gain, and others which will be a net loss. If you somehow plan for all this and make it just about break-even out of Grit, then it ends up being a dps gain in Grit.

The present system is a lot more convoluted.

It's also worth pointing out that situational dps gains are new to DRK. Sole Survivor usage is very encounter-specific. Some fights have fairly regular add spawns. Others reward your creativity for throwing out SoSu on destructible objects, like giant swords and rocks. Some fights may never have anything that you can use the ability on. None of this has an earth-shattering effect on your dps; they're just a small reward for players who know how to use them. That's usually the draw of DRK over playing a simpler tank.

Having TBN commit to being a consistent gain would promote its use. You are not a White Mage. TBN is not a poor man's Divine Benison. This is a shield which triggers a counterattack. It would be nice to actively try to get procs off of your teammates, rather than feel like you need to hold off shielding because it's a dps loss and you no longer need the extra buffer outside of prog.

There are two ways of doing this. Either give Bloodspiller MP gain (i.e. one Syphon Strike's worth) so that it's not such a marginal gain over Syphon Strike and Souleater, or have TBN also apply a DA effect to your next Bloodspiller/Quietus when it breaks. The balance has to swing so that your blood moves feel more powerful, in order for this to happen.

[NymeriaVelaris]

I don't think that TBN is "designed" as a break-even skill; its value is dependent on several external variables

You think its a coincidence TBN is a break even skill despite being dependent on so many variables?

I doubt that. Its obviously intended this way. The changes in past patches were just fine tuning to reach the current sweetspot.

Having TBN commit to being a consistent gain would promote its use. You are not a White Mage. TBN is not a poor man's Divine Benison. This is a shield which triggers a counterattack. It would be nice to actively try to get procs off of your teammates, rather than feel like you need to hold off shielding because it's a dps loss and you no longer need the extra buffer outside of prog.

It is no dps loss on average though.


Sole Survivor is a very weak skill with a 2 minutes cooldown, ofcourse it doesnt affect DRK dps by much.


TBN has a 15 seconds cooldown.

Currently in a 10 minutes fight the average DRK uses TBN around 5-15 times while being able to optimize dps.
If a successful TBN would be a significant DPS increase, it would mean an average use of 3-4 TBNs per minute if you want to optimize your dps.

It would require 30-40 successful TBN uses in a 10 minute fight for max dps.

An insane skill ceiling increase and a nightmare to optimize.
And if you are doing any content which doesnt have enough outgoing damage DRK dps would always suffer.

[Lyth]

You think its a coincidence TBN is a break even skill despite being dependent on so many variables?

It isn't really, though. It's a clear dps gain if you truncate out a Hard Slash from the encounter. It's a significant dps loss if you truncate out a Syphon Strike or Souleater. You only break even when you truncate an entire combo, which resets it to being about even. There are certain multiples of TBN which are dps gains, certain multiples which are dps losses, and certain multiples where you just about break even.The only way to find out is to map out all of the encounter GCDs and math it out on each fight. That's a level of complexity above what I'm proposing, and most people just don't bother with it. It would be significantly better to know if it was a consistent gain or loss, regardless of the GCD layout of the fight.

And that's just when you're out of Grit. The potency trade-offs are different once you're actually in Grit. It also depends on which patch that you're talking about. I've had to recalculate the trade-off from scratch in 4.00, 4.01, and 4.05, and none of these were direct changes to TBN. It's never consistently been a gain, loss, or even.

So no, I really, really don't think it's by deliberate design.

Sole Survivor is an undertuned skill with 2 minutes cooldown, ofcourse it doesnt affect DRK dps by much.

Sole Survivor is still a situational gain, though, and it's thankfully a consistent one at that (i.e. it's never a dps loss to use it). If you're looking to perfectly optimise the fight, then you're going to use SoSu wherever you can. But it's not going to compensate for you missing GCDs or not perfecting your rotation elsewhere.

The same is true for TBN. Making it into a consistent dps gain isn't going to upturn everything you know about the job. You should know the mitigation timings for both tanks anyways. But you shouldn't be holding back a TBN cast on your co-tank simply because you can't remember if the next GCD to be truncated by Bloodspiller is going to be a dps gain or loss. That basically defeats the purpose of the skill.

If you're doing content with fewer AoEs, does SAM suffer due to a lack of Third Eye procs?

[NymeriaVelaris]

It isn't really, though. It's a clear dps gain if you truncate out a Hard Slash from the encounter. It's a significant dps loss if you truncate out a Syphon Strike or Souleater. You only break even when you truncate an entire combo, which resets it to being about even.

You can save Bloodspiller, finish your combo, and use it when the boss comes back. Nothing lost.
Planning out GCDs for an entire fight is indeed too complex and therefore we should only consider the average gain/loss, which is even. And if you consider healer dps its a gain.

The same is true for TBN. Making it into a consistent dps gain isn't going to upturn everything you know about the job.

As i said, instead of 5-15 TBN uses in a 10 minute fight we are looking at 30-40 uses if you want to optimize. And these 30-40 uses will have to be applied on basically everything the boss throws at you, including auto attacks. On top of that if you fail (which is much more likely with more risky uses), the dps loss would be even bigger than it is now. So yes, ofcourse it would change the gameplay in a big way and increase the skill ceiling tremendously.

