A cool rework for Living Dead and Superbolide

Living Dead
Ability Instant 300s
Grants the effect of Living Dead.
Your HP can be reduced below 0 without being KO'd under the effect of Living Dead. The negative HP can be healed as normal HP. If your HP is below 0 before the Walking Dead timer runs out, you will be KO'd.
Living Dead Duration: 10s
Additional Effect: Restores HP with each weaponskill successfully delivered or spell cast
Cure Potency: 1500

Superbolide
Ability Instant 120s
Reduces HP to 1 and creates a barrier which nullifies damage equaling the reduced HP.
Duration: 15s

Yes, this is not an invul. However, they gain another ability:

Role Reversal
Ability Instant 360s
Converts all damage taken into healing and all healing received into damage.
Duration: 10s

Sorry, no. GNB is enough like a DPS already without practically removing its invuln and swapping it for a damage buff. I like being unkillable for a few seconds, not just swapping HP for a shield.

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Originally Posted by Vandso

Superbolide
Ability Instant 120s
Reduces HP to 1 and creates a barrier which nullifies damage equaling the reduced HP.
Duration: 15s

Yes, this is not an invul. However, they gain another ability:

Role Reversal
Ability Instant 360s
Converts all damage taken into healing and all healing received into damage.
Duration: 10s

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I always thought that DRK could have this before they improved Living Dead. I thought that Living Dead could just be a massive version of The Blackest Night as you described.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I always thought that DRK could have this before they improved Living Dead. I thought that Living Dead could just be a massive version of The Blackest Night as you described.

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It would add some variety and fit thematically, the problem is currently it would create a massive balance issue and I'm not talking about some minor inconvenience like "tank job X does 200 less dps than tank job Y".

Right now invulns allow you to survive mechanics that would kill you 10 times over, changing one of them to just provide a barrier would make a massive difference because now you have to decide between a job that just brings a big shield and a job that let's you potentially ignore a mechanic entirely.

We would have to change all invulns to no longer make you unkillable, which I would be fine with tbh.

Arent all of those like massive nerfs?

Who cares, dark knights will never, EVER FOREVER EVEEEER be as cool as Death Knights.

If the Gunbreaker uses Superbolide when they're low on health then the barrier will will do almost nothing and they'll die from the next hit anyways since their total effective health is still the same. Role Reversal's cons are obvious as it means healers will HAVE to immediately stop healing you. All it takes is for a white mage to accidentally hit you with Benediction while you have this buff and now you're dead. You also cannot use these abilities together as healers will see your HP drop to 1 and will likely start chewing apart your shield as they panic to try and save you

That Living Dead change is just a nerf all around.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Arent all of those like massive nerfs?

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They are.

They literally just took LD and gave it the old downside back.

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Originally Posted by PredatoryCatgirl

Sorry, no. GNB is enough like a DPS already without practically removing its invuln and swapping it for a damage buff. I like being unkillable for a few seconds, not just swapping HP for a shield.

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The second ability that I mentioned is an invul. All the damage that they take from the enemies are healed instead, and healers are the ones who do damage to them.

No thanks.

I feel like making Superbolide not an invuln or death save would mean GNB is worthless in high end groups as a tank.

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Originally Posted by Vandso

The second ability that I mentioned is an invul. All the damage that they take from the enemies are healed instead, and healers are the ones who do damage to them.

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These abilities are so bad I can only assume you want to nerf tank invulns into the ground.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I always thought that DRK could have this before they improved Living Dead. I thought that Living Dead could just be a massive version of The Blackest Night as you described.

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it was but if I recall the kicker was if the healer didn't top you off you died XD

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Originally Posted by MsMisato

it was

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It wasn't a shield. It worked exactly like it does now except that the healer had to heal them up instead of the DRK doing attacks to heal themselves.

The issue with your Living Dead there, is that a lot of the abilities we invuln do obscene amounts of damage, as they're meant to punish a lack of tankswap. If you take two TBs back to back when they apply some kind of Vuln effect, often the second hit does well over 300000 damage (our HP max atm is around 120k), with some having even higher amounts going into the millions (for some reason). This rework would then require that the healers heal that massive amount of HP to save the DRK, effectively locking WHM as the only healer that can deal with the invuln's effect via Benediction.

It works for DK in WoW (Purgatory) because DKs have Death Strike, which heals them for 50% of the damage they took within the past few seconds (and they can back to back two of them if they have full RunicPower), so their selfhealing is obscenely high, it's their whole identity/gameplay. DRK here does not have anywhere near as much selfhealing capability, even WAR in it's current state would not have a good time with something like this, I'd expect.

Though, I do agree that LD is kind of bland with how they 'reworked' it. Just slapping a 'you heal yourself lol' effect on it is kinda lazy, IMO. A while back, before they did the change, I did actually come up with an attempt at a more thematic effect for the invuln, which leaned into the lore and identity of DRK a bit more, and would have more interesting 'downsides' to play around. Unfortunately, I'm unable to find the original post I made about it, so I'll have to rewrite it as best I can from memory:

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Living Dead, 300s CD

- Upon execution of Living Dead, grants the status Living Dead, which prevents all damage taken for 10 seconds (similar to Hallowed). Additionally, grants the status Walking Dead for 300 seconds, dealing 1% of the DRK's Max HP as damage per tick (works out as 100% of their HP over the full duration). This damage cannot reduce the DRK below 1 HP.

- Upon execution of Living Dead, the action button for Living Dead becomes 'Borrowed Time', which pauses the Damage Over Time effect of Walking Dead until Borrowed Time is deactivated again, or Walking Dead expires. This gives the DRK a way to temporarily stop the damage from ticking if they need, for example, in preparation for a TB or a 'HP must be 100%' mechanic. However, it comes with risk, as pausing the DOT and leaving it paused for too long means that the damage compiled might be too much to deal with all at once. In a target dummy scenario, it worked out that Souleater alone was enough to out-heal the DOT effect. %-based Mitigation like Shadow Wall would not affect the DOT damage, but TBN and shields would block the DOT for their duration.

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Perhaps overhealing could 'remove' duration from the DOT, too? In which case, the 'Bene instantly solves the downside' would still be a thing (as it'd clear the full DOT instantly). Either way, I'm not a massive fan of the 'solution' they gave LD. It's better than the old version, yes, but it could have been so much more

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

The issue with your Living Dead there, is that a lot of the abilities we invuln do obscene amounts of damage, as they're meant to punish a lack of tankswap. If you take two TBs back to back when they apply some kind of Vuln effect, often the second hit does well over 300000 damage (our HP max atm is around 120k), with some having even higher amounts going into the millions (for some reason). This rework would then require that the healers heal that massive amount of HP to save the DRK, effectively locking WHM as the only healer that can deal with the invuln's effect via Benediction.

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The popular strat for paradeigma 1 has both tanks use invulns. During the time of the damage vuln up our drk took around 2 million damage (now ignored because LD prevented hp loss at 1hp). Before getting current BiS tank hp was somewhere around 100k hp iirc. That means we'd have 10 seconds to heal 20 times the drk's total HP. With the LD self heal drk can heal themself for anywhere between 3 times to 5 times of its hp (since in this nerfed version the self heal wouldnt go away). That leaves the healers to heal the drk for around 15 to 17 times their total hp, with 300k damage coming in ~3s before living dead runs out.