Drk: worst designed class

[Lyth]

Most of the Stormblood changes were the result of removing the MP drain from Darkside. Prior to this, MP generation was in a natural state of balance between Darkside and Syphon. You had a relatively slow rise in MP over time, but you also needed to have some MP in reserve for abilities like Dark Passenger and Carve and Spit. Dark Arts was still important, but it tended to come into play during periods of higher MP generation, like Blood Weapon and Blood Price.

Removing the MP drain from Darkside created several issues. First, the MP generation from Syphon was unopposed. Second, you have the addition of the new Delirium which is essentially massive MP dumps. Also, with the removal of Dark Passenger as a viable single target ability, you suddenly have an extra 2 DA worth of MP every minute.

The devs' solution to keep up with this MP excess was to replace the MP drain of Darkside with Dark Arts uses. But in order to keep up with demand, you now had to be able to use it on Syphon as well as Souleater. So if you want to use Dark Arts on an oGCD, it's a forced double weave. If you want to use any regular oGCD, it's also probably a double weave, because you need to constantly use Dark Arts to avoid capping.

I see people occasionally mention that Dark Arts gives you flexibility to "burst when you want." This shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of how the job works. Your MP bar is not big enough relative to the MP cost of Dark Arts to store up extra uses for a rainy day. You use it, or lose it. Burst is not burst. You don't dps harder. You dps longer.

All in all, it was a series of incredibly bad decisions.

If you want to fix it, the first thing that you need to look at is MP generation. Right now, all our MP generation happens on Syphon as one big block. Why? On WAR, they had the common sense to space it out. It's not like all your abilities generate no gauge until you hit Maim, at which point you have 30 extra gauge. Spread it out so that everything generates a small amount of MP. That way, you avoid having these massive MP dumps.

Delirium is another problem here. I'm not sure why the blood cost is there at all. IR had a much smaller resource cost to use at the start of this expansion and it was removed, despite it being a thousand-fold more powerful. But if your goal is to build off of Blood Weapon, it's done in completely the wrong way. What are we going to do with all this MP? We're not going to spend it faster. It's just going to take longer to burn through.

Instead of focusing on Delirium's MP generation, they should have focused on speed. There's a natural limit at which speed boosts are effective, of course. The faster your GCD, the less room you have for double weaving. But there are other ways to do "fast". Have actions hit twice. Shorten the recasts of oGCDs such that they come up very quickly while the window is active. Make it actually feel like it has an impact, instead of being just a longer Blood Weapon.

On the MP expenditure side of things, you need more ways for people to spend it. Carve and Spit should have the MP cost built in. Dark Passenger should be something that you actually want to use in single target.

And as for Dark Arts itself? In a perfectly balanced system, you'd have enough resource spending oGCDs such that Dark Arts didn't need to be constantly used. But I suppose that the easiest solution is to have it last for the full 10 seconds, boost any abilities used while it is active, and just replace MP generation with blood generation. Use Dark Arts, your MP generation stops, and your Blood generation starts.

Also, this bit about TBN being equivalent to self-healing is nonsense. Pick an older fight to solo and try to "self-sustain" yourself using just TBN. There's no way of recovering lost health, so if the fight drags on for long enough, you're going to die. It's like saying that Hallowed represents an infinite amount of self-healing.

[Hierro]

Also, this bit about TBN being equivalent to self-healing is nonsense. Pick an older fight to solo and try to "self-sustain" yourself using just TBN. There's no way of recovering lost health, so if the fight drags on for long enough, you're going to die. It's like saying that Hallowed represents an infinite amount of self-healing.

An older fight? Are we going to talk about relevant situations or not? It doesn't make sense to use "soloing old content" as valid criteria for self healing when the only valuable context is for the sake of giving healers an easier time in relevant content.

[shao32]

An older fight? Are we going to talk about relevant situations or not? It doesn't make sense to use "soloing old content" as valid criteria for self healing when the only valuable context is for the sake of giving healers an easier time in relevant content.

mitigation is not HPS, TBN is not a self-healing skill bcs it's don't recover any HP in the process so it can't be classified as such in any form of argument.

