Living Dead and other DRK QOL in 5.3

[Cyatheales]

Ah yes, how very difficult to track indeed. It starts as a red buff when the invuln is waiting to go off and changes to a gray debuff once it's active. Complicated and difficult to track, indeed.

/s

By "hard to track", I meant the fact that the little grey debuff tells you nothing about how much healing is actually needed to get the drk to the safe zone. Which is why a lot of healers see benediction as the only reliable way to get rid of it-- maybe your cohealer has already dumped a bunch of their cooldowns into it and you only need a couple regen ticks to get them to safety, or maybe they didn't even notice and you still need to heal 80-or-90-something% of their max health in however many seconds are left. Yes technically the health bar is a way of gauging it, but it's also being reduced by any damage the tank takes because LD isn't a true invuln, and it gets even less useful once vuln stacks get involved. There's no way to tell how much health has been restored compared to damage taken so the skill becomes an obnoxious cooldown eater that puts the healers (and by extension the tanks) at a significant disadvantage after it's used, because the alternative to blowing your emergency healing on it is potentially letting the tank die. That lack of transparency is a big part of what makes it such a clunky skill.

And by "complicated" I don't just mean its mechanics but the way they interact with their environment. For example, overheal doesn't count, so benediction isn't actually enough to remove it since their health is at 1 at the time so the actual healed amount is (max health - 1). It's possible for a drk in LD to die after benediction "restores all of a target's HP", conflicting with the tooltips of BOTH abilities. Speaking of benediction... how long does the LD invuln actually last? From the tooltip you'd think 10 seconds, but if you get bene and a regen tick right away it disappears, leaving you with a 300 second cooldown for not even a single second of invulnerability while other invuln skills would still be going for another 3 whole gcd windows (HG/SB specifically blocking potentially thousands of extra damage during this time).

And when I said "needlessly complicated", it's because none of its quirks and failings and mechanical weirdness are because it's such an incredibly versatile utility skill that a few edge case disadvantages are inevitably going to fall through the cracks-- after all that there's still a huge disadvantage over other invulns which is that you DIE if you are at anything but 100.0% health when it wears off. Half health after hallowed ground? holmgang? superbolide? Whatever, no problem. 95% health after living dead? You're dead and there's a decent chance the party wipes.

Complication is good when it adds versatility or creates opportunity for strategic uses-- when it makes people aware of their kit and think about how to use it together effectively, and rewards them for doing so. When it punishes people for assuming their skills are built to be intuitively useful with correct tooltips, maybe not so much.