Can we give Abyssal Drain a proper indicator please?

As a healer it's frustrating to work around because it's never clear if the DRK in question is dropping to use this or just dying. Several times I've been told "I was going to use Abyssal Drain and then you bene-d me", so I'd like to have some way of knowing that Abyssal Drain is available or to have it reworked slightly so that it's use can be communicated in a way I as a healer can use to plan around. My preference would be for a simple "Abyssal Drain Ready" effect when it comes off cooldown rather than a change in functionality.

This is an interesting topic to think about because this may actually go beyond just Abyssal Drain, but to stay on topic I'll keep it to Abyssal Drain.

First, technically you can roughly tell whether or not a Dark Knight is holding Abyssal Drain or not by keeping tabs if you recently saw the animation or hear the sound of it going off (or alternatively Carve & Spit), the problem is rather keeping tabs on a 60s CD without a clear indicator when they use it "again". For example, I use my Abyssal Drain relatively early before a healer uses resources (60-70% max HP) so its out of the window fast + I used it for damage, others will hold it exclusively for the heal which is probably where your problem is rooted in.

Realistically, other than making UI elements to keep track of certain abilities (maybe selected per job), it's not realistic to expect a single cooldown in DRK's kit to have a visual tell that "Abyssal Drain / Carve & Spit is ready". The other way would be to have the sustain be a buff that you can see, working a bit similar to Bloodwhetting, but other than that it is "just" a 60s CD attack with a lifesteal attached to them. Maybe this would be easier if Carve was split from Drain again.

Honestly, a lot of abilities could benefit from having better communication to them - maybe not WoW style addon fiesta of "telling everything", but certainly more. Ironically, in PvP they made strides to make certain effects more visible. PLD's Hallowed Ground and DRK's Undead Rebirth effects have huge visual tells showing whether or not they are active for instance.

As a healer, I don't exactly care about whether something like Abyssal Drain (or Bloodwhetting) is currently off-cooldown. I care about what the remaining cooldown is, so that I can gauge whether the tank's HP might hit zero first in the absence of any healing.

But then, I care about only these particular skills because they can have a yo-yo like effect on a tank's health.

Part of being a healer in this game comes down to relying on your game sense and listening for sound queues/visual effects. it's something you'll just develop over time as you fight alongside the different tanks in the game.
I do suggest you try and not let peoples comments like that affect you. As long as they're not dead, you guys can continue the fight and you'll further develop that game sense. salty egomaniacs exist everywhere, so you can only control what you do, which is to continue improving and trusting in your abilities.

I play WHM on my alt and I noticed that if I keep regen on them while they pull and space out my usage use of Holy rather than spamming it, I can pretty much keep the tank alive indefinitely without even resorting to using lillies

last tip I have is smth i've been telling everyone for awhile now...challenge yourself to get comfortable with using swiftcast-holy as your first action when the tank finishes pulling!
it's seriously stupidly strong in dungeon content, and those 4 seconds of stun buy you the time to cast medica2/regen/cure2/lillies, whichever the tank needs

I've had a ton of fun healing as WHM by changing the order in which I use my spells. once you learn to trust in yourself, you'll be able to keep your tanks alive, and we'll in turn trust in you to keep us alive [:

Abyssal drain hardly heals enough to worry about it. That drk was just being whiny.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

As a healer it's frustrating to work around because it's never clear if the DRK in question is dropping to use this or just dying. Several times I've been told "I was going to use Abyssal Drain and then you bene-d me", so I'd like to have some way of knowing that Abyssal Drain is available or to have it reworked slightly so that it's use can be communicated in a way I as a healer can use to plan around. My preference would be for a simple "Abyssal Drain Ready" effect when it comes off cooldown rather than a change in functionality.

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Doesn't the same work the other way around? The DRK can't tell when you'll be using Bene, either!

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

As a healer, I don't exactly care about whether something like Abyssal Drain (or Bloodwhetting) is currently off-cooldown. I care about what the remaining cooldown is, so that I can gauge whether the tank's HP might hit zero first in the absence of any healing.

But then, I care about only these particular skills because they can have a yo-yo like effect on a tank's health.

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This is similar to how I operate on the rare occasions I heal as well.

In dungeons the only thing that really matters is that they use their mitigation. I will be rotation through a set of pre-planned oGCDs (or GCDs in the case of Lillies) anyway because they're free, and since those are planned with 0 healing from their end in mind it doesn't matter which tank I get either.

In raids you basically never need to heal them anyway because your party healing will sustain the tanks as well.
Same applies to savage as well, with tank buster healing being pre-planned and whatever invuln usage your tank has is usually communicated before the pull.

