to Future DRK Players

[Jirah]

To see it anything like a fight is an unhealthy way to do it. If anything it should be seen as documentation for the state the job is currently in; the more complaints, the better. It's one way to understand the current pathology of what's plaguing the job.

Problem is most new players simply have no frame of reference and you can't blame them for it either. When you start playing a game you don't exactly look for reference for what it used to be, instead you do your best to enjoy the experience overall. Anything else seems outlandish to me. Eventually even the new players will ask for more, it's only a matter of time.

They can do alot by removing Delirium or reworking it. Integrate synergy between actions that doesn't involve once in a lifetime activation of EoS/FoS to maintain a lazy attempt at Dark Arts. Make it interesting. Allow for versatility and give players enough to work with so they are not underwhelmed. Make a good distinction between DRK and all 3 other tanks. Living Shadow has literally no interaction with the toolkit and that's incredibly disappointing. The leveling experience needs to involve more actions at an earlier level. I believe DRK's journey to its glory days will take one or two expansions unfortunately.

And just like that we became the ascians. At least that’s my interpretation of it. Beings that known a better way of life look in pity of the malformed concoction we see before us today. Just remember that they once lived, they once loved, yearning for the cycle to end

[Bhearil]

I wonder how popular DRK will be on this expansion, since PLD is now the poster boy and their new Confiteor finishers look sick as hell, plus Reaper fullfilling the DRK dps fantasy.

I really wonder how many of those players "who like DRk as it is" will be left.

On Stormblood was "easier" because Darkside no longer drained MP (just negated natural MP regen) and you earned so much MP with combos that you had to spam Dark Arts constantly or overflow creating the broken yet fun AOE Lifedrain of death on dungeons run with Dark Arted Abyssal Drain, TBN and Quietus synergy alternating Blood Weapon and Blood Price.

Basically even if there still was some degree of complexity left, you had to try hard to really mess it up unlike Heavensward where mistakes were far more costly and easier to happen

[bundythenoob]

The insanity is the very loud minority which tries to ruin the job for the people who actually like to play it. Change this, change that, DRK rework there, here are my ideas for some new skills for DRK...

We had 3.0 DRK and people complained and they changed it. The people who complained likely never picked up DRK after the change and the people who liked 3.0 DRK were... not happy.

So we had 4.0 DRK and a new generation picked up the job and liked it. But the old 3.0 generation complained so hard that they changed the job again. The people who liked 4.0 DRK were not happy. And guess what? The people from 3.0 were not happy either.

So now we have 5.0 DRK and a new generation picked up the job and likes it. And the forum is full of people who cry "REWORK!"
All what will happen is that they will ruin the job again for the people who like the current design.


They really should stop with all the reworks and design the job for people who actually like to play it - which are a lot, I see many DRKs in the game.

this is the whole reason I've been fighting for the CURRENT DRK to change, NOT for the OLD DRK to come back. as much as I love the gameplay that we had prior to SHB, I understand that not everyone enjoyed said gameplay. I came to accept the direction that DRK was going, and I came to accept that some ideas were better off left in the past. yet what I could never for the life of me understand is why on earth none of our issues were addressed by the job devs?

I understand that there will be new players who like the current DRK shell, and I would rather Square's devs take the time to BUILD UP this version of DRK than create yet another unliked rework. I've been trying to push for some QOL changes for current DRK for what seems like forever now, and despite everything, the DPS ORIENTATED JOB DEVS showed that they would rather just not do anything to address the myriad of legitimate gameplay issues or job identity critiques. yet in all of their infinite widsom
rather than come to a compromise, by taking the older skill ideas and resource generation gameplay identity from the older versions and use it to empower the new DRK for the new generation

THEY DIDNT DO ANYTHING

AFTER SO MUCH FEEDBACK FROM SO MANY DRK PLAYERS FOR OVER THE LAST 3-5 YEARS

THEY

DIDNT

DO

ANYTHING




but I know for a fact that it was our fault for pushing DRK in a backwards direction, as opposed to helping the job move forward by imparting new players with the knowledge of the old skills and gameplay style, which is why I'm asking the new generation to try and get their job to once again be something that takes more than half a braincell to pick up and master, especially if these new players want to continue playing the game for the next couple of years

[Shin96]

-snip-

It's a loud minority of course. Because it's my fault the majority of players in this community are unable to voice their concerns or become vocal about their opinions.

Every job in this game has a certain amount of players disliking it on different issues. Some may seem benign, others found through experience. Here is the truth: No one is going to be happy indefinitely. You will always find people "crying" about all kinds of issues anyway. The question is what they are concerned about, and thus far I see alot of dismissal by people that only care about their own opinion. Before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, please take a look at the Dark Knight Megathread I created. The first post involved questions about what people like, what they want changed, etc. I didn't force my way of thinking on anyone, for instance. I encourage people to create an appreciation thread as well, everything is fine in my book.

