DRK's Over-reliance on WHM: Are we Dead or Alive?

[Kabooa]

Living Dead
Recast: 300
Effect: Summon a shadowy Simulacrum with health equal to your maximum health for 10 seconds. While active, attacks that hit you strike the Simulacrum instead. When the Simulcrum's health is reduced to 0, it is removed from the field.

[Marxam]

Living Dead
Recast: 300
Effect: Summon a shadowy Simulacrum with health equal to your maximum health for 10 seconds. While active, attacks that hit you strike the Simulacrum instead. When the Simulcrum's health is reduced to 0, it is removed from the field.

I like this idea but it falls short in multi-hitting tank busters/mechanics and cheese strats where the point is to out last the mechanic. The possibility of loosing the clone on the first hit and dying to the second hit could be its biggest downfall. Maybe change it so that the clone has a higher percentage based of your hp (ex. 150% HP) but takes 90% of the dmg and you take 10%? It kinda fits lore-wise harnessing your life energy but still being tied to it. They can even re-use the DA animation, which defined DRK for me in 3.0 and 4.0.

[Kabooa]

I like this idea but it falls short in multi-hitting tank busters/mechanics and cheese strats where the point is to out last the mechanic. The possibility of loosing the clone on the first hit and dying to the second hit could be its biggest downfall. Maybe change it so that the clone has a higher percentage based of your hp (ex. 150% HP) but takes 90% of the dmg and you take 10%? It kinda fits lore-wise harnessing your life energy but still being tied to it. They can even re-use the DA animation, which defined DRK for me in 3.0 and 4.0.

Having it come in at 150% health should let it handle most cheese mechanics - Survive the first hit, get blown up on the second. I think the only one that might cause problems is long 4 hit ones, but I think only...Titan has that this tier?

People would start using that as a DPS tool instead of an oh shit button. It would be popped on CD so that healers could maximize their DPS output during its window.

I sincerely doubt this. You're going to lose more down the line by using it this way than by using it to mitigate damage that takes more than HoTs to heal.

[Absimiliard]

I sincerely doubt this. You're going to lose more down the line by using it this way than by using it to mitigate damage that takes more than HoTs to heal.

Not really. TBN + literally any other mitigation cooldown DRK has already trivializes even the strongest of tankbusters. TBN has much the same effect on wall to wall pulls. If used wisely - with proper mitigation CD staggering - you are about as close to immortal as you can possibly get without being a paladin. Nothing would be lost at all by abusing the suggested mechanic to let healers get in more DPS unless there's some kind of unforeseen major screw up that makes you absolutely need your duplicate just to stay alive. Thing is, it's probably already a wipe if things have gone down hill far enough to force the tank to use its trump card as an actual emergency cooldown rather than the convenience we generally treat them as..

What about this:

Living Dead (360s CD):
Grants the effect of Living Dead. When HP is reduced to 0 while under the effect of Living Dead, instead of becoming KO'd, your status will change to Walking Dead.
Living Dead Duration: 10s
While under the effect of Walking Dead, most damage done to you will heal you instead of dealing damage. You cannot be healed higher than 50% of your maximum health while under the Walking Dead effect.
Walking Dead Duration: 8s

This potential solution would do several things:
1) It would play on the concept of a Dark Knight feasting on the souls of its enemies.
2) This solution completely removes healing requirements from the skill. Healers would only need to heal the tank back after the immunity ends.
3) This solution makes Living Dead usable in solo content and significantly better in 4-man content.
4) The reason for the decreased Walking Dead duration, increased CD to 360 sec, and limitation on how much healing you could receive is to balance out this skill. The Walking Dead effect in this version is MUCH better than the current version, and IMO the skill would need these other limiters to keep it from being better than other tank immunities.

Dark Knights don't eat souls. Even souleater, despite its name, is not in any way affecting the opponent's soul. The closest they get is ripping out a small amount of their opponent's aether to heal themselves. Despite how some abilities are named, the job sadly has no actual ties to the abyss. They are simply drawing on their own inner darkness to perform the feats we see.

The cooldown is probably too long for the benefit. Its shortened duration coupled with the lengthy cooldown would make it less desirable for cheesing mechanics than the existing version of Living Dead. Likewise, converting most incoming damage into healing, while very interesting, would pose a massive number of issues for the balance of the game.

I would propose instead that Living Dead instead operates exactly as it does now except for one major change: baked in healing. We take the existing Living Dead - or Walking Dead buff, specifically - and add to it an addendum which states that healing from all sources is increased by 50% for its duration. A secondary effect of this would be an additional 100% (stacking with the initial 50%) increase to all self-generated healing from job actions.
(Note: 150% increased self-healing still isn't enough for a DRK to fully heal itself in the span of the Walking Dead window. That's just a placeholder number. I am uncertain as to the exact percentage increase we would need to make this feasible.)

[Kabooa]

Not really. TBN + literally any other mitigation cooldown DRK has already trivializes even the strongest of tankbusters.

Except those pesky 300% Vulnerabilities that 3/4 of the current tier uses.

Invulning saves more healing than splitting these.

[Absimiliard]

Except those pesky 300% Vulnerabilities that 3/4 of the current tier uses.

Invulning saves more healing than splitting these.

People would obviously save it for those rare instances where they would have to be the ones cheesing a mechanic. This will not stop them from using it to get more damage out in virtually all other circumstances.

[Kabooa]

People would obviously save it for those rare instances where they would have to be the ones cheesing a mechanic. This will not stop them from using it to get more damage damage out in virtually all other circumstances.

So...regular dungeons?

[Absimiliard]

Living Dead
Recast: 300
Effect: Summon a shadowy Simulacrum with health equal to your maximum health for 10 seconds. While active, attacks that hit you strike the Simulacrum instead. When the Simulcrum's health is reduced to 0, it is removed from the field.

People would start using that as a DPS tool instead of an oh shit button. It would be popped on CD so that healers could maximize their DPS output during its window. That being said, I actually quite like the idea of it. It would effectively be a tank immunity that sees use as something OTHER than a last resort/cheese button while at the same time being just as effective as everyone else's tools. Would probably need more than 100%, though. Like maybe give it 100% of your HP plus the equivalent of a full TBN.

One thing I would say, however, is that you might be better served to call it Dark Simulacrum. Living Dead makes it sound more like you're reanimating a nearby corpse (which, granted, would be awesome) to fight for you for however long it lasts.