Some simple DRK changes, and why they would improve things.

[Crater]

I've been thinking about this for a while, and while there's a general consensus that DRK needs help more than the other two tanks right now balance-wise, and there are a lot of threads making suggestions on how to change things, I think that (with no offense intended to people who have proposed the more sweeping design changes) there are comparatively few ideas floating around that are in line with SE's policy of mostly making simple variable changes to accomplish class balance. Going down the list of job skills, I'll try to identify where I think design and balance problems exist with the class, and how each change will address those issues.

Unleash

The problem: The primary problem with Unleash is that it is now an extremely counter-intuitive skill, and teaches new players some very bad habits. It's natural for a new player to look at the skill and think "Okay, this is my AoE damage skill, so I should use it whenever I'm fighting multiple enemies". The problem is that the damage on it is extremely low, to the point where single-target rotations are usually better than Unleash.

Before level 26, Hard Slash -> Syphon Strike is stronger than Unleash on 1-3 enemies, as strong on 4 enemies, and only becomes weaker at 5+ enemies (rare to see in dungeons at those levels).

After level 26, Power Slash combos are stronger than Unleash on 1-4 enemies, and only marginally weaker at 5+ enemies (again, rare to see in that level range).

After level 45, Souleater combos along with DADP on cooldown are stronger than Unleash on 1-8 enemies, and only marginally weaker on 9+ enemies (while providing small amounts of healing and mitigation that Unleash does not, and is infinitely sustainable, whereas Unleash will drain you of MP).

New players are very unlikely to realize the way that these numbers shake out, and so many will be taught to play the class poorly, using Unleash on pulls where it is ineffective for them to do so.


The secondary problem is that whether you're using single-target or Unleash at those levels, it's simply not effective enough. Until DRK gets Abyssal Drain, its damage on an AoE pull is nearly as bad as PLD was before they got Total Eclipse. When WAR gets 120 potency Overpowers right out of the gate, and even PLD has Circle of Scorn and Total Eclipse by the time they hit level 50, DRK is left in the dust and cannot contribute meaningfully to a party in any level 50 content.

The solution: Unleash should be changed from a Spell to an Ability - that is, it should be made off-GCD, with a cooldown from 2-5s.

The first thing this does is to teach new players how to play effectively - that they should be continuing to use their GCD attacks with off-GCDs woven in between them. Right off the bat, this clues novice players in to the idea that DRK is the tank class with a high APM and many off-GCD skills to be used.

It also brings DRK's performance in low-level dungeons up to an acceptable level. 50 AoE potency, added to DRK's single-target combos spread around a pack, puts them roughly on par with WAR (and at level 46+, PLD) in terms of damage on most AoE pulls.

At the same time, despite being oGCD, this doesn't cause any imbalances to DRK at high-level. The MPotency ratio on an oGCD Unleash would be roughly similar to a non-DA Dark Passenger, which most people agree is a pretty poor return on damage for your MP.


Power Slash

The problem:
When Stormblood launched, the enmity multipliers on Rage of Halone and Butcher's Block were raised from 5.5x to 7x. Power Slash remains at 5.5x.

The solution: This should be bumped up to 7x, to reach parity with the other tanks.

Presumably the counter-argument here is that the Dark Arts effect on Power Slash was buffed to double the enmity bonus, taking it from 5.5x to 11x.

However, this is not necessary to balance tank enmity. PLD has Shield Swipe (450 enmity-potency, 15s cooldown) and Circle of Scorn (300 enmity-potency, 25s cooldown) to bolster their single-target enmity, even without touching Rage of Halone. WAR has Onslaught (a ridiculous 1000 enmity-potency, used mostly during Berserks but potentially on a 15s cooldown), and still generates BG if they use Butcher's Block, making it a relatively light DPS loss.

Bringing non-DA Power Slash up to a 7x multiplier to match the other tanks is absolutely fair. DA Power Slash being raised up to double that at a 14x multiplier is not exactly an insane boon to DRK, compared to the tools listed above that the other tanks have - and frankly, being able to pump out that much enmity (at the cost of a substantial amount of MP/damage) should be 'a unique thing DRK can do', similar to any number of unique perks that the other tanks have.


Blood Price

The problem: Blood Price's effect on MP regeneration is almost unnoticeable in single-target prior to the level 66 trait (and is pretty bad even with that trait), and is incredibly weak even in AoE pulls until you're being hit by 8-10 enemies.

