Changing the Dark Knight's Living Dead to something more palatable

First time really posting in the official forums, but here goes:

I think that Dark Knight's (DRK) Living Dead should be changed as follows:
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Living Dead (Lvl 50)

Call upon forbidden magicks to forestall your end, preventing most attacks from reducing your HP to less than 1.
Duration: 8s.
Cooldown: 300s.

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And a new trait at lvl 62 [or to add to Blackblood or Enhanced Blackblood (level 66) :]
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Enhanced Living Dead (Level 62):

Living Dead's duration is increased to 10s gains the effect:
Exchange your current Blackblood and HP amounts, while also granting 5 Blackblood for each physical attack landed.
When Living Dead expires, exchange your Blackblood and HP values again.

If your current Blackblood is at 0 at the moment of exchange, you will have 1 HP.

Blackblood formula:
1 Blackblood = 1% HP
HP exchanged with Blackblood will be converted to a percentage amount equaling the percentage of your total health, rounded up.
Duration: 10s. [Cooldown will remain at 300s]
{Something to consider: Allow the Dark Knight to activate Living Dead again to end this ability early after 1s-2s buffer Cooldown}
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So why change Living Dead's effect? In my opinion, Living Dead is the weakest out of all the tank immunities. The Dark Knight that uses Living Dead has now way to continue battle by themselves once they enter their Walking Dead effect. Dark Knights do not possess enough curing skills (A 60s Abyssal Drain, a 3rd GCD Weaponskill: Souleater) to heal an amount equaling their HP total, and if there are no healers around, Dark Knights can only wait for their end.

This gives Dark Knights a chance to continue on by themselves, to bring their immunity in line with the other abilities, Such as: Holmgang; Hallowed Ground; and Superbolide.

Some balancing that I can already see happening to my proposed Living Dead:
-Duration may be too long
-Blackblood granted per physical attack landed my be too high, may be lowered or changed to 'per weaponskill' instead.

I do hope that this proposal is considered, but I would also like to invite the community (and or Devs) to discuss this ability.

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Originally Posted by Xemsi

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But this would mean withholding dps, which is not good. If you are getting the gauge quickly, you should be spending it, not holding to it.

What's simple and could help with living dead imo is:

- mandatory healing: from 100% to 50%;
- drk gains a lifesteal from every move they use, a not super strong one, but one that sure helps (idea being, hey, drk is a damn zombie now, let it be blood thirsty and heal with it);
- now this one is a bit far fetched, but would be cool; when the mandatory hp is healed, living shadow cd is reseted and is granted 1 free use.

Anyway, just reducing the mandatory healing part and giving drk a lifesteal there would help with this cd a lot, ideally they also would give drk a much better sustain with other ways as well.. but... who knows...

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Originally Posted by Silkerin

But this would mean withholding dps, which is not good. If you are getting the gauge quickly, you should be spending it, not holding to it.

What's simple and could help with living dead imo is:

- mandatory healing: from 100% to 50%;
- drk gains a lifesteal from every move they use, a not super strong one, but one that sure helps (idea being, hey, drk is a damn zombie now, let it be blood thirsty and heal with it);
- now this one is a bit far fetched, but would be cool; when the mandatory hp is healed, living shadow cd is reseted and is granted 1 free use.

Anyway, just reducing the mandatory healing part and giving drk a lifesteal there would help with this cd a lot, ideally they also would give drk a much better sustain with other ways as well.. but... who knows...

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1st one I was already on board fully with the idea.
2nd one I genuinely love because then that could give it something that ya know... doesn't make it auto die like how PLD/WAR/GNB have an invinc in a more traditional fashion but also have a heal or something they can put on themselves so they can at least live through another hit even after the duration is over. Thematically that sounds great too considering you are a "walking dead" at the time.

3rd one while cool as heck.... is prolly why it shouldn't be implemented. They're meant to be emergency GTFO buttons, so adding this kinda just makes it more of a mechanic to use/abuse for dps than one you should be saving for the moment you think you may die some time soon.

