DRK - Excessive "Conditional" Effects

[SyzzleSpark]

I wanted to highlight a major problem with DRK that I've noticed more frequently as of late.

I can sum up this problem with a simple if-then statement with variables.

"This ability gives you x, but if y, then z."
-Where x is a seemingly very beneficial effect, y is a condition that is often either A) partially or completely outside the DRK player's control or B) a scenario that is overwhelmingly commonplace compared to the alternative which would render x intact, and z is something bad, a penalty, or punishment.

There is also a smaller, sub-problem to this, wherein DRK abilities are complicated in a way that conflicts, directly or indirectly, with attempts to balance them, by amounting to excessively complicated expressions.

I.E.
"Ability a costs b and gives you c with an additional effect of d"
-where d is the only actual effect of the ability, and b and c cancel eachother out when the expression is simplified.

Living Dead:
"This ability does gives you [invulnerability], but if [you are not healed for a value equaling or exceeding your maximum HP], then [you die]."

The Blackest Night:
"This ability gives you [a 20% HP shield], but if [the shield is not completely consumed], then [its DPS resource cost is not refunded/you lose 140 potency]."

Sole Survivor:
"This ability gives you [a chance to get a 20% HP/MP heal], but if [your target doesn't die in 15 seconds], then [it does literally nothing]."

Dark Passenger:
"This ability gives you [oGCD damage], but if [you're not in Blood Weapon and about to drop a Quietus that will cap your MP and then some, or tanking 10 or more mobs], then [it costs 1/4-1/2 of your mana for relatively insignificant potency]."

On the second, "sub-problem" the most obvious culprit is Delirium.

"[Delirium] costs [50 Blood Gauge] and gives you[2400 mana] with an additional effect of [+8/+16 seconds on Blood Weapon/Price]."

The Blood Gauge and Mana cancel eachother out - the only thing Delirium actually does is buff Blood Weapon by 8 seconds...
... this literally makes Delirium just a shade over half the gain of the Blood Weapon you buff with it, while being on triple the recast time.


.......
Soak that up.
Delirium is half as powerful as the Blood Weapon you buff with it, and has triple the recast.
.......


To put this in perspective, this would be like Inner Release being a +30% attack power increase for 10 seconds on a 180s cooldown.

TBN suffers from this same issue.

"[TBN] costs [2400 mana] and gives you [50 Blood Gauge] with an additional effect of [+20% HP shield.]."

All it really does is give you a 20% shield, but this is compounded by the fact outlined above - sometimes it'll also cost you 2400 mana.


*****
Anyway. That is all. Just wanted to highlight what I have observed to be some patterns in DRK's many problems, namely, its abilities are deceptively weak given resource conversions disguised as gains, and arbitrarily punishing abilities reliant on meeting conditionals to not leave the player in an equally bad/worse spot than had they not pushed the button in the first place.

[Chrono_Rising]

Couldn't agree more. And relatively few, if any, of these conditionals are rewarding.

TBN is probably one of the worst offenders of this, as working out our blood conversion benefits further depends on the stance we are in and whether or not there is a raid buff currently active.

It feels as though SE actively needs to work at making our skills unrewarding, and the more you look into it the deeper the issue goes. This is 100% a core issue in dark knight's design.

I know we feel differently on this, but the fact that grit puts just a little more mana restore on siphon strike so that you gain more mp in grit then when dropping grit grinds my gears. Drop grit, lose siphon strike mana bonus, gain blood weapon to make up for it, comes up just a little short. Why?

[SyzzleSpark]

My main problem with Grit has always been two-fold:

1. It costs both a GCD and 1800 mana, when either of these costs in isolation is sufficient to balance it with Defiance, and
2. Souleater's HP restore.

Can I just take a moment to rant about the f***ing Souleater HP restore?

Here is a thing that is supposed to be our passive benefit in tank stance, a 400 potency attack that restores HP based on damage dealt. They nerfed this to, I believe the figure was 88.4% of the damage dealt, in SB.

