Suggestion: Living Dead in 3.2

1)Living Dead: Grants the DRK a shield equal to the maximum HP. If the shield is consumed, the player gains (2)
2)Walking Dead:Cannot go below 1 HP but dies if HP is not topped off.

As it currently is on the live servers, LD is considered punishing when coordination is not fully there even if the problem is somewhat mitigated through the use of STR, which makes the recovery easier.
However, as of 3.2, if LD stays the same,things will just get harder. With the change I proposed, the skill functionality will be split into 2 parts:

A) Immunity
B) Recovery if more than allowed

If the DRK has 21k HP and takes a 22k hit, the player will end up with 20k HP and the Walking Dead buff. So the healer has to heal for 1k to make Walking Dead go off.
If the DRK takes an unmitigated Akh Morn, LD will be a lot like the current LD with fullVIT, whereas the player will have to be topped from 1HP.

What do you think about this? Post any different ideas.

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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So basically a zombie status? Like FFX? I wouldnt mind that.

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Originally Posted by WolfKid

So basically a zombie status? Like FFX? I wouldnt mind that.

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Kind of, but iirc the Zombie status never converted damage taken into healing. I think it cut the damage you took though.

So....you're basically asking for a stronger version of Benediction (since it's all shields, no overheal at all) as well as keeping the original Walking Dead component?

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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YES!!!

This is how Living Dead should have worked. As it is now, it is near useless because almost every healer in the game will panic and full-heal you the second they see your Hp drop below 25%, thereby canceling the status before you've even gotten to use it. Both Pld and War ultimate def CD's are used without additional buffs. Drk's almost never have this option, because they have to worry about the healer not paying attention and removing their status (at which time there is a mad scramble to try and put up emergency buffs). Changing it in the way you suggested would be infinitely better. Not only would it allow the Drk's ultimate def CD to be self-reliant, like Pld and War, but it would also actively encourage the healer to attend to their other activities (such as dps or topping off the rest of the party). Further, it wouldn't be too OP, because if the Drk used it at a bad time (such as a low dmg instance) they could potentially walk out of it in worse shape than they went in. If the Dmg is not high enough to heal them, the healer could not help (cuz they'd be killing them faster).

The only thing that I wouldn't be sure about is HoT's. It would feel really clunky having to go through your status bar and manually disable every HoT healer's put on you, especially in Trials/Raids that have party wide AoE's. It might be better if the status somehow canceled them, or nullified their healing over time ... Either way, it would be a hell of a lot better than the current version.

As a tank, I'm pretty sure you've been through a couple of situations where both the tank and the healer blew every CD they have to keep the tank alive due to no communication, in this situation, the worst that had happened was wasted CDs, at least the tank's still alive :D.

If LD works like "Reverse", I'll probably be howling in laughter when the DRK pops LD, Benediction/Lustrates/Synastry/ED used, all CDs popped and a dead tank to show for it.

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Originally Posted by Februs

YES!!!
. Both Pld and War ultimate def CD's are used without additional buffs. Drk's almost never have this option, because they have to worry about the healer not paying attention and removing their status (at which time there is a mad scramble to try and put up emergency buffs). Changing it in the way you suggested would be infinitely better. Not only would it allow the Drk's ultimate def CD to be self-reliant, like Pld and War, but it would also actively encourage the healer to attend to their other activities (such as dps or topping off the rest of the party). Further, it wouldn't be too OP, because if the Drk used it at a bad time (such as a low dmg instance) they could potentially walk out of it in worse shape than they went in. If the Dmg is not high enough to heal them, the healer could not help (cuz they'd be killing them faster).

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Pretty sure that Holmgang has an explicit "HEAL ME OR I'M DEAD" tag attached to it. And none of the problems of WD debuff.

Reversing the damage for 6 seconds would be pretty cool. So would basically anything that wasn't Holmgang with a little extra.

I do like how it is currently, but what about it converting the damage (that would of killed you) to healing done on you , then the rest of the WD Buff/Debuff?
That would A) Reduce Bene dependence (and healer dependence) B) Give more power to the DRK to control the usage and C) make it better than Holmgang for the cooldown.

@Lucidia: There's a reason I don't use LD unless A) I'm on VOIP with at least 1 healer and B) I know I won't activate it so it's just style points.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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DO IT. I was thinking just boost my stats or something like Last Resort but your idea is much much more interesting. And ties all into the DRK wanting to take all the damage.

