A (maybe) different outlook on the current DRK situation

[DoppelShifter]

...And I say "different" because I actually liked most changes and don't actually mind the fact it didn't get much "new" stuff, but I'll get to that.

I'll split this into 4 sections: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Suggestions. They'll also have to be split into 3 (possibly more) posts because 3000 characters is too few for any decent conversation on... almost anything that involves balancing systems.

But the TL;DR is: the changes are on the right direction, but the few things left unaddressed can essentially make the class useless in the perfect storm of situations. And that happens a bit too often for comfort. I've seen some of the same complaints around, but either too aimless, too simplistic, too angry and often without concrete suggestions. Also, I talk about more than just "DRK needs more self-healing".


The Good:
I think for the first time since the class's inception back in Heavensward, EVERY SINGLE BUTTON in our bar has a purpose and a semi-constant use (...except Living Dead, but we'll get to that). Quietus was a waste of Blood Bar / Delirium (and it was outclassed by Stalwart Soul + Flood of Shadow anyway), first-rework-Abyssal Drain had too long a cooldown to be reliable, Salted Earth's ground-targeting made many tanks forget to set it up, Delirium and Blood Weapon's mismatched cooldowns meant often DRK's delayed one's use so they could pop both together, etc etc.

Now everything has its use. The syncing of Delirium and Blood Weapon, plus potency changes, now mean Quietus weaved with Shadowbringer, Abyssal Drain and Flood of Shadow are our main AoE rotation, with an extremely powerful burst. Also, Delirium being changed to stacks rather than duration means we don't need to rely (...as much, I'll get to that too) on strict Skill Speed values to have optimal DPS.
Plus, the syncing means we have a reliable burst window that comes every 60 seconds, instead of "whenever the buffs' cooldowns align".
Also, removing the ground targeting from Salted Earth and giving it a secondary activation means we now use it far more easily and often (though I still think the cooldown is a tad too long).

Even though "the only two new things" we got from Endwalker was a two-charge "Super-Flood-of-Shadow" and a two-charge mini-Rampart, the under-the-hood refinements mean the entire kit is finally useful. We not only got the new skills, we also got the old ones that in the past weren't worth using.

The result is a versatile yet somewhat streamlined tank with lots of sustained damage, a big AoE burst and decent party utility.

[DoppelShifter]

The Bad:
But we also got a very big flaw, specially when compared to the reworks of the other tanks: we have almost no self-healing. Dark Knight. The class that, at its inception, was THE champion of self-healing in the heat of combat (WAR was having growing pains and Clemency's immense casting time meant PLD's self-healing was nearly useless inside heavy combat).

On the post-Heavenward expansions, Warriors and Paladins became the uncontested big champions of self-healing, and even more so with the Endwalker reworks. And with the new Heart of Condurum combined with two-charge Aurora and post-potency-rebalance Brutal Shell, even Gunbreaker (previously DRK's rival in "weak self-healing") can be essentially immortal in the right hands.

...Dark Knight, on the other hand? All we have now is Souleater (which heals less than ever, when in the distant past we had complete lifesteal parity with damage dealt) and Abyssal Drain (which in the past was a spammable spell that allowed DRKs to be immortal during heavy pulls, but now it's just an ability with a very long cooldown that only serves as a very occasional boost of damage during heavy pulls, plus a small breather to the healer's impending heart attack once we run out of defensive cooldowns.

Sure, we do have the best on-demand shield-based mitigation of all tanks, The Blackest Night. But as any good Scholar (and now Sage) knows, Shields are only as relevant as your ability to heal before the shield breaks.

And DRK cannot heal enough before that shield pops. Abyssal Drain and Souleater got nerfed, we lost Sole Survivor, and we got nothing to fill their places. Compared to the other 3 tanks, all of which able to solo-heal themselves during an entire bossfight, we DRKs can die during a simple wall-to-wall pull, depending on the healer matchup (...we'll get to that too).

