Living Dead and other DRK QOL in 5.3

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Originally Posted by Cyatheales

a needlessly complicated effect that's hard to track

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Ah yes, how very difficult to track indeed. It starts as a red buff when the invuln is waiting to go off and changes to a gray debuff once it's active. Complicated and difficult to track, indeed.

/s

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

Ah yes, how very difficult to track indeed. It starts as a red buff when the invuln is waiting to go off and changes to a gray debuff once it's active. Complicated and difficult to track, indeed.

/s

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By "hard to track", I meant the fact that the little grey debuff tells you nothing about how much healing is actually needed to get the drk to the safe zone. Which is why a lot of healers see benediction as the only reliable way to get rid of it-- maybe your cohealer has already dumped a bunch of their cooldowns into it and you only need a couple regen ticks to get them to safety, or maybe they didn't even notice and you still need to heal 80-or-90-something% of their max health in however many seconds are left. Yes technically the health bar is a way of gauging it, but it's also being reduced by any damage the tank takes because LD isn't a true invuln, and it gets even less useful once vuln stacks get involved. There's no way to tell how much health has been restored compared to damage taken so the skill becomes an obnoxious cooldown eater that puts the healers (and by extension the tanks) at a significant disadvantage after it's used, because the alternative to blowing your emergency healing on it is potentially letting the tank die. That lack of transparency is a big part of what makes it such a clunky skill.

And by "complicated" I don't just mean its mechanics but the way they interact with their environment. For example, overheal doesn't count, so benediction isn't actually enough to remove it since their health is at 1 at the time so the actual healed amount is (max health - 1). It's possible for a drk in LD to die after benediction "restores all of a target's HP", conflicting with the tooltips of BOTH abilities. Speaking of benediction... how long does the LD invuln actually last? From the tooltip you'd think 10 seconds, but if you get bene and a regen tick right away it disappears, leaving you with a 300 second cooldown for not even a single second of invulnerability while other invuln skills would still be going for another 3 whole gcd windows (HG/SB specifically blocking potentially thousands of extra damage during this time).

And when I said "needlessly complicated", it's because none of its quirks and failings and mechanical weirdness are because it's such an incredibly versatile utility skill that a few edge case disadvantages are inevitably going to fall through the cracks-- after all that there's still a huge disadvantage over other invulns which is that you DIE if you are at anything but 100.0% health when it wears off. Half health after hallowed ground? holmgang? superbolide? Whatever, no problem. 95% health after living dead? You're dead and there's a decent chance the party wipes.

Complication is good when it adds versatility or creates opportunity for strategic uses-- when it makes people aware of their kit and think about how to use it together effectively, and rewards them for doing so. When it punishes people for assuming their skills are built to be intuitively useful with correct tooltips, maybe not so much.

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Originally Posted by Cyatheales

And by "complicated" I don't just mean its mechanics but the way they interact with their environment. For example, overheal doesn't count, so benediction isn't actually enough to remove it since their health is at 1 at the time so the actual healed amount is (max health - 1). It's possible for a drk in LD to die after benediction "restores all of a target's HP", conflicting with the tooltips of BOTH abilities. Speaking of benediction... how long does the LD invuln actually last? From the tooltip you'd think 10 seconds, but if you get bene and a regen tick right away it disappears, leaving you with a 300 second cooldown for not even a single second of invulnerability while other invuln skills would still be going for another 3 whole gcd windows (HG/SB specifically blocking potentially thousands of extra damage during this time).

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Hi, just dipping in here to test and correct this section really quick. Walking Dead does account for overheal, sort of. Benediction is 100% of the HP value, and upon me getting slammed by a tankbuster while in /sit and no regens, Walking Dead was immediately cleansed upon the Benediction, no questions asked. Pure conjecture here, but I'm thinking instead of triggering the "death" flag at 0 HP, LD just sets the HP at +1, triggers the Walking Dead flag, and then it starts the HP counter there and not at 0. So you'll always be coming into Walking Dead at +1 HP. Or there is some kind of lower limit exception going on, and you never actually hit 0 HP at all, like on Holmgang, but I doubt that due to how the tooltips are worded.

Even if this wasn't the case, and Benediction DIDN'T cleanse it, 1 natural HP regen tick from just being in combat, would certainly be enough to make this point moot. To add on to that, Souleater healing is is about 2-3%, and you have enough time for at least one complete Souleater combo outside of Delirium. 3.X - 4.X also had the Souleater healing effect only on Grit Souleaters, but I never had any issue back then LDing out of Grit and surviving after a Benediction.