At the same time, though, we all have to recognize that Blood Price in its 3.x incarnation was wildly overpowered, and we can't go back to that again.

The solution: While under the effect of Blood Price, MP costs should be reduced by 25%.

This has the effect of making all your MP go about 33% farther with Blood Price up, which is a nice, useful effect, both in single-target and in AoE, without giving you infinite MP in AoE, and without giving you an insignificant amount of MP in single-target. It's equally useful on small-pull AoE with 3-4 enemies, and on big-pull AoE with 10+ enemies. And maybe more importantly, it actually makes Blood Price feel like a Grit-centric equal to Blood Weapon, rather than a terrible 3rd Place ribbon that just makes it feel even worse when you can't get BW up.


Dark Passenger

The problem: The MP cost on Dark Passenger is too high for what it does, and has largely been excised from the hotbars of a lot of DRKs, without a particularly visible loss of efficacy.

The solution: I'm not alone on this one, but it bears repeating anyway: The MP cost on Dark Passenger should be reverted to its pre-SB state, and put back down to (at level 70) 1200 MP.

This is a very slight increase to DRK damage in single-target: Basically, every 30 seconds, you can exchange half a DA worth of MP (that is, 70 potency worth) for a 100 potency attack. 30 potency every 30 seconds - somewhere on the order of 0.3% extra damage, but it would make the class feel much nicer to play.

And of course, in AoE, it would make DP an unambiguously good skill to use, with or without DA. While it's not terrible in AoE in its current state, and is a little underrated, it also wouldn't be imbalanced for it to be a little cheaper: 3600 MP for 240 potency is not going to make Abyssal Drain obsolete or anything.

Dark Mind

The problem: While Stormblood did PLD the mercy of eliminating specific damage-type conditional cooldowns by making Block apply to any sort of damage, DRK feels left behind in that regard, stuck with a major cooldown that can only be used on magic tankbusters. It also costs MP to use effectively, and can't even really be described as "overpowered" for the attacks it works on, due to the short duration, but is merely "powerful" in those situations.

The solution: As I see it, there are two solutions here.

One is for SE to say "No, this cooldown stays magic-only, but we promise that Deltascape is the new model for content design, where the majority of the tankbusters are magical." In this case, the damage-type dependency can stay, but the effect (and DA effect) should be boosted. The base mitigation of Dark Mind should be increased from 15% to 30%, and the Dark Arts effect should be to instead double the duration from 10s to 20s. It isn't uncommon to run into situations where spikes of damage, or consecutive cleaves/tankbusters, are spaced 10, 12, or 15 seconds apart. In many of those cases, (free, damage-boosting, universal) Vengeance is a better cooldown than (MP/damage-costly, type-specific) Dark Mind, because of the extra duration. If it's going to remain such a specific mitigation tool, then it should have power to match.

The second solution is what I'd prefer. We have at least one all-magic fight in Deltascape (Catastrophe), and another fight where the vast majority of tank-threatening damage is magic (Exdeath and Neo Exdeath). Despite this, Dark Mind doesn't feel overpowered in those fights - it just feels appropriate. Therefore, I really can't see any reason why Dark Mind should be restricted to magic damage in the first place. Turning it into universal mitigation, at 15% free/30% DA, would basically just put it on par with one of the many tools in WAR's suite of cooldowns (while I'm at it, yeah, Raw Intuition should just be changed to 20% damage reduction from the front - but that's a tangent). The weakness of its short duration remains, for situations where tankbusters are placed 10-15s apart, but it doesn't simply become a dead cooldown on any fight where SE forgot to make the tankbusters magical (see, so far in SB: Susano, Halicarnassus).


Shadow Wall:

I'm just mentioning this so that people don't think I forgot it: I think that Shadow Wall is fine, so long as Dark Mind is brought up to par, and TBN stays the way it is. Comparing it directly across from Vengeance or Sentinel, it comes out the obvious loser, but that isn't a problem so long as the rest of DRK's toolkit makes up for that difference.

Plunge

The problem: Where to begin? The animation lock is too long; DRK should not have any skills that eat up both 'oGCD slots' when they're already the most oGCD-heavy class in the game. The range is too low; every equivalent gap-closer has a 20y range. There are places in fights that seem specifically designed to make Plunge an exercise in frustration, with knockbacks happening 25 seconds apart compared to Plunge's 30s cooldown.

