Possible issue: Disparity with Living Dead and tank max HP

[YojimboM]

It seems now, with tanks having even greater HP pools in comparison to the amount of healing a healer can do on average, that Living Dead sometimes becomes unhealable.

I started to notice this when leveling in duty finder at the start of the expansion. A lot of the time if I used LD and Walking Dead proced, I would just die. Some of the time it was due to healers simply not knowing what it was, but other times a healer would be spamming heals on me and still couldn't meet the healing amount required. It seems particularly hard on Scholar for most of the leveling process since Lustrate is about all they have if Excog/Recitation isn't up, and Astrologian can also struggle too without an Essential Dignity up.

I ran Malikah's Well and Mt. Gulg a few times with a healer friend that I'd consider to be above average-good in terms of skill, they are easily capable of healing wall-to-wall pulls in any content, have experience in savage, etc. If they didn't have their oGCDs available or some sort of burst healing available, it was actually impossible for them to heal enough to keep me alive if I went Walking during a trash pull. On more than one occasion I ended up dying even with them knowing it was going to pop and immediately spamming GCD heals. They needed to at least have some form of oGCD heal available, or multiple even.

This seems to be a bit of a design issue, since tank HP has been pushed to nearly double what it was last expansion, but obviously healing hasn't increased to that level yet. In other MMOs, there were some cases I can remember of mechanics that involved healing to max HP where tanks would intentionally keep their max HP lower than it could be due to issues like these. In FFXIV, though, it is impossible to lower your max HP intentionally without using lower ilvl gear so this is unfeasible.

Hopefully the dev team is foreseeing this issue and thinking of a way to counteract it.

If someone has done the hard math on this, I would be happy for them to post it, to know if this has any consequences down the road at level cap as well.

[HumanNinjaToo]

I don't have any experience healing, and not a lot of experience with DRK. That being said, just hearing what other people are saying about this skill, and reading the tool tip, it seems very situational. It seems like this is an 'oh sh!t!' button that needs to be coordinated with the healer, which is hard to do considering the circumstances an 'oh sh!t!' button would be needed. Alternatively, it makes sense that this skill would need to be used just before a tank buster or something that you know is going to kill the DRK.

It just seems like healing to full health is difficult to do sometimes unless conditions are perfectly planned. 10 seconds isn't a lot of time to react, after all. Maybe this skill made more sense when DRK had that one heal spam skill that people say was lost/taken away in SB.

As a newish player, this skill doesn't make a lot of sense for me to use, ever. The reward does not seem to justify the risk of tank death.

[vaitepiha]

Living dead was garbage at the start and now it's even worse !
It's only useful if a White mage is ready to spell "benediction" (insta heal + full HP).
As you said, how can à healer can give you around 50 000 hp in 10sec ?
I have a macro :
p) Sole survivor on me, heal me to full hp if at 1 hp

Most of the time, it's a fail...

[HumanNinjaToo]

So if the only surefire way to heal DRK from 1 HP to Full HP is WHM benediction, then the DRK is not only reliant on a WHM being in the party, but also on said WHM to have benediction ready and not have to wait on recast. So this sounds like it has to be a perfect condition again. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like if you are expecting the DRK to take enough damage to kill it, making living dead useful, then perhaps things are not going so well in the fight and their is a big chance that WHM has already used benediction. Seems like DRK living dead requires too much pre-planning to be worth using at all.

[YojimboM]

I don't have any experience healing, and not a lot of experience with DRK. That being said, just hearing what other people are saying about this skill, and reading the tool tip, it seems very situational. It seems like this is an 'oh sh!t!' button that needs to be coordinated with the healer, which is hard to do considering the circumstances an 'oh sh!t!' button would be needed. Alternatively, it makes sense that this skill would need to be used just before a tank buster or something that you know is going to kill the DRK.

It just seems like healing to full health is difficult to do sometimes unless conditions are perfectly planned. 10 seconds isn't a lot of time to react, after all. Maybe this skill made more sense when DRK had that one heal spam skill that people say was lost/taken away in SB.

As a newish player, this skill doesn't make a lot of sense for me to use, ever. The reward does not seem to justify the risk of tank death.

There is no such thing as an "oh shit" button. It's an immunity cooldown. You use them to trivialize certain mechanics (eating a stack solo, taking multiple of an unsurvivable hit, etc) or to give healers time to do whatever they want or DPS instead of needing to heal the tank. They're really useful for dungeons because there are a lot of situations where a healer might not even have to heal you for most of a pull at all if you use them correctly. The last reason you want to use an immunity is for an "oh shit" situation because that means something went catastrophically wrong somewhere else.

Living Dead has, until recently, always been one of the better immunities since it has a very long duration (over 10 seconds of "immunity" most of the time since the healer knows they can just let you drop), it allows you to move (when Holmgang used to root you), and the condition to resolve it is something that had to be done anyways: healing (minus Hallowed Ground).

