Living Dead

[Chrono_Rising]

All of what you just said about swapping after a holmgang is completly dependant of the fight and assume that the WAR will take absolutly no damage in any way for an extended period of time.

Ok, I’m not sure what you are trying to refute as:

Option 2, tank swap after invulning or stop taking damage through other means (like cover). If you tank swap you can probably lower your healing requirement to something like an oGCD and regen, depending on mechanics following after, the healing requirement may be reducible to a regen and fairy heals (12 to 15 seconds should be about half your HP without other healing).

I admit this right in my analysis.

oGCD heal and regen is likely enough to get you through most damage, and works in 3 out of 4 turns this tier. Yes, it takes some coordination, but in doing content with a cotank and healers who you know and play with, which is also common, this works. And pairing this with cover is a way to force this to happen, which works in 2 of the 4 turns. The main point here is that Living Dead doesn’t offer even similar benefits of strategy because of its strict pass fail mechanic.

You also need good party coordination. These techniques are mostly moot in PF. Being able to pull it off and take advantage of it is actually the exception, not the rule.
Anyway, if you take the possibility of encounters where you don't need to heal your WAR after a Holmgang, I can do the same for cases where strong healing is required immediatly. In which case, Living Dead is, if not better, on par with Holmgang.

I also conceeded this point, if you are going to continue tanking after homgang then you will likely have the same healing requirement as Living Dead. I’m not sure what you are trying to refute as I admitted this right in my analysis. Also, sure to use things effectively it requires skill. Thats not an argument against the skill, it just means it has a higher skill ceiling for using even more effectively. And of course you can engineer situations which having 10 seconds of invuln is better than having 6. We haven’t seen nearly as much requiring long invulns, but they do come in handy in o8s.

Also, it's extremely frequent when a WHM is in the team to use Benediction after a Holmgang/LD. If bene is used, it actually doesn't matter if the tank is a WAR or a DRK. In fact, it's easier to bene a DRK under LD than a WAR under Holmgang, as the timing window is way shorter for a WAR. More on that below.
And when it comes to AST, they might be forced to use more tools and GCD to heal a DRK (Essential Dignity + Synastry + Benefic II. Bonus points if Convalescence is used), but the effort required to heal both tanks doesn't varies that much in the end.

I wouldn’t say extremely frequent, but given there are two healer spaces and 3 healers more parties have a whm than don’t I suppose. I really don’t think the window matters when it comes to benediction as far as who is “easier” to press a 100% heal on.

As far as the Ast heal plan you have you are still short about 20k without conva and 8k with conva on the dark knight baring a crit, in which case the warrior will survive this argument, if there is time for one more heal the dark knight will as well, but if you waited until 3 seconds were left on living dead the dark knight is dead in this example. Since in that example you need two GCD heals still from 1 healer that means you need to have started healing 5 seconds in advance of the 9 second cutoff for the debuff so we are down to 4 seconds of no healer intervention. A second healer can make it so you start this process later of course.

Still, my point remains relevant: healer intervention is usually required in both cases. And the difference in ressources needed to deal with a Holmgang or a Living Dead is actually not that big of a deal. At least, no way near as some people in this thread said.

I’m not sure when I disagreed with this.

Ok, lets be clear, a tank at 1 HP will need to be healed, which means healer intervention since no tank does self healing in a great way, my main point is the degree of healer intervention varies greatly depending on your strategy.

My point was that Holmgang has a variety of way in which you can pass the mechanic, and you have freedom of choice and strategy depending on what is happening. You don’t have that on dark knight. You must pass the healing requirement within the prescribed time or the dark knight dies.

The automatic proc guarantees the full duration of the 10 seconds "1hp" state no matter what happens.

Using your own ast plan for healing: Essential (crit) => synergy=> Benefict 2 (crit) debuff wears off. This will avoid the full ten seconds. The full duration isn’t set in stone.

Another example: plan to die to accumulated damage, pop living so walking is up for tank buster, healer panics sends heals, walking dead doesn’t trigger, Living Dead wears off, tank buster one shots us. Did the plan work? Sure it wasn’t your fault and it would have worked, but its no longer up to you once you put the plan in motion. Again, the full duration isn’t set in stone.

This is not something you have with Holmgang, which usually means that Holmgang will be effective for something like 5 or 4 seconds only. Or even less if the WAR has a tendency of pressing the button too early.

Popping buttons too early is in the war’s power to change as well. That is a key difference. And as I pointed out, if we have one healer dealing with healing off the walking dead debuff we also have close to the same amount of time to heal up the dark knight, using two healers can get closer to the max time. Regardless 90% of tank busters only need it to work for 1 hit. Yes, be mindful of when heals must go out, but thats like a mantra that should be engraved on every healing crystal.

Living Dead is much more stable and the outcome will always be predictable, meaning that the healer have full control on its timings. When it comes to Holmgang, that's not the case. The WAR plays a big role in how much time they'll give to their healers.

See above. It is as predictable as anything involving other people is, its not nearly as stable as you are making it out to be. You are overstating the reliability of Living Dead, to try and fight those overstating the healing requirement around holmgang. Having progressed through 4 tiers with 9 healers on dark knight I have seen many ways this skill can go wrong, even when people understand the skill and the strategy. Every invuln is susceptible to human error.

I like the fact that you took Neo Exdeath as an example, it's probably one of the lastest end game content where this difference is the most obvious. With Holmgang, your timing needs to be perfect. Even more so during the delta followed by a random laser that you need to avoid, which can be problematic because of the root. The chance for mistakes is quite high. With Living Dead, the chance of messing up is almost zero thanks to that safety cushion.

Living dead also has issues with thunder since healers may also need to dodge, which brings us into the early movement/removing walking dead debuff from pre-healing the debuff off. It was particularly bad for the second thunder buster. And if you had to time your LD for the thunder then you needed to pop it early on the first one, and if you popped it too early you would need to die to start the walking debuff and keep your invuln, which was possible provided you were not getting healed during that time. Be slightly late in use and it wasn't up when you needed it. Again, all skills have human error.

If suddendly Living Dead didn't had that automatic proc thingy, it's ease of use would drastically drop, both for the DRK who would now have to time it right, and the healers who would have less time to heal.
It's not only about being able to capitalize on LD, it's about how stable, convenient and predictable it makes this ability. Holmgang is pretty much the complete opposite in that regards, not even talking about the root.

Saying that it's not valuable is absurd. Reducing the possibilities for mistakes is something highly valuable in end game raid environment. The 10s safety cushion provides exactly that.

As I’ve pointed out, there are still errors that can happen, the cushion is not a panacea. Your points mainly lay on human error factors, the point is human error still impacts living dead. Again, most of the cushion value is in time management. And we are drastically overstating the difficulty of popping a cooldown at the last second to get additional benefits. For example holding Hallowed to catch two busters in o8s by popping it later in the cast, it is not particularly difficult.