First Week Awk Drakania’s Discord Feedback:

Explanation: In this feedback I’ll be summarizing the most common feedbacks from the official Drakania Discord according to how many approval it got and how often it was posted, then I might add a few things to the feedbacks based on what I understood and what the community sees as solution and at the end I’ll post a screenshot of all the feedbacks, also showing the emojis of approval (thumbs up) or disapproval (thumbs down).

PS: Because of the big amount of feedback and also repeated feedback (Either being repeated from last week or this week), I won't be counting the upvotes inside the feedback and I'll be summarizing what's being asked for each topic). On top of that, on the screenshots I start most of the written feedback with a positive and a negative vote, so there’s a possibility the votes have one positive or negative vote missing (my own).

PS²: “D:” stands for Dragonblood and “H:” for Hexblood

PS³: Some feedback didn’t change, so I’ll just re-write the feedback from last week in some specific parts.

Link for the feedback from the previous week: https://www.naeu.playblackdesert.com/en-US/Forum/ForumTopic/Detail?_topicNo=23716&_page=1

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Class in General

Winged character and falling animation and Flight: The feedback from last week is still the same. A feedback repeated over and over at Drakania Discord channel, but also in streams and youtube videos (as far as my research goes), a common feedback we’ve seen over and over is that a class with wings shouldn’t “fall”. We have Lahn in the game who can glide and kind of fly, but she’s basically running on the air. In the meanwhile Drakania can turn herself into a dragon, have wings. It completely takes the players out of immersion when they have to go through a fall animation, when not even Lahn has it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc7znJo0Fe8 + https://youtu.be/JZuySbTnCY4 

Player Collision: The collision against players at Dragon Flight and Dragonwalk prevents drakania engage and disengages quite often.  

Markthanan’s Heart: "When Drakania takes critical damage, her second Dragon heart begins beating, and the ions gathered nearby turn into Drakania's HP to quickly heal her wounded flesh." So unless she got surgery to remove her second heart, it makes no sense to the players why this skill can't be applied to awakening, maybe like the Red Moon from Maehwa now has an awakening version, so should Markthanan’s Heart.

Dragon Flight: Same feedback as last week.dragon flight the skill is named flight, but after a while her wing, which is part of her body, simply disappears and she falls after the 450 stamina limit. My suggestion is that in case she's flying away from the floor, she gets a gliding fall animation like Lahn. Plus: make it usable while jumping with shift+Q, she can fly but can't even jump and press space to fly while still jumping , so at the moment feels more like she glides, not even good enough, and doesn’t really “fly”. We don’t even see her wings flapping like flying animals do. Takes the player out of the immersion of playing the class when they see it having wings, transforming herself into a dragon as one of her real forms, etc, when we see her having a fall animation and only a fall resistance of ~2 seconds. Shift+space could transition from pre awakening to awakening after using Markthanan’s wing.

Global Lab Comparison: A feedback that keeps being repeated throughout the whole week is how at global lab she was actually fun and looked like it was going to work as a decent class at live servers. Upon arrival at the live server she received a lot of changes and nerfs that made a big amount of the Drakania community lose their hype about the class. On Global lab she had an amazing kit to be a good flex class in group pvp and a good 1v1 duelist, but her lack of protection got even higher and what made her being a class capable of acting as a good flex class disappeared with the flight changes and even the Storm Maul (W+RMB) changes.

Some Drakania nerfs contradicts what the community expected of a Dragon Knight. It takes more than making a dragon appearing to make a dragon in a game. Dragons in RPGs are known for being beefy, strong, fire breaths. From these things, our awk only has the fire breath and turns herself into a dragon a single time at her 200%, which is not useful in any current game content. One thing about fighting dragons in RPGs is that we know they'll have airborne skills and we only have one, a mermaid in BDO has more airborne skills than a dragon, another thing expected of a dragon is that they'll be very resistant which was the idea behind the dragonblood, which is painfully unprotected - but the few protections are VERY long, so it feels like we're protected - Dragonblood also got the +20 DP buff this week, but being CC’ed in most of our “Dragon” skills that are extremely slow doesn’t feel like it’s fair, if we compare how defensive slow character’s skills are. Hexeblood, which has some Witcher/Warlord/Magic Knight kind of mage inspirations, is liked by the community if it wasn't for a few huge problems that are very harmful for games like Black Desert online, those will be mentioned later. 

