Trying to understand the complaints about DRK

[Lyth]

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If you look at the example that you cited, you use TBN 22 times over the course of a ten minute fight, which works out to be a little more than once every thirty seconds. That's significantly more than you'll see in most of the better optimised runs.

This is the reason why your Bloodspiller values are inflated. The additional Bloodspillers that you gain are coming at the expense of DA Souleater and DA Syphon. What's more, if you look at your total counts for your combo actions, you have one less Souleater than you do Hard Slash and Syphon. This suggests that at least one of the forced Bloodspillers clipped Souleater, costing you a minimum of 93 potency on at least one of those TBN uses. That's a surprisingly large amount to accidentally lose on a "dps neutral" defensive, especially when many players consider spending 170 potency on IB to be anathema.

If you look at better optimised runs, you'll generally see a pattern of Souleater contributing the most dps, followed by autos, followed by Syphon, followed by Bloodspiller. This is partially because a lot less MP gets dumped into TBN (some of the better runs use on the order of 0-2 uses total). It's also because better coordination with raid buffs tends to increase the weighting of your harder hitting abilities relative to your autos.

I don't want to dissuade anyone from using TBN here. You're going to lose more dps from a lost GCD due to mistakes in uptime than you will worrying about clipping Souleaters. But the system as a whole is unnecessarily convoluted.

Why does any of this matter? There are two reasons. The first is related to burst. As we said earlier, burst makes your life easier. The smaller the window that you concentrate your dps into, the less important overall uptime becomes, and the more room you have for error. This is one of the reasons why you have lower percentile WARs doing comparable dps to DRKs nearly 40 percentiles above them. Bloodspiller and Delirium are supposed to be hard hitting attacks. But because DRK tries to be cute with the MP/blood exchanges, you end up treading water instead of getting the proper gains out of them.

The second reason is related to playstyle. Most people recognise that dps, even as a tank, is really important. But a frequently voiced complaint amongst more defensive minded players is that you always seem to lose out for mitigating. Perhaps this is a missed opportunity. If cleverly shielding your teammates made you stronger, then Sheltron, Intervention, and TBN could pave the way for a more engaging defensive playstyle which rewards you offensively for protecting others, to contrast with WAR's approach of doing more damage by just hitting really hard. If diversity is what we're after, this is one way to do it.

When Stormblood first launched, a number of us were really pleased with the seeming interplay between blood and MP. There was this sense that you'd juggle resources to boost your damage output. But because blood is restricted to the level 70 abilities, this interplay is nearly non-existent. I'm wondering if we'd be better off simply uncoupling MP and blood and treating them as independent entities.

If that were the case, you wouldn't have to worry about how adjustments to Bloodspiller might nerf Delirium and buff TBN, or how adjustments to combo potencies might buff Delirium and nerf TBN. You'd just have a system where proactively shielding yourself and your teammates from harm simply made you hit harder. Think Zarya to WAR's Roadhog.