I'm posting this here instead of on the job-specific section because this is something I want to piggyback off of the whole issue surrounding healers in the game; it's not purely about DRK.
Story: Rolled Lunar Subterrane in roulettes, 14min elapsed. Party at the first boss. I don't ask why they need a tank. Relatively uneventful run until the last boss, wherein the healer of the group dies to a mech very early in the fight. No back-up healing in DPS, so the entire party wipes before long. This happens four times. After the fourth time, the healer leaves without saying anything. Then we had to wait to get another healer.
Had I been literally any other tank, we wouldn't have had to facewall that boss four times, and we wouldn't have had to wait. I could've gotten the group through without a healer. But I was on DRK, so we had to spend about fifteen minutes wiping and running back.
This is a two-fold problem:
1. DRK should not be the odd man out in this. If even one other tank lacked the ability to self-sustain the way DRK does, I wouldn't be upset -- if there was a distinction between offense-focused tanks and defense-focused tanks, I would've just accepted I was using an offense-focused tank, and that'd be that. Note that I am not advocating for self-sustain to be taken from other tanks; I'm just giving an example.
2. I should not have the thought: I could've gotten us through without a healer. If a dungeon requires someone in the healer role in order for the queue to pop, then a healer should be mandatory mechanically. This goes back to the problem with healers in general and part of what they tried to strike over. I noticed that even Dawntrail's MSQ saw the cracks in the game's current design surrounding this, as they put DPS jobs (RDM) in dedicated healer slots for duty support, because having a dedicated healer wasn't really necessary.
If the intention from Square Enix is for MSQ dungeons (as Lunar Subterrane is) to be simple enough to be run without healers, then healers should not be necessary for the queue.
If the intention from Square Enix is for healers to be required in dungeons, then dungeons should require healers as part of their design.
Both of these are macro problems that will require more than just a simple patch to fix, and I get that. And so, in the meantime, what can be added in a patch is self-sustain abilities for DRK. With the game being as it is, DRK needs to be beefed in such a way to survive in a dungeon environment, because they are the only tank who cannot.
I understand that jobs are tuned and balanced around raids, but I need to be able to get my damn DRK to max level in the first place in order to get to the raid. And in order to do that, unless I decide to go nuts and only do alliance roulette and PvP, I'm going to have to run dungeons.
And right now, with the way the game is, running DRK is miserable to run in dungeons.
Continue reading...
Story: Rolled Lunar Subterrane in roulettes, 14min elapsed. Party at the first boss. I don't ask why they need a tank. Relatively uneventful run until the last boss, wherein the healer of the group dies to a mech very early in the fight. No back-up healing in DPS, so the entire party wipes before long. This happens four times. After the fourth time, the healer leaves without saying anything. Then we had to wait to get another healer.
Had I been literally any other tank, we wouldn't have had to facewall that boss four times, and we wouldn't have had to wait. I could've gotten the group through without a healer. But I was on DRK, so we had to spend about fifteen minutes wiping and running back.
This is a two-fold problem:
1. DRK should not be the odd man out in this. If even one other tank lacked the ability to self-sustain the way DRK does, I wouldn't be upset -- if there was a distinction between offense-focused tanks and defense-focused tanks, I would've just accepted I was using an offense-focused tank, and that'd be that. Note that I am not advocating for self-sustain to be taken from other tanks; I'm just giving an example.
2. I should not have the thought: I could've gotten us through without a healer. If a dungeon requires someone in the healer role in order for the queue to pop, then a healer should be mandatory mechanically. This goes back to the problem with healers in general and part of what they tried to strike over. I noticed that even Dawntrail's MSQ saw the cracks in the game's current design surrounding this, as they put DPS jobs (RDM) in dedicated healer slots for duty support, because having a dedicated healer wasn't really necessary.
If the intention from Square Enix is for MSQ dungeons (as Lunar Subterrane is) to be simple enough to be run without healers, then healers should not be necessary for the queue.
If the intention from Square Enix is for healers to be required in dungeons, then dungeons should require healers as part of their design.
Both of these are macro problems that will require more than just a simple patch to fix, and I get that. And so, in the meantime, what can be added in a patch is self-sustain abilities for DRK. With the game being as it is, DRK needs to be beefed in such a way to survive in a dungeon environment, because they are the only tank who cannot.
I understand that jobs are tuned and balanced around raids, but I need to be able to get my damn DRK to max level in the first place in order to get to the raid. And in order to do that, unless I decide to go nuts and only do alliance roulette and PvP, I'm going to have to run dungeons.
And right now, with the way the game is, running DRK is miserable to run in dungeons.
Continue reading...