WARs and DRKs

[Marxam]

I can only hope the poster boy curse continues. WAR and DRK definitely got shafted when they removed tank stances, TP and standardized MP amount, since much of their tool kit required to be in one, or both (DRK), of their respective stances. It really shows how shallow their toolkit really is (not exclusive to WAR and DRK as PLD's is also in the same boat). The ShB homogenization didn't help either.

WAR went from a tank that exemplified player adaptability and mastery by tanking in OT stance while still keeping hate and staying alive to now, where it plays like a 2.0 WAR. There was a level of HP balancing so switching stances can also be considered using a defensive or offensive cd because it either increased HP max and healing received (Defiance) or critical hit rate and damage depending on gauge amount, respectively. It literally plays like 2.0 WAR, one tank stance and everything, but without the utility and niche skills of ARR like Mercy Stroke, or the MNK cross class.

DRK went from a resource management tank to now, a one combo and one cd spammer. Shadows all cost the same and only get 3 uses at full MP. It's literally aetherflow if you think about it and Living Shadow is just Queen Automaton but you can't tell it what to do. Before, your MP was constantly draining due to Darkside so replenishing it via siphon strike and while building blood gauge was a constant balance between DA usage. Dark Arts improved and enhanced certain skills depending on if Grit or Darkside was active, but that got removed and changed to free shadow on TBN proc. Ironic how DRK went from the most convoluted tank to play to

I just find it fascinating that you got two tanks whose core design was around options to adjust to the situation at hand to now, where its plays straight forward with no deviation. PLD got away easy since it wasn't heavily tied to its OT stance, which only gave extra auto-attacks (yay!) and its playstyle was straight forward form the beginning. Push buttons for damage or cd. WAR and DRK had to work for some of their cd usage. Removing tank stances not only buffed PLD, but the new dps skills it got pushed it over the top. The removal of tank stances had far bigger implications than what I thought, and at the beginning of of ShB I knew it was a really bad idea and after 2 years I still say its a really bad idea. It's up there, alongside Diadem dropping i210 gear with RNG stats that can exceed Goridan savage gear. Whether or not they learned anything is left to be seen and I guess we'll find out on the 17th when the LL drops but they need to understand that gameplay > story. The story hooks you but the gameplay keeps you.

[Lyth]

I can't say that I've seen a more complete misreading of events.

DRK has always been a single combo job. There's a simple reason for this. The focus of the job has always been on your MP bar. Every GCD, you decide when to expend MP or hold on to it. Under the previous Dark Arts system, that wouldn't have worked on a job that has to follow a strict rotation.

But surely, Heavensward DRK had three combos? Well, two of those combos were fake. The decision was never between using a Delirium or DASE (Dark Arts Souleater) 'combo', it was whether or not you consumed MP or held onto it on the final step of your single combo. I know that aesthetically this made a difference for some players, but the decision tree didn't change. And Power Slash? As cool as it looked, let's not waste time discussing how much of a dps loss that was. This is why you'd just have a WAR pull for you. You can always voke off them after the first tankbuster. They were punished less for establishing enmity.

Stormblood was the first time that this resource focused playstyle was systematically criticized and mocked by a few well known but misinformed individuals and parroted more widely by others. The main thing that Stormblood got wrong was the MP generation/consumption balance. They removed the MP drain from Darkside, which was never all that difficult to manage, and expected that could be counterbalanced with more Dark Arts usage. But the part about DRK being a 'one combo job' was not a new development. Your decision each combo was where to use Dark Arts, not what preset combo comes next in your fixed rotation. There are plenty of other jobs that follow a strict rotation with no actual decision-making. But most of these 'one-combo' claims came from people who barely had a clue about the job at the time.

Actually, the main simplification in Stormblood was that in order to make room for the additional Dark Arts usage, they discarded a lot of our oGCDs, mainly through the cross-class system changes. This was probably the single worst development to affect us, and we've never fully recovered from it. I detest what Stormblood did to our job with a passion.

I don't think that Shadowbringers has changed all that much, aside from streamlining things and offering up Edge/Flood as a less irritating alternative to DA's boost sfx. There isn't really a point in adding in extra combos, outside of being able to brag to people about how many combos you have. What could break up the GCD flow in a more interesting way is if you introduced in a couple of variable recast GCDs that function similar to how Drill does on MCH or how The Rose of Destruction does on BLU. Bloodspiller and/or Scourge could do that here. I'd much rather see more diversity go into our oGCD usage, with a slight uptuning of our resource generation given that the balance swung to the other extreme this expansion. Most of DRK's gameplay happens on the oGCD.