[Hierro]

mitigation is not HPS, TBN is not a self-healing skill bcs it's don't recover any HP in the process so it can't be classified as such in any form of argument.

It's all eHP, so I don't know what to tell you exactly especially when fflogs classifies it as such.

[Lyth]

...

Self-sustain means exactly what it says on the tin. You cannot measure "self-sustain" if there is a healer present. If you're capable of soloing current content, then we can use that as a metric instead.

Also, don't let fflogs (or other people, for that matter) do your thinking for you.

[Hierro]

Self-sustain means exactly what it says on the tin. You cannot measure "self-sustain" if there is a healer present. If you're capable of soloing current content, then we can use that as a metric instead.

Also, don't let fflogs (or other people, for that matter) do your thinking for you.

Good thing we're talking about healing, not sustainability. Not even WAR can "self-sustain" entirely through today's raids.

[Shurrikhan]

An older fight? Are we going to talk about relevant situations or not? It doesn't make sense to use "soloing old content" as valid criteria for self healing when the only valuable context is for the sake of giving healers an easier time in relevant content.

When the point you're replying to is that 'it's not sufficient in relevant content, despite what others may have you believe about TBN's strength', is it worth jumping down someone's throat to slap on the same parameters they're already implying as the reasonable limits of discussion?

In an ideal world, I wish to see blood weapon and blood price just built into the stances they are a part of, and have our cooldowns buff their attributes further.

<Spitball idea warning>

I've been thinking about this myself. Consider if Blood Weapon's MP generation is a default behavior. It creates MP at a flat amount + per-potency amount. The Blood Weapon skill itself increasingly drains MP to proportionately build Attack Speed or whatnot.

Imagine there as being Shadow, Blood, and then Black Blood (the combination of each) as resources. The first two are simply a graphic overlaid atop the HP and MP bars, showing what portion of your HP or MP can be "tapped" -- used for something more. The third is an optional bar onto which these can be duplicated, along with always showing the shared amount. Generating self-healing taps HP, with overhealing still tapping. Spending MP creates 'tapped' MP - Shadow. Both "taps" gradually fade with time, at a combination flat and percentage rate. To make the largest Blood shield you can, then, you should generate a ton of healing. To maximally augment or sustain defensive Shadow abilities (Shadowskin, Shadow Wall (now utility), Dark Dance, Dark Mind), you should rapidly spend just before having to augment/sustain. As a rule of thumb, Blood provides fixed absorption, Shadow provides chance/percentile mitigation.

Darkside allows you to consume untapped resource, albeit at lesser efficiency. For MP, this means higher potential burst at cost to sustain. For HP, this means being able to put up a blood shield at cost of current HP (where it would normally be free if from "tapped HP" alone, just consuming the tap) in time to be healed up before a big hit.

Let's say we return Shadowskin and Dark Dance in some form and throw on two Blood spenders to balance that out: Red Thirst™ (Bloodbath with a fixed bonus; great for pairing with AD or Unleash) and Grim Ward (slices upward/forward, leaving a trail of [energized, slightly gelatinous-looking] blood that forms a shield before the DRK).

So, Blood Weapon consumes MP for Attack Speed, tapping MP.
Blood Price causes HP consumed/lost to generate MP, tapping HP.
Delirium enhances certain Blood/Shadow effects for its duration.
Then your (buffed) Quietus, The Blackest Night, and Bloodspiller consume both.
(Or, have Bloodspiller spend Blood to deal massive damage and debuff the enemy to provide a flat self-heal bonus to each of your strikes, have a revised TBN spend Shadow, have Quietus spend both, and use a different second Black Blood skill -- whatever, really.)

So, you build MP and HP for bonus damage/effectiveness and survival, tap MP and HP for further bonus effectiveness/abilities, and can combine them through Black Blood for yet more.

[Chrono_Rising]

Snip

Can you describe the tapping mechanics in more detail?

