Low developer effort rework for the DRK Job

[Shurrikhan]

You can tell these hacks didn't have any plan to make things better when they stealth nerfed Living Shadow's potency for the SOLE PURPOSE of putting it back to its original potency 8 levels later, and pretend it's new. It's like if your dad took your playstation out of your room, boxed it and gave it to you as a christmas present a year later. It's either maliciousness or incompetence, and either option should be met with scorn, not the praise that's being dumped on it by the zealous idiots who pretend Square can do no wrong.

This... clearly wasn't thought through. I realize it's fun to get offended, but note that unless you end up underpowered over the affected level range, potencies have merely been shuffled (in this case, to your advantage) rather than removed.


Living Shadow being less important over the 80-87 range would only be worth complaining about if DRK's damage were weaker than other tanks across levels 80 to 87. Otherwise, having already been balanced without the full-power Living Shadow, you're simply looking at Living Shadow making up a slightly smaller portion of your overall damage than it used to, until level 88. That's not a problem; it's probably even ideal.

Consider the alternatives. If you're balanced across level 71-80 but then get a stronger capstone skill than most, you're temporarily overpowered at a level cap important to synced content. That's not great. Now, you could nerf anything or everything else related to rotation ST damage instead of that skill, but then you're undertuned while leveling AND you need more traits cluttering up your Actions & Traits page by which to give back that lost power to many skills, rather than just the one, come level 88.

The end result is really just that the capstone skill is temporarily less important, making less of your damage involve a DoT on a long CD. Unless we're actually underpowered over only the span reliant on that level 80 skill for parity... so what? It just means your damage is less hampered by / invested in a clunky DoT.

Tl;dr: They more than likely simply nerfed Edge of Shadow less than they otherwise would have, slightly increasing DRK's damage at 74-79. The alternative would have you suffering from potency loss for 5 levels more. Unless your level 80 damage increased more than other tanks', at worst you're now a bit overpowered leading up to level 80.

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What matters is tight parity (both ST and AoE) at level caps and as near to that as would be worth the effort between level caps. If you're wondering why we got 3 single-target traits across 81-90, look no further than Salt and Darkness and Shadowbringer, both 50% AoEs with significant, even if not huge, potency per minute.

Note that PLD saw minimal ST dps increases from traits, and likewise 50% AoEs across its new skills. WAR's new attack was only a 30% AoE and an AoE spender choice (shared cooldown) that requires 3 targets to pull ahead while all traits were likewise ST. GNB? Roughly the same thing. ST traits, and a 20% AoE.