This somewhat compounds with one of the oldest issues of the class: Living Dead still absolutely sucks. When you're popping Living Dead, you're probably in a panic situation, meaning your healer is probably already past their bursts. So they often will NOT have enough healing burst left to top you off and you will inevitably die. Doesn't help that your pitiful self-healing won't help a lot either.

The only other small issue that comes to mind is that while the balancing team did an excellent job converting most Tank Burst Buffs to stack-based, they forgot Dark Knight has two of those (Blood Weapon and Delirium), and they only converted one (Delirium). This means we still have some DRK's having to handpick gear and melds to hit Skill Speed thresholds, which I thought was the main cause of converting these things to stacks across all tanks in the first place (plus, setting up Skill Speed this way means the class behaves completely different when inside Synced content and Endgame content, and it might even be a meaningless effort past a certain ping -- which is my particular case in the current gear level). Blood Weapon needs to be stack-based too.

[DoppelShifter]

The Ugly:
And here's where the issues I mentioned above become far worse when combined with the current meta. It's one thing to look at a class in isolation, but when you put it alongside all other classes, issues will appear. And DRK has some ugly ones.

First, the obvious: as the tank with the weakest self-healing in the entire roster, endgame-level healers have to adjust their way of healing whenever they get matched up with a DRK. I've seen this multiple times. It's often no fault of the healer; they just spent the last 10 matchups healing immortal Paladins and Warriors, and suddenly now they're matched up with a DRK that can't heal self-heal to save her own life.

Second, and this is a particularly egregious "special case" of the first issue: DRKs match up HORRIBLY with Sages. Ponder with me for a second: what happens when you have a shield-based Tank with bad self-healing and match her with a Healer with the weakest panic burst of all current healers? Yeah. Not good.

DRK + SGE is a matchup made in hell. Most of the times I died in endgame dungeon pulls, I was matched up with a Sage. Often a Sage who complained that "maybe I didn't use enough cooldowns", all the while I stared at my hotbar, all icons definitely on cooldown.

...Well, all except for Living Dead, because if Sage has issues healing DRK in *normal* conditions, can you imagine one trying to top-off a DRK, from zero to full, before the counter reaches zero, after running out of their already tiny pool of panic burst healing?

Yeah. DRK + SGE brings the worst from both classes, and it showcases their worst aspects. Two AMAZING and INCREDIBLY FUN classes, mind you. They're my favorite tank and healer. But they have flaws, and they compound in a very, very bad way.

...Which makes me sad, because again, they're my favorite classes. And also singe Sage is a new class, I get matched up with them a lot. That gets annoying fast.

[DoppelShifter]

The Suggestions:
If you managed to read until this point, wow, thank you so much!

The suggestions can't be *too* specific without access to lots of playtesting, parsing and access to the the design team's balancing guidelines. I'm a game designer, so I know most player suggestions can't be taken at face value because we lack the proper information. But I can make some "educated suggestions":

1. More self-healing:
   By far the most urgent issue, and there are SO MANY different ways to attack this.
   For example, make Blood Weapon or Delirium also grant lifesteal.
   Or drastically reduce Abyssal Drain's cooldown and un-tie it from Carve & Spit.
   Or give Shadowbringer some life-steal.
   Or make it so the Dark Arts bonus attack have lifesteal.
   Or give some HP regen to Oblation.
   Or buff Souleater's lifesteal.
   
   ...Or, my favorite: a combination of some of the suggestions above. Whatever fixes the issue and matches DRK's self-healing with the other tanks.
   .
2. Make Blood Weapon stack-based as well
   This one is easy: instead of a 10s duration buff, just make it 3 or 4 stacks instead, just like Delirium, so we don't have to worry about melds, or about changing class behavior every time a synced dungeon removes our Materia buffs.
   .
3. Rework Living Dead
   For this I don't have the same direct ideas on how to fix, because Living Dead as a basic concept is so counter-intuitive and so detached from its actual purpose.
   
