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

[Deceptus]

snip

Hell, even Walking Dead proccing a DOOM debuff that where you have to be healed to full would be better than current.

At least healers are used to seeing that.

[Eira95]

I've had an idea for reworking Living Dead for awhile now, it may not be anything new but it would be a lot more fun to use and actually be useful, at least I think it would but I could be wrong. Basically what it would do once activated it would summon a shadow minion (like Living Shadow) but it wouldn't attack. Instead the minion would absorb damage intended for the DRK and last until a fixed amount of damage was taken or until time expires. It would be simple and effective, pretty cool to look at and use, and would fit into the DRK lore.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Hell, even Walking Dead proccing a DOOM debuff that where you have to be healed to full would be better than current.

At least healers are used to seeing that.

I've said elsewhere that separating Walking Dead's "cannot drop below 1 hp" and "dies unless healed an amount equal to max hp" in to a buff and a debuff would probably be the best way to fix Living dead. 10s is plenty of time to heal the Dark Knight, but many healers who understand LD tend to delay heals so that the "cannot drop below 1 hp" part stays up longer. This actually ends up shortening the time they have to heal the Dark Knight.

[darcstar62]

I've had an idea for reworking Living Dead for awhile now, it may not be anything new but it would be a lot more fun to use and actually be useful, at least I think it would but I could be wrong. Basically what it would do once activated it would summon a shadow minion (like Living Shadow) but it wouldn't attack. Instead the minion would absorb damage intended for the DRK and last until a fixed amount of damage was taken or until time expires. It would be simple and effective, pretty cool to look at and use, and would fit into the DRK lore.

Isn't this just TBN with an animation?

I've said elsewhere that separating Walking Dead's "cannot drop below 1 hp" and "dies unless healed an amount equal to max hp" in to a buff and a debuff would probably be the best way to fix Living dead. 10s is plenty of time to heal the Dark Knight, but many healers who understand LD tend to delay heals so that the "cannot drop below 1 hp" part stays up longer. This actually ends up shortening the time they have to heal the Dark Knight.

I like this idea -- it's a useful invul, the healer can tell what's going on, and it doesn't require the healer to micromanage their heals/timing. Whenever I pop LD now, I have no idea if the healer is going to know what to do...

[Numenor1379]

Why not just change the "must receive heals equal to 100% max HP" to a smaller percentage, 75% or something?

[SacrificialToast]

Why not just change the "must receive heals equal to 100% max HP" to a smaller percentage, 75% or something?

The lower they make that threshold, the worse the invulnerability becomes, unless they actually make it 2 separate effects, which they should do anyway.

[TouchandFeel]

Why not just change the "must receive heals equal to 100% max HP" to a smaller percentage, 75% or something?

While somewhat alleviating the amount that needs to be healed in a short interval, it makes the situation of a healer accidentally ending the invulnerability early potentially more likely since healing enough to remove the "will die" effect also completely ends the "can't drop below 1hp" effect.

Additionally, since there is zero messaging for how much healing has been done against how much needs to be healed, relying on weaker and less predictable heals instead of something like Benediction basically leaves the healer in the dark as to when they will cross the healing threshold, resulting in them dispelling the invuln too early and the DRK dying because they needed the extra duration to soak another buster, or being too late and not dispelling it in time resulting in again a dead DRK. Not exactly the result you want from your supposed invulnerability defensive ability.

That is the overarching problem with Living Dead, it has multiple layers of caveats that end up potentially punishing the players severely and because they are intertwined, trying to make a minor adjustment type of fix like the one you suggested results in a domino effect of consequences with the other tacked on caveats. It's just overall a problematic design as it is, especially when comparing Living Dead to the other tank invulnerabilities.

