Question for fellow DRK's who have played its new Shb iteration.

[Kreyd]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

[Valic]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

TBN, LD will never change, and that's okay, it's unique. Could make it so you only need to be healed for half your hp maybe but anyways.... Technically GNB's 80 is just an upgraded version of the same ability they get at level 18 that perfectly weaves between GCD's. DRK's.... just doesn't make sense. Quietus doesn't make sense to use for aoe'ing either and feels awkward to pop at points. MAJOR agree on your stance with TBN, I feel that way too. you should NEVER feel afraid to save your teammate because you think you'll be giving up your buff or dps. It jut feels like a game of chance sometimes.

[Kreyd]

Technically GNB's 80 is just an upgraded version of the same ability they get at level 18 that perfectly weaves between GCD's. DRK's.... just doesn't make sense. Quietus doesn't make sense to use for aoe'ing either and feels awkward to pop at points. <AJOR agree on your stance with TBN, I feel that way too. you should NEVER feel afraid to save your teammate because you think you'll be giving up your buff or dps. It jut feels like a game of chance sometimes.

Quietus really needs mp regain on every enemy hit instead of one, if they thought it was OP then just make it "reduced MP gained on 3rd,4th, enemy" etc. It's just so bad right now to use because it literally doesn't do anything for you, besides damage of course.

This.

Sorry but one thing in particular in your lists really glared out to me. Why are you glad that Sole Survivor is gone? You didn't even get anything to replace it. Having it literally only helped you, it was even buffed to still be effective in boss fights.

I dunno...It was a straight gain, but it just somehow tweaked me, that we could never use it to it's full potential in a boss fight and it was just a press on demand like bloodprice. I always thought it would've been cool as an "Places an debuff on an enemy. Everyone hitting that enemy gets HP/MP back." ability. But in the end I just didn't care for it anymore.

[Tranquilmelody7]

TBN, LD will never change, and that's okay, it's unique. Could make it so you only need to be healed for half your hp maybe but anyways....

Just tweak living dead so Full MP is required to remove the debuff.

That way we can manage the death debuff on our own, while healers will still have to keep us alive afterwards.

[Valic]

Just tweak living dead so Full MP is required to remove the debuff.

That way we can manage the death debuff on our own, while healers will still have to keep us alive afterwards.

Can you imagine being so low on MP and using this and actually having some way to get back to full MP right now? Our MP regain is pretty slow atm so, that'd basically count us out 95% of the time.

[jetfire117]

What I like about new DRK is, that a lot of the little tweaks we had in SB were removed:

-SE now heals in tank stance.
-Bloodgain is not high in aoe and low in single target anymore.
-Blood Weapon is not tied to off stance.
-Blood Price were removed.
-Sole Survivor were removed.
-We finally got a raid wide mitigation.
-C&S/Dark Passenger double weave were removed.

What I dislike is the stuff that basically everyone is saying.

-MP reg is really low, therefore we are doing less ogcd's and the jobs feels less busy/slower than before.
-Quietus is mediocre at best.
-Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are magic only/pretty weak.
-Abyssal Drain still has the "Top in aoe/flop in single target" thing.
-Living Dead still is "meh".

Most issues I have atm are with TBN and Living Shadow.

TBN is now a 500 potency loose if it not breaks, and 0 potency gain if it does. Therefore and because of it's high MP costs we need to be way more carefully to pop it than we were before.

Living Shadow doesn't add anything special/interesting to our playstyle, and is just a 2min dmg cd. (to be fair, so it is with the lv 80 skills of WAR's and GUN's too)

Quietus really needs mp regain on every enemy hit instead of one, if they thought it was OP then just make it "reduced MP gained on 3rd,4th, enemy" etc. It's just so bad right now to use because it literally doesn't do anything for you, besides damage of course.

[Lyth]

...

There are plenty of directions that they could have theoretically taken the job.

Likewise, there are plenty of jobs out there already that are based around strict rotations. PLD is one of them. There's an upfront commitment that you make to learning the steps, but once you have them practised, very little changes.

DRK has always represented the other end of this extreme. It's a resource-driven job. There isn't really a "rotation". There's a set of rules and breakpoints that you use to make decisions on the fly. Locked rotations limit your ability to adapt to variations in resources. If you wanted a more elaborate combo system on DRK, it would have to be something more along the lines of what MNK has, where you can choose from a number of first, second, and third steps. But there's nothing to say that this wouldn't have panned out significantly differently than the present system as far as decision making logic is concerned.

