Thread: DRK QOL changes for 5.4

Originally Posted by WhyAmIHere

sadly. It used to be the haste tank, but that was gutted. It still kinda is the anti-magic tank, but it's superfluous in that regard in that "yeah sure you guys can block everything as well or better than me, but I have DARK MIND!!!"

I personally don't understand the adherence to having been or needing to be the "haste tank". Even when Blood Weapon provided a haste effect it was a quite small amount that only shaved off enough milliseconds per GCD to at most maybe squeeze in one extra GCD into the Blood Weapon window.

As I have presented before in multiple other threads, haste-style effects in a game like this, with its GCDs and server <--> client communication making ping a factor, tend to be problematic. Make the haste effect not be fast enough and it results in changing the game-play and feel by little to none. Make the haste effect too fast and while it makes the general GCD rotation speedier, it then vastly shrinks the time between them which negatively affects oGCD weaving and could cause problems with people with higher ping. While conceptually there could be a sweet-spot between being too slow and too fast for a haste effect to function properly and be meaningful, in FF14 that space between the two is incredibly razor thin to the point where I don't see that working well.
I also firmly believe that people's memory of Blood Weapon being "fast" before is in fact not due to the haste effect on it, but from its primary feature of resource gain. Back then DRK didn't really have any strongly defined periods of burst and the game-play cadence was much more level overall. The points where there were peaks of activity were when you could actively do more actions and most of those actions were fueled by resources. So you would pop BW and would be able to use more DAs, more Bloodspillers/Quietuses and the like due to the increased resource gain, resulting in a flurry of activity that unsurprisingly felt relatively "fast". In contrast when you look at DRK now you have a very strongly defined burst period with Delirium that then makes the bit of extra activity surrounding BW seem lesser and then couple that with the change to BW of not gaining more resources from hitting multiple enemies, taking away the crazy amount of resource gain and ability spam against packs of mobs, and BW ends up feeling relatively slower.
If you take a hill and stick it into a fairly flat landscape it will seem big and tall. If you then stick it in among other hills, it tends to just blend in. Stick the hill into the middle of a mountain range and it barely even registers at all. That is essentially what happened to Blood Weapon and it has very little to do with the haste effect being there or not.

In many ways the concept of speed, at least in such an instance as this, is determined by two things, 1 is the number of actions performed within a period of time and 2 is the amount of variance of those actions.
With 1 we have relative hard-caps on the amount of actions that can be squeezed into a period of time due to the GCD system in the game and we have already gone over the restrictions of said system in regards to "too fast" and "too slow", leaving the only real aspect of change available being the number of oGCDs that can then be used between those GCDs and so the only way to really increase speed along variable 1 is to increase the availability of oGCDs by either increasing how many oGCDs are in the kit or by increasing the frequency of use of the oGCDs in the kit. Since adding even more oGCDs to the kit could potentially result in button bloat, frequency of use is likely the better option to utilize with maybe the exception of many one more brand new oGCD or so.
With 2, while it is not increasing the actual number of actions occurring within the period of time it alters the perception of the amount done because in regards to effort, when we vary actions or tasks our brain is having to do more work to register and adjust for the changes and so we perceive more as having happened during that time period. To see this in action simply do the following. First press the 1 key on your keyboard 5 times at regular intervals over 5 seconds. Now instead press the following sequence of key-presses, again at regular intervals, over the same 5 seconds. 1-2-1-3-5. Even though both sequences of key-presses are the same length and occur at the same intervals over the same period of time, the second sequence is virtually guaranteed to feel "faster".

So based on the above, the whole "haste" concept is really nothing more than a red herring and that if players want DRK to "feel faster" they need to focus on the frequency of oGCDs and the variance of GCDs within the DRK kit.

Originally Posted by bundythenoob

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As Kabooa pointed out, haste doesn't have an effect on passive MP regen ticks. Those are based on server ticks and live independent of the GCD. The only place haste would affect resource gain is through the combos and even that would be minimal since your GCD rotation cycle speed would have to be increased quite a bit before you would notice much in the way of gains and I've already talked about the problems such a drastic increase in GCD speed could result in.

