Fixing Tank's Invulnerability Abilities Thread

[Lyth]

I've posted this in the Living Dead discussion thread as well, but there are some fairly big discrepancies when it comes to tank invulns. This is pretty important, because the invulns shared between your chosen tank duo dictate how easily you can trivialise tankbusters in a fight. This was true for the past two expansions as well, but Shadowbringers makes it that much more obvious.

The easiest comparison is between Hallowed Ground and Superbolide. They're identical, except that Superbolide has a 2 second shorter duration and also comes with a penalty that reduces your HP to 1. Setting side the obvious risk in which you fatfinger the cooldown and send your healer into a panic, it just doesn't offer anything that Hallowed doesn't. Even if this was set at a 6 minute recast, I don't think that it would be worth the penalty over Hallowed. Both Xeno and Merri mention that Yoshi-p thinks that Hallowed is too powerful, but is afraid to nerf it because it might make people upset. Personally, I think that's their fear of "upsetting people" is why they keep putting out progressively worse iterations of tank balance.

Holmgang and Living Dead is another fairly obvious comparison. The most obvious point is number of uses per fight. Holmgang gives you double the number of uses per fight over Hallowed and Superbolide. That means that you can cheese double the number of tankbusters. Living Dead is somewhere in no-man's land as far as recasts go, where it sometimes gives you an extra use, and sometimes doesn't.

It used to be that the main drawback of Holmgang was that it required a target (sometimes you have an untargetable boss) and that it rooted you in place. That's gone now. Holmgang is the only one of the old tank invulns to get a rework, despite the fact that it was already the single most powerful invuln in the game. It no longer roots you in place, just your enemy. The description also seems to suggest that selecting a target is optional. Meanwhile, Living Dead's penalty remains the same, and still is probably the single least liked and least intuitive abilities in the game.

Even if you felt that the instant death penalty on Living Dead was warranted (it isn't, and it makes even less sense now than ever given how little burst healing DRK has to offer), the implementation is terrible. I've gone over them at length, months ago:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Considerations
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ns-Tank-Forums

It's also obvious that this is an ability that a lot of people take issue with:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...d-not-removed?
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...r-s-nightmare.
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ead-QoL-Change
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Dead-QoL-buff
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-a-little-more
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ion-Discussion
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ng-Dead-in-3.2
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ead-suggestion
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ed-Living-dead
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...rovement-ideas
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...and-suggestion
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Dead-feedback
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Sole-Survivor

I'm also pretty sure that I explicitly flagged the issue in the feedback thread that the dev team supposedly translated and reviewed, prior to the proposed DRK reworks:
Dark Knight Feedback Thread

And this is just looking at direct Living Dead feedback. I can't even begin to mention how many times it came up in the middle of other discussions as well. What was that? Ignore four years of negative feedback on the ability and buff Holmgang instead? Good idea. Wouldn't want all those WARs cancelling pre-orders on you. They definitely wanted that Dark Knight statue. I mean, you do get that odd WAR who claims that Living Dead is fine. But then let them take the instant death penalty. They're the ones with all the self-healing buffs. That way they can actually put the new Thrill of Battle buff to good use.

It's kind of impressive that Xeno had to actually point out to Yoshi-p that Holmgang was more powerful than even Hallowed. I mean, what ability did you think was trivialising your tankbuster design? Genius. And he's afraid of nerfing Hallowed because of the potential backlash? You might as well forget ever seeing any sort of parity on Holmgang, then. If he's afraid of even the PLD community, there's no way that he's going to take on WAR mains.

I've said this before, but I'll settle for them just fixing Superbolide (and Camouflage) at this point, because I have little to no faith in their ability to balance or even respond to feedback on older skills, especially given what we've seen in the Stormblood media tour. If Shadowbringers has anything in common with Stormblood, the DRK tooltips are going to look even worse after we get the final versions of these actions. GBR looks like something that I'd like to play if they'd just fix the personal cooldown suite.

I've said it before: this is the problem with partial homogenization. Tanks get picked based on the differences between abilities, not their similarities. I found it hilarious that even looking at the 30% cooldowns, despite making them nearly identical, they couldn't resist making Vengeance better by keeping in the damage reflect. If you make the tanks nearly identical, it's these supposedly "small" differences that lead to large variations in pick rates.