WHY IS THE HEAL GATED BEHIND GRIT WHEN GRIT HAS A DIRECT DAMAGE PENALTY AND THUS A HEALING PENALTY ON A LIFE-STEAL-BASED-ON-POTENCY/DAMAGE-DEALT???

You never ever ever... never ever...

NO DRK in the ENTIRE HISTORY of the game, has EVER seen the full value of Souleater's potency as a heal***, because that f***ing heal is gated by and filtered through the Grit Damage Penalty, so you go into it thinking you'll get a 400 Potency heal, but you actually get a 400 * .884 * .8 potency heal.. that's 282.88 healing potency.

Only you SE, only you... could gate a healing effect behind a stance that actually directly NERFS what its effects would be were it not gated as such. Grit's damage penalty makes Souleater's heal WORSE.

UGH. GROSS.

***Edit: Correction - if you go into an old primal and wipe yourself up to 40% echo, you'll see how much Grit Souleater should be healing you for.

[WhyAmIHere]

Sounds like DRK needs to be...
{Unchained}

*rimshot*

[SyzzleSpark]

IDK about {Unchained} but I know about {Berserk}

Us, the day after SE gets their ducks in a row and fixes the job:

[EuronTribal]

Completely agree. It feels like our intitial design philosophy was supposed to be take a big risk for a big payoff. Punish us for playing wrong reward us for getting it right. Seems like they just focused on punishing us, and rewarded us with breaking even.

[Shurrikhan]

So we went from hidden weaknesses when stacking abilities (3.x) to muddled and strangely weak individual abilities (4.x)?

[Crater]

This is a really good post.

I'm not sure how much substance I have to add to it at the moment, but I would like to throw an opinion on the fire here, speaking at least for myself: I think that it is totally okay for DRK to have complex interlocking mechanics, or for DRK to be reliant on specific conditions for their abilities to be effective, if and only if the reward for successfully mastering those mechanics and using them correctly is much greater than the reward other tanks get for using their more straightforward abilities.

I personally feel - and I don't think I'm alone on this one - that part of the draw toward playing DRK has always been that it's simply a more complex, nuanced, and risky class to play than any of the other tanks. I think that a lot of DRK players like the challenge, and like having to exercise caution and awareness to make full use of their abilities, and want the class to feel as though you're constantly on the cusp of losing control and having your entire kit fall to shambles, as long as the reward for not a mistake and not falling into shambles is that you get to feel seriously powerful in everything that you do.


I don't think there's a clearer example of this than comparing DRK to the other tanks in terms of their 4-man dungeon AoE rotations:

- PLD's dungeon strategy is to maybe Flash once or twice to hold aggro, then spam Total Eclipse and keep Circle of Scorn on cooldown, while rotating defensive cooldowns.
- WAR's dungeon strategy is to get Storm's Eye up while pulling, then spam Overpower for enmity and damage, use any BG you can get on your AoE BG consumers, while rotating defensive cooldowns.

- DRK's dungeon strategy is making sure that you've got the MP to secure aggro, then make sure you have enough MP to use TBN for defense, rationing any remaining MP between Abyssal Drain for damage/enmity, Dark Arts for DAAD healing, or Dark Passenger for burst damage and small mitigation, while also making sure that you don't overcap on Blood, using the Blood on Quietus for extra damage and MP management - making sure that you don't overcap on MP either - which drives further AD damage/enmity, DAAD healing, DP burst, while making sure that you have enough MP in the tank to use your next TBN, and trying not to have to resort to single-target combos, to keep yourself afloat. Strategies for using your various skills differ wildly in Grit compared to non-Grit, rather than just being a simple "same thing, but more/less tanky" difference, because of Blood Price versus Blood Weapon, and how Delirium interacts with either. Actual standard cooldowns basically function only to close the gaps in your active mitigation/defense rotation.