Remember that the point of LD is to avoid death with minimal investment. If Morn Afah wacks me for 300K damage, and I'm bene'd immediately, I can still attribute that to the invuln as an overall gain even with auto attacks afterwards, because I wouldn't have survived the initial hit normally, and that's how most situations with LD work out. It's not about HP saved, it's about tank and healer resources saved, that's more important. It's when you dump resources into a WD, only for the DRK to STILL die is where the issue is, as you stated.

Just TBN after the bene, if that's applicable. If the healer wants to optimize that by delaying the healing to that 1-2 second debuff number, particularly if you're invulning multiple things at once, that's their choice. I realize this part is mostly semantics, but the LD duration is, outside of few VERY specific instances, a non-factor on the DRK's part in a composition that includes Benediction. Once you get to a uncoordinated SCH/AST comp you can throw that out the window though.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You really aren't the brightest bulb in the box, are you? What part of "arbitrarily swapping the tank's invulns around is silly and makes no sense" has managed to slip past your brain? Actually, don't answer that, because it's probably better for my own sanity that way. Still though, you've really proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that nothing will sway you from your narrow and unenlightened view of how things work in this game. Which, I wish I could say surprises me, but that would just be lying. Although I suppose that in the end it's partially my fault for expecting anything else from forums, considering the demographic of players that primarily inhabit them.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The furious backpedaling itself spoke volumes more than anything that I could have offered in response.

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What Lyth said. I couldn't have put it better.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

Ah yes, how very difficult to track indeed. It starts as a red buff when the invuln is waiting to go off and changes to a gray debuff once it's active. Complicated and difficult to track, indeed.

/s

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I doubt you ever have to take that healing responsibility before. Why trivialize the responsibility that you never took?

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Originally Posted by cactuarzzzz

I doubt you ever have to take that healing responsibility before. Why trivialize the responsibility that you never took?

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You might wanna look at my jobs, I have SCH at 80. And as to why I trivialize something; when everything that someone says is both wrong and just bad, I kinda end up not taking those people seriously. Especially when it's someone who has made it blatantly obvious that they don't even properly understand the things they're complaining about to be valid in complaining about them in the first place. But I don't know why I expect anything else from most people that come to forums. The majority are 100% GCBTW members.

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Originally Posted by Cyatheales

The main problems I have with living dead are that it's (a) a needlessly complicated effect that's hard to track, and (b) too heavily reliant on your healers dumping all their powerful cds on you afterwards due to drk's lack of on-demand sustain.

How's this for a simplification of the effect?

Living Dead
- Instant cast, 300s recast
- Grants the effect of Living Dead for 10 seconds (or 8, or 12, or 14, whatever's balanced now that it's not "layered"). While under the effect of Living Dead, your health value may be reduced to negative values without it resulting in your death. If your health is at zero or lower when Living Dead expires, you are immediately killed. Certain attacks may still result in your death while under the effect of Living Dead. (referring to the usual invuln-resistant stuff like enrages)

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This would be a buff to casual content, but a hard nerf for high end content where balancing actually matters and LD is more likely to be used, since it means the DRK is 100% dead in certain situations without Benediction. An example:

In Alex Ultimate, He does Divine Punishment, followed by 3 Divine spear tank busters. Divine Punishment leaves a magic vuln+ on the tank that makes them take hundreds of thousands of damage from the subsequent Divine Spears.
Currently, you can easily have a DRK handle the divine punishment + following Divine spears using LD even without Benediction, as the healers can just heal you in the divine spears and then dump an OGCD or powerful tool into you to top off that remaining amount you need to be healed after the 3rd.

The issue with your redux, is that the DRK's HP would plummet to -900,000+ and be impossible to heal without benediction, meaning DRK can no longer handle many of the things the other tanks can with their Invulns. A more recent Example is Shiva, where one of the popular strategies is to have tanks Invuln Morn Afahs near the end of the fight, which do 600,000+ to a single target, also meaning the DRK cannot invuln it using your redux without effectively being sentenced to death without Benediction.

All LD needs is either a way for DRK to lifesteal/self heal more effectively to help contribute (like the 2nd idea you pitched), or a modifier on walking dead that increases the potency of the healing the DRK receives during its duration so that a single healer can reasonably manage it.