   But I do have some suggestions, or at least some "directions that might bring fruitful ideas":
   - During the Walking Dead stage, ALL DRK damage (or at least all weaponskills) has lifesteal. This means the burden of topping-off HP is at least a shared burden betweek DRK and Healer, rathen than roll of the dice hoping that you're matched with a White Mage that has Benediction off cooldown.
   - Living Dead makes DRK harder to kill but *unhealable* (as if they were zombified). Increased HP/defenses, etc, but they have to rely on lifesteal to survive the super damage. This won't make them outright immortal like HG/Holmgang/Superbolide, but... let's be frank, neither did the original Living Dead.
   - Do not make it a binary "100% healed or dead" situation. Give DRK a gradual debuff instead, that either has to go off over time or has to be Esuna'd or overhealed. But don't outright make it "Oh, I was off by 1% so now my tank is dead".
   - Similarly to the suggestion above but in a different direction, stack the damage taken above the maximum HP and, after Living Dead ends, give the DRK a proportional heavy debuff (to damage, mobility, etc) that can only be removed by healing it off, like Doom.

This should fix the main issues with DRK and bring it on-par with the other tanks. It still won't have the massive burst of GNB, or the massive utility of PLD, or the raw self-sufficiency and self-healing power of WAR.

But it will keep DRK unique, while also viable.

Thank you for your time.

[Deceptus]

The Good:
I think for the first time since the class's inception back in Heavensward, EVERY SINGLE BUTTON in our bar has a purpose and a semi-constant use

Dark Mind and Dark Missionary would like a word.

[DoppelShifter]

Dark Mind and Dark Missionary would like a word.

Dark Mind was always useful against magic-based tankbusters, specially in raid scenarios (even before The Blackest Night was a thing), so it's still useful, albeit less so nowadays.

Dark Missionary is VERY useful for party utility to help healers during big arena-wide attacks or during stack moments (which again, are almost always magic-based, and almost all boss fights have them). The problem I have with Dark Missionary is that it has the same 15y radius as other similar skills, meaning if your party is scattered around (which is 90% of the time), they don't get the buff. Still, useful for reducing party-wide damage during stack moments.

[OdinelStarrei]

Oh boy, you certainly have a long one. As a note, you can always post a comment with sub-3k words, and then edit it, and put in the rest of your comment afterwards. Like how I'm going to do with this response. I'll do it piece by piece if I find something objectionable, as you did. If what I'm saying is insufficient, I can provide elaboration if required, I'm just a stupid DRK player. I apologize if this seems nitpicky.

The Good:snip snip

Regarding Quietus - I have to disagree here. Quietus was never a waste of a button, in either SB or ShB. In SB, Quietus was the only reason we were able to upkeep the permanent Abyssal Drain spam. If you'd look back to those old tooltips, AD would only heal in significant portions if it was combined with DA, and you would only be able to have infinite spam if you used Quietus, since the MP regen from BW would work on Quietus per enemy hit. This is how you went from 0 MP to max MP in a single GCD in big pulls. This also served to make it markedly unique from Decimate, something that current Quietus does not do very well. In Shadowbringers, Quietus regen was nerfed, but is still a useful button. This is not only because it's a innate 60 potency gain over Stalwart Soul(can't remember if this was different in ShB itself), but because it doesn't need the prereq hit of Unleash.

You can't compare a combination of both a GCD and a oGCD, particularly one that costs resources, to a single GCD that mainly focuses on preventing gauge overcap. This is like if you said Souleater + EoS is stronger than Bloodspiller, therefore making Bloodspiller not worth using. You need a gauge dump in AoE that isn't LS, or it's a objective potency loss that scales up with more targets. And if your concern is Stalwart Soul provides both MP and Blood in a single GCD, consider that Quietus under Delirium, a cooldown that we are going to have every dungeon pull, will regenerate 500 MP compared to the standard 200 MP like Bloodspiller. With BW and passsive MP regen, that leads to around 1300~ MP per GCD, MP ticks skewing that a bit. Instead of looking at Delirium as "no cost gauge spenders" you could also think of it as "150 free Blood that I can't use on Living Shadow". Not perfect, I know. That enough justifies Quietus existence. I'm also surprised that you didn't mention that Unleash and Stalwart Soul are spells, and therefore are locked to 2.5 GCDs, making BW impossible to get the 5 hit with only their usage, and making SkS a dead stat for 2/3 of our AoE GCDs. That's a design issue, that's pretty awful.