The class has everything to be fun and the few fun parts that gave the community a bit of the immersion MMORPGs like BDO tend to have, were taken away. This part of the feedback is not related to damage/stats, because it's too early and there's a lot to find out yet, mainly after the PvE changes this week (03/08/22)

The class is currently feeling like a Valkyrie 0.5 ever since she lost the effectiveness of what she barely had to stand out.

CC: Most of our CCs are at the end of unprotected skills. Adding more ways to jump direct to the CC part of certain skills would be a healthy QoL for the highly unprotected PvP from Awakening Drakania.

Awk - Pre-awk transition: Same feedback as last week. Although she has the two instances, playing with pre awakening and awakening, for people who like to mix them both, it's always a lot of fun and there’s so much potential. It’s a nice QoL improvement that could make the gameplay from Awakening Drakania transcend even further into how dynamic and capable her gameplay is and the accessibility from certain Pre-Awakened skills would allow her to still keep in touch with what we see as the chore of her class in general.

Some examples:

• Absolute Azure Onslaught  via quick slot to go from awk to pre awk

• Tectonic Slam or Fate Beckons when Absolute: Azure Onslaught is in cooldown to go to awk

• S+Q to switch with a block to awakening and vice-versa

• Dragonwalk in pre awakening has no Shift+W, so switching to Awakening pressing Shift+W sounds like a good idea.

• Shift+Space or space and Markthanan’s Wing to use dragonflight from pre awakening to awakening.

• Using Fate Beckons while in pre awakened Dragon’s Advance to switch to awakening using Fate Beckons (or another key to not have conflict with Eviscerate).

Skills in the hotbar to switch from Pre Awakening to Awakening:

• Skills that can be used on awakening at quickslot to switch stances also work in pre awakening to switch to awakening at that particular instance.

Skills in the hotbar to switch from Awakening to Pre Awakening:

• Markthanan’s Scale, Markthanan’s Breath, Markthanan’s Dominion. 

Dragonblood: Same feedback as last week. The connection between the skills and the flows don’t feel smooth enough.

Pre-buffs: Things like her accuracy buffs at hexblood are good, but if we switch to dragonblood, the skills are so slow that we can barely make use of the cores.

Core Skills: Same feedback as last week. Some skills that have a hexblood and dragonblood version would benefit from sharing the possibility of becoming a core skill together, for example: Tip of the Scale (Shift+LMB). 

Mobility: Same as last week. We lost a lot of the pre awakening and succession possibility to use certain skills in the middle of Markthanan’s wing, like Onslaught and Markthanan’s Claw. This mechanic in specific added a lot of flexibility and unpredictability when playing pre awakening/succession and was an amazing QoL to have and is being missed on Awakening.

Hexeblood: Same feedback as last week. Increase in AoE on her Hexeblood skills for PvE only purposes. Addition to the feedback: Add more ways to cancel the skills making them flow better between each other, mainly because most of the CCs are mostly at the last part of each skill.

Bugs found: 

• Awakening weapon being pulled out while in succession

• Removing core from Tectonic slam removes the ability to cancel as fast as the regular skill

• Using the core version of aerial burst removes the ability to use legacy afterwards.

• People are having the impression that the grab bugs you’re too close to the target and goes right through it

• D:Sundering Roar currently lag locks people in place and they can't escape from hit, also the amount of hits causes peoples CPUs to freak out and give them a drop in fps.

Skills:

D:Crackling flame: Return the knockdown from this skill. It was a nice unprotected CC, like Maehwa and Sorceress have in some of the skills in their kit. The ability of having it adds more different play styles available for the class.

Storm Mawl: Add more cancels to this skill, mostly suggested skills were to allow impale after the dash and shift+F (Aerial Burst) at the second and/or first part. It was also suggested to bring back the way it was on Global Labs, I-frame into Super Armor (The CC was not necessary). At the moment it feels awkward to use this skill and not being able to leave the animation for a long time with most of our kit.

Flow: Concealed Claw: Unrewarding skill for very low utility. Some suggestions were to make it protected, to compensate with the low protection the class has and thi skill is a very quick skill anyway.