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

All LD needs is either a way for DRK to lifesteal/self heal more effectively to help contribute (like the 2nd idea you pitched), or a modifier on walking dead that increases the potency of the healing the DRK receives during its duration so that a single healer can reasonably manage it.

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Right? It's so simple I half EXPECT it to happen in 6.0.
If they change anything my money is they do this.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You might wanna look at my jobs, I have SCH at 80. And as to why I trivialize something; when everything that someone says is both wrong and just bad, I kinda end up not taking those people seriously. Especially when it's someone who has made it blatantly obvious that they don't even properly understand the things they're complaining about to be valid in complaining about them in the first place. But I don't know why I expect anything else from most people that come to forums. The majority are 100% GCBTW members.

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You've already told us how you've exp playing DRK but we saw how much it mean. Next you're going to tell us how you don't mind throwing lots of SCH healing resources into LD's 9 secs window just to remove walking dead debuff?. Anyone can have any LV80 job it doesn't mean they like or main that job.

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Originally Posted by cactuarzzzz

You've already told us how you've exp playing DRK but we saw how much it mean. Next you're going to tell us how you don't mind throwing lots of SCH healing resources into LD's 9 secs window just to remove walking dead debuff?. Anyone can have any LV80 job it doesn't mean they like or main that job.

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You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

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Thank for confirming how you like to throw your healing resources into WD.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

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I semi-regularly use SCH and I didn't know this.
This is actually good to know, thank you.

I think when an ability requires the rest of the team to read the poorly written manual just to make it work, there's a design problem here. Rather than making rotations easier to make gameplay accessible to new players, why don't we just address problems in actions that have a legacy of being poorly designed?

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Originally Posted by Cyatheales

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Yeah, I don't understand why there are people arguing against a Living Dead gauge. It doesn't change the action at all. It just gives healers needed information to plan for an ability that they're expected to know about and respond to.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

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You're right in that Living Dead presently accounts for overheal. When it didn't do this, it was actually a big problem, because there were often sections in fights where there just wasn't any outgoing damage. So you had to be creative and deliberately take damage (sometimes taking vuln stacks in the process) in order to take that extra 1 HP of damage that could then be healed up. This ability has a history of bad design decisions attached to it.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate.

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You do realize that you've just confirmed the statement you tried to argue against, right..?

Yes, LD is cleanseable on any healer, nobody is saying it's not, neither did anyone say that SCH needs "all" resources to do it - just a lot and you've just listed 3 cooldowns, 2 Aetherflow stacks and a GCD(you're also forgetting that weaving 5 ogcds will mean you need to replace 3 Broils with Ruin II, 2 if you have a Biolysis refresh coming, which is even more losses). Just because you can do it quickly doesn't make it not costly. Invulns are meant to save resources like tank/healer cds and reduce overall healing requirements - when you have to toss so many things at the DRK to deal with LD you're failing to do that and are better off not using the invuln.

I was actually defending LD back in Stormblood when topping a tank off was pretty easy and(imo) worth the benefits of 5 minute cd with up to 19 second duration, but with how bloated tank HP pools are now it's become too hard. I don't mind it not being usable in solo or whatever, but LD really could at least use a healing buff and some kind of gauge for how much healing has already been done would really help making most of the duration without ending it early. I've proposed it in the past in one of my DRK rework posts - make Walking Dead a true invuln(this would make DRK's hp bar the gauge as it won't go down during the buff) and give it a healing received buff.

Or, you know, just get rid of the invulns altogether while reworking entire mitigation system, because it's overall pretty trash at the moment.

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Originally Posted by Satarn

You do realize that you've just confirmed the statement you tried to argue against, right?

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No, no I haven’t. Resources in actually difficult content (savage/ultimate, +/- EX) are almost entirely planned out. This means that not only does the SCH have a second healer aiding them to clear Walking Dead, but even if they were to solo cleanse it, that resource usage was still planned out that way to begin with and leaves the other healer with all resources available should an emergency arise.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

No, no I haven’t. Resources in actually difficult content (savage/ultimate, +/- EX) are almost entirely planned out. This means that not only does the SCH have a second healer aiding them to clear Walking Dead, but even if they were to solo cleanse it, that resource usage was still planned out that way to begin with and leaves the other healer with all resources available should an emergency arise.