Regarding Salted Earth and Blood Weapon -
There is a huge misconception about what happened with Salted Earth. SB Salted Earth is arguably the best version of Salted Earth to exist. With a cooldown of 45 seconds, decent potency, and passive Blood gauge accumulation(this is the best part), Salted Earth was a multi-purpose DoT that seriously syngerized well in the kit. Back in the day, while Salted was clunky with a <me> macro, it was still critical. When Shadowbringers rolled around, doubled the cooldown, removed the blood interaction, and took all of it's potency and moved it into I assume Living Shadow, there was a justifiable cry to delete the skill because it was almost button bloat. And I'm someone who actually defends the ability to move Salted Earth. Being able to place Salted Earth AHEAD of you and the boss you are moving made a lot of situations much easier to handle. Off the top of my head right now, I'm thinking of CC/BJ in TEA, Nael in UCOB right before divebombs, E8S after Mirrors, E7S add phase, E12S after certain Apocalypse casts, and I'm sure way more from HW (A7S) or SB (O8S trines, maybe O3S add cluster?) that I'm forgetting. The only thing Salt and Darkness is doing after they butchered Salted Earth in ShB is making the potency so high that it essentially equalizes to the damage we had in SB while being less interesting to use.

And frankly, if someone delayed the usage of Blood Weapon to match with Delirium, they didn't understand the tooltip. Blood Weapon is not a linear damage increase, it is a gauge accumulator and nothing more. If you didn't hold No Mercy to line up with Bloodfest, why would you hold Blood Weapon to line up with Delirium? Would MNKs in ShB hold Brotherhood to always line up with Riddle of Fire? Both being at a significant cost of usages to the skill per encounter? That is a skill issue, that's is a SE doesn't teach people how to play their own game issue, and not a design issue. The ease of use of a skill should never have any relationship to the number of actual usages the skill gets in content. That shouldn't be the case in general for anything, outside of fringe situations like the relationship we have with charged actions like Shadowbringer in certain killtimes or holding resources/CDs for cleave damage/phase pushing. Even now, you can't have BW and Delirium line up on the 1st usage, because of the mandate to have LS up by the 3rd GCD. They line up later (kinda) if you do an intentional 2-3 GCD delay, but that's obviously counter intuitive.

Regarding other skills and burst - No matter what version of the job we were in, the only button I would ever say was totally unused on DRK was Blood Price and maybe Unleash in HW/SB once you got good enough. And even then, if the DRK was pulling in a raid with no NIN, Blood Price would be used once pre-pull, disregarding anytime we would be forced into Grit during prog/emergencies. Everything on DRK was used within reason. And speaking of NINs, we always were a 1min/2min bursting job. That's what DRK is, an MP pooling job. All optimization breaks down to is, how many DA+SE/DA+anything/EoS+BS can we fit into raid buffs? That's always been the question, and how we arrived at our answer was different per expansion. This time around, in response to "feedback" we have had all the choice removed from us by making the MP regen 12K consistently, leading to only 4 MP spenders, and in EW specifically, a minimum of 3-4 Blood spenders after Delirium was changed. Our burst window was always reliable, but you had to actively set it up, much like how a NIN sets up Trick Attack 15-20 seconds in advance, we went in a different direction, by intentionally staying at near cap juggling MP regen before bursting all of it out at once. We do the same thing now, but the agency and failure state ranges from significantly reduced to no longer exists on DRK with the MP regeneration being as slow as it is, EW supplemented that by buffing LS to a frankly absurd level, and the addition of Shadowbringer. We essentially traded the ability to be invincible from SB into having one of, if not the biggest and easiest single target/AoE burst in the entire game.