I also have been critical of people that said they enjoyed the job, but that's because they call it perfect and nothing ever is. Even the most balanced job has issues worth talking about, wether the majority likes it or the minority doesn't really matter.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying 5.0 DRK if you want my statement on this particular issue. My biggest problem is the lack of variety in combos, the 1-2-3 spam has never been more true than now. Spamming Bloodspiller doesn't alleviate the issue either. If they can find a more engaging playstyle I would set aside my preferences easily. So it's mainly Delirium and the Souleater combo that irks me.

I am surprised at the sheer amount of mini dictators I see across these forums lately. If given the power, they would delete about almost any thread that doesn't agree with their superior opinions. Of course the developers will cater to the majority but that doesn't mean we have no right to voice our opinions. These forums exist for a reason.

No one is ruining anything. The only people I see ruining things are people trying to stoke division between players to sabotage the conversation, for whatever reason.

[Sazuzaki]

I know, TBN is by far the best tank short defensive CD (and even a decent competitor to bigger ones), but is also the "curse" that makes the job look fine "because has TBN" despite behind all shiny animations its a Warrior Lite with an horrible Living Dead aka "Bring Benediction or waste tons of healing to back them up or the DRK kill themselves"

DRK outside a new defense skill, gets upgrades to long cd skills(Unless Salted Earth Simulacrum have lowered cds) which makes the gameplay virtually the same as before, which is not inherently bad, but at least make gameplay more dinamic and fun instead of having to spam Souleater combo 80% of the time with some OGCD sprinkled here and there

Oh yeah I get you. Honestly, they can add anything to DRK and it'll be an improvement over 5.0. Just wish the other issues were finally addressed. Still praying for a Delirium rework.

[Sazuzaki]

They really should stop with all the reworks and design the job for people who actually like to play it - which are a lot, I see many DRKs in the game.

Just to start off, we request reworks for a reason. 3.0 DRK relied too heavily on being MT to boost its DPS. 4.0 DRK was just full of annoying and clunky Dark Arts spam. Dark Arts still should've never been removed, they just handled it HORRIBLY and decided to blame all of it on Dark Arts alone. 5.0 gutted the job to death and removed all identity from it, except for TBN. If they just stopped making bad decisions and returned to the roots of the job (being a magic knight by enhancing and altering your greatsword skills with dark magic) then it would be done.

The only reason people are playing it is cause of the surge of new players who've never heard about what the game was like before. Its got a super cool aesthetic, cool animations and TBN. Hell, I loved DRK when I started in ShB. Then I unlocked Delirium and it was an instant turn off. I remember laughing how they thought spamming 1 button was a good design choice. Turns out I wasn't the only one. Then I learned what the past expansions were like, and boy was the job shattered for me. Not saying the job is *horrible* rn, but even new DRK players that I've seen and asked still think 5.0 Delirium is hot garbage. Inner Release fits Warrior's losing control theme, but as for DRK? Any skill like that is just taking you back to lvl 1, where you're just mashing a single button until like lvl 2 or 4. It's not even direct critical hits. PLD Req. is actually unique and interesting with its range and magic reliance, and it has a finisher. 5.0 Delirium was a lazy rework of the skill, and could've been done much better. The community has made up fixes themselves that aren't even that much of reworks of the skill, but still infinitely better.

That raises my other point, we aren't even asking for a for full scale rework anymore. They can easily find a middle ground between people who like the job now, and people who liked it in the past just by changing up a few things:

*Don't make Delirium a copy of Inner Release
*Reduce some oGCD timers like Blood Weapon, Carve and Spit, and Abyssal Drain a little bit. Make make us use our oGCDs more often.
*Lower level TBN that upgrades into lvl 70 TBN

Of course we want more than just those three, but if they JUST do that in EW, It'll be such a good start and maybe you would stop seeing so many DRK complaint posts. DRK's only fun mechanic is TBN, other than that, the job is just boring 1-2-3 use everything on cooldown. Don't even get me started on pre-70 levelling, that was just a chore on its own.

[Lyth]

...

Just because a job design works well for a given expansion doesn't mean that it would work well in a different expansion.

Heavensward DRK worked well for 3.x. That's not because it was the best designed job. It just worked well for its time. It wasn't without flaws. If you used Dark Arts with Dark Dance, for example, you'd boost your evasion. But DRK relied on getting hit (especially by autos) in order to get Blood Price ticks, as well as to get parries to trigger Low Blow resets and Reprisal procs. There were many parts of the design that just clashed with each other. In addition, a lot of players at the time either didn't realize that spending MP on defensive Dark Arts buffs cost DPS to use, or didn't mind doing so. Some of the job's highlights, such as being the only tank with a gap closer, are things that we are less excited by now because it's a standard across all jobs. And I think most importantly, players were willing to overlook a lot of faults because it was a relatively high DPS job which was also viewed as relatively high skill to play.

Stormblood DRK did not work well for 4.x. It was a relatively low DPS job which was viewed widely as relatively low skill to play. It also unearthed a lot of the underlying weaknesses in Heavensward's design, because players were starting to realize that Dark Arts = Potency, and weren't willing to use a lot of their kit because they were gated behind DPS losses. If you look at the 4.3 changes, a lot of them just added the 140/168 potency as standard to every time you pressed the Dark Arts button. It's actually not rocket science to see why Edge/Flood replaced it. I have a really hard time taking people seriously when they claim to have loved Stormblood DRK back in the day, because a lot of those exact same posters were campaigning to get the job changed during 4.x.