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Just because it was planned, doesn't mean it was planned optimally. The point is that if you had to spend so much then it's likely it would be more efficient to just use something else for the TB/mechanic and exclude LD from your plans entirely. Of course if you're in raid, then you should spread the burden on both healers, but that just means you'll have to replace some of these SCH cds with AST ones - you're still spending a lot of your combined healer resources, which is how you should be thinking about them.

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Originally Posted by Satarn

Just because it was planned, doesn't mean it was planned optimally. The point is that if you had to spend so much then it's likely it would be more efficient to just use something else for the TB/mechanic and exclude LD from your plans entirely. Of course if you're in raid, then you should spread the burden on both healers, but that just means you'll have to replace some of these SCH cds with AST ones - you're still spending a lot of your combined healer resources, which is how you should be thinking about them.

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Except, there's a couple of things you all just keep conveniently forgetting here. First of all is the fact that healer resources are not the only thing to take into consideration; you must also consider the combined resources of the two tanks. One tank invulning a buster and then swapping is a significant resource gain over both tanks using normal mitigation like Rampart/Vengeance and swapping in between each hit of the buster. Not only does each tank now gain an additional cooldown during each of their turns holding the boss with which they can mitigate auto attacks +/- raidwide damage, which is a significant stress reduction on the healers, but the amount of healing that will be required on the tanks is roughly the same regardless of whether they invuln or mitigate normally. Almost every buster in savage/EX hits the tank for a minimum of half of their HP through proper regular mitigation (example: Dual Earthen Fists buster in Titan savage hits for around 105-110k through Rampart). If we factor in this happening twice, once to each tank with a tank swap and both of them using normal mitigation, that equals out to each tank needing to be healed for half of their HP; or one full tank's worth of health. If we instead have one tank invuln the entire buster before tank swapping, we now have the same amount of health that must be restored, one full tank's HP worth of healing, but we have gained resources on both tanks; allowing each of them to gain a use of Rampart/Vengeance which they would not have had were they to mitigate it normally that they can now use to mitigate auto attacks and raidwide damage which, as I already said, is a significant stress reduction on the healers. So in other words, in most situations invulning is simply the better choice. Unless the healers are having difficulty keeping people alive at a later time in the fight before their resources come back up there really is no reason to not use the tanks' invulns on a buster, as it simply is a net resource positive for the tanks and overall easier time of keeping the tanks up for the healers over the course of the entire fight.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

Except, there's a couple of things you all just keep conveniently forgetting here.

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I am not forgetting anything - I have literally mentioned the purpose of invulns as something meant to save tank and healer cds and reduce overall need for healing, in my earlier posts - but you'd rather "conveniently forget" that, I wonder why.

The issue with LD is that with how much healing it requires now, there are more situations when while any other invuln would save you cooldowns, LD will not, since you have to heal the DRK to full within the 10 seconds time and that costs significantly more than it used to. Not to mention the issue of having to quickly weave/gcd a bunch of extra heals during raid buff windows if things align that way.

You can not say that it's the same as having to heal any other 1HP invuln or just regularly mitigated TB - those don't have a timer, which means often you can heal the tank just a little and then let them hang on low HP for a while as AoE heals, HoT ticks and fairy slowly bring them back up pretty much for free, which isn't something you can afford with LD. The only times when tank actually needs their full HP, is right before mechanics that would kill them otherwise or during LD, there's no need to top tanks after every TB.
Now, there are absolutely still times when using LD is optimal even without a WHM, but the other invulns get more such uses, which wouldn't be the case if the healing required for LD was reduced.

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Originally Posted by Satarn

save tank and healer cds and reduce overall need for healing

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Which LD does just the same as every other tank invuln. Mitigating a long string of auto attacks from both tanks, especially if there are multiple invuln uses over a fight (which means multiple of these strings of auto attacks to mitigate with the saved CDs) totals out to saving the healers work over the course of a fight. So therefore, by your own reasoning, LD is completely fine.

I'm putting my TLDR; at the beginning:

TLDR; Living Dead takes more resources to handle than any other tank. This is not balanced out by an especially strong mitigation kit. Nor is this justified in terms of drk’s personal damage output. While the skill isn't to the point of unusable, it could use an adjustment to bring it inline with the usability of the other invulns.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

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I see your point that any healer can cleanse living dead, and I agree with it. In perfectly planned environments where everything goes according to plan you can achieve this. But let's also recognize that not everything goes to plan, and sometimes in the heat of the moment we don’t realize the consequences of how we react will domino down the line. Plans are great until things don’t go according to plan, that is half the issue with this skill.

