The Ultimate DRK Rework

[Dtrip19]

Yes, another one of these posts from a disgruntled DRK main from back in Stormblood. As always, please read the whole thing before responding, it is important to understand the whole rework before you comment on it. And before you say it, I know this will never happen, so don't bother reminding me, this is just what I want. Now on to the goals of the rework:

This rework is designed to achieve a very specific goal. That goal is to give a DRK player control over how exactly they contribute to a party, to allow them to make decisions on how to spend their resources to work either towards dealing damage or just simply surviving. On top of that, this rework is intended to restore the most important class identity that DRK had throughout it's history: it's resource management and the complex interactions between how DRK's can both gain and spend their resources. This design seeks to leverage all the beneficial changes that came to tanking with Shadowbringers (no stupid stance swapping and no enmity) while avoiding the homogenization and oversimplification that came along with it. This rework is intended to go along with a large scale overhaul to both Tanks and Healers, which I wrote about in detail on this google doc, but for the purpose of this rework, you can skip that if you're not interested https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...GwRIItIAbM/pub

Dark Arts (Added) – MP cost: 2400

Dark Arts was an essential part of DRK’s kit back in HW and SB and was the basis for complex interactions of the resources a DRK had available to them. For those who don’t know, Dark Arts allowed you to spend MP to empower the next compatible ability you used. The effects you could get from Dark Arts were extra damage, healing, a blind, and extra enmity depending on what skill you enhanced. I will go over what effects it should have when I get to the abilities that Dark Arts can be used with.

Edge of Shadow (Removed) – Now that Dark Arts is back, this skill is redundant and would overload a DRK’s hotbar. Dark Arts can be used for a variety of effects including damage, so to have this skill on the hotbar would invalidate the utility effects of Dark Arts as it would always be better to convert MP directly into potency unless this skill was nerfed into irrelevance.

Flood of Shadow (Changed) – No longer grants the Darkside Effect, MP cost reduced to 2400, Cooldown: 45 seconds.

Soul Eater (Changed) – Combo actions: Syphon Strike, Dark Arts Effects: potency increased by 200, restores HP equal to the damage dealt. Now only restores 10 Blood.

Power Slash (Added) – Combo action: Syphon Strike, Potency: 400, Dark Arts Effect: potency increased by 350, grants the Darkside effect (still increases damage by 10%).

This skill accomplishes two goals. The first is to give DRK a way to activate Darkside, as you would be without one now that edge/flood of shadow have been removed. The second is to make Power Slash the preferred weapon skill over Soul Eater if you are spending MP with the only goal to maximize dps. Since Soul Eater also grants healing when enhanced by Dark Arts, if healing is not needed, enhancing Power Slash is the better option for getting the most out of your MP.

The Blackest Night (Changed) – Now costs 2400 MP, no longer grants the Dark Arts effect, restores 50 Blood when the barrier is completely absorbed.

Syphon Strike (Changed) – Now restores 800 MP instead.

You will notice that all instances of MP restoration in the rest of this rework will happen in increments of 400 or 800, which is 1/6th or 1/3rd the amount needed for one Dark Arts or The Blackest Night. As any DRK main experienced in Stormblood, Dark Arts needed to be used way too often which made the class feel extremely spammy rather than satisfying because your MP generation was too high when your abilities restored MP in increments of 480 and 1200

Stalwart Soul (Changed) – Now restores 400 MP and 3 Blood for each enemy hit. Dark Arts Effect: Potency increased by 100

Blood Weapon (Changed) – Now restores 400 MP and 3 Blood for each enemy you deal physical damage to (includes auto-attacks). Duration: 15 seconds, Cooldown: 45 seconds

Salted Earth (Changed) – Now restores 2 blood for each enemy it deals damage to.

Abyssal Drain (Changed) – No longer inherently restores HP when hitting enemies. Dark Arts Effect: Potency is increased to 600 if it hits one target, or 300 if it hits two, Restores HP equal to damage dealt. Action type changed to spell, now on the global cooldown.

This will give DRK more flexibility with how quickly they can restore their own HP. Abyssal Drain will deal the same damage and heal the same amount as a Soul Eater even when used against 1 or 2 targets. It also is not spammable because it wouldn’t restore 10 Blood like Soul Eater, making it a strictly worse skill. However, it would still be very useful in a pinch when lots of healing is needed quickly.

Carve and Spit (Changed) – Delivers a threefold attack, each hit with a potency of 200, Cooldown: 45 seconds.

