So Drks getting rekt 3 expacs in a row great job devs

[Eorzean_username]

"WE HATE LIVING SHADOW"
who is "we"m living shadow mmakees a lot of sense for how the role quests went,

I loathe Living Shadow, mechanically.

It's boring and visually-irritating in practise, since it just copies arbitrary versions of my own actions, making my rotation look like a cluttered mess of random AOE actions and other visual-spam for 20s.

It's like all of the distracting junk that I turn-off from other Players, except it can't be disabled.

And then on top of that, it adds literally nothing to my rotation — in 7.0, I don't even need to bank Blood any more, because rather than fixing on-pull Blood generation or Living Shadow activation-time, SE decided to just take the most simplistic solution possible.

If Living Shadow at least only followed me around, and literally "Shadowed" (ie, literally copied / duplicated) my own actions, it would lead to potentially-interesting decisions about how to execute GCDs during the Living Shadow duration.

Even better if Living Shadow was an actual separate entity that could do something vaguely-unique, like off-tank a separate target.

Or if Living Shadow had no cooldown, giving DRK a branching choice-path for how to spend Blood during its entire rotation, rather than "pool for burst, and sometimes blow-off a Bloodspiller to avoid over-capping".

...Conceptually / aesthetically, Living Shadow is cool.

But as-is the usual theme with FFXIV Job Design since Shadowbringers (and, I'll argue, somewhat since Stormblood), the general idea is just "oh this looks cool, doesn't it?", with no actual substance or interest beneath that surface-level contribution.