A few changes for DRK: APM, QOL, LD

[RJD]

I’ve mained DRK for all of Stormblood and it is still thematically my favorite tank. My beef with the job is that it suffers from severe resource starvation during the leveling process and some mechanical clunk at endgame. Some of these can be addressed by making minor changes while others will require a deeper class rework; I will focus on the former.

MP Spenders: Edge of Darkness, Flood of Darkness, The Blackest Night. Reduce MP cost to 2500.
Reducing MP consumption will help resolve the MP starvation issues at low levels and also indirectly increase survivability by reducing the needed MP threshold for activation of TBN.

Spells: Unmend, Unleash, Stalwart Soul. Scale recast timer based on SKS like weaponskills.
This is a QOL change to improve consistency, especially in AOE pulls.

Dark Mind: Reduce damage taken by 10%. Reduce magic damage taken by an additional 10%.
This is a QOL change to improve utility outside niche magic buster use.

Stalwart Soul: Move to level 40. Deal unaspected damage of potency 100 (160 combo) to all enemies within 5y and restore 600MP.
Moving Stalwart Soul down to level 40 helps resolve the MP starvation issue at low levels and brings DRK’s AOE combo into parity with the other tanks. Generation of Blackblood can be added in Stormblood level brackets via the Blackblood trait at level 62.

Living Dead: Cooldown 300s. Gain the effects of Living Dead for 10s, nullifying all incoming damage. Afterwards, gain the effects of Walking Dead for 10s. While Walking Dead is active, take damage over time up to 30% of your maximum HP. This effect cannot be cleansed.
Living Dead is a difficult skill to play around because it provides very little feedback on whether you are immune or vulnerable. It also gives no value if Walking Dead is not triggered by incoming damage. This change aims to improve consistency by giving DRKs a true immunity period while still giving a flavorful but not crippling downside. Living Dead will give the same immunity period as Hallowed Ground with a shorter cooldown in exchange for inflicting unavoidable damage after immunity expires. Capping the damage over time allows healers to prepare and use appropriate cooldowns to compensate.

Continued >

[RJD]

Salted Earth: Cooldown 90s. Duration 15s. Create a field of whirling shadows around you, continuously dealing unaspected damage with potency 60 to all enemies within 5y.
This will reduce the clunkiness of having to place a ground target AOE while engaged in melee combat in addition to giving DRK a flavorful AOE DOT skill.

Enhanced Plunge: Trait. Gain a second charge of Plunge.
Move it to level 58, a current dead level, to make room for something interesting in Shadowbringers brackets.

Abyss Mastery: Trait. Gain an additional charge of Abyssal Drain and Carve and Spit. Replaces Stalwart Soul at level 72.
Carve and Spit: Ability. Strike 3 times for for 150 potency each. For each hit landed, restore 200MP and Cure self for 120 potency.
Abyssal Drain: Ability. Deal unaspected damage with potency 200. Restore 300MP once and cure self for 200 potency for each enemy hit.
CNS and AD become the resource generating counterparts of EOS and FOS. If resources are depleted, activate CNS or AD to replenish. If resources are plentiful, dump MP using EOS/FOS. This increases decision-making engagement and APM without forcing a major rework of mechanics. The changes for CNS and AD can be applied at the levels they are unlocked. Replaces Stalwart Soul at level 72.

Remorseless: Trait. Activating Delirium also grants a stack of Remorseless, increasing the potency of Bloodspiller by 100 and Quietus by 50. Each cast of Bloodspiller or Quietus executed during Delirium grants another stack of Remorseless. Stacks up to 5 times. All stacks expire when Delirium ends. Replaces Enhanced Plunge at level 78.
Delirium is currently a dollar store IR. This is not a full rework, but I hope this would give it some much needed impact until a more substantial rework is able to be done.

Summary
This version of DRK will increase its APM to make it feel faster by increasing oGCD availability. It will improve sustain by giving more self-healing while keeping it distinct from and in parity with the other tanks. It will reduce resource starvation by providing better MP generation tools spaced out more evenly throughout progression. It will reduce clunk by pruning unneeded clicks and improving DRK’s tank immunity skill. It will provide QOL changes and more meaningful progression by giving logical upgrades to existing skills as you level up and reducing dead levels. More comprehensive mechanical reworks will have to wait until 6.0, as per previous SE patterns of class changes.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

DRK since 4.2/4.3, raided entirety of Dimensional Rift Savage + current Eden Tier and also currently raiding on DRK in TEA, hope you don't mind if I give a bit of insight.

MP Spenders - Lowering MP cost without lowering MP Generators or lowering MP spender potency is an indirect damage increase. Not sure if that is a good course given EOS is 500 potency.

Spells scaling with SKS - 100%, I'd sign that bill immediately. The other option is shafting Skill-/Spellspeed altogether and call it Speed / Haste.

Dark Mind - if it wasn't for Reprisal, I'd have said yes, but no. For physical attacks, you are equipped with Rampart, Shadow Wall, TBN and Reprisal. If you need more to deal with physicals, might ask your co-tank to swap or your Melee to feint. The only content besides the rare case of raid bosses who only have physical damage where you end up having lots of physical damage is dungeons and for that you have MORE than enough.

Stalwart Soul - available at Lv40, yes. MP generation later Lv52-58, Blood later at 72. Stalwart Soul is pretty damn strong for what it is right now, imagine earlier.

