Living Dead and other DRK QOL in 5.3

[Satarn]

Except, there's a couple of things you all just keep conveniently forgetting here.

I am not forgetting anything - I have literally mentioned the purpose of invulns as something meant to save tank and healer cds and reduce overall need for healing, in my earlier posts - but you'd rather "conveniently forget" that, I wonder why.

The issue with LD is that with how much healing it requires now, there are more situations when while any other invuln would save you cooldowns, LD will not, since you have to heal the DRK to full within the 10 seconds time and that costs significantly more than it used to. Not to mention the issue of having to quickly weave/gcd a bunch of extra heals during raid buff windows if things align that way.

You can not say that it's the same as having to heal any other 1HP invuln or just regularly mitigated TB - those don't have a timer, which means often you can heal the tank just a little and then let them hang on low HP for a while as AoE heals, HoT ticks and fairy slowly bring them back up pretty much for free, which isn't something you can afford with LD. The only times when tank actually needs their full HP, is right before mechanics that would kill them otherwise or during LD, there's no need to top tanks after every TB.
Now, there are absolutely still times when using LD is optimal even without a WHM, but the other invulns get more such uses, which wouldn't be the case if the healing required for LD was reduced.

[Lucy_Pyre]

save tank and healer cds and reduce overall need for healing

Which LD does just the same as every other tank invuln. Mitigating a long string of auto attacks from both tanks, especially if there are multiple invuln uses over a fight (which means multiple of these strings of auto attacks to mitigate with the saved CDs) totals out to saving the healers work over the course of a fight. So therefore, by your own reasoning, LD is completely fine.

[Chrono_Rising]

I'm putting my TLDR; at the beginning:

TLDR; Living Dead takes more resources to handle than any other tank. This is not balanced out by an especially strong mitigation kit. Nor is this justified in terms of drk’s personal damage output. While the skill isn't to the point of unusable, it could use an adjustment to bring it inline with the usability of the other invulns.

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.

I see your point that any healer can cleanse living dead, and I agree with it. In perfectly planned environments where everything goes according to plan you can achieve this. But let's also recognize that not everything goes to plan, and sometimes in the heat of the moment we don’t realize the consequences of how we react will domino down the line. Plans are great until things don’t go according to plan, that is half the issue with this skill.

Here is the other half:
5 oGCD’s and 1 GCD to fully cleanse walking dead. Here are some other ways that can get handled:

The same situation but not a dark knight:
Hallowed - just top me off depending on my HP and nothing gets wasted.

Superbolide - Yes I’m at one hp, use one oGCD and we can tank swap at the end and I’ll regen my own hp. This works really well when the invuln goes into something like a trio, or other ultimate mechanics where you aren’t taking damage and can just get a regen from a healer for the down time.

Holmgang - about the same as superbolide. Put one oGCD on me tank swap and wait till I have equilibrium or a burst window with nascent flash. I did a pf with a warrior who holmganged the double slap, then without being healed at all nascent flashed their next IR window to full hp.


Our defensive kit must be the answer. One way around this obvious weakness is to simply not take damage.

What is below looks way better as the table I have in docs sorry!

DRK
Dark Mind
20% Magic Mitigation
TBN
42.5k shield on self
Empty

WAR
Thrill of Battle
20% HP +20% HP restore
20% Bonus to incoming healing
Nascent Flash/Raw
Either a heal or 20% mitigation
Equilibrium
32k heal

GNB
Camo
10% mitigation
50% increased parry chance
Heart of Stone
15% mitigation
Aurora
5.4k Regen
~32.6k heal

PLD
Empty
Sheltron
20% mitigation
Empty


Lets run some hypotheticals: AOE is coming up and I want to reduce the amount of healing I need. Lets say the aoe hits in the average range of 40k hp and an auto hits for 18k.

DRK - TBN Dark Mind! Ok dark mind takes 8k of that aoe, TBN takes the 32 and 10k of auto attack that does 18k. We mitigated 50.5k hp!