In regards to oGCD frequency and GCD variance, and whether through MP gain increases or other methods, I don't think that it is really an "either/or" situation and the best way to tackle it overall to make DRK feel "fast" is to do both in a measured fashion.

I am not sure that increasing MP gain is really the way to go for increasing oGCD frequency since DRK is pretty good with the frequency of MP ability usages, that and increasing MP gain has ripple effects that need to be accounted for and so any tweaking to that should be precise injections of MP at specific points to address certain issues. For example, the one place that I feel DRK really could use more incoming MP is during Delirium since you are burning through so much for your burst that you end up relatively dry after, leaving you with virtually no oGCDs to use and then you end up with that dreaded period of Soul Eater spam that is so maligned. If Delirium just provided a tad bit more MP per hit, it would not affect that much but that little bit extra is during the DRK's biggest dry spell and it will make DRK feel much better by helping to alleviate that. That is something that is relatively easy that I could see be implemented in a patch mid-expansion.

Other oGCDs could be tweaked to provide more frequency but those might require a little more tweaking, so it is tough to say whether the devs would be willing to do that mid expansion.
The easiest would likely be decreasing Carve and Spit's recast to 45s or 30s and adjusting the potency and MP gain accordingly to compensate. This would also work great for being able to line up with Delerium's 90s recast better, allowing you to use it to top off MP a little bit more right before Delirium or to help recover a bit more MP right after.

Other stuff like creating more variation in GCD rotations is a bit bigger and would require more sweeping changes that would likely need to be reserved for changes accompanying an expansion.
As I've said in other posts, I feel the way to do that is to take a note from GNB where they break up GCD rotations with more frequent cartridge abilities, with DRK's equivalent being Blood. This would require a slew of things including a potential rebalalencing of potencies for a few abilities to compensate for more frequent usage as well as adjustments to how Blood would accumulate. Do you just simply increase the Blood gain from combos? Do you add Blood gain elsewhere? Do you redo the Blood resource entirely to make it more like the Cartridge system on GNB? How does Blood Weapon fit into this all? How is Delirium affected? There are a lot of questions that would need answering, but it could be done, just not mid-expansion.

whoops, I should clarify a bit. I didn't mean the haste portion of blood weapon would make the skill bonkers, but I was referring to the speed of resource generation that you mentioned, and how it would affect current DRK due to the strength of Edge of Shadow and Bloodspiller. for a bit more clarity, say that current DRK got old BW back, getting 15 seconds worth of mana and blood generation every 40 seconds would cause a bit too much damage to come in.

I do agree though that simply adding haste increase to BW wouldnt feel as good as increasing its mana/blood generation, which is where I think current DRK should lean more towards.

I think if square turned Abyssal Drain back into a mana spender, we could allow for Blood Weapon to regain a bit of its old strength in generating resource, but they would also have to balance its potential AOE dmg vs Floods aoe dmg for moments in which the reapplication of Darkside isn't needed, and it would also have to have strength comparable to edge for moments in which self healing during bosses is needed. maybe if the lv 74 trait also extended to increase AD's potency?

As for your point on Delirium and CnS, they definitely need to generate more MP. CnS generating 600 per minute is rather weak for a capstone skill, and Bloodspiller giving us a measly 200 is nowhere near as good as Quietus generating 500mp per hit, but either way both of these would need a bit of rebalancing in the potency department if we are to use them more frequently, or if we are to use edge/flood more frequently, in order to keep the balance between tank jobs.

I think the problems with making Blood similar to GNBs cartridge system might just be linked to how blood skills are now being used for huge burst damage as opposed to consistent damage + resource like in the past. maybe DRKs burst should better be found in the form of Living Shadow being reworked so that Esteem copies our ability usage 1:1, which would effectively allow the consistent damage to become twice as strong during that period? not too sure on how that would work out though in terms of balance, seeing as how current blood gauge + Dark Arts would allow us to store resources until that window comes up.

Finally, as for Darkside swapping damage bonus for haste, that might be a good way to differentiate DRKs playstyle from WARs. Maybe increase Storm buff to 20% so that WAR stays slow but strong, and DRKs haste buff makes up for the lack of strong burst with fast consistent damage? but this might also need to be tied to the rework to blood skills as i mentioned.