Aerial Burst: Allow to be canceled by Doombringer and when used post certain dashes and certain skills, make it use the second part of the skill only. Like storm mawl, this skill feels awkward/clunky to use.

Doombringer: Was suggested to take the core from Tectonic Slam or simply have a float not being PvE only - It’s a very cool skill, which people would like to see more of a game changer.

Flow: Extinction: Flows terribly from D: Sundering Roar and it’s supposed to flow from it - Even when the skill is used via a quick slot it feels clunky.

Cloud Strife: Flow from a skill that’s SA, should also have SA.

Tectonic Slam: Can be moved following the camera.

Flow: Obliterate: Doesn’t match the range of the first part of Aerial Burst - which gives a weird sensation when the skill is used, mainly because it doesn’t have any good cancel, if not a single one.

D: Sundering Roar: Can be moved following the camera. It’s one of the favorite skills from the class, but it's really hard to use on PvE because it can’t be moved and even harder on PvP (although not very used on PvP anyway).

Refraction: When used while using the Q block, you have to unblock to do it while every other skill works fine, making the class feel clunky.

Impale: Allow it to be chained after the mobility segment of Storm Maul. One of the favorite mechanics from people who tested the class before nerfs and it added counterplay against classes that were already strong against succession drakania before.

Fate Beckons: Suggested to lock stamina regeneration instead of using stamina.

Abyssal Advance: Usable without switching back to pre awakening, since there’s no way besides C to switch from pre-awakening to awakening.

D: Spiteful Soul: Reduce or Remove movement from this skill. Too many skills moving forward.

Absolute: Soaring Assault: Allow use of Soaring Assault from awakening with LMB after Refraction, without swapping stances similar to how Striker can use Mass Destruction without swapping. This would give the class a very useful critical chance buff.

D: Tip of the Scale: Too slow for an unprotected skill.

H:Tip of the Scale: Less movement, it moves too much in the first parts, the last one is okay, because it’s useful.

Personal feedbacks on how it feels to play the class:

(They will be implemented in the screenshots, so feel free to read them in the next page and one more thing about the screenshots is that some feedback were directly written either because they’re already part of the feedback from the previous week or can be changed after the changes from this week.)

Screenshots:

I honestly don't know what their direction is with this class.

The selling point is dragonflight, but it has a long CD and is always getting stuck on something. The skill on CD should get a small increase in distance to at least not make her mobility inferior to succ.

The damage on dragonblood skills is pretty bad, and they're pretty slow for being mostly unprotected. The class is just screaming max resists for pve.

They lost their minds with hexblood. They just did class reworks and buffed the AoEs across classes. Why did they also add in knockback/knockdown(PVE) on some of those skills? I literally knocked some mobs back out of the reach of the same skill. W+F and W+E are launching you around out of position. Some skills are just scattering things around and making it harder to hit everything. Shift+LMB is making her go forward way too much. With succession you just nuke the entire 1-2 packs and move on. Clear speed is slugging behind due to the short range and thin cones of the hex skills.

Sure devs, a spear user with draconic powers is being outreached by someone with their bare fists and killing by punching air.

One glaring change that needs to be made is Hexblood Techtonic Black Spirit Rage.  Both techtonics are engages, yet the Dragonblood BSR retains movement where the Hexblood BSR is anchored in place.

In BDO, 100% crit rate on a skill out of the box is effectively a nerf.  It makes it so a skill with 100% crit rate does not benefit from all of your combat buffs (i.e. crit chance).  Dragonblood skills should be changed to 50% crit rate while keeping the same damage output if not maybe slightly lower.  As Dragonblood skills sit currently, only Sundering Roar and Doombringer are usefull in PVE.

Further, the animation lengths of all skills need a second pass.  Some skills are uncecessarily delayed when moving into certain other skills, reducing DPS.  Also with the rework, Dragonblood Savage Decree and Hexblood Tip of the Scale both got ninja nerfed by having their animation lengths increased.  Both skills now do about half the damage they would need to have to grind effectively.

Most of the buffs buffed skills that were already where they should be for grinding, leaving most skills that needed work left alone. Combined with some skills having increased animation lengths, the PVE changes took a step forward, and then a step backward.