I can see where this is coming from but this goes beyond that this. What about the healer suddenly spamming holy when you start popping TBN? Or when you pop any tank invuln? Most healers / tank interactions can boil down to whether or not you know if the other is going to use their own tools that will negate yours in effect.

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Originally Posted by Flowerscody2

Abyssal drain hardly heals enough to worry about it. That drk was just being whiny.

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Abyssal drain on 4 or more enemies is basically a benediction

Hardly nothing

I'm glad people pointed out that I took a narrow view and that the system I'm proposing would be of greater benefit if it applied to all major cooldowns, quite possibly including two minute ones.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I can see where this is coming from but this goes beyond that this. What about the healer suddenly spamming holy when you start popping TBN? Or when you pop any tank invuln? Most healers / tank interactions can boil down to whether or not you know if the other is going to use their own tools that will negate yours in effect.

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As regards this, I've long been an advocate of decoupling Holy and it's stun though not for this reason specifically, I want to be able to choose when I stun the pack and it would benefit DRKs too. In terms of invulns, I've never had an issue with them, I've had a couple of oopsies here and there where invuln and benediction have gone out at the same time but that's life, I find invulns are sufficiently well telegraphed with their icon being at the top of the list.

Well if it includes Abyssal Drain, it needs to at least work for all 60s or longer CDs, right?

What about 25s CDs like Warrior's Unga Bunga healing? That heals the same or more than Abyssal, so we'd also need to see that, right?

(that is to say, how do you make it so that you don't see 10+ icons with CDs over every person in every group?)

My immediate solution is to have a UI element, akin to the buffs/debuffs ones we already have, detached from the party list that has options - be that in the HUD Layout menu or in the Character UI menu - for players to select which types/categories or perhaps even individual cooldowns they want to appear in said element. One could also have the option to set it to show these indicators when the abilities are on or off cooldown, with a timer for those on cooldown. I could possibly see it being abused by people who set it to show things like Ninja's one minute attack and berate people for not doing their rotations properly but I believe that conduct is appropriately covered in the ToS.

The biggest issue I see with this idea is in 8-man parties where you might have two players with the same job and there's a lack of clarity regarding who has what available, that could be aided by labelling duplicate icons with the corresponding player number in the party list.

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Originally Posted by Flowerscody2

Abyssal drain hardly heals enough to worry about it. That drk was just being whiny.

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It's like 50+% of our HP in trash...

And generally the larger heal will wait for the smaller. Why pop a Bene at 40% still left?

And if we wanted a fix for that lost opportunity for coordination, then we'd likely have to introduce a ping system. "Ready/Almost Ready/Recharging/Just Used: {Skill, not thereby activating it}" (all one ping command, contextual with what you hit next). And perhaps the ability to track certain among party members' CDs, with perhaps a pinged Request Skill command (Ping option → ally via radial selector → skill via radial selector). Or, heck, even give the option to merge the two, using the first if selecting self and the second if selecting someone else.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

And if we wanted a fix for that lost opportunity for coordination

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... yeah exactly, then we could just talk to each other. It's wild that in an MMORPG, players absolutely refuse to do even the least bit of socializing, such as "Hey, always use your Abyssal on a trash pack when you are like <50%, I'll use Bene the second time you get low" or so.

A ping system can be good, but more in games that explicitly don't want to or cannot socialize, not comparatively glacial-paced games like this one.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Abyssal drain on 4 or more enemies is basically a benediction

Hardly nothing

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Ok Ill be honest I forgot they buffed the heal on abysssl drain in DT, but I still think communicating when its off CD is overkill. As healer I have more than enough ogcds to keep the tank alive even if they never use abyssal drain at all. A single full-heal during a trash pack is nice and all but not something to worry about enough that we need to coordinate with the tank for. If they pop it at a good time then great - If they pop it the same time you use a heal then... meh nbd

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Originally Posted by Carighan

... yeah exactly, then we could just talk to each other. It's wild that in an MMORPG, players absolutely refuse to do even the least bit of socializing, such as "Hey, always use your Abyssal on a trash pack when you are like <50%, I'll use Bene the second time you get low" or so.

A ping system can be good, but more in games that explicitly don't want to or cannot socialize, not comparatively glacial-paced games like this one.

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It's not so glacially paced that one can type complex sentences within oGCD gaps. There is absolutely a place for pings even in more social games...

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Abyssal drain on 4 or more enemies is basically a benediction

Hardly nothing

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Ehh, the "or more" is covering a lot of the ground there. Per target, its 500 tank cure potency, or ~395 healer cure potency. On 4, it's 1.3% less than 2 Cure IIs.

Tl;dr: It's about 10% of tank HP per hit. You'd need 10 for a technical Bene, 7-9 for "functionally a Bene".