I think that if you took either of these jobs and just copied them into the current expansion, players would be extremely unhappy. The game has changed. All the other jobs have changed, and no job exists in a vacuum. So you can't silence discourse on the job. It has to evolve with the game.

Regardless of whether you like the aesthetic choices made, it's hard not to see Shadowbringers DRK as a more streamlined, synergistic version of the job compared to previous iterations. I suspect you'd see a lot less complaints if it wasn't a lower dps tank for the second expansion running. Would I like to see a speed buff again? Yes. But maybe the solution is to do something situational like Reaper does, dropping to a 1.5 s GCD in Avatar form. Would I like to see a different aesthetic on Delirium? Probably, but every tank has a one button spam window now, especially with GNB's combo being turned into a single button. And I absolutely, definitely don't want to go back to Stormblood's Delirium, which was the most awkward, most ineffectual 'burst' window of all time. You do not burst by increasing the duration on something. You burst by increasing the potency. Whoever designed that was delirious. I'd sooner lose Delirium over Salted Earth, if they ever reverted that change. Players across all language forums wanted to burn it with fire during Stormblood.

Do I want to see Living Dead changed? Definitely. And I want the dev team to actually talk about invulns and the impact that they've had on fight design to date, rather than avoiding the topic. I actually want to see invulns removed and an emphasis placed on learning how much to actually mitigate.

This is not a generational thing. The game changes, and the jobs have to change with it. I think if Warcraft classic proved anything, as much as players think they want to go back to earlier points in time in an MMO's history, they actually don't. Keep your memories of Heavensward and Stormblood. But you'll think more fondly of them if you let them stay in the past.

[RatCopter]

I remember sitting there saying "...that's it?" after DRK's part in the trailer, and it took me a good day of sulking to really get over it, but my takeaway from it is that the new abilities is completely function over form. Nothing really flashy except the thing that looks like Flood 2. So with that in mind, I'm going to have to wait and get an actual feel for lvl 90 DRK to really have an opinion on it, rather then seeing what's new and trying to extrapolate from there.

The thing I liked most about previous iterations of DRK was it's, for lack of a better term, unorthodoxy. It didn't play like other tanks. ShB gave us something that played a lot like WAR sure, and I hate current Delirium as much as the next person, but this trailer showed me that we're taking a few tenative steps back towards that unorthodoxy; it looks as though that our new damage move is a follow up to Edge, as opposed to a burst ender like WAR's not!Confetiteor. That might be enough to keep me hooked, and especially with another shield to layer on with TBN.
I'm hopeful that's what it ends up being, and I'm also hopeful for a general oGCD cooldown reduction, that the "optimal use of defensives" translates to Dark Arts having extra potency, and that there's more interactivity to this new Salted Earth bubble move than just using it when it's up. Like building up stacks on an enemy inside it or something.

I am disappointed to see that Delirium probably won't be changed, ya boi Scourge isn't coming back(even though they've got a good system for DoTs now), and that the animation on the Salted Earth bubble baited me into thinking it was an upgraded Dark Missionary for like half a day. But otherwise, I'm cautiously optimistic about it all, which runs in stark contrast to all the doomsaying I'm seeing here lmao.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

the "DoomSaying", as you refer to it, is just because emotions are to run high, at the moment... The Job changes reveal trailer did not look good, all it did was show off new things, and did not address any of the common concerns and/or common complaints about Dark Knight, that appear in the forums.
We have no idea if Blood Weapon was fixed, no idea if there was a change to Living Dead, no idea if there was a change to Delirium, and then that moment at the start of the Live Letter, when they more or less said that a lot Dark Knight players around here will be ignored.

so emotions are just to run high and burn hard, at the moment. After every player that was insulted by the Live Letter calms down a bit, and when we get our hands on 6.0 Dark Knight action tooltips, then the activity in the threads will swing one of three ways...
the changes end up to look good, despite how bad the Live Letter was, and complaints around here will be more passive, or Dark Knight looks terrible in 6.0, from our perspectives, in the case of no change or fix towards the most common complaints, and then either complaints around the threads become akin to a flood, or a lot of us may even just give up and disappear.

[Hierro]

I have a really hard time taking people seriously when they claim to have loved Stormblood DRK back in the day, because a lot of those exact same posters were campaigning to get the job changed during 4.x.
[...]
And I absolutely, definitely don't want to go back to Stormblood's Delirium, which was the most awkward, most ineffectual 'burst' window of all time. You do not burst by increasing the duration on something. You burst by increasing the potency. Whoever designed that was delirious.

I loved Stormblood DRK, like my own son! I still maintain the job was fine back then. Plunge was the anti-knock back needed. For all encounters designed, including ucob and uwu, DRK's lack of a raid-wide mitigation CD like dark missionary did not adversely affect a party's success. Still, arm's length and dark missionary are welcomed additions.

DRK wasn't meant to burst with delirium. It was meant to go fast! Don't you like Sonic games, old friend? Don't you like going fast? YOU GOTTA GO FAST!