The solution: Plunge needs buffs on just about every front.

The animation lock should be reduced - the target here is that if a DRK is standing in melee range (and doesn't need Plunge for the mobility), they should be able to double-weave Plunge and Dark Arts in the same oGCD, with Blood Weapon up.

The range should be extended - just bump it up to 20y, like every other gap-closer.

The cooldown should be reduced, from 30s to 20s. This has three effects: First, it makes Plunge more usable as a gap-closer in fights that have multiple consecutive knockbacks. Second, it gives DRK a small but necessary DPS boost - Plunge currently tends to make up between 3% and 4% of a DRK's total damage, so increasing the number of Plunges by 50% would raise DPS by 1.5-2%, closing a lot of the (unnecessary) DPS gap between DRK and PLD/WAR. Third, it aligns Plunge's cooldown to Blood Weapon. Just as PLD will always get one Spirits Within inside of their Fight or Flight, and WAR will always get one Upheaval inside their Berserk, because those skills have 30s cooldowns compared to their respective buff's 60s cooldown, Plunge at 20s would always line up so that every second Plunge lands inside of a Blood Weapon.


Sole Survivor

The problem: Sole Survivor has a weak effect, is hard to use, typically can only be used during really inopportune moments, and is completely unusable in many fights without adds.

The solution: Get rid of Sole Survivor as a debuff. Just make it an instantly-poppable heal, for 20% HP and 20% MP.

20% HP is a weaker heal than Clemency, even without Convalescence or Requiescat. It's about as strong as Defiance Equilibrium, and is weaker than Berserk-Defiance Equilibrium. The cooldown is twice as long as Equilibrium, and (IIRC) %-based heals like that don't produce enmity the way that Equilibrium does.

20% MP is less than a single Dark Arts/TBN. It's nice to get, but doesn't really do that much for you.

DRK has the fewest/weakest self-healing options of all the tanks, and has a very limited ability to generate MP on-demand if they can't do a single-target melee rotation, despite the fact that all of their AoE and ranged skills require MP. Sole Survivor being a universally-applicable solution to both of those issues closes the gap a little bit in a class-unique way.


Quietus

The problem: Quietus's Dark Arts effect is terrible, and should never be used, under any circumstance.

The solution: On the other hand, there's an obvious hole in DRK's AoE toolkit. During a dungeon pull, when longevity is a factor, non-DA Quietus really is a godsend, giving you enough MP to keep going. But during AoE sections of raids and trials, you often find yourself in a situation where you really don't care how long your MP lasts - you just want to get as much AoE damage in, as quickly as possible.

DA Quietus should not restore any MP on hit (unless you're running it with Blood Weapon), but the potency should be raised up from 160 to 280 - a boost of 120, slightly lower than Dark Passenger's DA effect, to the same overall potency as Decimate (at, let's be clear, a much greater cost than Decimate, considering the Blood loss as well as the opportunity cost of not getting the MP regeneration, to make up for DRK having better oGCDs for AoE).


Bloodspiller

The problem: The weird way in which Bloodspiller has different potencies for unbuffed, Grit, Dark Arts, and Grit+Dark Arts is clumsy as hell, and makes the skill a nightmare to balance since SE seems to not adjust all the aspects at once. And since TBN ties the potency of Bloodspiller and the potency boosts of Dark Arts together in a way that means that the relative value of each is affected by the other, this is a skill that's going to see a lot of tweaking over the lifetime of the game.

The solution: "Ignores the damage penalty inflicted by Grit." It's really that simple.


In Summary
The cumulative effect of these changes would be to:

- Make DRK more intuitive, and more effective, for new player and/or at low-level synced content, which are two major failings of the class's current design.
- Bring DRK up to par with PLD and WAR in terms of enmity generation, by making non-DA Power Slash less horrible, DA Power Slash less underwhelming, and by giving them a usable oGCD enmity skill as an answer to the other tanks' respective abilities.
- Bring back a couple skills that were overnerfed in the transition from Heavensward to Stormblood, making it feel rewarding to use DRK's entire toolkit, without simply buffing raw power to the point where those skills become overpowered.
- Improve DRK's self-sustain (from 'almost nothing' to 'worse than the other tanks, but with lower DPS costs'), and either remove the unique susceptibility that DRK has to content design with physical-only tankbusters, or at least give them commensurate power in the instances where their magic-only toolkit can be brought to bear.
- Improve DRK's DPS, and the alignment of some of their cooldowns with respect to both other cooldowns and to some fight timings that currently mess with a lot of DRK's usefulness. In truth, these changes would probably still leave DRK as the lowest-DPS tank, and further adjustments may more may not be necessary on that front, but they would close the gap pretty significantly, and would improve the overall flow of gameplay.