Even in Heavensward, there really was just one dps combo. You never used Souleater without DA. I know that a couple of content creators have fixated on this point, but it demonstrates a near complete ignorance of what makes the job design work. Some people, unfortunately, are better off popularising game knowledge than they are at contributing to it.

I think this is always going to be an issue with jobs like DRK. People look at it from the outside, and say "this can't be that difficult." Actual player performance rarely reflects this, though. In Heavensward, everyone knew what the job was like from the outset because there was a lot of interest in levelling it. In Stormblood, it really wasn't until later in the expansion, when people started to try it out for themselves, that people started to actually recognise that it was still the most complex tank job by a long shot (not that it had much competition, let's be real).

If your goal is to maximise the number of combos you have, PLD is probably more your jam.

...

Dark Arts, as it was introduced in Heavensward, was an interesting idea. The original function, namely, to augment an attack, was an interesting one. There were still problems, namely, the instant you tie Dark Arts (and MP) to potency, you become limited by whether something is a dps loss or not. DADD and DADM were fun, but you dropped them when you were trying to optimise. Even in a fight like A12S, where using DA on DM could allow you to solo tank more of the fight, it was preferential to just swap and avoid the potency loss altogether.

That's also the reason why PLD has moved to a completely dps neutral gauge.

When Stormblood substituted Dark Arts for Darkside's MP drain, Dark Arts was already dead. There was no 'nuanced' enhancement effect, it was a straight up 2400 MP = 140 potency. Delirium was just plain awful. You didn't even see a net benefit until you had at least 15 seconds of continuous Blood Weapon uptime. Anything less and it was just a reverse TBN on a 120 second (and later 80 second) recast. You were treading water. They could just have easily removed the cost, letting you use that blood towards an extra Bloodspiller in place of an extra DA, and just extend the duration of BW by 8 seconds to produce the same effect.

I'm not sure if this is a level-based issue, but I'm not seeing an issue of not having things to do. It feels like there's always either something else coming off cooldown, or some MP or blood threshold to be adjusted for. Those rare moments where there's a bit of downtime, you're either making decisions about mitigating something with TBN or having to deal with a raidwide. And with three major offensive cooldowns syncing and unsyncing at different times across a four minute period, there's definitely a lot of variations in how things play out.

Pure off-tanking might be a bit different, but if the expectation is that we take an active role in helping our co-tank mitigate, I think we're going to be pretty busy anyways. Generally speaking, if you ever find yourself just waiting around pressing the one combo, there are probably five different things that have come off cooldown without you noticing.

If you liked watching your MP slingshot around while you hammered the DA key between every GCD, you probably won't like this iteration of DRK. That being said, having played all three iterations of the job, this version seems a lot more faithful to the original than Stormblood ever was.

[Wyndam]

snip

That's probably the best comment in this thread right there.

[Tint]

When Stormblood substituted Dark Arts for Darkside's MP drain, Dark Arts was already dead. There was no 'nuanced' enhancement effect, it was a straight up 2400 MP = 140 potency.

Interestingly in tank stance there were more decisions / priorities for Dark Arts.

Carve and Spit for biggest potency buff.
Bloodspiller because the bonus potency wasn't reduced by tank stance.
Souleater for the extra heal.
Syphon Strike when you were overcapping.
Dark Passenger when you were overcapping really hard or for extra burst.
Power Slash for extra enmity.
And of course TBN wich you could use instead of Dark Arts.

I actually loved DRK in tank stance. It was slow and methodical, one combo = one Dark Arts or TBN. And there were these priorities, not just press button for 140 potency.

Wished 5.0 DRK would play more like 4.0 DRK in tank stance...

[Reynhart]

Even in Heavensward, there really was just one dps combo. You never used Souleater without DA.

Sure, but you didn't always use Dark Arts at all, just to make sure you have enough mp to keep Darkside up, so Delirium was an alternative, on top of having a debuff worth keeping up.

I think this is always going to be an issue with jobs like DRK. People look at it from the outside, and say "this can't be that difficult."

I'm definitely not a top raider, but since you don't have to think of what combo to use, nor have anything to maintain during fights (since you can refill far more MP than Darkside will require before expiring, MP that are basically always spend to keep Darkside up) nor require any preparation prior to your spam-Bloodspiller phase, I'm pretty much convinced that DRK has become much easier than it ever was.

If your goal is to maximise the number of combos you have, PLD is probably more your jam.

Personally, I think no job should only rely on a single combo over and over, especially since PLD already had that issue in ARR. And DRK is the only tank who only has only one (single target) combo. It wouldn't have been very difficult to keep another one just to maitain a specific (unique) buff.