Thread: 5.3 patch complete note. Yes just keept upgrade WAR and forget about DRK

Originally Posted by ReiMakoto

Snip snip.

Oh, I remember you. You were optimizing during Alphascape too right? Naturally, I agree with everything you're saying. Shame what's happened to the MP economy, that's another major component of the old styles that are completely butchered nowadays. I'd hazard a guess that our 90s burst doesn't even really exist from an optimization perspective, because it's all GCD Delirium Bloodspillers, and the 60/120/180 edge bursts matter more overall, since those are actually able to be influenced with Dark Arts, and if you're not paying attention, you can miss them. But you're right, it pales in comparison to"scheduled mana demolition" from back in the day. I've always thought if they just took DA off of Syphon Strike, maybe increased the cost to what Edge is now relative to SB's mana amounts, we could've had the ideal compromise.

On top of that, we're also missing that +50 Blood thing from TBN. This is actually a huge deal, because GCD manipulation on DRK doesn't exist at all now. This all falls under the bigger umbrella of "lack of kit interactivity", but ending phases on Bloodspillers/DASE after planning GCDs was not only a gain, it was a gain that was easily presentable, separated good DRKs from GREAT DRKs, and could be simply explained to even casual players. "You ended on Syphon Strike? Oh, just find some place to throw in two TBNs, and get rid of the Syphon and Hard, end on the previous combo's Souleater instead, you don't break combo and it's an overall potency gain."

Too many things were removed off DRK at once and not replaced with anything to compensate, which is why I'm wondering if compensation needs to come from fight design than the job itself if SE is unwilling to even explain what DRK is supposed to be at this point.

I'm trying to be optimistic here. When I was in a group where 6/8 members all had raid buffs I needed to account for, compared to the two that I usually get, I had more fun. I'm literally grasping at straws here dude, I know.

Originally Posted by Sqwall

I don't main DRK enough to realize this, but does your shadows HP drain skills funnel into you? I never even noticed or took the time to look.

Because if it doesn't then that would be a perfect opportunity to have your shadow - Souleater, Siphon strike, blood weapon, abyssal drain, carve and spit, Bloodgauge would also funnel to the DRK as well as TBN breaks would funnel to the DRK for free MP.

This would fix quite a large portion of what DRK is lacking on a 2 min cooldown.

This would make delirium and Living Shadow be very powerful to offset, offer choice, and this would ultimately increase DPS if your living shadow is giving you heals and bloodgauge. More flood and edges, more MP, more bloodspillers or quietus. But if it already does then i'm DRK ignorant. I main pld and war for tanks.

Like I said, kit interactivity doesn't exist on DRK. There's really no worse offender to this than LS. Give it 50 Blood, and off it goes. LS hits are 400 pet potency each, hitting seven times. Abyssal > Plunge > Quietus > Flood > Edge > Bloodspliller > CnS. Doesn't change. AoE attacks still function as AoE with no damage fall off, so it's powerful. But it's boring. It really is just a pretty DoT that makes people think you're not standing in the right place for mechanics. Should've been around in the theorizing part of pre-ShB, people had all sorts of fascinating ideas, like Delirium snapshotting your GCDs/oGCDs and having LS replicate them on usage. Remember, ShB DRK is designed in a way that there is functionally no choices that need to be made anymore. If a button lights up, you need to press it, preferably within raid buffs, but probably immediately.

More MP would be nice, but then you've trivialized Darkside even more than it already is. More Bloodspillers is debatable, because we already have a large majority of our damage coming from Bloodspiller already, and I'm not entirely sure I like having high potency attacks have even more prominence on tanks. Example, you play PLD, you know how on PLD you can 100% tell if your Confiteors direct crit or not, especially in openers? The amount of variance between a crit Confiteor and a normal one are absolutely insane, and that effect is replicated on DRK with current Delirium. There's too much potency jammed in single skills, but that's just my opinion.

And let's be honest, you play WAR too? Offensively, all WAR players are DRK players, and vice versa, whether they realize it or not.