Is anyone surprised at this point?

[OdinelStarrei]

Wait, I thought people enjoyed this part of it.
Players are coming out of the woodwork pining after old versions of DRK. One of the points consistently touched on was 5.0 turned Delirium into a mindless Fell Cleave spam as opposed to how it used to be something you had to plan your rotation around to optimize lining up the right skills inside it.
Now with Blood Weapon I'm hearing "you gotta prep for that part of the rotation to hit certain skills within it? No thanks!"
Is this really what the common consensus? Cuz now I'm getting very mixed messages...

Delirium is bad, but at least it's consistent. I can trust Delirium to work properly.

I'm not sure if you are being intentionally obtuse, but there is a very distinct difference between "I really like setting up portions of my job kit to be utilized in unique ways." and "This skill has an incorrect tooltip and unintended or unintuitive interactions." I'm going to give you an example of the former. Getting 4 Atonements inside of FoF on Paladin is a small potency optimization by removing a Riot Blade and replacing it with an Atonement, without going into too much detail. Is it intended? Probably not, but it is 1. Reasonable to come to the conclusion that it is possible because of the extremely long 15 second duration given on the 3 stacks of Sword Oath, when you only really need 10, and executing all 3 stacks back to back only takes 5. It is comfortable. And 2. NOT doing 4 Atonement does not significantly alter, transform, or ruin the PLD rotation by not being executed. It's not the lynchpin of the physical phase.

As for the latter, when MNKs were pre-pulling Anatman for a GL stack before the rework, was that technically "high-end optimization that increased the skill ceiling"? Yes, but it's also bad job design to rely on a an unknowable tickrate for ideal opener conditions. When SMNs have to triple-weave in Bahamut for an optimal burst phase, is that "utilizing your entire kit under raid buffs?" Yes, but it's counter-intuitive on a basic level, and on a SMN-specific level, it contributes to an already clunky job setup, looking at you Trance/Deathflare/Enkindle: Demi/Enkindle: Summon/Brand of Purgatory. When BLMs were legitimately dropping Blizzard IV out of their rotation entirely in SB due to lackluster potency contribution, that's a failure of the job design.

I do not need to plan my rotation around Blood Weapon. I need to make concessions for Blood Weapon. 0 - 2.5 - 5 - 7.5 - 10. That's five GCDs at 2.5 GCD, mathematically, but not practically. Blood Weapon is tooltip'd as a 10 second buff. It's 9.8~. Tooltip is lying. And so is Inner Release, and all the buffs like it. But those are lies that give leeway to the player for the sake of a smooth, consistent gameplay experience by adding the extra second. It benefits the player, while BW punishes the player with unrecoverable resources. At the end of the day, 5 GCDs should be 5 GCDs. Requiescat is 12 seconds for a reason.

Is it a big deal? Well, that depends. Logically, no, it doesn't really matter. But I'm going to tell you right now, when I have to pull Oracle to the south of the arena, and for SOME reason, Blood Weapon doesn't activate on a hit, outside of me cursing in voice, a few things start happening over the next thirty seconds, one from a ADPS perspective (the only thing keeping DRK engaging), and a resource management perspective.

1. Because I missed 600 MP on the last hit, for reasons I cannot really determine outside of "I lagged" or "I was too far away for a centi-second positioning the boss" , I can no longer get in the last Edge of Shadow at the very end of fifteen-twenty second raidbuffs (Divination/Battle Litany/Technical Step etc etc) activated in the opener. Will this ruin the pull? No, but it's FEELS REALLY AWFUL, knowing that I could've had consistent, maximum raid contribution, but I was undone by a sub-second error or the complete lack of lag compensation. It's already bad enough with the MP ticks. This is particularly frustrating if you've been given a melee card.

2. Because I missed that 10 blood, the potion that popped after the 1st Syphon Strike, will be missing the very last Bloodspiller at the end of the 30 second duration. I do not generate enough Blood naturally to end my potion with my highest GCD action. This is just lost damage for no reason. Which again, doesn't feel good.

And don't even get me started on missing a Blood Weapon hit in situations where that last hit is the difference between me being able to summon Living Shadow or Bloodspiller in time for the 2 min Divination or 6 min re-openers or god forbid, boss phasing. Again, I INTENDED for my buff to work properly, I put BW in the second weave slot, and the game says nah, just have 2.4K/40 instead. That is frustrating. Jank is not engaging, it is frustrating.

I should not feel like I am fighting my primary resource acquisition oGCD.
It doesn't make any sense to consider 4 hits to be the default, when every other buff in the game that gives job resource on every job does it on their own with no additional influence from MP ticks or GCD acquisition, from Meisui, to Bloodfest, to Ikoshoten, to Barrel Stabilizer, all give at least 1 usage of their gauge spender. Some give two. BW, if intended to be 4 hits, would not even give 1 usage of Edge/Bloodspiller on it's own. That doesn't make any sense. 5 hits make sense. It lines up in the opener correctly, it gives me just the right amount for a total MP/Blood dump in raid buffs and potion time. That can't be an accident. Shout-out to Bozja Haste gear making this problem irrelevant by the way.

I think that part of the problem is that the English forums have had by far the least active community team in the past year, especially post-Covid. I'm not even convinced that bug reports are getting through, while you at least see acknowledgement of bug feedback and localization mistakes if you look through the German and French Dev Trackers. You can always blame the language barrier, but if your community support isn't even bothering to feedback the information to the team, you can't even blame the devs for being out of touch. I'm not sure how the problem can be fixed, when we don't even have a voice to begin with.

I'm going to go even further. This is arguably why it seems so "hyperbolic". Because people are just whining into the void about it and it gets no acknowledgement. People act like "Oh this is just like Living Dead, they don't listen to DRKs, they only listen to players who don't play it." I'd actually disagree, and say this is a drawn out, less serious version of the Ungarmax situation, where NA/EU just outright are not listened to about anything of consequence, despite multiple reports, and is honestly baffling when SE has gone out of their way to attack elements of the game that require optimal ping. (see: NIN rework) . That's a bit worse than my personal performance taking a hit. Ungarmax alone should've been the catalyst for taking a closer look at international feedback, and it was said as much during the discussion of the event itself, but it has not materialized for this specific issue on DRK alone.