I genuinely love the first two ideas here though. It doesn't need to be complicated even, if they so much as gave the first option it'd be a nice fix to either die or have benediction ready. Second just makes it palpable to use your invulnerability and not 100% confirm die every time you're not healed enough, especially if this gets paired with the half hp healed idea. Just attack as much as possible and unleash hell and bam, your thing is removed and you survived a pretty decent amount without Auto-death kicking in. Other tanks don't have an auto death so no reason DRK shouldn't have the option to deny it at least.

Some points.

As long as Living Dead has a penalty attached to it and Holmgang does not, Holmgang should be on a longer recast. Superbulli and Hallowed follow that rule for a reason.

Second, if you want survival to be in the hands of another player, the ability has to be as simple as possible so that everyone involved instantly understands what is going on. If you take SB's penalty as an example, it's very visually obvious (i.e. suddenly, your tank's HP is 1). On LD, there's a debuff that pops up, and if you hover over it, there's a wall of text that you can try to decipher while your doom counter ticks down. And even experienced players don't actually know how much remaining healing they need to pump into you. It's either bene, or slam in those heals until it disappears. Really bad design.

If you want to keep things roughly the way that they are, everything needs to be made more obvious. Place a red counter that starts counting down from 10 to 0 over the DRK job icon in the party frames. Place a black bar next to the DRK's HP bar that disappears as you provide more healing, letting you see how much more healing is required to meet the check. Also, make it so that meeting the check doesn't remove your invulnerability. There's nothing worse than dying to a follow-up tankbuster because your healer cleansed the effect too quickly. And perhaps either add a convalescence effect to the ability or reduce the %HP required to cleanse. We're getting into the 120k healing range now, and it keeps going up.

An alternative solution is just to take other players out of it, like all of the other invulns. For the next 10 seconds, your HP can't go below 1. When you hit 1 HP, it changes to: You can't take damage from most attacks, and you can't be healed by other players. All your attacks grant you additional lifesteal. Now it's all in your hands. Just you and your opponent. The flipside is that if there's nothing to beat up, you probably will die. But it's more interesting when it's something under your control than another player.

Any invuln design that gives you a dps boost is going to be exploited, so it's best to keep that out of this.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Some points.

As long as Living Dead has a penalty attached to it and Holmgang does not, Holmgang should be on a longer recast. Superbulli and Hallowed follow that rule for a reason.

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The problem here is that people think Holmgang doesn't have a penalty. It does. PLD's hallowed ground is meant to be used to be invulnerable when you're feeling uncomfortable at your low hp but its abused instead and considered OP, hence why they give it such a long cooldown because they dunno how to change it without peeving every PLD off. Superbolide encourages the use of it at low hp by taking out the middle man and yanking you down to 1 hp and then putting invulnerability on you, allowing the healer to catch up in heals while you take no damage. PLD and GNb have an invulnerability, despite their HP value. WAR "can't go below 1" assuming it even gets hit and has the shot of getting hit hard enough to go below 1. Not only is its duration shorter, and not a given "invulnerability" but this means when you use it, your healer can heal the WAR but they'll still take damage as opposed to superbolide/hallowed just outright saying "nope". WAR's weaknesses is that you can only survive beyond 1 hp, you're not invincible though, the healer will still have to catch up in healing for both your lost HP AND the damage you're taking while this buff is up as well. The other 2 give you ample time specifically just to make up for the hp you've already lost.

Now, this is all to say that every tank job (except PLD to a degree, other than its cooldown) has a penalty to it. Which makes sense, you're trading something to basically take a hit or a few you normally should not at all be able to take.Superbolide you're trading in a remaining amount of viable and potentially useful hp, WAR you're on the brink of death an the healer has to amp you up to take whatever is about to come your way AND you have to expect death as not to waste the cd for the short duration its up. DRK same deal except... its more punishing than the others. Living Dead suffers the penalty that WAR suffers of taking oncoming damage while also needing healing to survive normally but ALSO needing it to remove the debuff from auto death.

Imo, there should be something akin to a combination of the other jobs here. Have living dead work how it does now but once you hit 1 hp, walking dead will only kill you if you haven't received at least 50% of your hp in healing AND keep the buff still on for its full duration to be unable to go below 1. This way there is still reason to heal the DRK for that penalty and they benefit from a longer duration version of what WAR's holmgang is. That is an option or keep it how it is now but while inw alking dead make the tank invulnerable to most attacks but still require the healing penalty.