I personally feel that the tank invulnerabilites as a whole need to be looked at and tweaked to bring them more in-line with each other and establishing and maintaining basic guidelines for differentiating them while keeping them balanced, because right now they are a bit too out of sync with each other.
An example of this that I would like to see is standardizing the recast times for the invulns to say 300s or 360s and relying more on the effect and duration to make them unique. I also think that each invuln should have a singular and straight-forward negative aspect designed into them, such as Superbolide's "drop to 1hp" effect being a counterpoint to it's "immune to damage" effect.

[Numenor1379]

While somewhat alleviating the amount that needs to be healed in a short interval, it makes the situation of a healer accidentally ending the invulnerability early potentially more likely since healing enough to remove the "will die" effect also completely ends the "can't drop below 1hp" effect.

Additionally, since there is zero messaging for how much healing has been done against how much needs to be healed, relying on weaker and less predictable heals instead of something like Benediction basically leaves the healer in the dark as to when they will cross the healing threshold, resulting in them dispelling the invuln too early and the DRK dying because they needed the extra duration to soak another buster, or being too late and not dispelling it in time resulting in again a dead DRK. Not exactly the result you want from your supposed invulnerability defensive ability.

That is the overarching problem with Living Dead, it has multiple layers of caveats that end up potentially punishing the players severely and because they are intertwined, trying to make a minor adjustment type of fix like the one you suggested results in a domino effect of consequences with the other tacked on caveats. It's just overall a problematic design as it is, especially when comparing Living Dead to the other tank invulnerabilities.

I personally feel that the tank invulnerabilites as a whole need to be looked at and tweaked to bring them more in-line with each other and establishing and maintaining basic guidelines for differentiating them while keeping them balanced, because right now they are a bit too out of sync with each other.
An example of this that I would like to see is standardizing the recast times for the invulns to say 300s or 360s and relying more on the effect and duration to make them unique. I also think that each invuln should have a singular and straight-forward negative aspect designed into them, such as Superbolide's "drop to 1hp" effect being a counterpoint to it's "immune to damage" effect.

Very fair points.

I guess my issue with the 100% requirement is the current ratio of healing skill potency to tank HP.

Quick and dirty math here:

For the most part my Cure 2s do roughly 25k in HP restoration (i448 atm) without crits, etc. Tank HP is sitting around 140k at around the same ilvl.

A large percentage of the time the invuln's are used as panic buttons. The problem here is that by then the healer has also usually blown their oGCDs (I treat Bene as a normal CD and not a panic button).

So given the very rough numbers above; you have 10s to heal 140k, with the most powerful spam skill restoring 25k or so and takes 2.3s to cast. So you need (without crits) 6 casts to save the DRK, but only time for 4.

It is impossible to save a DRK in WD with our current spammable skills. It's either Bene them, or pray to god that you've got a oGCD left or two.

Perhaps a solution would be to break apart the LD invuln from the heal check. Leave the 10s invuln as is regardless when the HP is restored. Given the healing resources required, keeping the LD cooldown shorter than Hallowed seems fair still.

[Fernosaur]

While somewhat alleviating the amount that needs to be healed in a short interval, it makes the situation of a healer accidentally ending the invulnerability early potentially more likely since healing enough to remove the "will die" effect also completely ends the "can't drop below 1hp" effect.

TBF if Walking Dead ended at 50% max HP healed every healer could deal with it with a single GCD+oGCD in the worst case scenario. Recitation+Excog+Lustrate/ET Adlo, double ED (or Benefic II+Synastry), and Benediction are all enough to heal a tank's HP to 50%. It would make it so you didn't absolutely need a WHM for it to be efficient and would make it a lot more usable in dungeons as well, since all three healers could just wait until the last four seconds to end the effect and get more out of the duration.

[LichKaiser]

I think a easier solution to actual K.O. (or Death) penality is just to change it into "Weakness" ( Weakness
Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Mind are reduced by 25%. 100sec duration) debuff if not healed in time when Living Dead debuff fades. Making the actual skill working in same way but with a less punishing sistem if healer cant keep up DRK healed in time. This will resolve the Total dipendence from benediction, and a litteraly shit design.
I think this "lazzy solution" will improve LD with nearly no work from development team.