A completely stupid DRK idea

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I mean, yeah it's impractical, but it does sound pretty damn cool and fun to properly pull off.

I agree with Tint tho. I wish DRK was more about heavy-GCD based attacks that you have to empower using your mana.

Good times. This and Bloodweapon on Stormblood release:
- Recast time reduced from 60 to 40 seconds.
- The effect increasing attack speed by 10% has been changed to reduce weaponskill cast time and recast time, spell cast time and recast time, and auto-attack delay by 10%.
- The Blood Gauge will now increase by 3 each time a physical attack lands.

GCD-heavy DRK was the best.

[ForsakenRoe]

GCD-heavy DRK was the best.

Having the choice of being crit-heavy and kinda slow, or full skillspeed chimp mode and both being pretty close in damage was also pretty great, I remember making a meme for my FC cos I discovered that swapping one meld from a G5 crit to a G5 skillspeed got me down another 0.01, making me 2.06 under Blood Weapon. Bearing in mind that Dark Arts was a 2s CD, it became almost unbearably fast, as using DA too late in the weave window would cause you to clip. I also borrowed some FC members to throw me Enhanced Arrow and the fairy speed thing, just to see what it'd do. IIRC it got me to like 1.78 on a dummy. Completely unplayable, 10/10

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Having the choice of being crit-heavy and kinda slow, or full skillspeed chimp mode and both being pretty close in damage was also pretty great, I remember making a meme for my FC cos I discovered that swapping one meld from a G5 crit to a G5 skillspeed got me down another 0.01, making me 2.06 under Blood Weapon. Bearing in mind that Dark Arts was a 2s CD, it became almost unbearably fast, as using DA too late in the weave window would cause you to clip. I also borrowed some FC members to throw me Enhanced Arrow and the fairy speed thing, just to see what it'd do. IIRC it got me to like 1.78 on a dummy. Completely unplayable, 10/10

Exactly. While it technically does nearly the same thing as EoS/FoS, Dark Arts compiling more damage into GCDs rather than OGCDs felt more impactful - a critting DA Bloodspiller felt amazing.

And yeah, some issues of it was like the 2s recast or the comparatively low MP cost vs MP generation, both of which could've been solved with reducing the recast to 1s (like EoS/FoS) and increasing the MP cost (and potency) by +50% to reduce frequency while keeping potency per MP the same and making GCDs feel even more weight behind them.

I miss the tempo of Bloodweapon the most though, in Stormblood you had 47.5% uptime alternating Delirium BW and standard BW windows. Big refresher from the GCD monotony.

[Sazuzaki]

"Attune with the darkness within you"
"Can only be used when succumbing to the Darkside"

God that's so fucking cool. Why don't they do flavor text like that anymore?

[ForsakenRoe]

This will probably not gonna happen in FF14 but I have ideas about turning DRK into a stagger/recover tank (Brew/Blood DK hybrid).

Back in SB while it was the black sheep of tanks, I thought the same. Call it 'Suffering' instead of Stagger, have Dark Passenger be the 'remove some of your Suffering' button, have CDs that interact with the Suffering amount, be that by making more of the damage be converted into Suffering, ways to counteract the Suffering buildup by healing some of it off, or something like having TBN pause the Suffering timer, at the cost of 'well now the DOT is going to hit harder per tick once it wears off'

And I feel the same about Carve, it used to be THE big hit, now it's lost it's oomph. If you look at older skill animations, eg Hard Slash, Syphon Strike, Carve, you can see that when your character swings the sword there's a kind of 'momentum' the blade holds, like you're not 'swinging the sword', moreso lugging it in the direction of the enemy and letting it's own weight do the job. Bloodspiller was the first skill where it makes the blade look kinda weightless, and it's just followed from there

I don't want to have all these Shadowbringers and Edges to spam, I want to be Guts and slam the enemy with a massive slab of metal. Guess I have to go WAR for that

"Attune with the darkness within you"
"Can only be used when succumbing to the Darkside"

God that's so fucking cool. Why don't they do flavor text like that anymore?

Old DOT descriptions were better previously too. Biolysis and Combust 3 both say 'dealing unaspected damage over time' when you mouse over them on the enemy's debuff list, iirc. Miasma was 'Lungs are failing, causing damage over time' and Combust 1 was 'Proximity to a theoretical sun is causing damage over time'

[Sazuzaki]

Combust 1 was 'Proximity to a theoretical sun is causing damage over time

How'd we go from that to 'dealing unaspected damage over time'

Feels like the creative juices I hear about from the old days have gone away. I hope things get better after FF16 releases.

[Payotz]

Back in SB while it was the black sheep of tanks, I thought the same. Call it 'Suffering' instead of Stagger, have Dark Passenger be the 'remove some of your Suffering' button, have CDs that interact with the Suffering amount, be that by making more of the damage be converted into Suffering, ways to counteract the Suffering buildup by healing some of it off, or something like having TBN pause the Suffering timer, at the cost of 'well now the DOT is going to hit harder per tick once it wears off'

Yeah. This was always my impression back when I was still new and playing DRK in Stormblood. The job quests always implied that DRK always kept coming, regardless of how much they get hit. In fact in some cases, they hit back harder. So a stagger mechanic that gets converted to damage bonuses would be a lot more lore accurate mechanic than... Inner Release but edgy..

I can understand old Blood Weapon because it just buffs the GCD recast speed, but the whole Edge/Flood spam makes me feel like my two hander is just a knife. It doesn't make any sense.

I want them to experiment into making DRK the "squishy" stagger tank with the highest possible skill ceiling because of how stagger interacts with damage. Kinda like how Blood DK is really.

[Mekhana]

"Attune with the darkness within you"
"Can only be used when succumbing to the Darkside"

God that's so fucking cool. Why don't they do flavor text like that anymore?

I think that's because Koji Fox used to write the descriptions for almost everything now it's a bunch of 'randos'...

Totally valid, both were beasts on their own, however perfection is subjective for both of them. HW DRK was more about being the Parry proc tank (Reprisal + Low Blow) with generally low usage of Dark Arts due to MP drain, but also came with tools like Blood Price that scaled MP regeneration with damage taken. For better or worse, that was a cool mechanic that supported not overmitigating to get the most out of it. The original Blood Weapon though if I read the tooltip right did not come with GCD haste, only auto-attack speed which I find somewhat boring. However GCD Delirium combo as an alternative to Souleater, Scourge as a maintainable GCD DOT and Dark Dance were quite fun.

What they lost in the parry engine (which I personally think was stupid as it cemented DRK into MT for the majority of fights for damage) they made up with the Blood System and TBN -> 50 Blood on break, which could be used on an ally. While not a DPS gain, it was a decently healthy alternative. Dark Arts frequency was really high given the extension of Blood Weapon, reworked Delirium and exchanging the MP drain for removing natural MP regen outside of DRK actions. And Blood Price got murdered, like goddamn it gave 1 Blood per hit and a few extra per server tick while only accessible under Grit. And every hit only gave 5% of a Dark Arts / TBN, you'd need to take 20 hits to get a single use out of it. Overall though, it was very fun to play the Speed Tank.

(I post this mainly as a source of information of others who may not know either of these)

I'd be fine with something like old Dark Arts coming back if it was like a 30 sec CD that turned the skill/ability into a new one with new vfx/sfx and more potency. Even if its something like Abyssal Drain+ or Carve and Spit+ Having to weave it all the time when you have too much MP to still hit like a wet noodle like the majority of SB can stay a memory.