Changes based on DRK's thematic approach to combat

[Zyne]

First let me say I'm not one to immediately give in when people claim a class is in a bad spot. I've taken a small break from FFXIV until recently, I'm actually quite glad with the changes, though I think they sit more as a bandage than an actual solution.

DRK currently sits with a few challenges to their play style, and I'm not looking at removing these, but slightly altering them with a few skill adjustments to give the class a slight bit more fluidity in game play.

Challenge 1: Damage or defense.

Drks main defensive skill TBN is directly harmful to their DPS if it does not shatter. Square is aware that players parse each other, it's time to come out and finally accept that this isn't an ideal situation. There are more examples of this, but this is the most prevalent.

Challenge 2: Lack of party utility

DRK's main skill again TBN is arguably their only party utility skill of worth.

Challenge 3: DRK's DMG suffers the most of the 3 tanks for downtime on the boss.

This one is explainable in the title.

Challenge 4: Dark Passenger

This skill have a very small window of usefulness, it currently is almost unanimous among players that it needs a revamp.

Possible ideas and changes

Currently I can think of a few things that DRK could have to increase their viability in most instances. However a few of them I would be hesitant to add just due to alienating the other tanks, over buffing a class is just as harmful as under buffing them. Compared to most MMO's FFXIV is quite balanced (down-vote me on that comment if you must).

Idea 1: Rework of blood price to being a trait, not a skill. Blood weapon useable in grit.

An idea to give DRK a niche is to double down on their concept of being able to be in both their tank and defensive stances at once. Remove blood weapons requirement to be in grit and allow blood price to be a trait.

However blood price as a trait needs to be worked that they do receive blood and mana when hit, but only at a maximum cap per 3sec. This will cap them from gaining too much, but also keep DRK's from intentionally getting damaged to build up dps.

As the skill blood weapon with this suggestion being now usable in grit the skill would need a nerf to it's effectiveness while up.

To give an incentive players to stay in grit it's overall damage reduction should be reduced.

Idea 2: Dark passenger and Salted Earth rework

DRK currently suffers a lack of party utility. I would like to rework DP, and salted earth to fix that.

I feel DP should have it's DA effect and mana cost removed. The skill also might see some resurgence if it is reworked to doing an effect much like reprisal but however being used as an aoe effect version of it. I understand doing this would likely result in a much longer CD but it does give a partial effect to the player request "Party shield."

SE is also a candidate under this idea being that it's a zone based skill. Having it get a minor buff to players standing in it (TP cost reduction comes to mind, this would help with the increased speed of MNK, SAM, DRG, and NIN) a small buff to incentize bringing the DRK further. This would also counteract a weakening of Blood Weapon allowing DRK's to not become TP starved at higher SkS.

Idea 3: Burst

An idea for improving DRK's burst DPS, though one I'm hesistant to talk about is a change in Blood Spiller. BS might benefit from being removed from the GCD and having it's DA effect removed. Doing so would make one's rotation feel a bit less clunky and also increase burst slightly.

Overall of the ideas

- Slight increases to their raid utility in the form of a TP use reduction and a boss dmg reduction skill

- Less incentive for staying out of grit making DRK able to do deal more dmg while MTing, however still having respectable numbers as a OT.

- Possibly more burst dps, but I'd be hesitant on this one due to more chances to use TBN resulting in the DRK being able to "Eat" skills that might normally require them to run.

- Two skills reworked to no longer have DA requirements means slightly more mana to spend on skills like TBN

This post will be edited and changed based on peoples reactions or ideas.

[Mahrze]

I think tweaks in general as to how we gain and spend MP/Blood would be a great start. How we can easily overflow on either is a joke, specially when we only have 2 abilities that use blood to potency, and 2 that "swap" MP <-> Blood.

Darkside definitely needs more than just the 20% damage buff. I personally think it should absorb the MP/Blood gain effects of Blood Price and Blood weapon. The TP reduction should be available only when out of "Grit" can be scrapped imo. And it should be the "tank" stance in the sense of being used as default aggro.

I personally would like to see Grit getting the treatment akin to Riddle of Earth. 10% for 30s, procs addtl 10% when hit for 10s and when proc ends, the whole buff ends, recast to 40s to make it a "button lights up, button gets pressed" defensive CD.

MP costs to defensive skills and Blood costs to offensive skills. DA being able to affect both. DA at this point would be like aetherflow, preferably with 5 point stacks instead of 3. Passive DA gain from Power Slash/Souleater. DA should definitely affect CD on defensive and power output on offensive. (iirc, TouchandFeel was talking about something like this)

Delirium should become a party buff. maybe something like reverse embolden I saw someone mention on another DRK thread, but DRK getting increased blood gains for more bloodspillers while the party gets magic damage buff but the buff dropoff only affects the user.

[Xesh]

We've been saying the same things over and over and over and over again for the past few months. Im Just sick of SE Not listening. At this point I don't even care about balance anymore, but what I do care about is how clunky Darks playstyle feels. Compare it to what made drk so cool and fun back in HW. All of that is gone and DRK has suffered a pretty big identity loss. Therefore I'd like to see a complete overhaul of Dks playstyle so the rotation is as satisfying as it was back in HW.

[Nedkel]

Blood weapon usable in grit would be just enough.

You cant just out of nowhere give an infinite amount of MP to the job that could sustain itself so hard. It will make DRK unkillable with Abyssal drain and TBN usable all the time.
The only thing that hold back DRK is his poor resource management compare to the cost of the skills, it already is not that bad on lvl 70 with quietus, delirium and etc. I am even afraid blood weapon would be too much at this point.

Dark passenger should have its potency increased to 140 (along with DA damage to 280), nothing more, that would be enough to balance it out, not being weakened in any way, because you will make low lvls drk to suffer even harder than they do now. And the salted earth is not a bad spell, it generates blood gauge and does dps every 3 sec to everything in the aoe, the tooltip on it is broken.

Also you cant really give a burst damage to the job that would have so big sustained dps, it would be overpowered.
Using DA on bloodspiller is not necessity, it just adds 140 potency same with other weaponskills. It still does its job with 400 base potency and 475 when in grit.
Change would be cool, but again, pair that with the blood weapon, blood price and etc you will end up with DRK having more dps than current state warrior, when he will be allowed to pull out 1k potency combo all the time with additional abilities like quietus, bloodspiller and etc.

[Xan_Kriegor]

Yoshi made it clear that he won't do things to make all jobs seem equal. Therefore we should suggest changes that will give the utility our class need but in a different way than WAR and PLD.

So, I don't like the idea of just giving us a party shield like the other two tanks. And I don't think they will give us a Reprisal kind of skill too. I guess they should try to do something different. Maybe making us a better single target shielder by increasing TBN from 10% to 20% in a friend. This way we would be better than WAR when it is useful to protect a single party member (like O7S) but worse when it is more important to protect the entire raid with Shake it Off.

When we say utility people seem to only think about shields. But we could have some utility in other ways too. I think it would be nice if Sole Survivor had a different kind of utility like being a debuff on target for 20 seconds that whoever inflicts damage to this target would regen a small amount of HP and MP. It could be for some % of damage inflicted. It would be a nice, useful and unique utility.

Also, Dark Passenger and Blood Price should have their numbers adjusted to be actually useful in Savage content.

And I do think they should change our Grit dynamic, maybe making it costs less mana to turn it on. And I don't know, maybe making it a dps gain to turn Grit on when you can double DABS and then turn it off again. This would add a little bit of complexity in our rotations but I doubt they will do anything like that because they are clearly trying to simplify tank dps rotations.