Living Dead - quite frankly, for what you suggest, 300s is too short of a cooldown for something this good. This is technically better than Superbolide, so 360s at least if not straight 390s. DOT worth 30% maxHP is like an auto attack in end-game content unmitigated. For having actually 10s of immunity akin to Hallowed, this is too weak of a downside for 300s. And I rather have a 300s Invuln.

Believe it or not, but Living Dead being as it currently is really isn't a bad thing. It isn't great, but given it is effectively a 10s Holmgang on the job that has the best short CD (The Blackest Night) of all tanks, I think the current one is justified. The only thing I can see it being rattled around on is how much you need to heal to cleanse Walking Dead.

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Salted Earth - basically a damage aura around yourself. Thought would be cool at first, but then I remember all the scenarios where I might need to break away from a boss for a mechanic... I believe I'd prefer the ground one.

Enhanced Plunge - I'd keep it where it is, there is no justification why DRK should have on-par mobility with GNB in early levels. If the goal is increased OGCD usage, let it not be this one.

Abyss Mastery - extra charge of Abyssal Drain, sure. Of Carve and Spit? (Un)holy sh**, no. That would make Carve a bit too good. (also no need to "replace" things on brackets, PLD for instance learns Sheltron Trait on the same level he gets Intervene).

Carve and Spit - on first glance, the only extra thing is the cure potency (overkill anyways), but I have my beef with "Strike 3 times" for the same reason I don't like Ninja's Dream-w-a-Dream. While with current CaS, you run a single instance of damage calculating critical and direct hits, 3-strike attacks calculate three seperate instances of that and you rely on compounded RNG to reach the same potential of maximum damage rather than with single-hit CaS. Usage across the fight balances out the overall damage it does, but it is just needlessly cumbersome for Crit builds.

Abyssal Drain - the MP generation component is frankly a bit much given how much MP DRK really generates already.

Remorseless - I believe you can make your own guess about it.

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Summary (from me)
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I can see why people want increased OGCD usage back (or not, depending who you ask) and I generally would be up for that. What I am NOT agreeing with is the need to improve sustain when DRK has access to penalty-free Souleater, Abyssal Drain and quite frankly TBN, which is effectively worth a Benediction per minute if you manage to break it every single time while keeping it on cooldown. The reason why sustain went down from Stormblood to Shadowbringers is because DRK just had too much of it for AOE. A second Abyssal Drain would do the trick in my book while for single-target we have more than enough, we are arguably the best tank for defensive / sustain purposes.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I can see why people want increased OGCD usage back (or not, depending who you ask) and I generally would be up for that. What I am NOT agreeing with is the need to improve sustain when DRK has access to penalty-free Souleater, Abyssal Drain and quite frankly TBN, which is effectively worth a Benediction per minute if you manage to break it every single time while keeping it on cooldown. The reason why sustain went down from Stormblood to Shadowbringers is because DRK just had too much of it for AOE. A second Abyssal Drain would do the trick in my book while for single-target we have more than enough, we are arguably the best tank for defensive / sustain purposes.

Living Dead makes this point invalid with how it currently works...

[Esmoire]

In general they might want to consider doing something for PLD, RDM, and DRK, with regards to their spell/skill speed. Maybe a trait that makes the lower of one be equal to the other. Would require some balance adjustments for PLD, though.

[Lammas]

My list:

Bloodweapon needs 1 more second of duration. DRK currently has pretty high SkS needs unless you have really good connection and Blood weapon lasting slightly more than 10 seconds (like some other 10 second skills apparently do) would solve most of the problem. I quite enjoy the high SkS but not the when the reason for it is janky design on one skill. I haven't thought of it much but giving it back it's old haste effect would solve the issue pretty effectively too. The aim would be to not allow 6 weaponskills under BW but make it more consistent for everyone to get 5 without having to stack absurd amounts of SkS.
EDIT: Immediately after hitting post I realized they could also just make BW give you 5 BW stacks and each GCD would use 1. That way it could have a longer duration without it ever having to worry about it.

AOEs do need to use SkS. It's kind of frustrating to have all this SkS stacked and then it's worth nothing whenever there's more than 1 target. The attacks being magic damage and being considered spells is a nice touch but nowhere as important as how they work in practice.

Those 2 seem like oversights and, at least in my opinion, should be fixed.

Other than that my only real issue is with Living dead having that arbitrary healing requirement and killing you if it isn't met. I'd just remove the healing requirement. Simple and elegant solution. Slap a minute of cooldown on it if you want. I wouldn't think that would be justified but I'd take that if if it got rid of the stupidity on the skill.

Delirium is boring but I guess that'll be what we're dealing with this expansion. Slapping 1500 potency on top of it wouldn't make it any more interesting. Would probably spark some interesting discussion on tank DPS imbalance though.
The problem with your AD and C&S change is that both of those skills are used on cooldown as damage skills tend to do. Unless you changed the cooldown on both to 30 seconds all that giving them stacks would do is pressing both of them one more time during your opener and then it would be exactly the same as it is now. Even if they were 30 seconds you'd just keep dumping both charges every 60 seconds.
That Salted Earth change wouldn't really make it better but the idea of having a damage aura is cool. I wouldn't mind that although I'd more hope that something like that would be a skill in the next expansion instead of changing a current one.

[Argyle_Darkheart]

In general they might want to consider doing something for PLD, RDM, and DRK, with regards to their spell/skill speed. Maybe a trait that makes the lower of one be equal to the other. Would require some balance adjustments for PLD, though.

As Reinhardt suggested, consolidating Skill Speed and Spell Speed into one stat is the most elegant solution.