Living Dead is often an unfun and frustrating cooldown for both tanks and healers

[RyuDragnier]

Also another thing to note. DRK has 10s of Walking Dead, but most healers start spamming heals at the last 4s.
This can work with other tanks, but not DRK.

1st heal: 10~8s
2nd heal: 7~5s
3rd heal: 4~2s
4th heal: Benediction or emergency oGCD.

Trying to spam heals in the last 4s is a no-no with DRK. Unless you have big oGCDs and/or cooperating with your co-healer.

I've noticed this is the main problem healers have with Living Dead, they try to do with it the same thing they do with other invulns, only to realize it doesn't work that way. If the healers start doing staggered heals when Walking Dead first starts, they can easily heal you out of it in a trial or raid without overhealing and forcing you out of it early. But most I've noticed will wait until the last second, instead of starting up immediately, and that's usually what leads to the DRK's death.

[Absimiliard]

I've been playing GNB since release, this has literally never happened to me and I use superbolide basically on cooldown in trash packs, you probably got bopped during the skill wind up

It is not a case of getting bopped during wind up. There is a known issue with Superbolide doing that, but it is pretty rare. It's evidently somehow related to the way the servers work. Go ask some of the Gunbreakers over in The Balance. They'll pretty much tell you the same. Some have even managed to reproduce the effect while using Superbolide from max health, essentially eliminating any chance of the wind up being the problem.

[Sancho_Nyanta]

On the Superbolid thing, you can actually see it in action if you watch the Nest vid of the Twining. Corey pops super and then immediately dies in the set of trash after the first boss.

On the Living Dead thing maybe if they had Walking Dead give us some kind of super bloodbath that would let us heal ourselves based on the damage we deal. They would just have to make it so that we can possibly do it on our own and that would clear my issues with it. I don't mind the death part. I just mind that there is nothing that we can do to help or otherwise stop ourselves from dying.

[Kale127]

At this point, after years of the community constantly mentioning how reviled Living Dead is, I've lost all hope of the skill actually changing. There are absolutely ways to change how things work on both ends - DRK and Healer - to make it flow more intuitively.

First of all, it should have a gauge. Activating Living Dead should open a gauge on my screen, which once I enter Walking Dead should begin to fill as I'm healed, with the effect being resolved/complete when the gauge is filled entirely. This allows me, as the Dark Knight, to effectively track how much healing I've taken in and how much I require to survive the effect. It allows me to communicate to my Healer how much more is required, which can prevent them from overextending their healing unnecessarily, and also allows them to know if they can spare a moment or two for an OGCD to come off cooldown, or any other myriad of things that might alter how we approach the situation. That we have this huge hurdle to overcome and have to do so blindly is ridiculous.

Alternatively, the gauge could appear over our heads, or on the screen of a Healer that has us targeted. Something to convey the information without requiring we communicate, to alleviate the idea that DRK is the only tank that requires actual communication to utilize a capstone ability.

(also since I neglected it, the gauge that appears should also have the countdown for the effect resolution)

I would also like to see a healing potency buff built into it to alleviate the headache imposed upon Scholars and Astrologians when the effect is active. I think something like 200% is ridiculous, but an effect similar to Convalescence or Mantra wouldn't be too ridiculous. Either that, or lowering the healing requirement in general down from 100%.

In general, there are a few things that can be done to make Living Dead more intuitive and less stressful to use without changing the skill entirely. I would rather see a rework to it, but at this point I think we can accept that after 4+ years it isn't going to happen.

[Lannybaby]

It always really bugged me that paladins are the only tank whose ultimate defensive skill has no weird stipulation. Just use it and gain god mode for 10 seconds. Simple, effective. The others have this 1 hp crap with slightly different conditions on usage. If SE wanted to homogenize the tanks, couldn't the other ultimates be somewhat similar to HG? It doesn't have to be as simple, but at least don't make it a recommendation for a WHM to be present in order to keep the non-paladin alive. WHM + benediction = done deal. SCH and AST have to cycle through a bunch of buttons to achieve the same effect, assuming they have the necessary skills off cooldown. If they don't, then gg.

[Absimiliard]

Living Dead is essentially a suicide button outside of organized content. You use that thing with pugs, you've got an odds on chance of biting the dust. You will then be blamed for your death despite there being no way for DRK to heal itself enough to get rid of Walking Dead short of having a ridiculous number of mobs to fire an Abyssal Drain into. At least Superbolide has the excuse of simply not working right a small part of the time. LD is just sucking as intended.

[Lyth]

The devs seem afraid to even acknowledge the issue.

There are a lot of people who want to see at least a discussion of Living Dead from a dev perspective. It was one of the more popularly requested topics in the last Q+A, but they instead chose to focus on fluff that relatively fewer people were interested in knowing about.

I suppose the solution is to keep driving the point home until they admit that there's a problem.

[Rasikko]

The only design bit I like about it, is how it transitions. Walking Dead -> Living Dead.

Unfortunately in a real sense it's: Walking Dead -> Will Become Dead

[Laphael]

[B][*]The intuitive way to use Living Dead, for a player that has not been educated otherwise, is to save it for an emergency where the DRK player is about to die. Then, they activate Living Dead as a last-ditch effort to stay alive.[*]This intuitive use of an ability, however, is completely wrong: the Walking Dead effect requires so much healing to remove it, that an unprepared healer (especially in 4-player content, or if their co-healer is dead or out of MP) literally may not be able to remove Walking Dead even with non-stop Spell casting without the support of OGCD cooldowns. However, by the time a DRK uses Living Dead as an emergency tool, the healer has probably exhausted all of their cooldowns already, meaning Living Dead is little more than a death sentence for the tank and a source of immense panic for the unprepared healer.
[/INDENT]

Ok, pls correct me if im wrong, but using Living dead as an emergency tool is useful.

Example:
DRK is tanking a big pack and is droping low even with cooldowns. The SCH cant keep up with heals anymore and the DRK is about to die so he activates Living dead.
Now we have 3 possible outcomes:
1. Walking dead does not activate, because the healing is just enough to not die. -> good, but cd "wasted"
2. Walking dead does activate and the SCH manages to heal through it -> good
3. Walking dead does activate and the SCH doesn´t manage to heal -> not good, but the tank lived 10 seconds longer than without LD and thats maybe enough to kill most mobs anyway.

So at least 2. an 3. are a better outcome than not using Living dead and 1. is just a wasted cd.

[Jandor]

Should just be damage will heal you for 10s, but heals will miss.

Still has potential to backfire, still wants to be coordinated with healer for best effect, but you couldn't really just outright kill yourself with it.