Here is the other half:
5 oGCD’s and 1 GCD to fully cleanse walking dead. Here are some other ways that can get handled:

The same situation but not a dark knight:
Hallowed - just top me off depending on my HP and nothing gets wasted.

Superbolide - Yes I’m at one hp, use one oGCD and we can tank swap at the end and I’ll regen my own hp. This works really well when the invuln goes into something like a trio, or other ultimate mechanics where you aren’t taking damage and can just get a regen from a healer for the down time.

Holmgang - about the same as superbolide. Put one oGCD on me tank swap and wait till I have equilibrium or a burst window with nascent flash. I did a pf with a warrior who holmganged the double slap, then without being healed at all nascent flashed their next IR window to full hp.


Our defensive kit must be the answer. One way around this obvious weakness is to simply not take damage.

What is below looks way better as the table I have in docs sorry!

DRK
Dark Mind
20% Magic Mitigation
TBN
42.5k shield on self
Empty

WAR
Thrill of Battle
20% HP +20% HP restore
20% Bonus to incoming healing
Nascent Flash/Raw
Either a heal or 20% mitigation
Equilibrium
32k heal

GNB
Camo
10% mitigation
50% increased parry chance
Heart of Stone
15% mitigation
Aurora
5.4k Regen
~32.6k heal

PLD
Empty
Sheltron
20% mitigation
Empty


Lets run some hypotheticals: AOE is coming up and I want to reduce the amount of healing I need. Lets say the aoe hits in the average range of 40k hp and an auto hits for 18k.

DRK - TBN Dark Mind! Ok dark mind takes 8k of that aoe, TBN takes the 32 and 10k of auto attack that does 18k. We mitigated 50.5k hp!

GNB - Camo Heart of stone + Aurora! Ok Camo soaks 10% of damage for the next 20 seconds, that covers about 6 autos and the aoe. 14.8k mitigated. Heart covers 15% of 2 autos and the aoe (but 90% since camo was up too). Thats 10.2k mitigated. + Aurora + 32k HP. Total HP saved: 57k (25k Mitigated)

Take out any 1 of the skills except Aurora and you end up with about a 10 to 12k difference. If 5 oGCDs and a GCD planned into living dead is nothing, then a 10k difference in damage taken in autos during an aoe is a rounding error. Lets say we will only use Aurora or Equilibrium on busters. We are still only talking about 25k difference in damage taken. This isn’t alot when raid wide healing is going out which will heal more than this back since everyone else takes way more from raid wide aoes (estimate about 50 to 60k).


Lets look at tank busters. 60 to 70% of the tank busters the past two tiers have been physical. Crippling blow is one example of this, many tanks use dark mind on this and turns out it mitigated nothing. Given that we are struck by lightning you would think magical but its not, test for yourself. Every buster in e6s is physical, double slap in e8s is physical.

What this means: Dark mind isn’t getting the mileage it used to when so many busters were magical and dark mind could be up for all of them (e2s as an example of how abusable this skill could be).

DRK - TBN + mitigation every tank has in addition! Dark Knight takes 42.5k less damage because of TBN.

GNB - heart of stone + what any other tank would use! So the extra 15% mitigation depends on how much damage we would take for how much it would mitigate. For crippling blow we could take as much as 65k and we would mitigate about 10k which is a 32k difference which is the damage healed by aurora or an unbuffed equilibrium.


By the ways these are set up you can easily translate the same numbers from GNB to WAR and see warrior is in even better shape than GNB. And you can see by not over mitigating GNB and WAR can both cover all the situations because they have the cooldowns for it. DRK just has one button where everyone else has 2 or 3.

The exception here is Paladin. Paladin is probably at a disadvantage in mitigating except when it comes to the very powerful hallowed ground.

Handling Invuln ability: PLD > GNB ~ WAR > DRK
Mitigation: DRK ~ WAR ~ GNB > PLD
Dps: GNB > PLD > DRK ~ WAR

Tilda here meaning approximately equal but order reflects my preferences here.


TLDR; Living Dead takes more resources to handle than any other tank. This is not balanced out by an especially strong mitigation kit. Nor is this justified in terms of drk’s personal damage output. While the skill isn't to the point of unusable, it could use an adjustment.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

So therefore, by your own reasoning, LD is completely fine.