And to double down on that, what even is a reliable burst window in FFXIV? It's in the 1 min. It's CERTAINLY on the 2min with the way buffs are. The game has been pigeonholed thoroughly in that regard. DRK is now the epitome of that. So much that I'd actually say our sustain damage is absolute trash. Take a look at this graph.



As you can see, this isn't sustained at all. These are SUBSTANTIAL peaks with a middling sustain. The sustain has to be bad, otherwise DRK would be doing more damage that Ranged DPS jobs. DRK is not versatile. It doesn't heal itself very well. It adapts poorly in emergencies. It doesn't have interesting game mechanics. TBN is controversial at best. It has one undeniable trick. And that trick is huge damage in raid buffs.

The Bad: snip snip

I have to agree, even if I don't really care about sustain on DRK anymore, because there simply isn't enough damage for me to care. But even with that said, the additions we got for the expansion on the mitigation end have been incredibly underwhelming. Oblation is far too weak for an 82 skill. Now that we are relatively high geared, I can safely ignore Oblation, and no one except for me, the person who goes over VoDs and designs the entire tank/DPS section of our mitigation timeline would probably notice anything different. The removal of Abyssal Drain GCDs, the removal of Sole Survivor, the removal Blood Price for the casual player, and for those things to be replaced with nothing, or really underwhelming alternatives (like buffing TBN from 20% to 25% in ShB, like what are you doing) just really annoys me.

I'm not going to go into Living Dead. Living Dead alone proves to me there's some crucial logic behind the relationship between tanks and healers is totally missing in the development room. It's not even worth talking about in length.

I take issue with part, though.

But as any good Scholar (and now Sage) knows, Shields are only as relevant as your ability to heal before the shield breaks.

That's not true. Shields are relevant because they zero out damage and because they don't have a deprecating effect when you stack them like mitigation. If anything, mitigation combined with shields makes the shields stronger by extension, since the shield itself is being drained slower. This was probably the justification for making Oblation as trash as it is. The ability to heal before shields doesn't matter if you've gotten enough percentage mitigation to survive regardless, and when that's not an option, the massive amount of SGE regens are crazy, and Zoe+Pnuema is a great burst heal. With two healers, even a SCH co-heal, it's even less of a problem. Anyone who was progging Firestorms of Asphodelos or Decollation with only full HP and shields will testify about how dead you are if you try that. It doesn't even need to go that far either, in big pulls in dungeons, TBN can work just fine, but it needs to have mitigation paired with it to make it worthwhile, or it's just going to break instantly and leave you with nothing. In fact, as someone who plays SCH/SGE as my primary healers, I made a post specifically about the SGE+DRK relationship. I've already typed up a storm, so please forgive me for regurgitating something I said about SGE specifically in a different topic.

SGE
I'm pretty sure a good SGE and a good DRK combination is absolutely busted. You get the DRK damage, you get the SGE damage, and you get the sturdiest TBNs. With the massive amount of oGCD, self-reapplying shields SGE brings, things like Kerachole, Holos, and Taurochole combine with Oblation, all of those oGCDs having short recasts that further amplify Haima, Panhaima, and TBN. The only thing I would ever have to alternate between pulls were Panhaima and Haima, everything else was easily handled by these other incredibly powerful oGCDs, with me spamming AoE the entire time, applying Soteria once the Panhaima/Haima shields fell off. Even on first pull where I would use the weaker Panhaima, it was more than made up for by a Krasis+Physis II and Zoe+Pneuma combo once I let the DRK get a little bit low after I had used the initial suite of damage mitigation. It's not like I needed weave slots, or that any of these had particularly long cooldowns. SGE is a true maverick in this department, and I not only performed the best using it, I had the most fun working together with general tank mitigation for mutual benefit. Seriously, this comp is brutally good if both players are playing at their peaks, I cannot recommend it enough.

