We really need to talk about Living Dead

[Lucy_Pyre]

-Snip because post length zzzzzzzzz-

I don't agree that the way LD functions is, by itself, bad. At the end of the day this is an MMO, and in most MMOs in order to properly understand a class/job you typically have to play it to some extent. This very reasoning extends to LD and people not understanding it. But along the same lines, let's look at how many healers utterly refuse to allow a WAR to manage their own HP with Nascent. Now while I don't doubt that there are simply some healers who are beyond jaded by no-mitigation tanks, most decent and above healers will typically let a tank coast on their own HP for a while until the actual need to heal them arises; which WAR is arguably the queen of (debatable VS DRK and TBN) with the sheer amount of healing that they're capable of doing. Unfortunately, many a healer either doesn't even know that WAR is capable of burst healing themselves for a huge amount of health, or doesn't understand their healing potency enough, and just never lets them drop to around 50-60% HP so that they can get the full value out of a Nascent Flash usage.

If they played the job then they would understand this better, and I do think that tank & healer players should at the least have a basic understanding of what one another's jobs do, but realistically most healers or tanks aren't going to play their counterpart's job just so that they can understand some of their kit better. On the point that LD could be easier to understand at a glance, like some sort of indicator of how much health is still required to heal, that much I can agree to. However, I completely disagree that LD needs any sort of major sweeping change to its functionality beyond maybe some minor visualization improvements. Off the top of my head, a number system like Embolden could work. Simply start the Walking Dead debuff at 10 'stacks' to indicate 100% health is required to heal, and have the stack reduce by 1 for every 10% of health restored. Although when also on the topic of Walking Dead I can't also help but point out that I've had more than a handful of times running EX farms on DRK where, even with two WHMs in a party, the healers have failed to clear the debuff. Some players are simply beyond any reasonable form of assistance, no matter what it may be.

[Chrono_Rising]

I don't agree that the way LD functions is, by itself, bad.

9/10 times I agree that LD serves its purpose. I do think that it could be improved because when it has failed, most of the time its “raised a dps and used benediction… opps” try to heal unplanned, get to 130k and then die from the debuff expiring so even just a small tweak to either sustain to help this or to incoming heals would minimize this further.

As you say later though, healers that don’t deal with it don’t deal with it and there is not fixing that.

On the point that LD could be easier to understand at a glance, like some sort of indicator of how much health is still required to heal, that much I can agree to. However, I completely disagree that LD needs any sort of major sweeping change to its functionality beyond maybe some minor visualization improvements.

I’m glad we can agree on something. I’m not sure what categorizes a “sweeping change”. Are adding back old self-sustain (conva and 4.5 sole survivor) sweeping changes?

[Lucy_Pyre]

9/10 times I agree that LD serves its purpose. I do think that it could be improved because when it has failed, most of the time its “raised a dps and used benediction… opps” try to heal unplanned, get to 130k and then die from the debuff expiring so even just a small tweak to either sustain to help this or to incoming heals would minimize this further.

As you say later though, healers that don’t deal with it don’t deal with it and there is not fixing that.




I’m glad we can agree on something. I’m not sure what categorizes a “sweeping change”. Are adding back old self-sustain (conva and 4.5 sole survivor) sweeping changes?

The only suggestion that I've seen anyone give for any sort of a major change that I didn't entirely hate was to have the percentage of health that wasn't restored by the time Walking Dead times out to be paid in mana consumption, rather than death. So healed to 80% = lose 20% max mana, etc. Granted, a lot of people seemed to dislike that, but the only other suggestions most people give seem to just be along the lines of 'Make LD a 10 second Homgang', meanwhile those same people turn right around and complain about how DRK feels too much like WAR already. To be frank, the primary issue I have with any suggestion to make LD radically better is the exact same issue that I have when people want DRK to do more DPS; that being that TBN exists and is so blatantly broken.