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Originally Posted by Februs

The only thing that I wouldn't be sure about is HoT's. It would feel really clunky having to go through your status bar and manually disable every HoT healer's put on you, especially in Trials/Raids that have party wide AoE's. It might be better if the status somehow canceled them, or nullified their healing over time ... Either way, it would be a hell of a lot better than the current version.

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I don't think that they would have a problem working around this. For instance, DoTs don't give you Blood Price returns, only direct damage. So they could probably easily use some of the same programming to make only direct heals harm you.

Eos/Selene might be a nuisance, but there'd be no way they'd be able to out-damage the incoming healing from any remotely powerful boss.

One argument at the moment is that healers who don't know how living death works cancel it before it gets used. If it was changed the way that healing harms you, we'd still have healers who have no idea how living death works. Except now, the worst they do is heal you (which, if they have time to do so gives the ultimate end result, you're alive) while with the zombie stuff, they'd actively kill you and then moan about you taking too much damage.

When I first heard about dark knight I first thought of the zombie status too. But for ffxiv I was hoping for more of a thorn mail type of CD where it would reflect a certain amount of dmg back to the source for a short duration or after a dmg threshold total was met. So it would be good for one tank buster or a bunch of raid dmg.

Something I thought about the LD in its current state, in regards to healers canceling it before the benefit. Since Holmgang and hallowed ground both stay in effect a set time, regardless of incoming heals or not, a suggestion to LD: instead of canceling it, healing the DRK for their full health gives them a buff instead. If that buff is not present when the LD runs out, they die. This would, admittedly, keep it mostly like it is now and still highly healer debendant. However it would remove threat of getting it removed prematurely which would also ease the healing time as healer could just pump out what they have to without carefull timing concerns. In this way they could already start during the first phase of the LD as the buff would only be processed after the walking deat state, if the DRK succumbed to it during the LD. Otherwise it would be checked in the end of LD timer.

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Originally Posted by Violette

Pretty sure that Holmgang has an explicit "HEAL ME OR I'M DEAD" tag attached to it. And none of the problems of WD debuff.

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Not quite. Holmgang has a "Heal me or I might (probably will) be dead" tag.

Nothing about Holmgang guarantees a War's death without healer input. IF their Hp is reduced to 1, then it is HIGHLY likely that they will die without a healer, however the status itself will not kill them. Something needs to hit them for that last 1 Hp. Further, if the dmg lightens up after the big hit the War has the tools to self heal enough to stay alive until a healer can get to them (equilibrium, Bloodshower, etc). If the Dmg completely stops after the hit (say, the boss leaves the arena for example) a War requires no immediate healing at all. I've seen plenty of War's get through their Holmgang without requiring 100% of the healer's attention. It's not recommended, obviously, but it's definitely doable. Drk's, on the other hand, do not have that advantage. If WD is activated, they will die if the healer does not reach threshold. Nothing will stop it, and Drks cannot self-heal enough to bypass the status effect (unless there happens to be a large sum of enemies nearby whom they can somehow sea urchin without getting aggro ... which is highly unlikely).

Further, Holmgang cannot be canceled early by a healer. The status effect is in effect regardless of anyone's intervention for it's full duration. WD can be canceled before the Drk even gets into it. If a healer reaches threshold on a Drk while they're only at living dead, then they will not get the full benefit of Walking Dead. War's and Pld's do not have this deficiency. They get their ultimate CD regardless of what the rest of the party does. When and how they use HG or Holmgang is purely up to them.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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Please yes. I might want to play DRK at all if it was like that (I already have a holmgang ability, no interest for a second one)

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

.. Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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Wouldn't that make it even more broken than HG is?

You tell your healer you're gonna pop it soon
-> healer dps for 3-5 seconds before you pop it. Once you pop it you should have been under 20% HP or so to get full benefit of the dmg healing
-> healer still dpsing for another 10 seconds (that's the duration of LD ? Correct if I'm wrong). After 10 seconds for you getting healed by the boss/mobs healer still has time to dps cause you won't need heals thrown your way when you're sitting at 100% hp. That's 15-20 seconds of healer dps.

With Holmgang you dont get much anything unless warrior manages to crit Seconditions Wind + Equilibrium and even then it's 6-12 seconds

And with HG if pld didn't use it at 100% hp you have to top hin off before dpsing so it can be from 4 to 15 seconds.