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I mean, sure, if you ignore the entire rest of my post which explains why that is not always the case, yeah.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

TLDR; Living Dead takes more resources to handle than any other tank. This is not balanced out by an especially strong mitigation kit. Nor is this justified in terms of drk’s personal damage output. While the skill isn't to the point of unusable, it could use an adjustment.

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Living Dead requires no more healing than a GNB using Superbolide or a WAR using Holmgang who has Thrill of Battle & Equilbrium on cooldown, and doesn't have access to his burst damage making his Nascent Flash healing minor at best. No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health. So, really, the only exception to this is a WAR with ToB + Equil ready to go as well as some burst damage to pump into Nascent, but that isn't going to always be up depending on where in a fight these busters and invuln uses are, as ToB + Equil is just as likely to be used after a non-invuln'd buster or even after heavy raidwide damage such as the Tumult & Voice spam miniphases in Titan savage phase 3. In other words, the only true outlier here is PLD with Hallowed Ground. Now, I hate to break it to you, but if only one out of the four doesn't require healing assistance, then that means that that is the one that's out of place; not the one that simply has an arbitrary time limit on when they need to be healed, even though in most situations the other tanks are going to get healed for a similar or identical amount in the same time frame as the DRK would for anyways.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

Living Dead requires no more healing than a GNB using Superbolide or a WAR using Holmgang who has Thrill of Battle & Equilbrium on cooldown, and doesn't have access to his burst damage making his Nascent Flash healing minor at best. No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health. So, really, the only exception to this is a WAR with ToB + Equil ready to go as well as some burst damage to pump into Nascent, but that isn't going to always be up depending on where in a fight these busters and invuln uses are, as ToB + Equil is just as likely to be used after a non-invuln'd buster or even after heavy raidwide damage such as the Tumult & Voice spam miniphases in Titan savage phase 3. In other words, the only true outlier here is PLD with Hallowed Ground. Now, I hate to break it to you, but if only one out of the four doesn't require healing assistance, then that means that that is the one that's out of place; not the one that simply has an arbitrary time limit on when they need to be healed, even though in most situations the other tanks are going to get healed for a similar or identical amount in the same time frame as the DRK would for anyways.

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Originally Posted by Chrono_Rising

Superbolide - Yes I’m at one hp, use one oGCD and we can tank swap at the end and I’ll regen my own hp. This works really well when the invuln goes into something like a trio, or other ultimate mechanics where you aren’t taking damage and can just get a regen from a healer for the down time.

Holmgang - about the same as superbolide. Put one oGCD on me tank swap and wait till I have equilibrium or a burst window with nascent flash. I did a pf with a warrior who holmganged the double slap, then without being healed at all nascent flashed their next IR window to full hp.

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I just gave you three examples 1 from savage and two examples in ultimates.

Heres three more from the current tier:

Centaurs charge can be excoged and equilibrium and you’ll get to full HP with healer environment regens before any significant damage has gone out. Same way bolide can be handled.

E6s: If not the main tank after the fire tornadoes you can again get by with just equilibrium/Aurora and a ground regen before the next aoe goes out.

E7s, you can holmgang both busters and get by with an oGCD and your own sustain. The hard part is the RNG element of knowing if/when you can do this.

As you said with healing: It just takes planning.

The only one that has to be handled within 10 seconds is living dead. All of these let healers spread out their healing potential, lower the spike and let people put more damage gcds into the thing you actually want to kill even saving GCDs down the road.

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

Living Dead requires no more healing than a GNB using Superbolide or a WAR using Holmgang who has Thrill of Battle & Equilbrium on cooldown, and doesn't have access to his burst damage making his Nascent Flash healing minor at best. No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health.

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E5S: First raidens charge next raid damage is 40 seconds later. If you threw your personal heals off at random you would have a 2 out of three chance of it being open during this interval including things like healers healing during this. As the OT you will be fine.

E6S: After the blaze orbs the OT take two hits in the range of 35k an oGCD and their own heal would keep them alive. There is AOE healing going out during this you have enough hp to survive and an IR nascent window coming up on warrior + more aoe heals going out. Healers don’t need to drop 170k worth of healing on you immediately.

E7S: After the first buster the next time the OT takes damage is 1.5 minutes later. The second has damage outgoing within 20 seconds both before and after, but hey healers can throw a oGCD to bring the OT up, and save the healing for the group till after the tank uses their invuln and goes to 1. Which will also handle the damage coming up.