GNB - Camo Heart of stone + Aurora! Ok Camo soaks 10% of damage for the next 20 seconds, that covers about 6 autos and the aoe. 14.8k mitigated. Heart covers 15% of 2 autos and the aoe (but 90% since camo was up too). Thats 10.2k mitigated. + Aurora + 32k HP. Total HP saved: 57k (25k Mitigated)

Take out any 1 of the skills except Aurora and you end up with about a 10 to 12k difference. If 5 oGCDs and a GCD planned into living dead is nothing, then a 10k difference in damage taken in autos during an aoe is a rounding error. Lets say we will only use Aurora or Equilibrium on busters. We are still only talking about 25k difference in damage taken. This isn’t alot when raid wide healing is going out which will heal more than this back since everyone else takes way more from raid wide aoes (estimate about 50 to 60k).


Lets look at tank busters. 60 to 70% of the tank busters the past two tiers have been physical. Crippling blow is one example of this, many tanks use dark mind on this and turns out it mitigated nothing. Given that we are struck by lightning you would think magical but its not, test for yourself. Every buster in e6s is physical, double slap in e8s is physical.

What this means: Dark mind isn’t getting the mileage it used to when so many busters were magical and dark mind could be up for all of them (e2s as an example of how abusable this skill could be).

DRK - TBN + mitigation every tank has in addition! Dark Knight takes 42.5k less damage because of TBN.

GNB - heart of stone + what any other tank would use! So the extra 15% mitigation depends on how much damage we would take for how much it would mitigate. For crippling blow we could take as much as 65k and we would mitigate about 10k which is a 32k difference which is the damage healed by aurora or an unbuffed equilibrium.


By the ways these are set up you can easily translate the same numbers from GNB to WAR and see warrior is in even better shape than GNB. And you can see by not over mitigating GNB and WAR can both cover all the situations because they have the cooldowns for it. DRK just has one button where everyone else has 2 or 3.

The exception here is Paladin. Paladin is probably at a disadvantage in mitigating except when it comes to the very powerful hallowed ground.

Handling Invuln ability: PLD > GNB ~ WAR > DRK
Mitigation: DRK ~ WAR ~ GNB > PLD
Dps: GNB > PLD > DRK ~ WAR

Tilda here meaning approximately equal but order reflects my preferences here.


TLDR; Living Dead takes more resources to handle than any other tank. This is not balanced out by an especially strong mitigation kit. Nor is this justified in terms of drk’s personal damage output. While the skill isn't to the point of unusable, it could use an adjustment.

[Lucy_Pyre]

TLDR; Living Dead takes more resources to handle than any other tank. This is not balanced out by an especially strong mitigation kit. Nor is this justified in terms of drk’s personal damage output. While the skill isn't to the point of unusable, it could use an adjustment.

Living Dead requires no more healing than a GNB using Superbolide or a WAR using Holmgang who has Thrill of Battle & Equilbrium on cooldown, and doesn't have access to his burst damage making his Nascent Flash healing minor at best. No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health. So, really, the only exception to this is a WAR with ToB + Equil ready to go as well as some burst damage to pump into Nascent, but that isn't going to always be up depending on where in a fight these busters and invuln uses are, as ToB + Equil is just as likely to be used after a non-invuln'd buster or even after heavy raidwide damage such as the Tumult & Voice spam miniphases in Titan savage phase 3. In other words, the only true outlier here is PLD with Hallowed Ground. Now, I hate to break it to you, but if only one out of the four doesn't require healing assistance, then that means that that is the one that's out of place; not the one that simply has an arbitrary time limit on when they need to be healed, even though in most situations the other tanks are going to get healed for a similar or identical amount in the same time frame as the DRK would for anyways.

[Chrono_Rising]

Living Dead requires no more healing than a GNB using Superbolide or a WAR using Holmgang who has Thrill of Battle & Equilbrium on cooldown, and doesn't have access to his burst damage making his Nascent Flash healing minor at best. No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health. So, really, the only exception to this is a WAR with ToB + Equil ready to go as well as some burst damage to pump into Nascent, but that isn't going to always be up depending on where in a fight these busters and invuln uses are, as ToB + Equil is just as likely to be used after a non-invuln'd buster or even after heavy raidwide damage such as the Tumult & Voice spam miniphases in Titan savage phase 3. In other words, the only true outlier here is PLD with Hallowed Ground. Now, I hate to break it to you, but if only one out of the four doesn't require healing assistance, then that means that that is the one that's out of place; not the one that simply has an arbitrary time limit on when they need to be healed, even though in most situations the other tanks are going to get healed for a similar or identical amount in the same time frame as the DRK would for anyways.