But yes, that's hardly nothing, especially since W2Ws will usually have said 7+ enemies.

"Did you die?"

If they complain more then block and ignore. Their fundamental complaint boils down to "I was going to make your job easier but you did your job exceptionally well and didn't need it."

Go figure there's a tank complaining a healer is undermining their role. This is a nothingburger of a complaint and you did NOTHING wrong.

Edit: Before I get accused of ignoring the problem, the is a problem solved not by mechanics but by communication. You could use this example for so many buttons, invulns especially. You could reverse this too. All we'd be doing is mechanically removing more need to communicate with teammates.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

Several times I've been told "I was going to use Abyssal Drain and then you bene-d me"

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At some level, I feel like this is a story of:

Healer: *does their job* :cool:
Tank: I was going to do your job for you. :mad::confused:

Maybe the simplest solution is simply to remove a tank's ability to completely restore their HP bar in one fell swoop in AoE situations?

I'd say its a bigger issue with Living Dead than Abyssal Drain.

Given Living Dead is typically used in more last resort scenarios and keeping it from poping can cause wipes.

Certainly, removing tank's ability to full heal is the simplest option, the preferred option even. I've just come to accept that it's never going to happen so the next best thing is to facilitate planning around that full healing capability.

This wouldn't even be an issue if Abyssal Drain created a Barrier instead of restoring raw health. That would allow a DRK to use it at the beginning of a pull for DPS and have a clear indicator on their health bar for the healer to see. Just let the barrier restore up to half it's original barrier amount if any is left when it times out after like 10-15 seconds and get eaten by damage secondary to TBN.

I'm of the opinion tho that all Tank sustain should be barriers and steady regens while raw healing output should be firmly in the domain of healers. Tanks should have interesting things like their invulns being removed as a single long cast cool down and instead be reworked into their basic action economy. Imagine if Dark stored Blood Gauge to Trigger their Walking Dead state allowing them to fight for a few GCDs without dropping past 1 HP with healing attached to their actions. This would work with their barriers well and give healers a clear indication for when it's time to heal without any messy overlap of who is responsible for bursting their health to full. The tanks avoids death by using hp barriers and well timed Invuln GCD's and Healers restore massive health deficits like common sense would lead you to believe they are both capable of.

Why is ease or the removal of decisions necessarily better?

Yes, we could make it so AD gives a barrier so it'd never be delayed, but then... what's so awful about the ability to delay mit CDs slightly to weave in AD a bit sooner?

Moreover, unless there's a serious risk of the barrier not getting full use before it's duration ends, it's still just healing that thereby doesn't need to done identically to a heal except without any possible fail-state or reason to be aware of contexts.

Similarly, while stored blood gauge that could act as an invuln sounds interesting on paper, as long as its generation is merely routine, you'd have just made it passive. "Die" and you consume gauge per second instead of actually dying. I suppose the cheese of letting someone drop nearly to 1 HP before a big hit you effectively 100% mitigate from having nothing left to lose before healing back up to consume as little gauge as possible, or the like, could be interesting enough, but what little point there is to invulns is that they have to be used decently sparingly and deliberately per tank. Passively "triggered" resource spending as invulns and "Invuln GCDs" are not that, and I suspect it'd actually be a net loss to gameplay outside of almost absurdly perfect handling (of their redesigns).

Having taken a bit to think it over, I think going down the shield route for AD but I'm a bit dubious about LD as a gauge spender. To the question of "Why is ease or the removal of decisions necessarily better?", for me it's about aiding cooperation and reducing waste in a world where tanks are increasingly self sufficient. In my mind, this thread is and was never about removing anything or about dumbing things down, it's just about aiding coordination of resources.

This is a problem born from tanks and healers overlapping too much. Healers have big heals and want to hold them until the tank is low on HP to avoid overheal. Tanks have big heals and want to hold them until the tank is low HP to avoid heal. The result is that tanks and healers want to use their heals at the same time, and because healing power is so excessive someone's heal is going to be wasted. My preferred solution would be to remove tank healing so that heals fall under the domain of the healer. Proper synergistic class design removes the problem entirely. An indicator might also work but it's not something that I would want to see in game. It's a bit too close to having the game spelling out when you should do X or Y, which already happens too much.

HOnestly its a communication error, 99% of the healrs i get in normal content or even harder ocntent. They can adjust their healing around how bady the tank needs it. Tank using a couple cooldowns then a full heal after getting to 20%. they can divert more resources on the party or save a "OH SHIT" button for that oh shit moment. Could go a step further and make a macro that says "Hey i'm using TBN <or the tnak invul here> let it break first>. think abyussal was bad, try having a delayed hallowed grounds or superbolide that brought yo uto 1 hp and took a second before it applied.