Thread: Regarding no DRK adjustments in 4.1

Originally Posted by Crater

The only people who "universally agreed" on that BS are A) people who didn't know what they were talking about, and B) spoiled prima donna WAR mains who think that WAR being balanced against the other tanks means that WAR is underpowered. At Stormblood launch it was well-balanced against the other two tanks. When Delta was released and WAR's stance swap penalty was removed, it became the strongest tank, because it lost the big disadvantage that was meant to balance out its myriad strengths, which is where we are now.

The only reason that this delusion about WAR needing buffs survived in the first place is because the class's whiny-ass player base spent the last six months tossing out ludicrous suggestions like "Fell Cleave needs to be 750 potency and Inner Release needs to be on a 60s cooldown". It was never actually true.

And you could swap war with drk and your post would still be true. Have you seen the multiple 50 page threads that whine in just the same manner? People overlooking what drk does have, completely downplaying anything good they have going and stating anything that could be construed with negative for drk? Just like this one?

All 3 tanks are within 5% of each other in DPS. All 3 tanks have been shown capable of completing content at the highest levels (FFlogs has all combos of tanks just in the top 10 alone). Pld's party support is frequently overrated as it is largely unnecessary and overhyped in effectiveness (ignoring things like passage completely killing DPS). Drk IS the bottom of the 3, but not by the orders of magnitude these 50+ page whine threads claim (just like you state for war previously)

DPS: Drk DPS it has the simplest and least punishable ST rotation of all tanks. Its dps is also slightly lower potential by a few %. Lowest? Yes. A travesty of this age? Not at all considering the ease at which it is used. SE has even used that exact justification for DPS jobs slight variations in damage. ie: Ease of use and mechanics interference in performing. The relative DPS performance of all tanks fits their model and is not that terribly significant in their current state. Minor adjustments to potency can easily move this needle. No major retool needed.

Utility/Support: Was second. Probably now 3rd. (I have a sneaking suspicion one of the 'unnamed' buffs will be either a %hp increase or duration buff, but that's speculation.) Would not need dramatic changes to current kit to maintain parity.

Personal defense. All tanks have rough parity in stances, 'always up' CDs (IB/Shell/TBN), Same role skills, Immunities, Heavy CD. This leaves:

War: Raw intuition. Strong reliable Phy defense. Short CD.
Drk: Dark mind. Strong reliable Magic defense Still shorter CD.
Pld: Bullwark. Strong (less) reliable all defense on a long friggin CD.
2 high uptime abilities effective on magic/phy. vs 1 longer CD with less reliability that works on everything. Rough parity.

This leaves ToB on war and Passage (when used as a self CD) vs Nothing on drk.

Theres your hole. That's it. Drk is 1 medium CD away from virtual parity with other 2. Tob is weaker than passage, but doesn't stop damage and has a shorter CD. Drk needs 1 medium-ish CD to balance the scales. That's it in defense.
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TLDR:
DPS is within justifiable levels considering the devs approach of fight interference and ease of use.
Party defense: War had zero. Pld has a lot. Drk in the middle. A slight TBN or other adjustment would easily bring drk up to par with war.
Defense: Drk has 1 hole that the others don't. One could argue that TBN makes up for it with its near zero cost, OGCD nature, and absurdly short CD.

The only real problem is that all of drks balance design on defense parity and party support rides on TBN and its a smidge underperforming in both areas. Minor tweaks could easily bring back that balance in both areas and a couple potency adjustments can do the same for any remaining DPS disparity.

Drk is not broken beyond belief. War is not OP beyond belief. Pld has been largely overhyped for what it brings. Tanks are the closest to balance as in any time in history. Yet we get hyperbolic BS about the abysmal state of drk. A few slight tweaks and the world will be fine. The only 'complaints' at that point will be aesthetic. "I want scourge animation! 1 combo is boring!". But on a PRACTICAL level, tanks are VERY VERY close to overall parity. But these threads keep trying to blow minor disparities WAAAY out of proportion.

Calm your tits and wait for the 4.1 notes.

Originally Posted by Aana

Theres your hole. That's it. Drk is 1 medium CD away from virtual parity with other 2. Tob is weaker than passage, but doesn't stop damage and has a shorter CD. Drk needs 1 medium-ish CD to balance the scales. That's it in defense.