[SyzzleSpark]

Some opinions:

I think you let some abilities off the hook too easily while scrutinizing things that should be on the back-burner. I almost didn't read past Unleash and Power Slash before I got to the actual adjustments in your post.

While DRK got a free pass in Omega due to A: 1/2/4 being almost wholly magical and B. 3 allowing you an extra ~~40% mitigation through Awareness, I, like you, would rather this not be the case. It works, but it feels bad. So let me talk about some other things that feel bad.

Keep in mind that I live the pug life and from some basic google-fu I see that you probably don't, but just take that into account.

Unleash, Power Slash, Plunge, and Quietus I really don't see as problems. Other than perhaps Plunge these are not active parts of playing the job that apply to all content or all parts of a given piece of content. Unleash is weaker than TE, but to recover the resource that we use for it, we just use our single target rotation, whereas PLD has to stop doing damage entirely (Flash). Power Slash's new DA effect is actually beautifully balanced in such a way as to net you the 140 potency DA baseline if you drop Grit immediately after, thus being perhaps the only tank stance-relevant mechanic that SE appears to have designed to encourage a tank to drop their tank stance. Plunge is unchanged from 3.x and so I'm accustomed to its quirks and really can't be bothered with any of them in light of more pressing problems with the job. Quietus is what it is, and it works for that purpose in dungeons, but has barely any effect on raid content right now so once again its something that really I could take or leave and should be on the back-burner, IMO.

Anyway, on to actual problems:

TBN feels bad, and it doesn't even get an honorable mention in your post. Its powerful, no doubt, but its frequency of use and entanglement with our resources makes it more than a cooldown: its a mechanic. Moreover, after the removal of the DD+3.xReprisal combo and Shadowskin in SB, it was obviously clear to the dev team, as well as anyone with eyes, that DRK's mitigation suite was almost eradicated as a result. So TBN was very clearly and blatantly made to fill this huge hole with one skill.

What they should have done instead, is make DM work on physical damage as well and extend its duration to 15-20s, reduce Shadow Wall's recast time/extend its duration to 15s, and have implemented a slightly weaker version of TBN on closer to a 30s recast.

Instead we got what we have now, which is a cooldown suite of abilities that don't last longer than 10 seconds and provide a very bumpy ride whilst tanking the 10K+ AAs of the current savage tier. They absolved themselves of fixing our remaining cooldowns by implementing 1 new one that is extremely powerful, but honestly, they didn't even do that right, because of its resource mechanic. TBN is designed to stop mitigating damage as quickly as possible. Moreover when it does, you aren't actually rewarded. There have been many suggestions on how to fix this, and my personal favorite is the proc-ing of a DA effect upon TBN popping, and perhaps getting a portion of the Blood Gauge up front and the rest when it pops.

Perhaps the most puzzling and infuriating thing about TBN is that the ability is so blatantly designed to be used on tank busters and yet, is almost never strong enough to be used by itself, meaning that you don't actually gain an extra use of one of your other cooldowns, cross-role or otherwise, by using it. You must always pair it with something else, which means you can't use whatever that something else was, be it Rampart or Shadow Wall or whatever, on any of the fluff damage that happens in between TBs. What do you have to use? TBN of course. You have to use a TB ability on AAs. *confused head-twitch* Also its use on a party member is almost never meaningful, and I would argue is not any stronger of a utility than WAR's now-extraneous slashing debuff. TBN is a 5.2K shield on a party member other than yourself, usually your co-tank. Now, if your co-tank survives something with less than that amount of HP (meaning TBN saved their life) it usually indicates that they fucked up somehow (mistimes a cooldown, or maybe the healer forgot to shield). Its "utility" that at best can be a clutch save in a situation where somebody goofed, and at worst is practically unnoticeable.

