DRK changes from Prelim notes

[Crater]

Mostly changes that make DRK "less bad", without much that really makes it "good". Fixes some (not all) of the class's most fundamental failings, and probably does legitimately give it a small niche in certain fights, but it's not going to do much of anything to reverse DRK's fortunes.

- The Power Slash change was so incredibly obvious that it's kind of insulting it wasn't in the game all the way back in Heavensward; basically everybody with two brain cells to rub together was asking for this one. It's pretty irrelevant, though, because Power Slash is still a terrible combo that nobody should ever use - you still lose 70 potency worth of MP, ~30 potency worth of Blood, and another 30 potency directly when you use the combo, and this change just makes it so that you don't lose an additional 140 potency if you decide to DA Power Slash.

- Grit: Also a bit of a no-brainer; how good this is depends on how low the MP cost is. Realistically, the cost should be removed, not reduced, if the GCD cost is staying, but if it's only 480-600 or so MP, that's probably good enough. If it's still 1200 or more, they messed up, and this change doesn't really do anything.

- Dark Passenger is not terrible, but should have been 150/300 potency rather than 140/280. You don't get the 10% Slashing bonus on it either way, so 150 is still a slight loss in single-target compared to a Dark Arts, and 140 is a small but appreciable loss. It's strictly a gain in multi-target/AoE situations, can eke out negligible potency gains if used during a party buff window, and is probably finally a big enough gain in 2-target scenarios that it won't feel like splitting hairs just to point out that it's technically stronger, but that was never really the core weakness. The enmity modifier is possibly/probably very good, though, and (depending on what the multiplier is) could give DRK a rough equivalent to WAR in terms of being able to drop small amounts of potency to generate medium amounts of extra enmity.

- Dark Mind: Again, total no-brainer. Should have been in at Stormblood's launch, or patched in during the first two weeks of 4.0 just like WAR's costless stance-swapping.

- Darkside: QoL adjustment, doesn't affect anything really.

- Shadow Wall: This is an alright change. It's still strictly worse than Vengeance, but is probably most of the time better than Sentinel. This (and the DM change) finally kind of puts it into a place where TBN and Dark Mind can probably roughly make up for the disparity between DRK and WAR personal defensive kits - in certain fights that use magic tankbusters. On fights without magic tankbusters, I don't think this is enough to let DRK compete with WAR, but it is enough that I think DRK will pretty handily beat out PLD for personal defense. This gives DRK a niche, but not an especially great one: they still get edged out by PLD any time that you want to maximize tank DPS, any time that party-wide defenses are important, etc, and WAR is still a guaranteed slot in every fight.

- Plunge: Really good change; basically nobody was defending Plunge's terrible animation lock. The DA effect is really good: Since it's completely DPS-neutral (and sometimes even a gain) to use DA Plunge, it can be considered part of DRK's overall rotation, and that means that (depending on the enmity modifier they gave DA Plunge) DRK finally has enmity built into their optimized DPS rotation like the other tanks. This has been a unique weakness of DRK since Heavensward, and it's good to finally see it go.

- Sole Survivor: Another really good change. A 20% heal on a 120s cooldown makes it a pretty potent self-heal that rewards foresight and timing. Can't be used quite as often as the free Equilibrium that WAR gets every time Unchained is up, but will probably heal for roughly similar amounts, and comes with about 110 potency worth of MP to make up for that.



It's not even close to the kind of thing that's going to bring me back, but at least it wasn't literally just "+10 potency to Souleater". At the very least I feel slightly vindicated at spending so much time here harping on how bad DRK's passive enmity generation was, when nobody else really seemed to be picking up on it.