I made a fairly simply spreadsheet to analyze cd rotation uptime. I guess the result wasn't really surprising

WAR: Vengeance, Rampart, Thrill+Conv, Raw+Awareness, Anticipation
DRK: Shadow Wall, Rampart, Awareness, Anticipation, Conv
PLD: Sentinal, Rampart, Bulwark, Awareness, Anticipation, Conv, Passage

Methodology has WAR using the 2 combo'd abilities per synergy. If we didn't use them together it would be about equal to PLD duration. 300 second rolling CD rotation to find gaps (windows) where there isn't a buff available.

War: 2 windows of 5-sec no buff
Drk: 3 windows of 5 sec each, 1 window of 10 sec no buff
Pld: No windows. Cds to rotate the entire 300 sec

So, yes, I think the key to fixing DRK is Shadow Wall reduction. If reduced to 120 sec cd with 15 sec duration it would actually be slightly better than War with only 1 5-sec window with no buff. I know the cds themselves are not all equal, but I really wanted to find out exactly how much difference there was between having buffs up and not. Obviously this isn't a "real-world" type scenario, just for comparison purposes.

It looked a little something like this:

Sitting here wondering why they gave WAR a party buff in this round of updates and nothing for DRK and I remembered. Shake it Off was blasted on day one for being useless, and was even further cemented as a useless skill when no relevant mechanic even put debuffs on you that could remove. They've been working on fixing Shake it Off for a while. I feel like people need to continue the conversation about balance, because I think if its anywhere people can feel like there truly is a balance, is in defensive raid buffs for the tanks.

You wrote all of that and yet you have no idea what they are doing.

I'm not saying SE will shock us all by fixing everything wrong with DRK. I mean they thought SB WAR/DRK was acceptable.

But...again. You do not have the full 4.1 changelog so before assuming anything just wait another week ya?

I don't understand why these threads always have to devolve into my team vs. your team zero sum arguments.

Doesn't understand why it's always us vs them. Turns it into an us vs them argument.

(sorry, I respect ya. I just had to rib you about that lol)

Honestly, I have a very hard conveying in text form just how much I care about both DRK and WAR. I hope 4.1 changes things.

Originally Posted by Tegernako

You wrote all of that and yet you have no idea what they are doing.

I'm not saying SE will shock us all by fixing everything wrong with DRK. I mean they thought SB WAR/DRK was acceptable.

But...again. You do not have the full 4.1 changelog so before assuming anything just wait another week ya?

That is why I said "potentially" everywhere through out my post. I was trying to highlight through my word choice and usage that it is a potential, not a given.

I'm well aware that not all changes have been presented and that there is even a chance that things could change, however based on pretty much every Live Letter and Release Notes in the past the changes that aren't mentioned up front tend to be minor at best.

Mainly I was saying IF nothing is really done to fix DRK, which looking at what we have been presented through the filter of how things have gone in the past, then DRK may be left in a bad spot.

Originally Posted by Tegernako

Doesn't understand why it's always us vs them. Turns it into an us vs them argument.

(sorry, I respect ya. I just had to rib you about that lol)

No worries, no feathers ruffled. I would like to clarify though.

I'm not posing an us vs. them argument, I'm posing an us AND them one. It's inclusive, not exclusive. I stated that I liked the change to Shake It Off and that it's cool WAR is getting that. I also stated that it sucks that DRK appears like it may get overlooked and that a job that was already behind in many factors will just fall farther behind when the other jobs are buffed and it is not.

An us vs. them stance would have been if I said WAR shouldn't get the Shake It Off buff because DRK may get nothing. I want the Shake It Off buff for WAR and fixes for DRK.

Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

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I'm aware you used potential but what I meant is that I think you should just have reworded it to be less bleak sounding. (Though would you be a DRK if you did that?)

Because it's basically what OP said but with "maybe" added to it.

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

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That's an interesting breakdown and it provides some useful information.

However I feel it is overlooking effectiveness of the cooldowns.
The stacked CD's being calculated for WAR are more effective than the singular use of them being calculated for DRK. That's a noticeable disparity in standardized bases of comparison.

I would also posit that the burst self-heals are being overlooked as potential defensive manuevers. While they may not be used much, they are still there as a fall back for when something goes wrong. However I realize that those are outside of what you were specifically looking at, but I feel they should not be ignored when discussing defensive/self-preservation capabilities.

While I agree that the inequality of Shadow Wall versus Vengeance and Sentinel plays a major role in DRK's defensive gap, I feel that just dropping it's recast to 120s, while a big step in the right direction, might not entirely bridge the gap.

Overall I get what you were doing, but I truly hope that people looking at the info realize it is not the whole picture.