Living Dead and other DRK QOL in 5.3

[Lucy_Pyre]

a needlessly complicated effect that's hard to track

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

[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.

[OdinelStarrei]

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).

Hi, just dipping in here to test and correct this section really quick. Walking Dead does account for overheal, sort of. Benediction is 100% of the HP value, and upon me getting slammed by a tankbuster while in /sit and no regens, Walking Dead was immediately cleansed upon the Benediction, no questions asked. Pure conjecture here, but I'm thinking instead of triggering the "death" flag at 0 HP, LD just sets the HP at +1, triggers the Walking Dead flag, and then it starts the HP counter there and not at 0. So you'll always be coming into Walking Dead at +1 HP. Or there is some kind of lower limit exception going on, and you never actually hit 0 HP at all, like on Holmgang, but I doubt that due to how the tooltips are worded.

Even if this wasn't the case, and Benediction DIDN'T cleanse it, 1 natural HP regen tick from just being in combat, would certainly be enough to make this point moot. To add on to that, Souleater healing is is about 2-3%, and you have enough time for at least one complete Souleater combo outside of Delirium. 3.X - 4.X also had the Souleater healing effect only on Grit Souleaters, but I never had any issue back then LDing out of Grit and surviving after a Benediction.

Remember that the point of LD is to avoid death with minimal investment. If Morn Afah wacks me for 300K damage, and I'm bene'd immediately, I can still attribute that to the invuln as an overall gain even with auto attacks afterwards, because I wouldn't have survived the initial hit normally, and that's how most situations with LD work out. It's not about HP saved, it's about tank and healer resources saved, that's more important. It's when you dump resources into a WD, only for the DRK to STILL die is where the issue is, as you stated.

Just TBN after the bene, if that's applicable. If the healer wants to optimize that by delaying the healing to that 1-2 second debuff number, particularly if you're invulning multiple things at once, that's their choice. I realize this part is mostly semantics, but the LD duration is, outside of few VERY specific instances, a non-factor on the DRK's part in a composition that includes Benediction. Once you get to a uncoordinated SCH/AST comp you can throw that out the window though.

[cactuarzzzz]

You really aren't the brightest bulb in the box, are you? What part of "arbitrarily swapping the tank's invulns around is silly and makes no sense" has managed to slip past your brain? Actually, don't answer that, because it's probably better for my own sanity that way. Still though, you've really proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that nothing will sway you from your narrow and unenlightened view of how things work in this game. Which, I wish I could say surprises me, but that would just be lying. Although I suppose that in the end it's partially my fault for expecting anything else from forums, considering the demographic of players that primarily inhabit them.

The furious backpedaling itself spoke volumes more than anything that I could have offered in response.

What Lyth said. I couldn't have put it better.

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

I doubt you ever have to take that healing responsibility before. Why trivialize the responsibility that you never took?

[Lucy_Pyre]

I doubt you ever have to take that healing responsibility before. Why trivialize the responsibility that you never took?

You might wanna look at my jobs, I have SCH at 80. And as to why I trivialize something; when everything that someone says is both wrong and just bad, I kinda end up not taking those people seriously. Especially when it's someone who has made it blatantly obvious that they don't even properly understand the things they're complaining about to be valid in complaining about them in the first place. But I don't know why I expect anything else from most people that come to forums. The majority are 100% GCBTW members.

[MariaArvana]

The main problems I have with living dead are that it's (a) a needlessly complicated effect that's hard to track, and (b) too heavily reliant on your healers dumping all their powerful cds on you afterwards due to drk's lack of on-demand sustain.

How's this for a simplification of the effect?

Living Dead
- Instant cast, 300s recast
- Grants the effect of Living Dead for 10 seconds (or 8, or 12, or 14, whatever's balanced now that it's not "layered"). While under the effect of Living Dead, your health value may be reduced to negative values without it resulting in your death. If your health is at zero or lower when Living Dead expires, you are immediately killed. Certain attacks may still result in your death while under the effect of Living Dead. (referring to the usual invuln-resistant stuff like enrages)

This would be a buff to casual content, but a hard nerf for high end content where balancing actually matters and LD is more likely to be used, since it means the DRK is 100% dead in certain situations without Benediction. An example:

In Alex Ultimate, He does Divine Punishment, followed by 3 Divine spear tank busters. Divine Punishment leaves a magic vuln+ on the tank that makes them take hundreds of thousands of damage from the subsequent Divine Spears.
Currently, you can easily have a DRK handle the divine punishment + following Divine spears using LD even without Benediction, as the healers can just heal you in the divine spears and then dump an OGCD or powerful tool into you to top off that remaining amount you need to be healed after the 3rd.

The issue with your redux, is that the DRK's HP would plummet to -900,000+ and be impossible to heal without benediction, meaning DRK can no longer handle many of the things the other tanks can with their Invulns. A more recent Example is Shiva, where one of the popular strategies is to have tanks Invuln Morn Afahs near the end of the fight, which do 600,000+ to a single target, also meaning the DRK cannot invuln it using your redux without effectively being sentenced to death without Benediction.

All LD needs is either a way for DRK to lifesteal/self heal more effectively to help contribute (like the 2nd idea you pitched), or a modifier on walking dead that increases the potency of the healing the DRK receives during its duration so that a single healer can reasonably manage it.

[ItMe]

All LD needs is either a way for DRK to lifesteal/self heal more effectively to help contribute (like the 2nd idea you pitched), or a modifier on walking dead that increases the potency of the healing the DRK receives during its duration so that a single healer can reasonably manage it.

Right? It's so simple I half EXPECT it to happen in 6.0.
If they change anything my money is they do this.

[cactuarzzzz]

You might wanna look at my jobs, I have SCH at 80. And as to why I trivialize something; when everything that someone says is both wrong and just bad, I kinda end up not taking those people seriously. Especially when it's someone who has made it blatantly obvious that they don't even properly understand the things they're complaining about to be valid in complaining about them in the first place. But I don't know why I expect anything else from most people that come to forums. The majority are 100% GCBTW members.

You've already told us how you've exp playing DRK but we saw how much it mean. Next you're going to tell us how you don't mind throwing lots of SCH healing resources into LD's 9 secs window just to remove walking dead debuff?. Anyone can have any LV80 job it doesn't mean they like or main that job.

[Lucy_Pyre]

You've already told us how you've exp playing DRK but we saw how much it mean. Next you're going to tell us how you don't mind throwing lots of SCH healing resources into LD's 9 secs window just to remove walking dead debuff?. Anyone can have any LV80 job it doesn't mean they like or main that job.

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

[cactuarzzzz]

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

Thank for confirming how you like to throw your healing resources into WD.