Drk: worst designed class

[Lyth]

The developer feedback around the DRK rework in 4.3 suggested that there were issues related to DRK's resource management and gameplay that still needed time to be addressed, so the general thought was that this would happen in the expansion as opposed to 4.4/4.5.

Dark Knight
We are aware of the feedback we received globally, and understand that we need to make adjustments to this job. However, adjustments to the fundamentals of a job requires a good amount of time. For this reason, it would be difficult to make these adjustments during the patch series, and we won’t be able to address all the feedback we have received at this time. Please note that we will make as many adjustments as we possibly can.

There have been a lot of comments to adjust the frequency of Dark Arts usage, but for these changes we haven’t made any major adjustments to Dark Arts. Instead we have made overall adjustments to increase their offensive/defensive capabilities and usability.

Most jobs get some amount of rework during an expansion, but to implement the above considerations with DRK you do need to re-evaluate the resource system and how certain actions are designed.

DRK has a lot of interesting ideas with questionable implementation. It's nice, for example to have the option to either use Carve and Spit to generate MP in AoE, while being able to use DA to boost its damage in single target. In practice, however, most uses of Carve and Spit occur under DA, and it's nearly always a double weave. Is it necessary? No. I'm not actually making two decisions. I just want to press one button with the cost attached.

Likewise, take Delirium. Do I ever want to use Delirium without Blood Weapon or Price? No. There are four conditions to get a benefit from using the action. You need to have the correct amount of blood. Blood Weapon/Price has to be up. You have to activate the buff first and then extend it with Delirium. You need a minimum of 16 seconds of continuous uptime on the boss. Most jobs have one button for their big offensive buff, with no resource costs attached. And nearly all of them have a significantly bigger impact than Delirium.

The other common point is the fact that DRK tends to be the middle ground between WAR's absolute offense and PLD's absolute support, and it really needs a direction of its own. Self-healing/lifesteal is a good direction from this, but it needs to be a thematic direction across the entire job. Bloodspiller is a good example. It needs to be more than just a weaker Fell Cleave clone. Even if it gave you a small bit of health back, it'd offer a bit of unique flavour.

By the way, it's not hard at all to change Bloodspiller's effectiveness without changing the balance on TBN. The single easiest way is to drop both the cost of Bloodspiller and the amount of blood generated by TBN by the same amount. That gives you more frequent Bloodspillers while keeping TBN dps neutral. The alternative is to change Souleater and Bloodspiller by the same potency, which keeps the frequency the same while changing the potency.

I do think that direct "heals" are more a PLD thing in FF series lore, though, while restoring HP through attacks is more a DRK thing.

Jandor reminded me about the comment from fanfest about shields being integrated with the HP bar in 5.0. At the time, I thought that it was just a neat idea (could we see the amount of healing required to cleanse Walking Dead implemented in a similar way?) But I didn't really consider potential ramifications. If shields are now a numerical resource, then they may not necessarily exist as discrete buffs. If you have Adlo, TBN, and Shake stacked, your shield resource measures the total.

So do you keep all the buff timers, and just display the total amount of shielding? Do you remove the timers, and just merge all shields together into a single resource which, say, decays over time? Is there a max shield value that you can attain?

At the moment, shields are pretty powerful. They don't suffer from diminishing returns the way % damage reduction works. There are some limitations placed in terms off SCH and Noct AST interactions, but groups can put out a lot of shielding at the moment. A shield resource with an upper limit would both address the power of shields and rein it in. This would have implications for both TBN as well as the Veil/Shake LB cheese, but we'll have to see what happens.