Thread: A DRK Rework Suggestion for 7.0 (or beyond)

Originally Posted by Archwizard

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Like I said earlier, if you were designing the tank jobs from scratch, everything that you're suggesting would be very reasonable. The problem is that the playerbase has expectations of the jobs based off of their prior experiences with them.

The primary reason why WAR is currently the lifesteal tank is, unfortunately, because it got there first. There was a period in time during early Stormblood where it could have gone either way, and I've asked many of these same questions myself several years back. But now you have players who have been maining WAR for something approaching 10 years now, and there's a community expectation that's built up over time that it's 'supposed' to be good at lifesteal. If you want to know what you're up against, just take a look at the 'Tank healing is too high' thread to see what happens when you try to take away those toys. And from a developer standpoint, why would you want to risk it? You have players that are really happy with the design of the job. If you start tampering with it to make another job look more attractive, then you just end up with two groups of angry players instead of just one.

I'm likewise not a fan of trying to try to share lifesteal with other tanks. It's dumb enough that PLD now uses vampiric holy magic. Why would you throw yourself into the midst of that competition? I'd personally just like to see DRK develop a unique gameplay style and identity that isn't available on another tank, rather than ending up as a budget WAR just because it's in vogue. And that's the comparison that will invariably be made at the end of the day.

It doesn't matter either way. I can only point out the practicalities of the issue. Enjoy your homebrew.

If DRK were a job available from ARR, it definitely would be the lifesteal tank and WAR the heavy mitigation one, but it werent, so WAR got the lifesteal and PLD the mitigation back then... now DRK magic style of tanking can lend itself to both lifesteal and shielding and since TBN is a thing, that should be the direction they take us.
A direction i tought right now, quickly at that so there may be some serious flaw in my ideas, would be something like this:

get a "Brutal Shell"-like shield on our ST and AOE combos, change Dark Missionary to a 15% maxhp shield to the party, Dark Mind to a big shield and increase its cooldown to balance, and turn Oblation into a trait, giving raw mitigation to the shield we make.
Like this we could keep some light mitigation most of the time so our shields wont break instantly and Dark Missionary would became a very good party utility with a base 10% mit and some shielding, do this and we wouldnt even need much more sustain than Soul Eater and Abyssal Drain, maybe just changing the Dark Arts proc into a heal like the other tank spammables, just have to make sure the Oblation trait won't work with healer shields or it would became too strong.