Delirium is a bit of a side discussion. The meme response is that it's a budget IR, but the reality is that Stormblood Delirium was underwhelming and players both on these forums and the JP ones were constantly asking that it have a bigger impact than it did at the time. In Stormblood, it traded 50 blood for 1 DA + an additional 250 potency worth of MP if you got uninterrupted uptime on the 16 extra seconds. So while it's not terribly original and doesn't offer any unique job flavour, it's at least more impactful where Stormblood's Delirium was completely insipid.

I'd personally prefer it if they doubled down on Living Shadow as our main burst window and make it more interactive, but that's a discussion for later.

As for tank stance, there was probably no job that hated tank stance more than DRK. You simultaneously had some actions that required that you be in tank stance to benefit from them (Blood Price, self heal from Soul Eater, and the damage boost on Bloodspiller), and yet you simultaneously never wanted to be in tank stance and were actively punished for swapping stances. We repeatedly highlighted this as an issue across two expansions, and every time the retort was that WAR lost HP on cycling its tank stance, and it should be the only job entitled to fluent, oGCD stances that didn't cost you resources to swap. So what do you think PLD and DRK players did? Please do guess.

Who do you think asked for tank stances to be removed? Hmm?? The playerbase did. PLDs and DRKs did. Repeatedly. On this very forum. I'm glad they're gone. Because they really only benefitted one job. Good riddance. They were really just a crutch, and limited players' growth. A lot of newer players were unnecessarily scared to take it off because they were afraid of what would happen if they did. There are plenty other more interesting ways of creating a skill differential, uptime being the best example of one.

And if I were to pick one more thing to truly equalize the playing field, I'd ask for invulns to be removed on this coming expansion. Holmgang and Hallowed are miles ahead of their counterparts, and invulns collectively just trivialize mitigation in content. Just get rid of them and diversify the existing cooldown set to create job diversity. Force players to learn how much to mitigate and how to ration cooldowns.

I hope that PLD has a good expansion ahead. There are plenty of areas that the job can be improved on and fleshed out. I want to see an equal playing field where we have four diverse and equally interesting jobs, rather than seeing everyone run the same two tanks for an expansion. There were about three jobs that were near guaranteed lock-ins for raid spots from ARR to Stormblood, and the game was worse for it.

[ItMe]

I can only hope the poster boy curse continues.

I read your whole post and still don't understand why you are wishing for bad things to happen.
Can you run past me again why you're hoping a job is poorly handled?

[Absimiliard]

I can only hope the poster boy curse continues.

But why though? Right now, if we put playstyle changes aside for a moment, all of the tanks are pretty well balanced with one another. None of them are so far behind as to actively harm a group by being there, and none of them are so far ahead as to have become mandatory. Each one has its own niche; WAR is the healing tank, PLD is the utility tank, DRK is the mitigation tank, and GNB is a DPS that sneakily painted its icon blue while nobody was looking. Any tank is fully viable for any encounter. Changing that by messing PLD up will drag us all down.

[Claire_Pendragon]

I think that DRK very much appeals to players who are used to games with a faster baseline GCD. That's why a lot of us miss the old Blood Weapon haste buff and would like to see it become baseline.

If edge/flood gave a GCD reduction, instead of base dmg increase, that would have made current DRK a billion times better. My biggest gripe with old DRK, even my favorite "HW DRK", was that blood weapons haste couldnt be maintained 100% of the time.

As for current WAR, while nearly identical to SB WAR, the identity to SB WAR (for me) was also its stance dancing, or tank stance dmg penalty removal. Now that it no longer has anything like that, it feels too shallow.
They dont need to remove stance dancing, while keeping the current tank stance system. Just as storms eye, and butchers block are practically the same, except one gives dmg+ and another gives guage, the "new" stances could have worked in a similar fashion. (all while keeping the current tank stance on, and uneffected)

Tank stances

IMO, they should have made the 4 tanks as such:
one tank has a rotation, so as to work for enmity
one tank has a rotation, so as to work for mitigation
one tank has a rotation, so as to work for dps
one tank has a mix of all 3 to a lesser degree

lets use DRK as the base example. (Only because its the most straight forward of the tanks, and makes the example easier to explain.) The buff from DRKs edge/flood is a DPS increase. so DRKs design is the "Maintains DPS". But if WAR/GNB/PLD had identical playstyles as a base, then the edge/flood equivalent oGCD attack, would also increase one of the tanks mitigation power, both passively, and in their CDs. another tank would get a tank stance enmity booster while the buff is up. the other tank probably has to alternate between edge/flood for mitigation/enmity, while gaining some DPS from both. (the reason why this wouldnt be "as hard" would be factors like "stacking the buff" would be made easier, and without a penalty, or some similar system.)

