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.