This button is simple, it will give a DRK three more hits during Blood Weapon each time you combine them just to round out the MP and Blood economy.
Quietus (Changed) – Now restores 400 MP for each enemy hit.
Bloodspiller (Changed) – Potency increased to 700

Delirium (Changed) – Deals damage with a potency of 300 and restores 2400 MP, action type changed to weaponskill, now on the global cooldown, Blood cost: 50.

This is another important change that achieve multiple goals. It helps to reestablish DRK as a heavy resource management class, allowing DRK’s to convert Blood into MP in a useful way even against single targets (previously this could only be done while facing multiple enemies by using quietus). It also differentiates DRK from WAR which fortifies the identity of both classes. The potency and MP numbers on this skill is actually very important. It deals 300 potency in damage, which is the same as the average potency of one of DRK’s weaponskills, meaning you barely lose damage from the usage of the global cooldown (It is slightly worse because you delay your resource regeneration from your combo actions). It also restores 2400 MP which can be converted into 300 potency if Dark Arts is used on Power Slash, meaning that you won’t be gaining any damage by using this skill over a Bloodspiller.

[Hierro]

Great, you killed dungeon DRK for no real reason, 0/10.

[Seraphor]

TL;DR TC wants SB DRK back

[Beddict]

Great, you killed dungeon DRK for no real reason, 0/10.

Nah, the changes would just revert things back to SB DRK which was incredibly durable in dungeons. Abyssal Drain is back in the GCD, Dark Arts is back and makes Abyssal Drain heal, popping TBN gives 50 Blood, Quietus restores a lot of MP per enemy hit, Salted Earth provides a lot of Blood in large pulls, Stalwart Soul provides a lot of Blood and restores a lot of MP in large pulls. Gather the enemies up, drop Salted Earth, TBN, and then alternate between Dark Arts Abyssal Drain for mass heals, Stalwart Soul combo to restore MP and Blood, and Quietus to restore even more MP because why not. There are some differences, but for the most part it's just SB DRK with a slightly different coat of paint.

[dangadget]

You lost me with the return of Dark Arts spam

[Dtrip19]

You lost me with the return of Dark Arts spam

I can already tell you didn't actually read my post, which is why i specifically asked people to read the whole thing before jumping to conclusions and leaving non- constructive responses like this.

Had you taken the time to read and understand the rework, you'd have realized that DRK's mp generation has been slowed down significantly by roughly 33% of what it was in Stormblood. Not only that, but blood weapon would no longer reduce your GCD by 15%, ensuring that the pace of the job is kept under control so it doesn't feel spammy. In stormblood, you could generate enough MP to cast dark arts/tbn 9-10 times a minute, as well as having to use delirium every 90 seconds to generate a burst of MP, which then had to be burned, which would also extend blood weapon forcing you to keep your lower CGD for longer. Overall it just sucked. With this rework you'd have enough MP to cast only 7-8 dark arts/tbn's a minute (if no MP is spent on abyssal drain at all), no delirium bs, and a slow, consistent GCD the whole time. In other words, the job would feel nowhere near spammy, and actually every usage of dark arts would feel impactful and satisfying because the effects have been amplified to compensate for their reduced frequency.

[TheRealQuah]

Why does everyone on here want to go back to SB DRK, when it was the worst tank. It was arbitrary spam, and hardly anyone played it. It's now the second most played tank and is rated higher than it's ever been. We need to work on evolving from where we are now, not another complete overhaul.

[dangadget]

You misunderstand.
I did read that, but the fact of the matter is that I never cared for Dark Arts in any of it's incarnations, so that's automatically a thumbs down IMO, but others may obviously disagree.

[TouchandFeel]

So a few thoughts on the proposed rework.

1) The Dark Arts changes actually messes up the baseline defense of DRK by making a separate GCD combo and incentivizing it over Soul Eater. The heal from Soul Eater is an understated but important part of DRK and is the job's unique form of "passive" defense; akin to the heal from Storm's Path on WAR, shield blocks on PLD and the heal+shield on Brutal Shell for GNB. They are all there in the background creating that base level cushion of mitigation or sustain to help keep the tank alive and they only work like that because they are constantly happening, constantly in play. Remove that piece of the puzzle by having DRK focus on a different, higher dps combo and you have removed an intrinsic element of the job's defensive kit, essentially nerfing it in comparison to the other tank jobs. There is a reason why the tanks that have two combos have them designed with one that you use the majority of the time and the other it just used occasionally to keep something up like a buff, that way things like resource gain and sustain can be attached to the one combo that will be used most of the time and therefore be a relative constant.

