Living Dead and other DRK QOL in 5.3

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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.