Your Dark Knight players are unhappy. あなたの暗闇騎士プレイヤーは不幸です

[Danelo]

It buffed dark mind, gave dark passenger a blind status effect on enemies, gave dark dance an evasion effect(which worked well with DPs blind), added hp restore onto abyssal drain and increased enmity gain on powerslash. C&S lost the MP regain but went up in potency quite a bit, and it buffed souleater potency. Some of these were less useful than others, but it was a nice mechanic that should have been retained and refined. Instead it was turned into nothing but a potency boost for nearly every gcd before it's eventual removal.

I wasn’t fond of da+dm but I wouldn’t mind if dark arts changed the function of the next weaponskill

[Oizen]

They literally could have just revert the changes made to darkside and blood weapon to fix dark arts spam instead of reworking the job. They had it working for the entirety of HW and it's only broken because the devs:
1. Reduced the cd of blood weapon from 60s to 40s for some reason.
2. Removed the mp drain from darkside so you literally can't lose it.
3. Made our other mp spender, dark passenger, obsolete.

They way over buffed mp generation because they thought that was what players liked and when it didn't work instead of reverting the changes they threw the baby out with the bath water. For some reason they thought it was better to make two brand new abilities and a whole new job gauge rather than just change some numbers so we can't spam dark arts.

Its just depressing to me that they actively decided making DRK into a WAR clone without self healing was the way to go after all of that.

[Crater]

1. Reduced the cd of blood weapon from 60s to 40s for some reason.

Blood Weapon always had a 40s cooldown until Shadowbringers ruined it.

[Jakulo]

For some reason the changes listed during the launch of SB was blood weapon's cd changed from 60s to 40s but looking through footage from HW the cd was 40s so it was a mistake on my part.

[Lyth]

Here's the problem as I see it. You can't simply rework an existing job. There are expectations on how it's 'supposed' to work based on prior iterations. DRK's difficulty is that there are not one, but three DRK job designs, each of which is different in its own way.

Heavensward was based off of a single resource (MP) that decayed spontaneously over time. You could toggle this off during downtime by turning off your primary damage buff. At baseline, your standard combo generated MP at a rate such that your total MP would gently float upward. You made a decision at the end of every combo about whether you burnt this off or not. During Blood Weapon/Price windows, your MP rose more rapidly, requiring you to use Dark Arts Souleater more often. Dark Arts allowed you to use MP to toggle on special functions of your abilities for additional damage or utility. Aside from this, the job was largely a string of fast paced oGCDs and reactive procs related to either taking damage or parrying.

The main reason why it was revised was because it was possible to become resource starved if you mismanaged your MP, which could be dangerous if you messed up at the wrong time. Also, it's worth noting that while everyone looks back at Heavensward's Dark Arts system favorably, it would never work in the current era because we're much more focused on damage trade-offs. You would never use Dark Arts for utility if there's a potency price tag attached to MP.

Stormblood was based off a dual resource system. MP no longer decayed spontaneously over time, but also didn't tick up over time. You could reactivate your natural MP regeneration by turning off your primary damage buff. So at baseline, your MP generated a lot faster. Because there was no natural MP drain, the game forced you to constantly burn this off with Dark Arts uses. This was compounded by a lengthened Blood Weapon window under Delirium.

This resolved the issue of you becoming resource-starved and losing Darkside. In exchange, you were punctuating more GCDs with Dark Arts than Shatner does periods with words. It was a clunky, unwieldy system. However, it was extremely good if you lived next door to the servers, because everything was a double weave. It was changed because most people don't. It also killed off a lot of Heavensward's more fun abilities by turning them into either role actions, or locking them behind Grit.

What Stormblood did well was create interesting interactions between your two resources, especially in multi-target situations. TBN uses MP and gives you blood. Quietus and Delirium Blood Price use blood and give you MP (or both in the case of Blood Price). Abyssal Drain uses MP and gives you HP. You juggled resources to get whatever effect you wanted. Unfortunately, they didn't allow any of these shenanigans in single target, perhaps for good reason.

I think that if you want to rework the core gameplay loop, you have to pay homage to all three versions.

So how do we set up a two combo system that fulfills this? I think the easiest way to do this is to separate out MP and Blood into two different combos, and make this the basis of converting MP into Blood. Your baseline combo restores MP on each step. This is important because it ensures that you're never locked into a no MP state. You spend MP on Edge and Flood as normal, except this time to gain Dark Arts procs. You consume a Dark Arts proc to activate your second combo, which gives you Blood on each step. Get to 50 blood, use Delirium for your burst window (which we can talk about designing later). Once per minute, use Living Shadow to gain 50 blood for a burst window that's automatically synced up with raid buffs. That's how I'd see a two combo system working on DRK, rather than having a maintenance combo system. You'd have to similarly design the rest of your cooldowns to play off of exchanging MP for blood and vice versa.

[ItsUrBoi]

A generally good change would be to make it so that DRK has its own gimmick or mechanic. Many jobs have their own mechanics : red mage, dragoon, gnb , paladin, black mage, white mage, etc even warrior!

A decent look at the job could be as stated previously to look at the previous iterations and take a bit from each that was great.
Here are some examples of what I'd like to see:
1. Some form of Dark Arts which allows you to upgrade actions to stronger versions with higher potencies and maybe "stronger" animations.
2. Scourge as a DoT either rotationally used ( like on Paladin ) or instead of Salted Earth -> Salt and Darkness with no CD.
3. Living Shadow to upgrade yourself similar to Reaper's Enshroud or some form of interaction with the Shadow so that the input is more than pressing 1 button every 2 minutes and forgetting about it.
4. Some mechanic which allows you to sacrifice a portion of HP to deal more damage.

Points 1 and 4 I feel like are what makes the job unique - to have its own thing while also maybe more sword swinging and less "dark magic" would be cool since Shadowbringer is so similar to Flood many people thought at first its just Flood during the EW action trailer.

[Kalaam]

I think the use of DA is still possible, I see 2 ways to go about it:
1- It costs dark side instead of MP
2- Edge/Flood and TBN cost darkside instead of MP, Darkside could then be generated with either a second combo, proccing shadowBRINGER (come on that's in the name!) from TBN or other things.

[Absimiliard]

Maybe start by retooling DRK to not be WAR's K-Mart equivalent.

[Xrison]

Maybe start by retooling DRK to not be WAR's K-Mart equivalent.

More like the dollar store equivalent. Kmart used to have decent stuff from time to time.

[MagiusNecros]

MP for DPS. (oGCDS and Heavy Thrust buff)

Blood Gauge for Mitigation. (Blood Price/TBN) Blood Price becomes TBN. Acquire blood on doing damage and MP from taking damage. Blood return on Salted Earth/Salt and Pepper too.

Dark Arts to enhance select actions for mitigation or damage.

Blood Weapon becomes Delirium. 5 Stacks. HP and MP return per weaponskill "delivered".

Adjust the heal check on Living Dead to 25% HP or apply the Doom debuff after the 10 seconds of Walking dead elapses. 10 second invuln and then 10 seconds to cleanse the doom. Give it a nice marker above the DRK's head too. A healing bonus would be nice too.

Remove shared recast on CnS and AD.

AD now costs MP and is spammable and is a HP sustain tool.

Dark Mind and Dark Missionary now mitigate all damage.

There I fixed DRK.