Shadow Wall is not fine and I don't believe that a cooldown that is a whole other job mechanic in itself excuses its problems, or our lack of sustained mitigation that lasts long enough for a healer to react to and adjust their GCD usage accordingly. But maybe that's just me. I like somewhat weaker, short-recast cooldowns, and I like sustained mitigation and not this spikey, "take zero damage from 1 AA in exchange for taking the next 4 AAs on your bare ass" nonsense.

Sole Survivor I don't think is hard to use or weak, just situational. 20% isn't really that much weaker than Clemency or Equilibrium really (which are both equally powerful? 1200 potency), as 20% of 52000 is a touch over 10K which could easily just be a low roll on the former two. And 20% MP is definitely significant even if it doesn't add up to a full DA. That being said, I wouldn't argue with your change, and I think a 120s recast easily justifies on-demand use.

Bloodspiller's tooltip has never triggered me in the way that it seems to trigger most people. Idk I guess reading tooltips and doing math comes naturally to me. I think the verbiage was chosen over what is used in the IB tooltip due to the fact that IB is only useable in Defiance, so its appropriate to word it in that fashion. Bloodspiller also no longer ignores the damage penalty. It ignores about 75% of it. It would have to be 500 potency baseline in Grit to constitute "ignoring the penalty" but it is only 475.

Grit going unmentioned in your post is a head-scratcher too, as while it is free to turn off, it is the most expensive to turn on by a landslide, and it is the ability to turn on your tank stance that can save your life, not the ability to turn it off. The cost of a GCD alone is sufficient to balance it with the largely free Defiance, whereas the 1800 mana is just a kick in the genitals. Alternatively, they could make it oGCD with a 1s recast and give it a higher mana cost, around the same as DA, which would invoke roughly the same potency loss as sitting in Defiance for 10 seconds.

More than anything I want to see the return of mechanics that reward you for maximizing the job and its resources. Right now you aren't rewarded, you break even with a baseline that is set in stone as soon as you use 9480 mana. Assuming good uptime and hitting DA Carve on cooldown and low Grit usage if any, that 9480 mana (roughly 560 potency) sustained over the course of a fight is the exact distance between the skill floor and skill ceiling, which to me feels just a-w-f-u-l.

In an expansion, aside from the obvious buffs from increased level cap and gear, your DPS floor should remain where it is and require you to master the new mechanics of the abilities you learn while leveling to reach the new ceiling. In SB, our floor was LOWERED, and we are required to master the new mechanics to stay where we were.

While some of these changes are more complicated than simple number-tweaking, they aren't the ridiculous full-job-redesigns that people commonly suggest and I believe they are pretty well in line with the simplicity of balance adjustments that, as you rightly point out, we've come to expect from SE. Basically I want to see all of our defensive cooldowns buffed which the exception of TBN which I wouldn't mind seeing a slight nerf, and for our DPS ceiling to be raised noticeably but gated by skilled play. I want more frequent checks to see if we are managing mana and Blood optimally, and a worthy DPS payoff if we are. I want our mitigation to not be so expensive. I want burst. I want TBN to be rewarding to optimize. I've made countless posts on the forums of simple solutions to our problems and the preceding statements pretty accurately sums them up.

[Crater]

- 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.

[koroko220]

I haven't even gotten through all of this yet, but you want to take away their AOE aggro generation? What? And you can't count abyssal drain as you get that far too late.

[SyzzleSpark]

- Re:

Most of your points I can get on board with even if they aren't addressing issues that are a personal priority for myself. So I'll address the one core disagreement I see, the mitigation.

Active mitigation is all fine and good, and I don't have an argument with that.

What does bother me is that there is so much cost associated with mitigating on DRK, and TBN should be more of a gain when you master it. It is a mechanic, and you do have to, as you rightly point out play at it for a while in order to maximize it from a mitigation standpoint, but because of the mana-to-blood interaction, its clearly a DPS mechanic as well, or at least one that interplays with it.

I'm fine with DRK being the active tank and that was certainly what I enjoyed about it in 3.x, and your assessment of DA's parity with things like Berserk is great. Imagine however that Berserk shared a recast with one of WAR's most powerful defensive cooldowns, and you start to see the problem I have with TBN - it draws from your DPS with no real payoff for the active-timing mini-game it forces you to play. Again, I'm fine with DRK being the active tank, but right now its that AND the resource tank. I'd be 100% fine with having to time a 5 or even 4 second TBN if I got a significant DPS payoff for my initial investment of mana, because mana is by-and-large a DPS resource for DRK, not a mitigation one (although 1.5 of our 3 non-invuln/non-cross role CDs use it, which is a whole other problem). If you invest in stocks you're not doing it to break even, you're investing it for that resource to grow and accrue value. Right now it doesn't because 50 Blood only barely breaks even with 2400 mana and in some cases is even worse, albeit only slightly.

