Living Dead

[Phoenicia]

So recast isn't a penalty but holmgang's recast makes it too strong? Get your story straight.

All the tank invulns have benefits and drawbacks to them.

You say that, and then you say this:

while sharing the 1hp drawback with holmgang while adding the healer requirement/death penalty on top of that.

So you want others to consider Recast as a penalty, then LD would have Holmgang's "penalty" of dropping to 1 HP, Hallowed Ground's "penalty" or being only usable once/twice in an encounter AND have the heal requirement/death penalty on top? Lyth already did a very good job explaining how this "extended duration" you're penalizing me for isn't even in my hand nor does it ever get as long as Holmgang (as I probably also did in another post, probably on another thread).

I mean... If WAR having its invulnerability matching 2 of the PLD's, and until 4.4, 1 of DRK's, regular CDs doesn't stroke you the wrong way, I don't know what will.

While I don't think simply taking Holmgang and pushing it's CD to 5 minutes is the best way to fix it. I'd rather they split the root effect on a separate CD and give WAR another mitigative crutch (#FreeInnerBeastFromDefiance) to lean on instead of how it heavily relies on hg, I still believe Holmgang truly is what needs to be fixed to tone WAR a bit down. The only other ability I can think of that is as overpowered as Holmgang is Trick Attack.

Regardless, I hate discussing WAR on non-WAR topics, I'd rather we get back to LD. The simple truth is, LD doesn't have the CD of Hallowed, nor the "restrictions" of Holmgang, yet it manages to be worse than both. And thematically does NOT fit "DARK" knights. More often than not, I find myself looking for an alternative ability to replace it entirely instead of fixing a way to remove its penalty.

After all, it is VERY annoying to see my static's WHM (of all the healers) getting disgruntled when I use DRK (my main) over PLD (the more convenient tank) all because of 1 ability. Even when out of said ability, DRK's personal mitigation out-mitigates PLD and WAR on 3 out of 4 fights, if not all, this tier.

[Derio]

DRK is the only tank where the healer has to be on their toes after you use your invulnerability move. I have had my fair runs where the healer fell a few thousand HP short of healing me to die to LD.

I hope DRK rework fixes LD. The other tank invuls have a huge advantage over LD.

[ElazulHP]

I didn't realize while leveling DRK how much I would end up hating this skill. I end up dead almost 100% of the time I use it with randoms so I just removed it from my bar lol...

[Canadane]

I think a lot of the time people use it when it's not planned to use it.
Hallowed Ground, Holmgang, and Living Dead all benefit from planned use rather than an emergency failsafe button.
This is why there's a delay on all of their activation. Same delay Benediction has. It's part of the defensive cooldown rotation, not used in emergencies only.

[Gemina]

I can count with the fingers on one hand the amount of times I've died to walking dead because I did not receive healing. I can even remember the specific instances that it has happened. Two of the occasions I died to it didn't even happen in battle, but because WD was still active after the fight/pull was over and tick-tock-tick-tock-dead. It's actually kind of hilarious because the healers were always all, "WTF!?" However, the amount of times it has saved my tail FAR outweighs this little mishap. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've been left alone to eat a stack marker in PUGs. It's ridiculous.

I'm not saying it is a perfect skill by any means, but I don't share the frustration I am reading in a lot of the posts here. If I was to change anything about it, I would give it the shortest cooldown of all the invul skills because of the potential for WD to not even get triggered. WD status doesn't change the fact that you were dead anyway had you not used LD.

As a healer main, I will never, ever buy into the excuse of forgoing the responsibility to heal the damn tank, ESPECIALLY in favor of getting a few more GCDs in to deal damage. They need to be paying attention to the status bars and the fact that a tank is sitting at 1hp for several seconds. They don't need to understand how LD/WD works, they only need to understand that tunnel visioning will almost always lead to a tank death. If a DRK dies to WD it is on the healer for not paying attention. Period.

[Mansion]

DRK is the only tank where the healer has to be on their toes after you use your invulnerability move. I have had my fair runs where the healer fell a few thousand HP short of healing me to die to LD.

I hope DRK rework fixes LD. The other tank invuls have a huge advantage over LD.

Well. Holmgang bringing you to 1HP does expire after some time, so if there is an auto-attack coming after you'll be happy to get some healing too. And the healers have 6 seconds to react.

The only "bad" thing about Living Dead is the 100% healing requirement. If it wasn't there, Living dead would just be a looser version of Holmgang where you can move, but you'll still need some form of healing after it.

[Lyth]

...

I think there are multiple factors at work here.