I'm not against the penalty so long as there's a method behind it that makes sense to WHY we're getting the penalty. If we're gonna pop LD, still taking oncoming attacks that keep us at low hp AND have the threat of not enough healing = auto death, then there needs to be a pretty good pro side to balance this out like invulnerability for a full 10 sec duration or healing potency increases on character while this is up + attacks now life steal. I usually popped convalescence back in the day when I popped LD because that way they didn't "need" benediction, they could just pop a couple heals and I'd be just fine. Without it though, its all the harder to recover them to max hp without higher end heals on long cd's.

TL;DR: every tank job's "salvation skill" has a penalty in one form or another, DRK's is just the most punishing of them and always has been in need of balancing the pros/cons of it while PLD's also just too OP to adjust without making people mad about changing it.

I am of the mind Living Dead should go the life steal route. It fits best within the lore and solves the issue of DRK being the only tank entirely dependent on another player to survive. Regardless, something needs to be addressed because Scholar and Astro have to blow far too many resources. In a raid environment, you'll have two healers and more or less planned usages. When it comes to dungeons though, Living Dead borders on a suicide button. Twice now when my friend attempted to heal it on AST while leveling she straight up couldn't unless she had ED charges ready.

Living Dead being a suicide button is definitely an issue. After allt his time, they /still/ haven't fixed it. Why do tank cooldowns need to screw the person using them in the first place? There is zero reason all the tanks couldn't have their own unique version of hallowed ground, complete with altered animations/sounds and a different name.

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Originally Posted by Absimiliard

Living Dead being a suicide button is definitely an issue. After allt his time, they /still/ haven't fixed it. Why do tank cooldowns need to screw the person using them in the first place? There is zero reason all the tanks couldn't have their own unique version of hallowed ground, complete with altered animations/sounds and a different name.

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Because then it becomes something to abuse like how we have people doing Titania EX and eating several of the tethers with their invincibility or all of the Fae Light's that are supposed to be shared with tanks. I feel like its not that abnormal to want some balance with a skill that makes you literally invincible for the sake of stalling for time or managing a mechanic on your own. If they do that, they remove what little identity tanks have left atm lol.

If anything, Living Dead needs a better indicator of when Walking Dead is up, how much time is left on it, and how much more healing is needed. A red bar replacing your health bar would be one thing that could indicate it's up and how much more healing is left. The timer...I would normally think of the old Doom countdown over your head like in old FF games, but that could interfere with mechanic indicators so it's not a very good idea.

Keep in mind Living Dead has the longest duration at potentially 20s. Pretty rare that it will ever get there, but it is it's maximum duration. You have 10s to hope it doesn't activate, and 10s to fix it actually activating. WAR is the same as the 2nd half without the dying and only 6s. Without an intended death Holmgang < Living Dead. On the other hand neither block damage that isn't the most lethal singular point of damage. Nowdays tho, getting a CHeal value in 10s without benediction is rough... since damage is still incoming during that time.

Might be nice for the remove condition to change from 100% Current Health, to Recieve 100% Max Health worth of Healling, so if you get that 120k healing off in 10s they live even if they never hit 100% health. Which is more doable considering incoming damage isnt increasing the healing required to remove the condition. Since right now, unless your using Benediction, the healing requirement for walking dead can be 200-300k health in 10s.

PLDs is known to be OP, thus why it has the longest CD by a minute. Its more-or less unchanged to not upset players. One of those things they will probably vastly change in the next FF MMO.

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Originally Posted by OcieKo

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This post very clearly illustrates how poorly written the tooltips are. But that is also a consequence of how convoluted the ability itself is.

First, Living Dead doesn't mitigate damage for 20 seconds. The only time that it mitigates any damage is when you are at 1 HP. That means that the 'active duration' only occurs when Walking Dead is active. Second, Walking Dead kills you at the 10 second mark. So you really only have 9 seconds of active duration at most, and that's generally only if you have a WHM using Benediction. Outside of that, your healers will have to throw heals at you as fast as they can to cleanse the effect, which generally means that it lasts for a lot less time.

The main benefit of the "Living Dead" part of the ability is to reduce the effective recast. So if I use it 9 seconds earlier before the effect triggers, I save 9 seconds on my next recast of Living Dead. So instead of being 300 seconds, it's 291 seconds.