You know what the problem is? I had to use my entire kit on all healers to heal a DRK in a way I thought was comfortable for both sides. Since I'm of the mindset, "Perfect practice makes perfect" I would play dungeon pulls like I'd be in an extreme trial or something. Use your entire kit, ABC, space out mitigation properly, do as much damage as possible, eat food (since it's so easy to make now/EXP), etc etc etc. This was MANDATORY. The same thing was demanded of the DRK, even when I play it. Reprisal, AL, doing actual damage, the works. It was actually quite enjoyable and easy when I found the right tank.

But when I healed the other tanks? I still did all those things, but it didn't feel nearly as needed, and if the DPS were slacking, as long as the tank pressed even a handful of mitigations, I don't think I'd be any the wiser. The high skill floor for basic adequacy on dungeon DRKing is not conducive to players who are not willing to put forth the effort to not be at a bare minimum competent in their dungeons on each party slot. If you get a Cure Iing WHM, or a Diagnosis-only SGE, or a single-targeting anything, you as a DRK are going to die, painfully, there is nothing you can do about it. Just take the penalty, it will be a lot less annoying. (Addendum, the other way around is also applicable, a TBN only DRK with no CDs or a kitchen sinking one who can't spread CDs properly is similarly a disaster.)

When I had good DRKs, DRKs that would play like I would in dungeons, it was easier to heal them than all of these bandwagoning WARs who think that 1 Bloodwhetting is the only CD they need to press in an entire dungeon pull. For the casual player who doesn't press all of their buttons, healing DRKs or tanking as a DRK must be an absolute nightmare, which would explain the discrepancy in experiences. I've never had any problems healing DRKs or being healed as DRK if both parties were capable of playing at even an acceptable level. But you need all parts of the team to be doing that to really get the most out of it in dungeons, while other tanks are running around soloing things all day, carrying people with literally nothing inside of their skulls, no problem.

So that once leaves us with the tried and true DRK problem that we are all familiar with. Noticeably more effort for the same overall result as other jobs in the role, now extended to the entire light party. I don't really care if they adjust this, since I like being challenged, I'm just pointing out what I've observed now that all my tanks and healers are at 90. BiS DRK is going to shred Smileton and Sigma pulls to pieces though. With damage CDs, I'm already slicing some packs down in less than twenty-five seconds with a decent group, the damage is already pretty obscene with a i600 greatsword. I'm not justifying this, I'm just saying Living Shadow and two Shadowbringers/SaD/Floods are enhanced multi-enemy deletion devices.

The Suggestions:snip sip

No Dark Mind fix? Guess that means you actually understand what it's used for then, and I don't need to go into how useful Dark Mind is in savage. However, if I may make a suggestion of my own, maybe bring back Dark Dance and have it share a cooldown with Dark Mind? Or maybe just make more magic-attacking mobs in big pulls? I'm sure someone will question," Why isn't Dark Mind all damage reduction?" (addendum: Actually, can you just make magic damage actually visible to the player. Did you know Shining Cells is magic, while Warden's Wrath is physical? WHY?)

You know what needs to be fixed? The developers should actually talk about what they want DRK to be, and ask for people who actually have an inkling how DRK is, and was played for feedback to make a version that doesn't cause everyone to hate each other and the job they are playing. These suggestions are all things that are no-brainers. You shouldn't have to be "educated" to ask for your own invulnerability skill to not kill you. You shouldn't have to be "educated" to know that deleting entire sections of a job kit and replacing them with nothing is ridiculous. You should have to be "educated" to know that Blood Weapon should be on the stack system.

This is a unjustifiable botch job, plain and simple. We are STILL in Shadowbringers, a version of the job a lot of people were not happy with because of what it did to the systems, even if you liked it, what we had was so much better. And it needed tweaking, it needed adjustments, but it didn't need to be deleted for worse, less interesting systems in Shadowbrigners. And I started to like ShB DRK by 5.5! For the systems to remain in this abysmal state in Endwalker is a complete failure of the game design, regardless of the fact that we are META tanks right now. We're more than viable, we're on the top. We're the top dogs in a way we never were during SB or ShB. Almost HW level. But the design is so infuriating, there is no joy in being at the top. There's only frustration from the players and silence from the developers.