[Chrono_Rising]

Been awhile Hierro, hope all is well.

I do think DRK can use little changes here and there, like some of the ideas Chrono's mentioned before. I know I liked this one idea of increasing passive blood gain via BW to 50 from some odd number like 46. But I don't think this class is badly designed, nowhere near close to it.

Wow that was an old post. For ease of reference: blood weapon on its own gains us about 36 blood, 2.4 dark arts, 7/10ths of a GCD, and 1/2 an auto attack per use. I've argued in the past that these values should be tuned up, in particular for those sub 1 expected values. Gaining 50 blood, 3 dark arts, 1 GCD, and 1 auto attack per use of blood weapon would be more satisfying. Delirium makes these values 1, which means every other blood weapon use can get you your extra GCD and auto. Thats 2 minutes to definitely see a return, unless there is any form of down time in which case you likely lose 90% benefit of the buff.

Also worth noting, the mana "gain" in blood weapon isn't a true gain. It is only a shifting of the mana you would have generated over 40 seconds in grit to be in a 15 second interval out of grit. Also comparing this with blood price where you expect to gain 25 blood, and suddenly blood weapon is only gaining you 11 blood, 7/10ths of a GCD, and 1/2 an auto. This ability should be revisited and potentially buffed. The 30 second recast I mentioned above would go a long way to making blood weapon more impactful, though we should still revisit the 7/10ths of a GCD and 1/2 an auto.

In an ideal world, I wish to see blood weapon and blood price just built into the stances they are a part of, and have our cooldowns buff their attributes further.

It's all eHP, so I don't know what to tell you exactly especially when fflogs classifies it as such.

The issue with the fflogs metric of self healing is that it counts shields as healing. There is good reason to do this for healers since scholar shields are a thing. But it makes less sense for tanks. It would be nice if the site would treat all mitigation the same way but until then it is easily skewed by tank shields. There are clear differences between how the game defines healing and how that site does. LD => sole survivor TBN does not mean the healer only needs to restore 60% more HP, they still need to restore 80% as only sole survivor counts towards the in-game self heal.

[Insanecell]

I feel like many people forget the reasons why changes were made to DRK as such. People praise the whole "retaliation" aspect of DRK, but forget that very point forced DRK into the MT role for optimal damage. HW DRK damage was far too RNG reliant and had too much distraction with having to keep track of procs. The way I see it, SB streamlined DRK and did a good job at doing so.

I do think DRK can use little changes here and there, like some of the ideas Chrono's mentioned before. I know I liked this one idea of increasing passive blood gain via BW to 50 from some odd number like 46. But I don't think this class is badly designed, nowhere near close to it.

as an interesting aside, I looked up some of the top parses for tanks on A12S. Warriors seem to average around 500 HPS in terms of sustain, but I found a DRK who broke 6.1k DPS while healing 700 HPS through liberal usage of TBN. The high usage makes them an outlier, but shows that you can indeed heal significantly more than WAR without impeding on your DPS.

Laziness is what I call it. Square couldnt do the work to reconcile the kit. Simple changes too. Rework DD to parry x number of attacks. Preserves the retalitory feel of drk but without the pure rng. Got rid of the mp drain instead of putting mp costs on the weaponskills while in Darkside. Keeps the feeling of fighting your mp while giving more control to players instead of a steady tick. Reworking DA to fundamentally change attacks instead of potency increases. Create Runic as a trait to allow spell parrying so we can have said retailitory play style on pure magic fights. Dont create rip offs of warrior actions let warrior be the big man on the block with fell cleave. A third combo, thought removing combos would be considered a bad thing considering in HW they had to create two for pld.

Shame its happened twice in a row for me, and apologies for the stream of consciousness. Blizzard gutted what I enjoyed about blood death knight on WoW as well. Same thing too. Drks still decent and blood dk is amazingly op in bfa, but both are just not fun. Well at least I found Red Mage. Can bounce between the two classes. I wanna get back into raiding instead of waiting for tanking to be fun again.