The difference in complexity, the risks you take with each skill use, the tradeoffs you have to make when comparing one option to another, etc, are many, many times greater than what you experience while tanking on WAR or PLD - playing DRK properly in a level 70 dungeon feels about as hectic as holding a controller in each hand and playing a WAR and PLD at the same time in entirely different dungeon runs. But the reward for playing DRK properly is felt very plainly: Your ability to mitigate and otherwise alleviate the healer burden is nearly as good as a Turtle Mode, 100% tank stance PLD or WAR, while you also deal as much or more damage than a fully-offensive WAR. The effort you put in to playing the class well is rewarded, relative to the smaller-effort, smaller-reward results you get on PLD and WAR. (WAR getting a stupid and unnecessary buff to Steel Cyclone's healing component throws this a little out of whack, and once again WAR is getting over-rewarded for not really having to do anything, but it still isn't enough to really upset the power rankings)

3.x DRK also came close to this ideal. It was a significantly tougher tank to play at a high level than PLD or WAR, with lots of limitations and pitfalls, but you were rewarded for doing it well: An optimized 3.x DRK did almost as much damage as a full-offense off-tanking WAR, while also having significantly improved defensive capabilities (barring a few fights where Holmgang being especially overpowered made WAR broken from a defensive standpoint). This wasn't perfect - the skill differential should have resulted in a situation where DRK did as much damage as WAR, not just almost as much - but it made learning to play DRK feel fun and worthwhile, because again, you were rewarded for your effort.


The real shame of 4.x DRK is that it's really not easier to play than 3.x DRK was - in a lot of ways, the moment-to-moment decisions you have to make, the amount of planning and foresight you need to have, the understanding you need to internalize of the various ways in which the class generates, consumes, and exchanges resources, etc, are actually more complex and difficult to deal with than the Heavensward incarnation of the class - you just simply aren't rewarded for dealing with those tradeoffs and drawbacks, or for mastering the class's nuances. Given the conditions you outline here, and the punishments you suffer for making a bad call, you would expect that a properly played DRK does 150 more DPS than a Deliverance WAR, has all the defensive capability of a Defiance WAR, and can protect the entire party as well as supplement a co-tank's mitigation as well as a PLD, and that these conditions, requirements, drawbacks, etc, are the only thing holding DRK back from ruling over the game's meta in a 3-DRK standard party composition. Instead, a perfectly played DRK is dead last in just about every metric you could use to measure a tank, and all of these conditions just punch it down even lower than that.

There's an audience out there for a hard-to-play tank with lots of pitfall skills and mechanics that can harm you more than they hurt you - but the performance rewards for playing such a tank need to be proportionally higher than what you get by playing the more straightforward PLD and WAR.

[Shurrikhan]

Completely agree. It feels like our intitial design philosophy was supposed to be take a big risk for a big payoff. Punish us for playing wrong reward us for getting it right. Seems like they just focused on punishing us, and rewarded us with breaking even.

This is the basis of almost all skillgap balance, though. Unless you wish to remove the lowest skill-cap jobs from any serious content, complexity can only award control of one's throughput dynamics, not throughput overall.

And even that is enough to potentially bar certain areas of fight design, such as burst phases that time particularly well with x high-control job, or certain spreads and timings of AoE | Cleave | ST requirements, lest one or a few jobs become "required" in kind.

[EuronTribal]

This is the basis of almost all skillgap balance, though. Unless you wish to remove the lowest skill-cap jobs from any serious content, complexity can only award control of one's throughput dynamics, not throughput overall.

And even that is enough to potentially bar certain areas of fight design, such as burst phases that time particularly well with x high-control job, or certain spreads and timings of AoE | Cleave | ST requirements, lest one or a few jobs become "required" in kind.

Crater said it better than me , but I’m not saying remove the lowest skill cap class from the game. I’m saying the punishment drks have for say, a badly timed tbn or, not dealing with ld properly are too punishing for what they offer in return. Increase the reward or if they’re too scared to throw balance off lower the punishment.