Living Dead: Tooltip Errors and UI Design Considerations [Tank Forums]

I originally posted this on the tank forums, but it was suggested that it be reposted here.

Living Dead tends to be a poorly understood ability, and a fair amount of the confusion about the action arises from errors in the tooltips.

https://i.imgur.com/CPYN6L3.png


Grants the effect of Living Dead. When HP is reduced to 0 while under the effect of Living Dead, instead of becoming KO'd, your status will change to Walking Dead.
Living Dead Duration: 10s

While under the effect of Walking Dead, most attacks will not lower your HP below 1. If, before the Walking Dead timer runs out, HP is 100% restored, the effect will fade. If 100% is not restored, you will be KO'd.
Walking Dead Duration: 10s

There are three errors in the description.

1. Your HP is never reduced to 0 while under the effect of Living Dead.
2. Some attacks just kill you outright, like enrages. The text should read "most attacks".
3. The goal is not to reach 100% HP (i.e. this is not a "White Hole" mechanic). The goal is provide an amount of healing equal to your total HP.

If a player with 10000 health uses Living Dead to survive an attack with 1 HP, and you heal them for 9999 back to max health, they still die. You need to provide 10000 HP of healing (i.e. the max HP value).

If you heal them for 10000 HP, but they take an additional 5000 damage in the interim, the effect is still removed, despite the fact that their HP is now 5000/10000.

The text should actually read:

You activate Living Dead. While this is active, most attacks cannot reduce your HP to less than 1. If you prevent a KO in this way, you gain the effect of Walking Dead.

While Walking Dead is active, most attacks cannot reduce your HP to less than 1. If you receive an amount of healing equal to your total HP while this buff is active, the effect will fade (along with its defensive benefit). If the buff is not removed in this manner before the timer runs out, you are KO’d.

What makes this problem significantly more difficult is that the tooltip information isn't really aimed at the player using it. If you activate Walking Dead on DRK, you can't do anything to save yourself. The person who actually needs to know how the tooltip works is your healer, who might not necessarily have your job unlocked, let alone know what all your tooltips say.

If you're a new player, you have time to sit down and look at your own tooltips. If you're a new healer, your first exposure to this ability might involve hovering over the buff icon to read the description:

https://i.imgur.com/QQBGVoG.png

Unable to be KO'd by most attacks. Status changed to Walking Dead in most cases when HP is reduced to 0.

It suffers from some of the errors on the original tooltip. HP is never reduced to 0. The phrase "Most attacks cannot reduce HP to less than 1" is probably more accurate. The description is also incredibly vague. What is "Walking Dead?" Well, we're about to find out, when it actually activates:

https://i.imgur.com/1jy1pMk.png

Most attacks will not reduce HP below 1. The inability to restore 100% of HP before the timer runs out will result in KO."

Surprise! Also, what does this even mean? "The inability to restore 100% of HP before the timer runs out" seems to suggest that you can't heal the DRK to full, and that you cannot do anything to prevent the KO.

It probably should read: Most attacks will not reduce HP below 1. If you receive an amount of healing equal to your total HP while this buff is active, the effect will fade (removing the defensive benefit). If the buff is not removed in this manner before the timer runs out, however, you are KO’d.

It should also make it clear that when the effect is removed by healing, the player is once again susceptible to KOs (i.e. the healer controls the duration of the defensive effect).

Human Factors
While you can change the tooltips to provide some clarity, it's still not very intuitive for newer players. It's also fairly intimidating. New healers are somehow expected to seek out the tooltip text (which is riddled with errors) by hovering over the buffs, read it, decipher it, and then use their remaining time to try and figure out how to remove the effect in a panic. It's also odd, because you'd expect a healing mini-game to save your tank's life to be a bit more explicit, as far as UI design goes.

https://i.imgur.com/vu7XlMr.jpg

Mash the healing button to save your tank? Y/N

For more experienced healers, you don't actually know how much additional healing you need, because there's no visual display of this. The only solution is to throw out heals until the effect disappears, which may result in the effect being removed too early or too late.

The easy alternative is to hold Benediction, but this is also not ideal, because it's on a 180s recast compared to Living Dead's 300s, and 300 is not a multiple of 180. So you actually lose 2/3 of a Benediction recast every time that you reserve it for Living Dead.

There was talk about having a shield resource bar next expansion to show how much shields you have left. I wonder if something similar couldn't be done with Living Dead. Turn the HP bar black to show that something bad has happened, and have the player convert the bar to green again with heals.

It's the classic DRK design problem of introducing an unnecessarily convoluted system that you have to work around, when a much simpler one could suffice. Writing these tooltips must have been a nightmare.