2) I honestly don't understand the need for DRK to have another combo-ender like WAR or PLD, pressing one button different in your combo rotation approximately every 30s isn't really any more fun or interesting. The only somewhat interesting part of the second combo-ender for WAR and PLD is not the fact that there is a second combo-ender, but the effect of them which are both centered around maintaining and maximizing up-time on something, a buff and a DoT, while minimizing the amount of times that combo-ender has to be used. Give DRK a combo-ender that is a buff to keep up like you did, just like WAR. Give DRK a combo-ender that is a DoT, just like PLD. Give DRK a combo-ender that is a debuff like it used to have and ... wait those were all intentionally removed and aren't coming back. Apart from those options you are left with little to nothing to base the second combo-ender around asides from just having one simply to have one.
Now look at the new tank that so many like to gush over, Gunbreaker. It technically doesn't even have a second combo like WAR or PLD, instead it breaks things up a number of different ways such as having faster resource gain so that a resource-based GCD attack can be used with every combo, or two every two combos, to break up the combo rotation and a burst period with a relatively short cooldown that is executed as a combo.
So why does DRK have to have a second combo-ender? Why can't it take more inspiration from somewhere else, like how Gunbreaker breaks up some of the 1-2-3 combo monotony? Why not look at increasing Blood gain to increase the frequency of Bloodspillers to break up Soul Eater rotations more? Why not come up with ideas that utilize an ability to enable or unlock another combo or something like it in the rotation? You could integrate something like that into Blood Weapon, or Delirium or even both. You could tweak Blood Weapon's numbers and have it be available every 30s instead of every 60s as well to make it match up with Gnashing Fang or approximately how often you would be using a second combo-ender.
There are many ways that DRK could have it's rotation spiced up and trying to introduce a second combo-ender just to have one is uninspired and boring.

3) The Blood Weapon change, being physical damage only, makes it virtually worthless in AoE.

4) Changing TBN from granting a Dark Arts and moving it back to giving Blood just simply brings back the ambiguity of TBN breaking being a loss, neutral or a gain which are arguments that I grew sick of seeing in the past and really don't want to see come back. The apples for apples, 1 to 1 trade dynamic of the current iteration where you gain something that is the exact same cost of the same resource as TBN was a smart move and was done for a good reason.
Additionally, creating a trade off of resource types like that can and likely will have ripple effects towards the rest of the kit and would ultimately result in either a very lop-sided kit where one resource and it's associated abilities would be deemed of much greater value and the other resource was just an annoying extra step you have to go through and get so that you can then trade it for the resources that you actually want; or both resources and their abilities would have to be restricted heavily in design and effect so that they are equitable and neither resource ends up being superior which would just end up making their associated abilities very similar and quite frankly bland and boring.
Separating out the resources and making each of them their own encapsulated thing allows much more freedom of design to do interesting things with and within their own sub-system, which is exactly the direction that the developers took MP and Blood in with ShB.
Could the current implementation use some improvement? Yes, very much so. However, moving backwards in such a way is not the solution and would end up being counter-productive.

5) The Delirium change poses the same problem as the TBN giving Blood change in regards to the inherent problems of resource trading that I have already gone over.
In addition to that problem, the proposed version of Delirium gets rid of DRK having a defined heavy burst period to line up with raid buffs, which not having was a huge complaint in Stormblood. Making it an attack with a bit of potency is a small change, but it is essentially the same as the StB version which was criticized for being underwhelming and boring. Sure the current iteration of Delirium is also criticized as being boring, but at least it gives DRK a defined burst period like every other tank and really it only needs some tweaks or additions to make it not seem like a copy/paste of Inner Release as opposed to completely redoing it.

6) The slower rate of resource gain from the rework not only reduces the frequency of Dark Arts usage, which is what you intended, but also reduces the frequency that TBN can be used which is a huge problem. Right now TBN can be used around, to slightly more frequently than the other tanks can use their frequent use defensive cooldowns. Since so much of DRK's defensive capabilities revolve around using TBN as much as possible, reducing the frequency that DRK can use TBN is a serious nerf to DRK.

Overall, the proposed rework seems to be not much more than just trying to take DRK back to a psuedo-StB state and I really don't mean that nor see that as a positive.

[TouchandFeel]

We need to work on evolving from where we are now, not another complete overhaul.

Exactly. If the focus ends up being another rework, all the time and effort by the developers will be used up on that and not moving the job forward, leading to what we have now where the two tank jobs that received the biggest reworking, DRK and WAR, seem to be a step behind in terms of design and complexity within the kit. The time and resources allocated to them for moving from StB to ShB was used up redoing things, not evolving them.

When you feel like your house needs another room added on, an additional porch or a new coat of paint; you do just that. You don't burn down the house and then rebuild it from scratch.