Are there busters where strats like this don’t work for? Sure, but more often than not, you can use invulns this way to save GCDs/multipurpose heal for healers. E8S is a good example as later phases has both tanks taking damage. But again, you only need to be alive for auto's, you still have self heals, and a burst window in most of the places where you would use your invuln.

There is one that always needs to be healed up within 10 seconds, I think you said the one that is singled out always is called an outlier right?

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Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health.

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You're saying this as if raidwide damage was something unpredictable that healers have to always be prepared for - but it's not, it's scripted, hell even auto damage is pretty much static now with bosses no longer able to crit since 5.0. As you've so smugly said before, in raid everything is planned. Healers should know whether or not the tank will need any extra healing after invuln, if they've got their own healing cd or burst phase for NF available and how much the HoTs/fairy can take care of. Good healers can and will let you sit on that low HP whenever possible.

Also I gotta ask man - you're using Thrill as healing after you take damage..?

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Originally Posted by Satarn

you're using Thrill as healing after you take damage..?

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?

Don't recall saying that, but okay bud. That said, it has completely valid uses both before and after taking a hit.

If there's one QOL change I want to see in DRK, it's moving Stalwart Soul to 40. its potency isnt too powerful at 160, but its mana generation would help make lower lvl DRK a lot more fun. If they did this, they could move Blood weapon to lv 30 and Edge of Shadow to 35. even better if they give Stalwart a trait at 72 that buffs its damage, but this change alone would make DRk so much more fun while leveling, fun while synced, and would help buff its damage by a small amount in dungeons after lv 40, but not too badly as to upset the balance at lv 80 content.

After all, if the other tanks have aoe combos by lv 40, why can't DRK?

I like when walking dead start to take effect they should give DRK some kind of darkening aura, and maybe a big countdown number over their head so healer can immediately know this just by looking at them, rather than forceing DRK to make a macro for it

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

My prefered option would be having the Walking Dead penalty hit MP and tally how much HP has been recovered.
So if you've only been recovered for 80% of your max HP, then the remaining 20% will be taken off of your MP, 2000 MP.
If you don't have enough MP, then you'll die.

This basically allows you to have an MP buffer on LD's healing requirement, which means you can be self sufficient if you can plan to have full MP when you use it.
It builds on DRK's MP management as well, maintaining job identity.

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I actually really love this idea, and it would definitely keep with the identity of DRK using its MP for skills and spells. plus, it would allow for skilled decision making to come through, whether its in the higher levels of play between a good healer who can help DRK keep their mana up, and a good DRK that can build mana to help their healer with the cost in PUG play as well as duty finder.

MP = dps.

The one problem that you'll run into is that the decision to heal you or not depends on the cost-benefit analysis of actually healing you up. Some healers might decide not to heal you at all, if it impacts their dps numbers.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

MP = dps.

The one problem that you'll run into is that the decision to heal you or not depends on the cost-benefit analysis of actually healing you up. Some healers might decide not to heal you at all, if it impacts their dps numbers.

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then maybe DRK can regain some of its old mana generation in order to make up for this new LD change?
perhaps fuse dark mind with dark price? or maybe walking dead resets blood weapon cooldown?

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Originally Posted by bundythenoob

then maybe DRK can regain some of its old mana generation in order to make up for this new LD change?
perhaps fuse dark mind with dark price? or maybe walking dead resets blood weapon cooldown?

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But that is still arbitrarily punishing Dark Knight for using their invuln when none of the other tanks are. If Living Dead were on a short CD, you could maybe argue but it's still longer than Holmgang, and Warrior is the one tank that can practically heal itself to full without any DPS loss or healer intervention.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

But that is still arbitrarily punishing Dark Knight for using their invuln when none of the other tanks are. If Living Dead were on a short CD, you could maybe argue but it's still longer than Holmgang, and Warrior is the one tank that can practically heal itself to full without any DPS loss or healer intervention.

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This is also the problem with the present iteration of Living Dead.

well as I've stated before: If theres one QOL change I want to see, its moving stalwart to lv 40, BW to lv 30 to complement Flood, and Edge to 35.

as for LD, I doubt they'll change anything, but I believe a simple fix would just be adding a convalescence effect. I'm not sure why these LD threads always end up bringing up tangents hehe

I remember times when DRK was able to fully heal himself out of living death in dungeon by using Abyssal drain, heh.

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

I remember times when DRK was able to fully heal himself out of living death in dungeon by using Abyssal drain, heh.

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Sole Survivor was really nice too.

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Originally Posted by Tranquilmelody7

Sole Survivor was really nice too.