Also didn't they add text command to cancel buffs instead of clicking them? If you had to cancel HoTs for this status you could just make a macro to do it. (As someone was concerned about hots and how they'd work with this

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Originally Posted by AniCelestine

Wouldn't that make it even more broken than HG is?

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Depends on the adjustments

as an example, my last Faust fight had a 1900 dps done on the tank. That would mean 19k heals on the DRK, effectively topping him up. with RNG on crits, Kaltstrahls, number of adds at the time you pop it and such, give or take 16-22k heals

equilibrate it like "damage heal you for 50-60% of their value" (random % here, no math done) so that the DRK has his "nope I won't die" moment without allowing the healer to just ignore healing (though just like HG, holmgang or current living dead, lol-benediction)

So the change here...
Are a shield to reduce the amount of damage done to the drk
And reduce the amount of heal needed to remove the doom ?

Why ?

As a healer i never had trouble to top a tank (with any of the 3 healer job)

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The shield bases on their max HP is like a huge adlo
But a cursed one

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Originally Posted by Nekotee

As a healer i never had trouble to top a tank

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The suggestion is based on the increased HP in upcoming patch and it was the closest meaningful change I could think of based on the current version of the ability.

As for those referring to a completely new iteration based on Reverse/Zombie, I would absolutely love something like that. The only problem is the way some healers would interact this it. For instance, what if a WHM's muscle memory leads him to Benediction you to death? Or if a healer forcefully tries to top you while they kill you instead. I know your average raid healer will be cooperative but it will take a while for the common sense or the new healer to adjust to that mechanic.

On the opposite the new patch will be a blessing
More HP = less chance to trigger living dead

And more or less trouble to top a tank... Each healer got some good tool to heal a tank :o

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Originally Posted by Nekotee

More HP = less chance to trigger living dead

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That's sadly not always true. If a DRK uses LD as a means of avoiding death on a pull or a damage-intense part of a fight, yeah, those situations will occur less frequently with larger HP pools. However, if LD is used as an immunity utility which is intended to negate an one-shotting mechanic, then the DRK will have to be healed for over 21k with our current gear for reference.

I understand why PLD is provided with a more solid and reliable immunity, but from my pov or the random healer's pov, LD will be less reliable than Holmgang for those cases. Like a point someone raised above me, immunity abilities should provide some short of tank self-reliance and the current LD with extra HP pushes the functionality even further than that.

Reverse effect could be interesting.

See a few comments about how they should/shouldn't tweak it because some healers don't know how LD works, know the buff symbols, or might bene a zombie DRK to death... imo those people should never be considered when making tweaks. If people are bad and don't know what moves do, it's very dangerous ground to start changing things specifically to accommodate those people.

I want dread spikes from ffxi, absorbs 100% of damage taken as hp, lasts for a duration of 15 seconds and keeps living deads 5 min recast.

The reason the duration is longer than any of the other tanks cooldowns is that unlike the other tanks you can still die while using this e.g. If you have 499hp and take a 500dmg hit you'll die before you absorb it. So to mitigate a tank buster you'd need to have more hp than the tank buster deals meaning you'd want to pop dread spikes early to absorb some damage while you recover before the buster comes. It also somewhat keeps the need for healing from walking dead as the healers would need to make sure the DRK is topped up so they can absorb damage safely, just to a less stressful extent.

Basically rather than being like a gimpy holmgang with a longer duration it would be more like a gimpy hallowed ground with a longer duration.

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Originally Posted by randysquirrel

Reverse effect could be interesting.

See a few comments about how they should/shouldn't tweak it because some healers don't know how LD works, know the buff symbols, or might bene a zombie DRK to death... imo those people should never be considered when making tweaks. If people are bad and don't know what moves do, it's very dangerous ground to start changing things specifically to accommodate those people.

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Unfortunately it goes a lot beyond those players. Let's assume that you are at 20% HP and your reflexes call for LD. What if your healer has already front-loaded a strong heal? If the heal is strong and fast enough, it will overpower the incoming damage that you expect it to heal you instead. Thus in total, we get a huge risk and lack of independence in the case of bad healers AND many potential accidents even with a decent healer.