Obviously im not saying to make every job a copy of DRK. Im just using the example for the sake of explaining how it doesnt effect the current games balance. (As this is the #1 argument everyone uses to say this is impossible in 14. and its obviously possible, and obviously i dont think the devs would ever do it, but for the sake of getting players to demand actual identity back for their tanks, i feel using such examples could get enough of the community to not only give feedback, but constructive enough feedback, it might MAYBE be heard.)

[ArianeEwah]

DRK has always been a single combo job. [...]The decision was never between using a Delirium or DASE (Dark Arts Souleater) 'combo', it was whether or not you consumed MP or held onto it on the final step of your single combo. I know that aesthetically this made a difference for some players, but the decision tree didn't change. [...]

I partly disagree here; Delirium WAS worth a combo of making the decision "when to use", just not solely within the combos themselves (damage could've been adjusted), but rather when to use a "stored" DA. Souleater always consumed DA, but if you wanted to use DA for e.g. Carve and Spit - and your only combo finisher would've been Souleater - you lose the option to actually store it until your choosen action was ready, and still save MP for your burst...

And well, we did lose it. In fact, it got even worse since Sython Strike consumed DA, too, and we got Bloodspiller which ALSO consumed DA - 3/4 of DRKs most used GCDs consumed DA, it made DA usage a pain, and I am not talking about the spam!

Tho, since Dark Arts is no more, I guess DRK has become a single combo job, simply because they removed the reason for using another combo. Yes, Delirium was kinda niche, but it still had a purpose other than the INT down debuff. I guess it just wasn't worth it since Sython Strike also got the DA consume.

For the rest of your post, I have nothing to add, I agree with everything else. I am sick of playing the same role without any diversity while I have plenty when playing melee or caster DPS. Gimme my haste tank, g'dammit!

[Lyth]

That certainly was a smart feature of the job design and was one of the major area where they got things wrong in Stormblood. But that was more of an intuitive thing that you did on the side to get DA to proc on the correct ability, and the INT down effect was pretty much your reward for existing in raid (like all of the 100% uptime debuffs).

When the average player brings up combo systems, they're usually talking about the standard holding pattern that you do at baseline. You always have a baseline combo that does damage and one or two maintenance combos that keep up an effect (buff/debuff/DoT). I don't think this really adds all that much to a job's gameplay because over hundreds of thousands of keypresses, you just fall into a rhythm and just press the buttons that you're supposed to without thinking about it. Does it matter if you sometimes press 4 instead of 3? No. I think that if you wanted to build up a more 'complex' combo system, you wouldn't do it with more combos. You'd do it with variable recast GCDs.

Let me give you an example. Take Bloodspiller, remove its blood cost, and give it a recast that is some multiple of the base GCD that isn't divisible by 3. Now you effectively have your fourth 'combo' button press, except it pops up at different points in your combo. If you wanted to make this system more interactive, let Bloodspiller increase the timer on your next Living Shadow by 5 seconds. Remove the recast on Living Shadow, but have the duration timer not automatically reset when you use it - force the player to build it up with Bloodspiller uses. Now you have a 'combo' system that requires you to track things instead of tapping out a set drum beat on your desk. This was what I was getting at with that point.

(Yes, I want baseline haste on DRK, and I also want them to merge Skill Speed and Spell Speed next expansion into a single Haste stat, such that both our weaponskills and spells benefit from it).

[Vyrerus]

DRK always a one combo job. Other combos "fake."

Just like, not empirically true. Yes, you always wanted the Souleater combo to go through with a buff, but you couldn't always, and that was the point. No matter how good you were at managing things and communicating/having your co-tank build enmity prior to swaps, you were going to have to do the very cool Power Slash combo to not impinge raid DPS(and to hopefully get you some more Low Blow procs back when those existed) and also so the DRG's face wouldn't get eaten.

