Changing the Dark Knight's Living Dead to something more palatable

[Absimiliard]

I think it's fair to say that the chief problem with Living Dead is your complete reliance on someone else to save your ass from your own ability. Even Superbolide doesn't assure your death, as GNB can heal itself back up fairly efficiently over the course of the ability. The amount of coordination required to be able to employ the ability without ending up dead for your trouble is beyond what is possible in 90% of pugs, making the ability virtually useless outside of premades. Additionally, it is the only tank immunity that can't be used to save one's behind when flying solo. DRK has no way of healing itself back up in time to get away with having used it unless they're lucky enough to have an absurd number of mobs nearby to nail with Abyssal Drain.

[Lyth]

If anyone else has anything else to add to this issue, I've compiled a list of points here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5098921

Let me know if I'm missing something.

[ashwich]

If anyone else has anything else to add to this issue, I've compiled a list of points here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5098921

Let me know if I'm missing something.

Thanks for doing this. To add to sort of a side point on the healer feedback, if anyone's like me who turns off target debuffs that's not mine (thanks alliance raid etc etc), they won't see the Walking Dead debuff on the tank. The only way to realistically track the walking dead timer is to put them on focus, or turn the debuffs back on.

I think the healer resource cost to recover from WD is a 5.0 design oversight honestly. I'm hopeful they'll do something to improve this.

[Adegx]

The only thing I would add is that for any UNPLANNED LD its already very likely your healer has already spent all/most of their resources including bene before it got to the point of needing LD. Outside of planned raid tactics good tanks dont pop LD until well after the healer is struggling. Which means any half alert healer has already begun spending cooldowns.

Even a WHM will struggle significantly to heal an "emergency LD"

Also for those rare occasions when it matters could we please have Walking dead drop off if you exit combat. Nothing like dropping dead between pulls.

[TouchandFeel]

I wish I could remember whom posted it so that I could give credit to them but one suggestion I saw was making the Living Dead button turn into a "Walking Dead" button once Walking Dead was triggered, that would turn off the ability. This way you can have the benefit of the not dying at a longer duration than Holmgang but you have to hit the "Walking Dead" button because if you left the skill going for the full 10 seconds then it would kill you as it does now but you'd be able to disable this once you were out of danger.

That was me in my thread here.

It was intended to be as barebones of a suggestion as I could think of, where as little as possible was changed with Living Dead since Yoshi-P has expressed reluctance to change the ability due to it conveying "job identity".

I actually added an update to my suggestions for TBN that is similar to this suggestion for Living Dead, basically allowing DRKs to press TBN again while the shield was active to force it to break, therefore giving them the chance of avoiding not getting the DA proc. Sort of a conceptual safety-net for the ability.

[Sancho_Nyanta]

Thank you. I actually really liked that idea of giving Living Dead that kind of button interaction where you control it. Personally I've never really minded that the skill would kill me as much as how much it required my healers to use so that they could save me.

As far as TBN, if they gave it something like that then they'd probably have to increase the CD timer to compensate the guaranteed activation. If they just gave it 2-3 more seconds on its duration then that would fix all of its problems IMHO. I mean you'd still have crazy people saying that it needs to be a DPS gain but this would make it always be a Defensive gain while staying a DPS neutral unless you throw it up right before a boss leaves the area.

[Lyth]

I added in the point about Convalescence's removal in Shadowbringers and its impact on cleansing Walking Dead, which I had forgotten to mention earlier.

Personally, what I'd like to see is:
Living Dead: Most attacks cannot reduce HP below 1 for next 10 seconds. If this effect is triggered, your status is changed from Living Dead to Walking Dead.
Walking Dead: Impervious to most attacks and cannot be the target of healing spells for the next 10 seconds. Absorb damage dealt as HP.
Recast 6 minutes.

This would put you at a disadvantage if there were no mobs that you could target when the effect triggers. But it makes the ability self-explanatory and more importantly, shifts the burden of managing the cooldown off of the healer and back on to the tank.