[SyzzleSpark]

increase the skill ceiling tremendously.

Well yeah, that's what a lot of us want. 99% of the problems with DRK right now can be summed up as "more effort, less payoff". We're asking for "more effort, more payoff" which is what we enjoyed in 3.x.

[Lyth]

...

I'm not sure that I follow. Bloodspiller isn't a flat gain. Because it costs a GCD, the net potency gain is reduced by the value of the GCD it replaces. You have no control over this. Holding the Bloodspiller doesn't change this. It has to do with the fact that we have relatively high combo potencies with resources stacked on to it, so Bloodspiller is only an 96-100 potency gain on two of the three combo steps. Fell Cleave is a bigger impact move in comparison because WAR has lower combo potencies and a bigger difference between the two.

I don't think TBN should break off of autos, but that's a consequence of the fact that they made the ally shield weaker. The personal shield is the correct difficulty level.

[NymeriaVelaris]

Well yeah, that's what a lot of us want

Yes people would like more depth to the dps rotation. But I highly doubt there are many people who want it to be done like you suggested. Even 3.x DRK was easier to optimize compared to what you ask for. Aside from the fact that it would make the class weaker overall on any content without enough outgoing damage to break TBN constantly. Noone really wants that.
I also think that trying to proc TBN every 15 seconds wouldnt be a fun gameplay mechanic but thats just my personal view.

I would prefer changes to Dark Passenger and Sole Survivor, to make them regular and impactful parts of the rotation. That would already help quite a bit.

I'm not sure that I follow. Bloodspiller isn't a flat gain. Because it costs a GCD, the net potency gain is reduced by the value of the GCD it replaces. You have no control over this.

You can save up to 2 Bloodspillers. If there is a downtime during a boss fight you can adapt your usages so you end the phase with souleater to avoid losing Bloodspiller value.

[SyzzleSpark]

Noone really wants that.

I'm still waiting for you to make an actual, constructive suggestion, or counter-suggestion, or even a change of subject. All you've really done in here is tell people "no." This isn't an attack by the way, its an observation.

Quantity and quality of the kinds of DPS gains we've been talking about do matter. From 4.01 to 4.05 it was technically a gain to hit TBN any time you knew it would pop, regardless of stance, and yet, the world kept spinning and none of the servers went down. It was a very small gain but still worth taking heed of if you cared about optimization. You didn't have to muck around with all this GCD mapping nonsense that I'm in disbelief that anyone would actually put themselves through. All you had to worry about was "when is the damage coming, and how much, and do I have the mana for TBN/will it be off recast when I need it again" - as it should be.

What some folks wanted at first was for the job to actually be less reliant on TBN. For the job's other CDs like Shadow Wall and Dark Mind to be brought up to speed, since they're lacking in some ways. Then a guy came along and pointed out that then DRK would just be WAR/PLD junior and that TBN had become a part of its identity: active mitigation. So people are trying to embrace TBN, however in doing so people want it to not have this tedious resource entanglement that it has. Forget its DPS component; even to reap the optimum mitigation rewards requires probably more fight knowledge and raid awareness than simply hitting Rampart or the like and then kickin' it for 20 seconds. I fail to see the issue with making this kind of active playstyle rewarding in a way that matters, for the sole reason that it asks more of the player.

Think about why this would feel good from a game design standpoint. Currently the number of times you can push TBN and have it pop in a given fight FAR exceeds the amount of times it is actually required from a mitigation standpoint. This is where all the headroom is right now for the skill ceiling to go up. Right now its completely empty. Lightning AoEs and Roar in o1s pops it. Gravitational Wave/Manipulation in o2s pops it. Dimensional Wave in o3s pops it. Literally any raid AoE in o4s will pop it. Right now you've got this feeling of "hey, I could pop this right now, even though I don't need it to survive and its mitigation is totally unneeded since I'll be getting the same healing as the rest of the raid, and it would be a DPS gai- oh wait..." I fail to see what would be broken about giving the player the option to observe these mechanics and apply an ability suitable to mitigate them, for a small DPS gain. How is this not what anyone would want from a game design standpoint? Why would you want this muddy grey area wherein an ability that is clearly applicable to a situation is worth literally nothing?

It also doesn't matter how much you overgear content currently, with the way damage is scaling. For an o3s auto attack to not pop TBN out of Grit with no other cooldowns running, you'd have to have close to 70K HP. A DRK is not going to have enough HP to render TBN impossible to pop on any given fight until that fight is no longer current content even for speed-runners/parse-runs.

I also think the idea of a DRK taking unnecessary damage to net a gain of a few dozen potency is ludicrous, as any intelligent player would see that that is inefficient in terms of raid DPS. You need not factor in poor play in discussions about hypothetical skill-ceiling increases, they're irrelevant. The fact is, there is a surplus of damage in these raids that would pop TBN but for which TBN is not necessary or even helpful from a mitigation standpoint, so it just sits there, having come off recast ages ago, unused. Sheltron is a DPS gain in the same way, and yet I've not heard a single syllable from any PLD mains about this non-issue you keep bringing up being a problem. It is mitigation for a net gain in DPS resources that can be used a lot more frequently than is required to survive (I cite the numerous PLD statements of "sitting on 100 Oath gauge" for reference).