DRK Consolidated Feedback Thread

[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).