The implementation of Living Dead is terrible. You're reliant on another player to survive the use of the ability. You're also reliant on the fact that, despite playing a different job, said player came in understanding how the ability works. The English tooltips are flat out wrong and unreliable. The devs reworked the entire UI system in Stormblood so that buff timers and effects were more explicit, but yet we still don't have any sort of HP bar visual cues that show that the effect is active or how much remaining healing is required. Your healers often are forced to expend their own cooldowns, either to save you, or to gain the full effect out of Living Dead.

And all these things could be worth it. Just maybe. If Living Dead provided some sort of unique advantage or benefit over the other two invulns to offset all this, you could try to overlook these things. Yet, it's the single worst cooldown out of the three.

Living Dead gets ignored for four years, without any attempts to fix the ability's multiple problems or even an acknowledgement that they exist, despite complaint after complaint from the community. I think that half of all DRK feedback threads take issue with the ability in some form or the other. WAR mains complain about how crit reliance makes their FFlogs look less pretty? Instant fix. You can see why we'd be annoyed.

[Gemina]

I think there are multiple factors at work here.

Agreed, but I believe the factors I see are different from your own.

The healer that suffers the most from using resources to patch up WD is SCH. And this is because their strongest healing comes via aetherflow and it is a limited resource unlike GCDs. However, as SCH I've never had any trouble dealing with WD simply by using Emergency Tactics along with Adlo and letting Lily take care of the rest. This can be further assisted with Rouse prior to getting Aetherpact @70, but once SCH has it, it is the only resource that uses up the fairy gauge. It is maximum HP that needs to be restored, and not healing the DRK to full. As WHM or AST, WD is hardly an inconvenience at all. Again, I will never buy into the excuse of healers having to perform their primary function during duties.

LD/WD does not change at all that tanks are reliant on healers to survive an encounter. This is honestly a very poor excuse at saying it is poorly implemented. ALL tanks need to be healed, or they will drop. If you die to WD, you were dead anyway because your healer tunnel visioned. It really is as simple as that. They don't need to read or even understand DRKs tooltips when it comes to LD/WD. They only need to know that their tank is about to die if they don't heal them; LD/WD actually buys them a little more time to get this done if it indeed does get to the implied emergency scenario.

Hallowed Ground is very strong, with only the extremely long CD as its weakness. Holmgang doesn't require as much healing as LD/WD but requires a target and bind, making it far more effective on bosses than on trash. These are VERY distinctive disadvantages in my book that DRK does not share with its invuln skill. DRKs invul is on a shorter CD than Hallowed Ground, and is equally effective on bosses and trash unlike Holmgang. I can't speak for other DRKs out there, but I'm not complaining about it. Again, I am not saying it is a perfect at all, but its reliance on a healer to do what they should be doing anyway isn't even what I would call a "disadvantage".

To expand on what I would change about it, I would actually have a reduced CD if WD does not trigger. I was going to say a full on reset, but that would be too much. In it's current state without a healing requirement, it becomes a better Hallowed Ground and a better Holmgang. Is that what you really want?

[TouchandFeel]

snip

I would disagree and say that Holmgang is at least as effective in large trash pulls as Living Dead, you just need to use and time it appropriately.

Basically you can use it by not popping any defensives, letting your HP get really low and then popping Holmgang, maximizing the up-time and effect of Holmgang. You then immediately follow up with a bunch of self-heals like Equilibrium and your normal IR+Steel Cyclone spam and you should get yourself pretty much back to full health by yourself, no outside healing needed. It's super effective and the only potential difficulty is syncing up with your healer so that they don't freak out when you let your health drop so low.
Basically, used effectively Holmgang can be a short-term period of invulnerability and a place for the over-healing from IR+Cyclone spam to be put to use. It's especially useful if you need to reapply Storm's Eye at the beginning of a big pull as it buys you the time to do that and then go into IR+Cyclone.

Now you can do the same thing with Living Dead as with Holmgang and it is mostly the same asides from two major differences.
First is that you have a bit more of a pre-cast cushion because of the auto-trigger when you hit 1 hp, which makes it require less precise timing than Holmgang.
Second and most importantly, DRK doesn't have the self-heal capabilities to pull themselves back from the 1hp brink effectively like WAR does and the healing requirement just exacerbates the issue by instilling a hard penalty of death on something that you can't overcome by yourself. While you are likely to receive healing after using Holmgang or Living Dead, DRK doesn't have the self-reliability of WAR to pull off things like what I outlined above for using Holmgang in mass pulls.

When you look at the two abilities in an isolated fashion, yeah they can seem fairly comparable, but when you take into account the way the rest of the jobs' kits and how they interact with Holmgang and Living Dead, LD's limitations and awkwardness really show.

I wouldn't suggest altering the recast time for Living Dead since it is balanced with the rest of DRK's defensive kit, but the way it works definitely needs to be changed.

[Gula]

So um, when should I use Living Dead? There's a lot of mixed messages in this thread.