And that's the true failure of DRK. A landmark example of the total disconnect we've been struggling against for years, in it's peak form. Shattering the playerbase's faith in the job design as a result.

[Deceptus]

Dark Mind was always useful against magic-based tankbusters, specially in raid scenarios (even before The Blackest Night was a thing), so it's still useful, albeit less so nowadays.

Dark Missionary is VERY useful for party utility to help healers during big arena-wide attacks or during stack moments (which again, are almost always magic-based, and almost all boss fights have them). The problem I have with Dark Missionary is that it has the same 15y radius as other similar skills, meaning if your party is scattered around (which is 90% of the time), they don't get the buff. Still, useful for reducing party-wide damage during stack moments.

Now tell me how to differentiate between physical attacks and magical attacks on the fly (without having to use 3rd party tools or an external website) because the game sure as hell doesn't.

[OdinelStarrei]

Now tell me how to differentiate between physical attacks and magical attacks on the fly?

Oh my god, seriously Square Enix what is your problem with this. I don't care that the UI designer came on and said "It's impossible!" It isn't, you just don't want to. "It'll take more QA time! Our internal processes aren't built for checking the DAMAGE TYPES on the abilities we DESIGN before implementation!"

Are you kidding me? I don't care. I shouldn't have to utilize an external repository to find out what damage types are. Full stop, end of discussion. This literally only punishes DRK, less so GNB, and maybe SCH now. If you're going to make Addle and Feint both damage types, you have to do something to or with Dark Mind or the way damage is dealt to keep parity, and I LIKE Dark Mind.

Change something in the battle log. God this makes me so mad.

[DoppelShifter]

Oh boy, you certainly have a long one. As a note, you can always post a comment with sub-3k words, and then edit it, and put in the rest of your comment afterwards. Like how I'm going to do with this response. I'll do it piece by piece if I find something objectionable, as you did. If what I'm saying is insufficient, I can provide elaboration if required, I'm just a stupid DRK player. I apologize if this seems nitpicky.

I know about that workaround, but the end result tends to be a huge wall of text that often scares away all but the most dedicated, and frankly it ends up being an accessibility issue for a lot of non-neurotypical people. Thus why I prefer the topic breakdowns and post breakdowns, even if the excuse is kinda weak.

(Also I'm a game designer by craft; writing a lot and trying to make it readable kinda becomes a constant habit)

And oh, don't worry, we're just two different kinds of DRK player. You're a Savage raider (probably in a static, I assume) who uses parsers to optimize every tidbit of your rotation. I'm a more casual player that sometimes does Savage content with friends, and never ever touches a parser because I've been a WoW player (that started playing during Cataclysm, experienced all content there was at the time, and just jumped ship months before Pandaria hit, never really looking back) and I know the toxic hellhole that comes with obsessing with Recount.

Re: The Good, Regarding Quietus et al [snip snip]

See, this is an example of what I said above. At the level I experience the game (I rotate between all 4 tanks, with DRK being the most fun for me), that being mostly roulette content and the occasional Extreme/Savage with friends when they're on a break from their static, that's where I bump into the issues you mentioned; not necessarily the lack of raw damage, but "somebody somewhere in the balancing team ran the numbers and found out that this is the damage potential of DRK -- except it'll only be experienced in Savage by spherical chickens in a vacuum", and the tooltips aren't exactly intuitive in pointing towards that direction.

That's why I'll take your word for it and just point out that it's not what's perceived by me in the level of content I run, by reasons you already explained yourself.

Re: The Bad [snip snip] The shield part

Hmmmmm that depends, and I think we're seeing it from different angles.

You're looking at the question from a Tank + Healer pairing, and that's fair, I agree with all of your points.