Ariane talked of why you would do the Delirium combo, so you could hold Dark Arts, and that was also true.

But really, your eyes on key presses instead of what's happening in game is what's wrong here. People don't want more combos just to vary up button presses a little bit. They want to see different things happen on the screen. The combos that have been eliminated also eliminated part of the video in this video game. You can set your combos to whatever button combination that you want, whether your combo is, "4-3-9" or "1-2-3" is irrelevant to what players like to see play out on screen. That's what people care about and why they complain about combos.

Just like glamours, people care way more about form over function. There are tons of people who also just use the, "fake" combo to see the animation.

Variable GCD is a nice idea, and jobs like MCH/BRD do make use of those, but they are not any less of, "tapping out a drum beat" than a full combo. They're just easier to execute, because when they come off of cooldown, you use them, sometimes needing to buff them before hand. Which is related to timers, which is what most old combos that were eliminated were tied to anyway.

The most interactive, not drum beat combos, that the game ever had were enmity combos. Their use(or not) depended entirely upon who you were playing with in addition to crit RNG, both your Crit RNG and the players lobbying against you for enmity's. And most people hated that, because it meant paying extra attention. If my memory is not mistaken, you and your sexy blindfolded avatar are one such individual.

[Lyth]

I'd agree if you said that enmity combos were unavoidable in ARR, given that you needed them for establishing snap aggro on adds (which the likes of Equilibrium later trivialized). I think that this was actually fairly interesting, as you had to be on a particular combo step during phase changes to be ready to SS > BB the moment the add dropped. But there were enough enmity tools from Heavensward onward that they weren't completely mandatory, especially with a NIN present. The only DPS job that didn't have tools to let you comfortably retain your enmity lead once established was MNK, and they tended to be less common in DRK groups due to the DK/Del overlap. And if you were going to have a tank use an enmity combo, it was going to be WAR because Butchers' Block carried the potency advantage. By Stormblood they were pretty much irrelevant due to the introduction of Shirk.

If it was mainly a visual issue, then that's fine, but there are better ways of doing it, and we'd also have glamour options for moves, similar to Warcraft's glyph system. You'd also wouldn't see people so resistant to PvP's approach of merging down a combo to a single button press (any predictions on whether GNB's continuation combo is going to go this route in Endwalker? #notIR) People are obsessed with this idea that having more combos automatically translates into more job complexity, when the actual decision making is the part that really engages your brain.

The thing with non-standard recast GCDs is that they pop up at different points in your standard combo. So it's sometimes 1-2-3-4, sometimes 1-4-2-3, and so on. That's a bit more interesting than your standard combo in terms of varying up the button presses, as long as the recast time is sufficiently short (i.e. once every 4, 5, or 7 GCDs). These sorts of actions are just one step below DoT management in complexity. It's a bit like having a Scourge button that doesn't let you press it too early, and gives you a visual indication on when to use it by lighting back up again. If I was creating a job from scratch, instead of giving it three combos, I'd give it one combo with two non-standard recast GCDs that intersect with your combo in different ways (say a multiple of 5 and a multiple of 7). It's the same number of buttons and actions, but it's much more varied (5-4-1-2-3-1-2-4-5-1-2-3-1-4-2-3-5-1-2-4-3-1-2-3-5-4 instead of 1-2-3-1-2-4-1-2-5).

[AziraSyuren]

As for tank stance, there was probably no job that hated tank stance more than DRK. You simultaneously had some actions that required that you be in tank stance to benefit from them (Blood Price, self heal from Soul Eater, and the damage boost on Bloodspiller), and yet you simultaneously never wanted to be in tank stance and were actively punished for swapping stances. We repeatedly highlighted this as an issue across two expansions, and every time the retort was that WAR lost HP on cycling its tank stance, and it should be the only job entitled to fluent, oGCD stances that didn't cost you resources to swap. So what do you think PLD and DRK players did? Please do guess.

Who do you think asked for tank stances to be removed? Hmm?? The playerbase did. PLDs and DRKs did. Repeatedly. On this very forum. I'm glad they're gone. Because they really only benefitted one job. Good riddance. They were really just a crutch, and limited players' growth. A lot of newer players were unnecessarily scared to take it off because they were afraid of what would happen if they did. There are plenty other more interesting ways of creating a skill differential, uptime being the best example of one.

quietly adds this to my long list of reasons why tank stances were awful