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I'm not even entirely sure why it was removed. all it did was help generate resource for the resource generation tank. it wasn't even difficult to use, it seemed very intuitive to me. the worst part is, we got no replacement for it, just a straight up hole in our leveling kit (which could be filled nicely by something like stalwart soul or dank missionary :P)
I can only think that they removed it due to the curtailing of tank job DPS, but idk. it just doesnt make sense to me

If I may throw in my 2 cents; I'm also pretty passionate about DRK and as a job, far from content with the current iteration.

With Living Dead, a lot could go wrong with that cooldown as from the time it's pressed to its resolution is out of your control which I think is counterintuitive for it to be your own personal cooldown that serves as the obligatory level 50 "last stand" ability. From the onset, I'd reduce the "Living Dead" status to 6 seconds and have a sort of anti-healing from any actions outside of your own. I think the anti-healing status would serve to ensure you die to proc Walking Dead and is a throwback to the anti-refresh status Darkside had. An in the situation it gets accidentally pressed, narrowing it to 6 seconds is a lot less punishing as it'll fall off faster.

For the Walking Dead status of Living Dead, it would also have this anti-healing debuff on it, but DRKs would have to only heal up to around 15-18% of their max HP to dispel the debuff or they'll still die once Walking Dead expires. I'd like if Living Dead wasn't tied to dying, but I get why Yoshi P doesn't want to take off the death penalty with how ingrained it is to this game's lore of the job. I know a lot players don't care about that either. I'm fine with both. But ultimately what I want is for Living Dead to be fair to DRK as their cooldown. Putting the burden off on the healers is extremely unsatisfying for both parties involved. Isn't even balanced to the other 3 tanks who're capable of essentially paying for their own tank invuln with reliable self healing or just the simple fact they don't auto-die once it's expired. I want DRK to be a little more self sufficient to do the same by reworking it to have an extended duration (approx. 15 seconds) and better self healing or "life steal" with it's toolkit. "Muh stronk TBN" is fine, but in situations where you would need to use Living Dead instead, TBN is then useless. DRK needs real sustain or there's nothing that separates it from being just an edgier, less damaging, bulky DPS job in those situations. I know DRK is gonna always have an edgy spin on some of its abilities, which is why I'm fine if a DRK still dies should Walking Dead expire, as long as they have the tools to avoid it themselves.

I think that DRK is currently resolves around The Blackest Night a little too much tat the est of its kit is very off balanced offensively, defensively and in its endurance. I think each of its level cap abilities need to be fine-tuned and strong overall for its kit, not just TBN.

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Originally Posted by Nefimmyr

"Muh stronk TBN"

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That sounds like a pretty cool idea for DRK's invuln. Having Walking Dead be cleansed by the DRK themselves would be pretty nice. I would just add something like "the tank must heal 15% of their total hp, but can still receive healing", just because on the off chance that the tank manages to cleanse itself, it would only have 15% health and might get clipped by whatever the leftover enemies might throw at them. every other tank invuln allows the tanks to receive healing during their invincibility time, so I think DRK deserves the same.

either that, or further enable the "muh stronk tbn" meme by making it reset cooldown once walking dead activates, thus ensuring that the DRK still has an effective 40% HP once they cleanse and activate tbn after that.

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Originally Posted by bundythenoob

That sounds like a pretty cool idea for DRK's invuln. Having Walking Dead be cleansed by the DRK themselves would be pretty nice. I would just add something like "the tank must heal 15% of their total hp, but can still receive healing", just because on the off chance that the tank manages to cleanse itself, it would only have 15% health and might get clipped by whatever the leftover enemies might throw at them. every other tank invuln allows the tanks to receive healing during their invincibility time, so I think DRK deserves the same.

either that, or further enable the "muh stronk tbn" meme by making it reset cooldown once walking dead activates, thus ensuring that the DRK still has an effective 40% HP once they cleanse and activate tbn after that.

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That's a good point I didn't account for about them coming out of Walking Dead without enough HP because they got clipped by another attack. Since the time I made the previous post I had the idea that instead of Walking Dead needing to be cleansed at all, your HP just needs to be above 1 after it expires. Meaning any of DRK existing "self heals" in lieu with any new or reworking ones could meet this requirement. But the catch would be that DRKs receive no external healing from party members nor the natural server HP regen tick. AND during Walking Dead, MP actions will have no cost like TBN so it can effectively give you a buffer when needed.