But my point was from the PoV of a tank, relying on her own skills. Because, say, the healer screwed up and died, or because they don't have enough healing output to balance out the incoming damage even with all mitigations on (....the fact some Sages I've encountered seem to expect me to have ALL mitigations on at ALL times instead of spreading them over the course of the very long Endwalker pulls is a whoooooole different can of worms).

From that point of view, it becomes a very simple matter: your only "reliable" source of healing is yourself. You pop your mitigations and your TBN. ...And now what? Granted, you won't take real HP damage for a long time, and during that time your Souleater will heal a few chips of health, and maybe you'll sacrifice single-target damage from Carve to use Abyssal Drain to get a tiny bit more health, but.... Then what? The shield will be gone and your overall HP delta was still negative. Unlike PLDs, WARs and GLDs that can heal far more than they shield, your humongous TBN shield only delays your inevitable death.

And that's the gripe I have with this particular shield-to-healing ratio.

As for your quoted post on DRK x Sage and the experience of trying to put effort vs playing very casually, that very much lines up with my experience, yes. To the point that one of the Sages that let me die in [First lvl90 dungeon, spoilerydoo] recently told me "Yeah, I'm way too used to healing Warriors that basically heal themselves".

And like... I don't tend to bring food for Roulettes or anything, but I do gear up and overmeld as if I were preparing to Savage, and I do try to use my defensive kit to the fullest, so I should be no slouch to any competent healer.
...And yet, almost every time I die, it's because a Sage expected me to just TBN everything to the face without taking damage, and their burst wasn't enough to prevent me from dying.

No Dark Mind fix? Guess that means you actually understand what it's used for then, and I don't need to go into how useful Dark Mind is in savage.

Yeah, actually I transitioned from PLD to DRK back in 3.1~3.3 when I was trying some Savage runs with friends, and a friend from a static mentored me into the basics of DRK. So I learned pretty fast about how important Dark Mind was for surviving mechanics (specially since TBN didn't exist back then to wallpaper over the role with less skill required).

As for Dark Dance, well, only if they reworked it for the new damage model (as that was a regalia from the Parry days), and that would demand a new button to the bar, so I doubt it.

And I don't even ask for the classic "Wah, Dark Mind should apply to everything". We have plenty universal damage mitigation already. I just ask them to keep improving the QoL stuff that visually differentiates kinds of damage (like we have visual markers for tankbusters, penetrating tankbusters, stacks, numbered stacks, individual stacking, area buster, etc etc). Some people do catch up pretty quickly what kinds of damage are magical and which ones are physical (some are indeed obvious by context), but having some kind of color coding on the casting bar or something more explicit on the battle log would be nice.

At least that would make people whine less about Dark Mind and Dark Missionary.

And lastly, yes, I do agree that we need more direct information on the direction they want for jobs/classes. And I do mean in general. I could write an essay on how bad it felt to play 6.0 Astrologian when compared to back when I played it in 3.0. I could summarize it as "Trying to play with a Texas Instruments calculator with RNG issues" but that's a looooot of simplification on the table.

But what I think they want for DRK, by comparing it from 3.0 to 6.0 DRK, is a "tank that can feel like a DPS on-demand, but by spending limited resources". Back in 3.0 this manifested as having to pop Dark Arts to empower stuff. Nowadays this manifests as weaving Shadowbringer/Flood/Edge. A lot has changed and I know a fair share of people who miss the 3.0 "complex mana-and-TP-management when-should-I-DA" Dark Knight of old times, while I particularly appreciate the flawed-yet-seemingly-well-meaning streamlined version we have now.

I just think they haven't hit the mark yet, and they could at least make the class far more comfortable with VERY PUNCTUAL changes. But so far, we'll have to wait. And as someone who knows how hectic things are on the behind-the-scenes of game development and production, this is not mere laziness or even pride or people just sitting on their asses. If I could risk a guess, I'd say it's akin to what happened to WAR between 2.0 and 3.0: keep it functional, test a few things here and there, but our hands are too full for a proper rework right now, so until the next window of opportunity, this will have to do.