Although I am being skeptical about this, I personally love the idea of Reverse and hope to see it work.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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Except in this scenario, my question then becomes what is the purpose of a tank buster? Let's say I'm in A1S and see Hyper Compressed Plasma coming at me, so instead of doing what I do now with dark artsing a dark mind and putting up shadow wall, I just pop off living dead and get healed for full health. Considering that it seems tank busters are most often the time this skill is used wouldn't that make DRK completely OP in raiding situations and eliminate the purpose of tank busters?

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Originally Posted by wereotter

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LD has a 300 second cooldown.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

LD has a 300 second cooldown.

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That still doesn't really answer the question. Why would I try to deal with at least that one tank buster when I could just use it to go to full health? Seems counter to the point of that mechanic existing at all, even if I could only do it every other time. I could see this being maybe a little more workable if the reverse status didn't go into effect until after you go into walking dead mode, but even then that could just cause your death if you don't take enough hits before walking dead wears off to regain your health, especially as your healer can't help you out. Also what happens if you have a SCH, and they have their fairy on autopilot? It hits you with Embrace which hurts you, it sees your health is lowered, it tries to heal you again... This could easily turn into death by fairy hugs.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

That still doesn't really answer the question. Why would I try to deal with at least that one tank buster when I could just use it to go to full health?

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Dunno. Why is Hallowed Ground even here if the point was to keep all tank busters relevant every time ?

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

Dunno. Why is Hallowed Ground even here if the point was to keep all tank busters relevant every time ?

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Hallowed Ground won't put you back to full health if you use it before a tank buster. Slight, but very important difference to what was suggested.

Embrace wouldn't hurt you enough to make a difference against a boss hitting (healing) hard enough to be worthy of popping the cooldown in the first place, any more than the piddly 300 pot heal would save your life had the boss actually damaged you.. Also, SCHs tend to manage their pet. Anyway the whole heals damaging you thing would be part of the balance. It was just cool idea i had, not a serious suggestion that I actually expect them to implement.

The end result is still the same thing as HG or Holmgang; you cheesed a TB and let your healers do other stuff for the duration.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Also, SCHs tend to manage their pet.

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<-- doesn't manage his fairy. Bad scholar right here ;)

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Hallowed Ground won't put you back to full health if you use it before a tank buster. Slight, but very important difference to what was suggested.

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Enter Clemency. Any Pld can time their HG buff to extend beyond the actual TB and then self heal right back to full Hp without the assistance of a Healer. It's not commonly done (because why bother when you have a healer who is likely going to cap you regardless), but it can be done without much trouble. Post lvl 50 content, the Pld skill set make TB's completely irrelevant at least one time during a fight.

TB's are not my only concern, though. Thinking about Raids and Trials is nice and all, but 90% of tanking is done in regular old dungeons. On average, a Pld gets 2 uses of HG per dungeon run. That's 2 MASSIVE pulls in which they don't have to worry about dmg for 10 seconds. Techincally, Drks should have the same ability, but they don't get that option because they are at the mercy of the healer (who, 9 times out of 10, is not paying attention to the Drk's status).

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Originally Posted by Nekotee

On the opposite the new patch will be a blessing
More HP = less chance to trigger living dead

And more or less trouble to top a tank... Each healer got some good tool to heal a tank :o

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Who's to say that SE won't up the dmg incoming to tanks now that there is basically no point in going any other than full vit mostlikely come 3.2, so maybe the "chance" to proc it will stay the same.

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Originally Posted by AniCelestine

Who's to say that SE won't up the dmg incoming to tanks now that there is basically no point in going any other than full vit mostlikely come 3.2, so maybe the "chance" to proc it will stay the same.

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they may, but the recent dengeki interview flat out said that full VIT tanks would have more dps than any mix of VIT/STR. So there is already no point in having any point in STR starting in 4 days.

They will most likely design encounters around the new HP pools though

How about making it so you can cast raise on a DRK under the effect of living dead and it will act like a benediction? Raise has a meaty mp cost and cast time (assuming no swiftcast) so it won't be that far off having to full heal them and it will take away the advantage whm has over the other healers when dealing with LD.

According to the preliminary notes, LD stays the same with HP increasing by ~35%.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

IF... they change LD, I'd rather see it do something totally different.

When 3.0 first dropped I wondered why it didn't grant something similar to the Reverse status from FFXII. Damage heals you, heals damage you.

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Giving healers a brand new way to kill me……

But I kinda like this.