- Re: Unleash, this is the single most unacceptably bad skill in DRK's arsenal, even though it only applies to low-level content.

You remember 2.x/3.x PLD? The class with such unfathomably poor AoE that people would swear up and down had "no AoE" and did "nothing" in dungeon pulls?

Well, level 50 PLD had Circle of Scorn, for 250 potency every 25 seconds, and they had Rage of Halone, with an average potency of 203.3 per GCD, or 2033 potency over 25 seconds, divided by the number of enemies.
Spamming Unleash, at 50 potency, is only 500 potency every 25 seconds (which ignores that you can't actually use it that often and will run out of MP).

DRK being ahead by only 250 AoE potency over the course of 25 seconds, compared to the 2033 potency PLD could spread around with their RoH combos, means that DRK does as little damage as 2.x PLD at level 50, until you get to a pull with nine enemies.

That is functionally unusable. It is as bad as the class that specifically received a new skill that they slotted in at level 46, instead of waiting until 60+ for new skills like every other class. It needs to be changed.


- Similarly, it doesn't really matter that the math on Power Slash's enmity has some nice synchronicity with the rest of DRK's kit. What matters is that DRK is, by an astounding margin, the worst tank at generating enmity over time, and pays an enormous price for doing so at any time other than an on-pull Grit pull (which they don't even really want to do anyway because WAR still has a stronger pull). There's absolutely no reason for DRK to be, just at a baseline, weaker than the other tanks in terms of enmity generation.

- I made the case for Plunge and Quietus above, and stand by it. Plunge is grossly undertuned, in pretty much all respects, and the DA effect on Quietus is actively detrimental to use. Both should be changed.


- I absolutely vehemently disagree with just about everything you say about defensive cooldowns. The signature aspect of DRK's playstyle - the thing that actually justifies its inclusion in the game compared to just deleting it and working on balancing for WAR/PLD exclusively - is that it's the 'active' tank.

WAR is straightforward: You want to do more damage, you hit the skill that boosts your damage by 30% for 20 seconds. You want to mitigate, you hit the skill that reduces incoming damage by x% for y seconds.

DRK's whole raison d'etre is that it doesn't do that. You don't have a skill that boosts the damage you do for a specific duration; you have Dark Arts, which essentially gives you Berserk on a per-GCD basis. Your primary defense doesn't come from hitting a button that reduces all damage for a particular duration; you have a button that nullifies a specific amount of damage for just the next few seconds. A slight duration increase from 5s to 6s might be in order, just to guarantee that you can always catch at least two auto-attacks with it, but beyond that, no. It feels fantastic to use, it's a lot of fun, and it's incredibly effective. If anything, I would reduce the cooldown, and simply make it less and less MP-efficient the more times you use it in quick succession (but that kind of violates my self-imposed rule of simple, variable-only changes, so I'm less willing to go into what I'd like to do about that).

TBN's effectiveness is really not in question, in the hands of people who know how to use it well; if you play at it for a while, in most fights if you play at it for a while you can easily find yourself mitigating ~15% of all your incoming damage with TBN, which compares quite favorably to even WAR's massive mitigation toolkit - and the key to that is that its effectiveness basically scales up as incoming damage scales down. Mitigating 80% of an one auto-attack eases the healing burden just as much as mitigating 20% of four auto-attacks, and unless you're playing with really skittish healers who don't really have a handle on their role, it's no harder for a healer to capitalize on that mitigation as it would be to deal with running a traditional cooldown.

Bottom-line, defensively: If DRK becomes another tank whose primary source of mitigation is to hit a 'mitigate X% for Ys', then it's just Warrior Jr. Not only does that make the two classes effectively impossible to balance versus one another, but it eliminates a unique and rewarding class playstyle from the game, for no real gain.

- Sole Survivor really is a garbage skill. It heals you when an add dies, essentially, which is the exact moment at which you cease to actually need the heal and MP that you gain from the skill. For all the whining and moaning that Warriors have been doing about Shake It Off for the last two months, I'd trade it for Sole Survivor in a heartbeat, because if I'm going to have a skill that isn't useful 95% of the time, I'd really rather it be one that does something significant the other 5% of the time.

- The fact that Bloodspiller no longer totally ignores the Grit damage penalty is why it needs to be changed. In its current form, SE can do little quibbling changes like bumping it from 380 to 400 and 520 to 540, but if they decide not to change the Grit potencies from 475 to 500 and 650 to 675, then the usefulness of the skill just gradually erodes, which shouldn't happen. Locking the effect to a simple "Ignores the damage penalty from Grit" keeps those values synced up, as they should be.

- I wouldn't mind Grit getting a little bit of love, but it's not something that I consider particularly necessary, compared to things like DRK being nigh-unplayable in pre-56 synced dungeons, having half a dozen skills that basically don't have a purpose in many fights, being horribly ineffective at enmity generation compared to every other tank, or having a skill that serves several different functions but is bad at every single one of those functions.

Costing a GCD but no MP would be a good change, though, and so would being oGCD as long as the recast time were 5s or less. What I don't want is to have to deal with being stuck in tank stance for an eternity like WAR with their stupid 10-second cooldown. That just feels awful, whereas 1-GCD Grit is really satisfying and fun.

- I think there are things that could definitely be done to raise DRK's skill ceiling in a fun way, but I'm not on board with the idea that the skill ceiling is any farther from the floor than it is for any other tank, and performance data from FFLogs and such doesn't bear that idea out anyway. As far as I'm concerned, that argument is more based on the fact that Xenosys Vex threw a Big Boy Temper Tantrum over Warrior in a video three days after Stormblood launched and threw out all the "this is braindead, this is so forgiving" stuff in an attempt to get across just how much like rocket science (only moreso) he thought that 4.0 WAR was. And for some reason that's just taken hold, despite the fact that different percentile scores show basically the same proportions across both classes and the DRK skill plateau that you might expect to see is completely absent.

I know how I'd like to see those changes made - but again, keeping it to 1-2 variable solutions.