to Future DRK Players

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

firstly, if DRK was a "bad job" like you said in the context of STB, then why did they not fix the problems with the job for the next expansion.

I mean, they did fix the issues many people were complaining about the job. Just not the fixes you personally wanted.
People complained delirium was an ineffectual burst button in a meta that was all about burst. So they -made- it a proper burst button.
People complained dark Arts was too spammy. So they streamlined it by replacing it with a new system that serves the exact same purpose in function, only you aren't spamming it as crazy as much as you were spamming DA in SB.

but neither of these versions have as much problems as the current SHB DRK kit.

and this is when we start heading into subjective territory, but IMO HW's kit had way more problems than SHB's does, my personal opinion is people look at it with way too rose tinted glasses. Functionally, SHB's kit works. It may not personally appeal to people, but everything works as it should both MT & OT wise. It's only flaw really is LD but thats been a constant across every iteration of DRK. HW DRK had serious issues about being OT between losing dps, the party losing a powerful mitigation tool in the form of Reprisal, two of its DA effects fighting against itself (Why would you ever give Dark Passenger a blind or Dark Dance evasion on a job that -wants- to get hit between blood price & reprisal? Not to mention the hilarity that was hitting blood price and then the WHM chain stunning the pack for 8s.) or several DA effects being basically worthless in raid (DA-DP, DA-DD, DA-AD.)

finally, in the context of SHB to EW, why were absolutely no changes made to fix the myriad of valid criticisms of SHB DRK laid out by DRK players for the last 2 years?
the issue of our resource generation abilities lacking impact could be solved many ways, such as the removal of mana regen ticks which would allow power to return to said abilities.
the issue of delirium feeling like a cheap clone of another ability, rather than being a unique resource tool for the resource generation tank
the issue of the disjointed kit because of the lack of interplay between said resources
the issue of Living Dead being a poorly designed skill (something which people seem to be adamant is the PRIORITY to fix, and not something that should be fixed ALONGSIDE the above problems)

To be fair, we have literally only animations and anything related to blood to go off of from the job action trailer, and several skills were not shown. LD could be fully fixed, Carve and Spit has a hidden visual effect to its animation that's been datamined in the benchmark indicating an upgrade, any of the various OGCDs could have new effects added to them. Delirium could have a secondary side effect that isn't visually shown. Saying 'no changes' is extremely disingenuous when you have literally no tooltips available.

As far as Delirium point, I'm going to give you a little lesson in game design and how the devs are applying it to FF14. People by large -love- flashy things. People -love- to feel immediate tactile feedback from interacting with something. Take a look at the job designs as a whole in SHB & EW. They have been streamlining systems that make very little visual impact (DoTs, resource generations, etc) In favor of grandiose visual flair. Look at Living Shadow. In form, it is effectively a reskinned DoT. But it is far more visually interesting than hitting Scourge and seeing a small tick animation pop up for the next 30s. Same thing with Queen. Lead shot was uninteresting visually. But summoning a huge ass robot to punch, kick and drill targets is far more visually interesting.

To that end, finishers &/or abilities that let you spam a big powerful button feel great to a ton of people. It gives a lot of immediate power and satisfaction, you -know- you're doing a ton of damage for Delirium's duration. Contrast SB's Delirium. You extended your BW or BP. Unless someone calculates how much extra MP they receive and then converts it to raw potency from Dark Arts, they don't know how much damage they just got from it. That's even before considering you hit the button then go back to doing your normal rotation, there's no immediate tactile feedback that you did anything with it. With SHB, you -know- you are doing 600 potency a hit, AND you get to do BloodSpiller's incredibly powerful, weighted animation multiple times in a row compared to just another hard slash.

Which also extends to interplay between resources - it's much easier to feel the tactile feedback of straight potency than to have to worry about math or think about how your resources are shifting to maximize damage. Hence why every job with any sort of complexity with resource generation has been steadily streamlined over the expansions in favor of grandiose visual flair.

what context justifies breaking a unique playstyle in an MMO which is inherently supposed to allow for multiple playstyles to suit the multiple people that play the game?

Many reasons. internal statistics showing the job is suffering from a drought of players. Wanting to make the job easier to balance in the future. Wanting to streamline the game in general. Take your pick of hundreds of possible reasons. Also being blunt, FF14 might offer many playstyles, but the reality is aesthetic flair plays a huge role in the jobs people choose. People might like the gameplay of WAR but despise its aesthetic and want to be the dark, edgy boi wielding a giant bigass greatsword. So then they give their thoughts on social media/fourms/in-game/etc, and it adds to the collective pool of data Square uses to make decisions.

the ONLY context I can think of is that Square decided that pandering to people who are unwilling to put in the work required to become proficient at a job far outweighed the option to continue to make improvements to jobs that their core playerbase would enjoy;

Bingo; and they outnumber you at least 10 to 1 when it comes time to pay the monthly bills. Possibly even way more, depending on how much you purchase off the mogstation vs them.

however, the big problem with this """context""" is that they showed that they can continue to make jobs evolve without destroying their unique playstyle

*Looks at AST's cards, SCH in general, MNK getting rework after rework*

Yeah...not always. Even history itself has shown they'll tear apart a job's identity to make parity with other jobs in its role. Exhibit A: Bowmage in 3.0.

why was the posterboy for the expansion shown no love compared to others like WAR, NIN, or AST? why was DRK shown no love in the next expansion, where they could have drawn upon MULTIPLE sources of feedback?

Ask that to MNK & SAM, the posterboys of SB. Because giving MNK an ability that intentionally went against its core identity of going fast fast fast by slowing it down and a rainbow of various tackles really wasn't really showing it much love. Not to mention poor SAM. A job meant to be a selfish dps when the meta was stacking so many buffs that the extra damage everyone did outweighed SAM's personal damage. Just because a job is a posterboy doesn't mean it gets preferential treatment. it just means its the job that's most in line with the theme of the expansion for marketing purposes, nothing more.

Also DRK was shown plenty of love in SHB. It got a rework of its jobkit. Just because you hate it doesn't discredit the time the DRk job designer spent having to create a brand new system that filled the same purpose of DA and then take meticulous amounts of hours balancing potency with the other tanks. Look at something like WAR, which effectively only got a bigger badder fell cleave & decimate. Or how many jobs in SHB just got heavily streamlined and lost more than they gained (SCH, AST's cards in SHB, AST AGAIN in EW losing half its identity with the loss of Noct).

and again, as I highlighted earlier, they did draw on feedback. They just listened to feedback you didn't like is all. But they listened.

This is just the opinion of someone who was told to look elsewhere, despite years of nothing but love and support for the game which showed me there was an MMO worth investing time into

I mean, let's be blunt here. You're just a single person, we all are, which is why Square doesn't listen to individuals. But they do listen to trends and a large majority...which isn't the case here. As I linked in the homogenization topic, there's been fan polls done across the 5.0 series on reddit that give a glimpse into the picture that the large majority are at least satisfied with DRK's changes in SHB. No doubt to me Square's internal statistics likely show a major uptick in DRK players this expansion compared to SB, but that's my speculation.

Streamlining and visuals is the name of the game now in FF14. Resource management across every job is basically 'build resource, spend it'. They're not going to be introducing or re-introducing interplaying resources at this point; the initial removal of Hagakure from SAM (and its return as a severely nerfed ability only useful for managing Sens in extremely niche scenarios) & DRK's design in 5.0 both indicate the devs have little interest in interplaying resources. Even RPR with its two gauges literally comes down to 'build one gauge to use attacks which build a second gauge which you spend to enter reaper mode.'