So I'll grant you your arguments about mitigation, but in doing so I can't neglect arguments about DPS (after all we are discussing DRK) - and if TBN and the remainder of our CDs are to stay the same (with the exception of your buff the DM which I agree with), TBN needs to offer significant payoff. Having to play that minigame just to break even with what other tanks can do by pressing a single button and then twiddling their thumbs for 20 seconds is definitely a cute variance in design mechanics, but its still more work on the part of the player, and while that can be fun, like you said, its nice to be rewarded for it and currently you are not, relative to the initial investment. The potency value of whatever resource a popped TBN grants you should be higher than the initial investment. This gives you something to maximize. I emphasize maximize here because in learning fights and learning to time it properly you can hit a slightly higher DPS ceiling which would make it both subjectively fun AND objectively rewarding. Its not just a gimme, you put in more work to get that mitigation and invested your DPS resource, so you should be rewarded with higher DPS than if you had failed.

If I had to select just 1-2 solutions and try and come to a compromise between our opinions, I'd go for this (I'm also going to cheat and chose 1-2 for mitigation and 1-2 for DPS):

DPS:
1. Revert DP completely to its 3.x form.
2. TBN procs DA when it pops and cuts the recast timer of C&S by 3s per pop.

Mitigation
1. DM works on physical damage as well, 10% base 20% DA, and lasts 20s.
2. Grit MP cost gone or Grit MP cost increased to 2400 and made oGCD with 1-2s recast.

As a personal aside, for those of us on the east coast without gigabit ethernet that got screwed by the DC move, I'd actually like to see the animation lock on all our oGCDs including Plunge reduced. Double weaving used to be such a joy and now its a bigger part of the job than ever, and yet for many of us it has gotten worse.

[Crater]

Phone posting from work for most of the day so I cant really reference your post as well as Id like, but I can agree a little more with that (albeit Id Prefer 15/30 DM at 10s).


This breaks my own rule about only small changes, but in my DRK dream journal Id rather see TBN at a 1200MP cost, with a 30 Blood return (ie you gain 20% overall on the exchange). Id also change the cooldown to 5s, with a stacking debuff that increases the MP cost by 25% per stack, 5 stacks per cast, and one stack is removed every 3 seconds and every use of Bloodspiller.

Id also fold the Delirium bonuses into BW/BP (so 18s/20s durations, respectively), and change Delirium into a skill with a 30s cooldown that activates DA for 40 Blood (again about a 20% gain) and is reduced in cooldown by 5s for every use of a DA-boosted skill.

The idea would be to maximize MP/Blood by juggling Blood and MP back and forth using Delirium and TBN, using DA as a pressure Release for MP, and Bloodspiller for Blood.

[NovaLevossida]

As far as I know, there's no in-game way of knowing if an attack is magical or not other than using your cooldowns and see if any mitigation has applied or not. For that reason alone, I'd like to just see DM work on physical damage too. If I have to go to sites outside of the game or look at guides on a fight-by-fight basis to know what attacks are considered magical, it's probably best to just change the ability and be done with it, especially since as you have pointed out that PLDs can just block magic now.

[InfiniDragon]

I like your ideas, apart from making Quietus no longer restore MP without Blood Weapon. The ideas make strides to improve the job without changing it completely based on a player's view of what DRK "should be", no offense to those who brought suggestions of reworks but I don't feel like a MCH style complete redo is feasible (until 5.0), and speaking from personal opinion don't want it.

Your approach seems much more immediately doable and would still help DRK in a few ways so I like it.

[Crater]

I like your ideas, apart from making Quietus no longer restore MP without Blood Weapon.

My wording may have been ambiguous. The idea was not to take away the MP generation from Quietus - only when Quietus is boosted by Dark Arts. It would be similar to Carve and Spit, in that you use the skill without DA if you want extra MP, and you use it with DA if you want high damage (except unlike CnS, the MP-generating, non-DA version would generally be the winner in terms of efficiency).

[aqskerorokero]

looking forward for the next expansion.....