Superbolide - Yes I’m at one hp, use one oGCD and we can tank swap at the end and I’ll regen my own hp. This works really well when the invuln goes into something like a trio, or other ultimate mechanics where you aren’t taking damage and can just get a regen from a healer for the down time.

Holmgang - about the same as superbolide. Put one oGCD on me tank swap and wait till I have equilibrium or a burst window with nascent flash. I did a pf with a warrior who holmganged the double slap, then without being healed at all nascent flashed their next IR window to full hp.

I just gave you three examples 1 from savage and two examples in ultimates.

Heres three more from the current tier:

Centaurs charge can be excoged and equilibrium and you’ll get to full HP with healer environment regens before any significant damage has gone out. Same way bolide can be handled.

E6s: If not the main tank after the fire tornadoes you can again get by with just equilibrium/Aurora and a ground regen before the next aoe goes out.

E7s, you can holmgang both busters and get by with an oGCD and your own sustain. The hard part is the RNG element of knowing if/when you can do this.

As you said with healing: It just takes planning.

The only one that has to be handled within 10 seconds is living dead. All of these let healers spread out their healing potential, lower the spike and let people put more damage gcds into the thing you actually want to kill even saving GCDs down the road.

Living Dead requires no more healing than a GNB using Superbolide or a WAR using Holmgang who has Thrill of Battle & Equilbrium on cooldown, and doesn't have access to his burst damage making his Nascent Flash healing minor at best. No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health.

E5S: First raidens charge next raid damage is 40 seconds later. If you threw your personal heals off at random you would have a 2 out of three chance of it being open during this interval including things like healers healing during this. As the OT you will be fine.

E6S: After the blaze orbs the OT take two hits in the range of 35k an oGCD and their own heal would keep them alive. There is AOE healing going out during this you have enough hp to survive and an IR nascent window coming up on warrior + more aoe heals going out. Healers don’t need to drop 170k worth of healing on you immediately.

E7S: After the first buster the next time the OT takes damage is 1.5 minutes later. The second has damage outgoing within 20 seconds both before and after, but hey healers can throw a oGCD to bring the OT up, and save the healing for the group till after the tank uses their invuln and goes to 1. Which will also handle the damage coming up.

Are there busters where strats like this don’t work for? Sure, but more often than not, you can use invulns this way to save GCDs/multipurpose heal for healers. E8S is a good example as later phases has both tanks taking damage. But again, you only need to be alive for auto's, you still have self heals, and a burst window in most of the places where you would use your invuln.

There is one that always needs to be healed up within 10 seconds, I think you said the one that is singled out always is called an outlier right?

[Satarn]

No healer in savage is going to let a GNB or WAR sit at 40-50k HP for a long period of time, even if they're the OT, because there's more than likely raidwaide damage coming up soon that requires they be at a relatively stable amount of health.

You're saying this as if raidwide damage was something unpredictable that healers have to always be prepared for - but it's not, it's scripted, hell even auto damage is pretty much static now with bosses no longer able to crit since 5.0. As you've so smugly said before, in raid everything is planned. Healers should know whether or not the tank will need any extra healing after invuln, if they've got their own healing cd or burst phase for NF available and how much the HoTs/fairy can take care of. Good healers can and will let you sit on that low HP whenever possible.

Also I gotta ask man - you're using Thrill as healing after you take damage..?

[Lucy_Pyre]

you're using Thrill as healing after you take damage..?

?

Don't recall saying that, but okay bud. That said, it has completely valid uses both before and after taking a hit.

[Satarn]

So therefore, by your own reasoning, LD is completely fine.

I mean, sure, if you ignore the entire rest of my post which explains why that is not always the case, yeah.