Thread: Blood Weapon 5.1

If you want to talk about blood weapon, then talk about blood weapon. Bringing baggage in from other threads just defeats your discussion before it even started.

The only issues with blood weapon haste as far as i can see is:

Pros:
*it brings back a much lamented loss to Drk (the 'fast' tank)
*it adds some differentiation between homogenozed jobs

Cons:
*Double weaving will be problematic and it will be crammed in with the current large burst of skill spam exacerbating this issue.

Ive never been opposed to drk reclaiming its haste effect. It was a nice quality thay separated how drk felt from other tanks. In fact with the generally lower use of ogcd skills in current Drk i think the haste effect would be more fun and less detrinental from double wewves with so many less DA to use.

However, i am concerned about forcing this in the opener that already requires massive ammounts of double weaves already as others have already brought up here and in other threads. If drk had its ogcd skills spread out more evenly instead of all crammed together this would look more promising. Or if the haste effect was looped in in a different way so it didnt add to the opener spam window as this specific change would, im all for it, but it needs to be functional.

Drk has cut out the ogcd spam that would make a haste effect really nice in SHB. As long as we can manage the opening zerg of ogcds we currently have.

The issue with a haste effect on the new Blood Weapon is that a lower haste value, like the previous 10%, would amount to virtually nothing due to the much shorter duration of 10s and longer recast of 60s.
If you increase the value to say 20% or more, you would then potentially start to see some noticeable gain but it could mess with double-weaving.

The only reason the haste effect used to be worthwhile was because of how frequently and how long it would be up. Being kept on pretty much constant cooldown and popping Delerium (the old version) when it was up would result in Blood Weapon being active about half of the time (~47.5%). So, while the haste was a very little boost, it was up so much of the time that it would add up overall. The current Blood Weapon is only active about 1/6th (16.7%) of the time if kept on cooldown. 47.5% of the time versus 16.7%, that is a huge difference or to put a number to it, almost 3 times as much uptime (2.84x).

In order to get approximately the same amount of gains from a haste effect that you would get overall from the previous version of Blood Weapon, you would have to give it a 25%-30% haste effect which would result in drastically tighter timing to weave OGCDs, that while single OGCD weaving would be fine double-weaving would become problematic.

The new Blood Weapon is different enough that the old version and the new version has become an apples to oranges situation, and expecting the same results when you try to flavour them with the same things is likely to end in disappointment.

In fairness, a haste effect does have the pro of helping a bit with fitting the 5th GCD into the 10s duration that is currently an issue, but imo that is better solved by just increasing the duration to 12s like Requiescat.

On a slightly different topic, although still related to Blood Weapon, I do think the ability still feels a little "meh" when used and could really use some more stuff rolled into it to make it feel more impactful when used while still being resource gain based. In addition to getting the fitting 5gcds issue fixed of course.

One way this could be done is by bringing in the classic and recurring element of "life-steal" to the ability having each weaponskill/spell hit also give a slight heal (cure pot of 200?) while reducing the cure potency of Soul Eater to 250, reducing the more spread out self-healing of DRK and making it more bursty.

Another potentially interesting thing that could be done with Blood Weapon is to make it your primary source of Darkside duration by having each hit provide a bit of Darkside time, while in tandem reducing the amount of Darkside time added by Edge/Flood.
For example, each hit under Blood Weapon could provide 8s of Darkside for a total of 40s with all 5 gcds. Then Edge/Flood would only provide 10s of Darkside per usage, making it so you have to get out at least 2 Edges/Floods to keep Darkside up before Blood Weapon is available again which should be easy enough since you can fairly easily put out 3-4 every 60s, it would just be less "automated" as it is now and require a little more management, being somewhat more akin to the HW version of Darkside where you had to keep your MP up to offset the constant drain.

Originally Posted by Izsha

snip

The reason I see most often given for bringing back the haste effect is to try to make DRK "feel fast" again.

I probably wasn't clear on this since I didn't say it explicitly in my previous post, but I am not in favor of going the route of adding back the haste effect and increasing the uptime of Blood Weapon, I am actually against trying to shoe-horn the haste effect back in at all. I just brought up the difference in uptimes to make the point that just slapping the haste effect back on Blood Weapon wouldn't end up with the result that people seem to think it would.

The main reason I am against adding the haste effect back and increasing the Blood Weapon duration to make the haste effect worthwhile is that it would require a ton of reworking of the values of resource gain, not only from Blood Weapon but every ability in the kit because the uptime would be so high it would have ripple effects that would touch everything. Those kind of number tweaking and fine-tuning adjustments are tedious and take a long time to do, test, tweak, test some more, tweak and so on until you get things back in balance. That's a lot of work just to instill a sense of "feeling fast" to the job that could probably be better achieved through more encapsulated and controlled means such as providing more frequent usages of OGCDs.