Second, Walking Dead's cleanse condition is not based on your present HP. It's based on the amount of healing that you've received while the effect is active. You don't need to be at max health. You need to receive an amount of healing equal to your total health. So if you have 120k HP total, you need to receive 120k healing irrespective of what your current HP is at the time the effect ends.

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Originally Posted by Valic

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Holmgang has no detrimental effect attached to the ability. It used to root you in place and require a target to activate, but this was removed in Shadowbringers.

If you compare GNB and PLD, GNB pays for having a 60 second recast by having an additional detrimental effect (Lose all of your present HP except for 1) as well as having a shorter duration (2 seconds). If we follow that same logic, Holmgang should always have a shorter duration than Living Dead (this isn't always the case, it depends on when your healer cleanses the effect) and it should also have the heal or die penalty attached. If you think about it, WAR's Nascent Flash is much better suited for dealing with this mechanic than DRK is.

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Originally Posted by OcieKo

Might be nice for the remove condition to change from 100% Current Health, to Recieve 100% Max Health worth of Healling, so if you get that 120k healing off in 10s they live even if they never hit 100% health. Which is more doable considering incoming damage isnt increasing the healing required to remove the condition. Since right now, unless your using Benediction, the healing requirement for walking dead can be 200-300k health in 10s.

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That is already how it works. They do NOT need to be brought to 100% HP. During the duration of Walking Dead, they need to receive 100% Max Health total healing. 120k, in your example.

It is still a problem, because barring Benediction, healers have to spend a silly large amount of resources to keep the DRK alive. This problem is exacerbated by the HP pools having scaled 50-60%, while healing potencies have not scaled to that degree.

To the OP, just replace Living Dead with Dark Dance that let's you dodge most attacks for 20 seconds and it sits on 5 minute cooldown.

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Originally Posted by DRKoftheAzure

To the OP, just replace Living Dead with Dark Dance that let's you dodge most attacks for 20 seconds and it sits on 5 minute cooldown.

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they will never do evasion stuff

20 seconds of possibly full evasion is pretty busted and if its only sometimes it doesn't guarantee your survival

i think Living dead should at 5-6 minutes and it heals all damage taken for 7-9 seconds

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Originally Posted by OcieKo

Keep in mind Living Dead has the longest duration at potentially 20s. Pretty rare that it will ever get there, but it is it's maximum duration.

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No this is a big wrong with the CD imo... The initial Living Dead 10s timer is not something you want to leverage. During that window any incoming heal is a waste of healer resources. Be a friendly DRK and don't pop LD until milliseconds before the point of death, because otherwise you're risking your healer to blow their Tetras/Lustrates/Benes/MP/GCDs/etc prematurely.. And that's when this skill is really at it's worse. For as much as that window is helping you, it's hurting the healer. You've just thrown your CD/GCD timing responsibility onto the healer instead of handling it yourself. Tanks should be helping the healer, tank invulns should be helping healers. That window is in part why the skill needs to be changed.

I think the Walking Dead debuff should be removed. Just have the skill be 10 second holmgang. If desperate for flavor, end of duration a portion of all damage dealt during the 10 second invuln is converted back to HP. Make it a positive feature. The buff-into-invuln-debuff mechanic needs to go. It is convaluted.

I would just remove the healing requirement for LD, no transition to walking dead after suffering a KO hit. A straight 10 second invuln, no gimmick or buffs needed

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Originally Posted by Ryutamashiisan

I would just remove the healing requirement for LD, no transition to walking dead after suffering a KO hit. A straight 10 second invuln, no gimmick or buffs needed

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Sometimes the simplest solutions are best. Living Dead is hamstrung by it's arbitrary need to be, "different". While I can appreciate wanting to have more distinctions between the tanks, if they can't come up with any differences beyond, "it's worse in every way", then maybe it's not worth the hassle.

Living dead is ok, I would only put a trait with a convalescence effect in it since we lost the skill.

