Quote Originally Posted by Deceptus View Post
Thinking about it and I think I've found another basic design flaw:

Generally opportunity cost items in MMOs follow a relatively standard concept:

Resources, or cooldown. One of the other, not both.
I'm trying to think of an MMO in which this is true...

BDO? No. B&S? No. WoW? No. GW2? No. Aion? No. In none are resource-consumption and CDs mutually exclusive.

DRK suffers because two of it's skills cost both.

TBN: Costs resources (heavy) and has a CD (low).

Living Shadow: costs resources (heavy) and has a CD (heavy).
This seems among the smallest of reasons possible for DRK's suffering.

We could certainly remove the Blood cost from Living Shadow, but then we have one more Bloodspiller per 2 minutes to tune Living Shadow or the kit (minisculely) down for. I don't see how that'd change our gameplay except to allow us to give even less of a damn about LS coming off cooldown soonish. I'm not sure what, if anything, siphoning back a Bloodspiller's bonus ppgcd away from Living Shadow, for instance, would improve.

We could remove the cooldown from TBN, but then its ability to be used against two different TBs only 10-12 seconds apart, without even needing careful pre-popping for the first, would mean both reduced skill ceiling and TBN having to be tuned more around the extremes of what it can do. I'm not sure what, if anything, that would improve, either.