So if the only surefire way to heal DRK from 1 HP to Full HP is WHM benediction, then the DRK is not only reliant on a WHM being in the party, but also on said WHM to have benediction ready and not have to wait on recast. So this sounds like it has to be a perfect condition again. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like if you are expecting the DRK to take enough damage to kill it, making living dead useful, then perhaps things are not going so well in the fight and their is a big chance that WHM has already used benediction. Seems like DRK living dead requires too much pre-planning to be worth using at all.

No. It's healing them for the value of their maximum HP. They do not need to be healed to full HP. If they have 110k HP max, are at 1 HP, get healed for 55k, take a hit down to 30k, get healed for another 55k, that's a total of of 110k and the debuff will be removed, for example.

Anyways, the topic is whether or not there is too much disparity between GCD healing and tank max HP right now, not whether or not Living Dead should exist (it should). If you don't understand the topic, usually better to not respond. You have very little understanding of how tank immunity is used or how Living Dead works.

[Canadane]

Living Dead, much like all the tank invuln abilities, are generally planned use, not emergency use like some think they would be.
When your healers know it is coming in advance, it is much easier to react to.

[HumanNinjaToo]

There is no such thing as an "oh shit" button. It's an immunity cooldown. You use them trivial certain mechanics (eating a stack solo, taking multiple of an unsurvivable hit, etc) or to give healers time to do whatever they want or DPS instead of needing to heal the tank. They're really useful for dungeons because there are a lot of situations where a healer might not even have to heal you for most of a pull at all if you use them correctly. The last reason you want to use an immunity is for an "oh shit" situation because that means something went catastrophically wrong somewhere else.

Living Dead has, until recently, always been one of the better immunities since it has a very long duration (over 10 seconds of "immunity" most of the time since the healer knows they can just let you drop), it allows you to move (when Holmgang used to root you), and the condition to resolve it is something that had to be done anyways: healing (minus Hallowed Ground).



No. It's healing them for the value of their maximum HP. They do not need to be healed to full HP. If they have 110k HP max, are at 1 HP, get healed for 55k, take a hit down to 30k, get healed for another 55k, that's a total of of 110k and the debuff will be removed, for example.

Anyways, the topic is whether or not there is too much disparity between GCD healing and tank max HP right now, not whether or not Living Dead should exist (it should). If you don't understand the topic, usually better to not respond. You have very little understanding of how tank immunity is used or how Living Dead works.

Well if disparity is the topic at hand, then yes, disparity exists. It's the only tank invul skill that requires someone else to make it work. Pretty much the only way to make the skill work is to have a WHM in the party that is communicating well with the DRK, which pretty much rules out all usefulness of living dead with 99% of pugs. If DRK cannot self-heal through it (which it can't), and the disparity between living dead and gcd's is so great (which you've already admitted to yourself), then maybe it should not exist after all.

[vaitepiha]

No. It's healing them for the value of their maximum HP. They do not need to be healed to full HP. If they have 110k HP max, are at 1 HP, get healed for 55k, take a hit down to 30k, get healed for another 55k, that's a total of of 110k and the debuff will be removed, for example.

In DF, you'll have to find a good healer to do that in just 10 sec...
And don't be salty, Dark knight is my main since heavensward.

[vaitepiha]

No. It's healing them for the value of their maximum HP. They do not need to be healed to full HP. If they have 110k HP max, are at 1 HP, get healed for 55k, take a hit down to 30k, get healed for another 55k, that's a total of of 110k and the debuff will be removed, for example.

In DF, you'll have to find a good healer to do that in just 10 sec...
And don't be salty, Dark knight is my main since heavensward.

[Shougun]

Living Dead, much like all the tank invuln abilities, are generally planned use, not emergency use like some think they would be.
When your healers know it is coming in advance, it is much easier to react to.

I feel like this is missed a lot when people talk about trying to nerf Hallowed Ground lol. Probably have done this myself too (miss the importance of planned groups). Holmgang fine, LD sucks, Hallowed Ground needs to be nerfed even more.. and I cri XD. When the team is prepared for the skill, as you already mentioned, it can make LD pretty nice because of how it works (timer starts on "death" rather than as soon as it's pressed). The lower cooldown ultimates also being nice for planning. Hallowed Ground just looks really cool and works smoothly in PUGs (probably most of the people who comment here, including myself to be honest).

Not that I'm opposed to making LD or whatever else smoother to use and more satisfying/solo "feeling". I'm not inherently against changes to LD and I can totally see how the skill could be frustrating (like casting benediction and then your tank uses Superboilde XD), just felt this perspective is sometimes missed and often leads to HG getting more credit than it deserves.. putting it in line to be nerfed all the time lol.