I wish I could remember whom posted it so that I could give credit to them but one suggestion I saw was making the Living Dead button turn into a "Walking Dead" button once Walking Dead was triggered, that would turn off the ability. This way you can have the benefit of the not dying at a longer duration than Holmgang but you have to hit the "Walking Dead" button because if you left the skill going for the full 10 seconds then it would kill you as it does now but you'd be able to disable this once you were out of danger.

I'm a fan of the no heals/dmg and having to heal yourself via lifestealing. Maybe add something so that incoming heals from other players are redirected to another party member in case some poor healer is still freaking out and spamming cures.

I think it's fair to say that the chief problem with Living Dead is your complete reliance on someone else to save your ass from your own ability. Even Superbolide doesn't assure your death, as GNB can heal itself back up fairly efficiently over the course of the ability. The amount of coordination required to be able to employ the ability without ending up dead for your trouble is beyond what is possible in 90% of pugs, making the ability virtually useless outside of premades. Additionally, it is the only tank immunity that can't be used to save one's behind when flying solo. DRK has no way of healing itself back up in time to get away with having used it unless they're lucky enough to have an absurd number of mobs nearby to nail with Abyssal Drain.

If anyone else has anything else to add to this issue, I've compiled a list of points here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5098921

Let me know if I'm missing something.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

If anyone else has anything else to add to this issue, I've compiled a list of points here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5098921

Let me know if I'm missing something.

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Thanks for doing this. To add to sort of a side point on the healer feedback, if anyone's like me who turns off target debuffs that's not mine (thanks alliance raid etc etc), they won't see the Walking Dead debuff on the tank. The only way to realistically track the walking dead timer is to put them on focus, or turn the debuffs back on.

I think the healer resource cost to recover from WD is a 5.0 design oversight honestly. I'm hopeful they'll do something to improve this.

The only thing I would add is that for any UNPLANNED LD its already very likely your healer has already spent all/most of their resources including bene before it got to the point of needing LD. Outside of planned raid tactics good tanks dont pop LD until well after the healer is struggling. Which means any half alert healer has already begun spending cooldowns.

Even a WHM will struggle significantly to heal an "emergency LD"

Also for those rare occasions when it matters could we please have Walking dead drop off if you exit combat. Nothing like dropping dead between pulls.

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Originally Posted by Sancho_Nyanta

I wish I could remember whom posted it so that I could give credit to them but one suggestion I saw was making the Living Dead button turn into a "Walking Dead" button once Walking Dead was triggered, that would turn off the ability. This way you can have the benefit of the not dying at a longer duration than Holmgang but you have to hit the "Walking Dead" button because if you left the skill going for the full 10 seconds then it would kill you as it does now but you'd be able to disable this once you were out of danger.

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That was me in my thread here.

It was intended to be as barebones of a suggestion as I could think of, where as little as possible was changed with Living Dead since Yoshi-P has expressed reluctance to change the ability due to it conveying "job identity".

I actually added an update to my suggestions for TBN that is similar to this suggestion for Living Dead, basically allowing DRKs to press TBN again while the shield was active to force it to break, therefore giving them the chance of avoiding not getting the DA proc. Sort of a conceptual safety-net for the ability.

Thank you. I actually really liked that idea of giving Living Dead that kind of button interaction where you control it. Personally I've never really minded that the skill would kill me as much as how much it required my healers to use so that they could save me.

As far as TBN, if they gave it something like that then they'd probably have to increase the CD timer to compensate the guaranteed activation. If they just gave it 2-3 more seconds on its duration then that would fix all of its problems IMHO. I mean you'd still have crazy people saying that it needs to be a DPS gain but this would make it always be a Defensive gain while staying a DPS neutral unless you throw it up right before a boss leaves the area.

I added in the point about Convalescence's removal in Shadowbringers and its impact on cleansing Walking Dead, which I had forgotten to mention earlier.

Personally, what I'd like to see is:
Living Dead: Most attacks cannot reduce HP below 1 for next 10 seconds. If this effect is triggered, your status is changed from Living Dead to Walking Dead.
Walking Dead: Impervious to most attacks and cannot be the target of healing spells for the next 10 seconds. Absorb damage dealt as HP.
Recast 6 minutes.

This would put you at a disadvantage if there were no mobs that you could target when the effect triggers. But it makes the ability self-explanatory and more importantly, shifts the burden of managing the cooldown off of the healer and back on to the tank.