Now, would I call TBN outright overpowered? That's not quite such a simple answer so I can't say with certainty. What I can say, however, is that TBN is by far the most powerful mitigation tool in the game (not counting invulns, obviously, nothing else can mitigate literal millions of damage). While Nascent is capable of healing for more than what TBN shields, the average healing amount over the course of a fight averages out to be less. TBN straight up just removes such a ludicrous amount of damage from existence over the course of an entire fight that, in some way, there has to be a trade off. Since a properly used TBN gives a Dark Art's proc that cost isn't damage output, as TBN thus becomes DPS-neutral. The trade off isn't in non-TBN mitigation, as DRK has the same 'regular' CDs as every other tank and even a bonus one to use on magic damage. So, where does it come from? In my opinion it comes from Living Dead. Even with (a) healer(s) having to burn some extra resources to clear Walking Dead over other tank invulns, their total healing requirement for the DRK is still significantly less over a course of a fight than what other tanks require, with the only tank being able to even compare on this being a well played WAR, yet even WAR can't reach the same height entirely.

[cactuarzzzz]

The only suggestion that I've seen anyone give for any sort of a major change that I didn't entirely hate was to have the percentage of health that wasn't restored by the time Walking Dead times out to be paid in mana consumption, rather than death. So healed to 80% = lose 20% max mana, etc. Granted, a lot of people seemed to dislike that, but the only other suggestions most people give seem to just be along the lines of 'Make LD a 10 second Homgang', meanwhile those same people turn right around and complain about how DRK feels too much like WAR already. To be frank, the primary issue I have with any suggestion to make LD radically better is the exact same issue that I have when people want DRK to do more DPS; that being that TBN exists and is so blatantly broken.

Now, would I call TBN outright overpowered? That's not quite such a simple answer so I can't say with certainty. What I can say, however, is that TBN is by far the most powerful mitigation tool in the game (not counting invulns, obviously, nothing else can mitigate literal millions of damage). While Nascent is capable of healing for more than what TBN shields, the average healing amount over the course of a fight averages out to be less. TBN straight up just removes such a ludicrous amount of damage from existence over the course of an entire fight that, in some way, there has to be a trade off. Since a properly used TBN gives a Dark Art's proc that cost isn't damage output, as TBN thus becomes DPS-neutral. The trade off isn't in non-TBN mitigation, as DRK has the same 'regular' CDs as every other tank and even a bonus one to use on magic damage. So, where does it come from? In my opinion it comes from Living Dead. Even with (a) healer(s) having to burn some extra resources to clear Walking Dead over other tank invulns, their total healing requirement for the DRK is still significantly less over a course of a fight than what other tanks require, with the only tank being able to even compare on this being a well played WAR, yet even WAR can't reach the same height entirely.

Says the Tank who get another healing tools that could even make the healer skip the healing sometime.

[Lucy_Pyre]

Says the Tank who get another healing tools that could even make the healer skip the healing sometime.

You're still talking?

[cactuarzzzz]

You're still talking?

Is that the best respond you can come up with?

[Chrono_Rising]

The only suggestion that I've seen anyone give for any sort of a major change that I didn't entirely hate was to have the percentage of health that wasn't restored by the time Walking Dead times out to be paid in mana consumption, rather than death. So healed to 80% = lose 20% max mana, etc.

Yeah I could see that being abusabl. Living Dead => spend all my MP… you can take me down from 200 mp to 0 but I already spent the 20%. I like Kaboo’s idea about super states that fit thematically, warrior getting a 10x HP adjustment ( and corresponding healing increase). Nerf hallowed to be a 99% mitigation instead of 100% so that it can actually be balanced in a world without invulns. No more “invulns” but still the ability to be super tanky.

Now, would I call TBN outright overpowered? That's not quite such a simple answer so I can't say with certainty. What I can say, however, is that TBN is by far the most powerful mitigation tool in the game (not counting invulns, obviously, nothing else can mitigate literal millions of damage). While Nascent is capable of healing for more than what TBN shields, the average healing amount over the course of a fight averages out to be less. TBN straight up just removes such a ludicrous amount of damage from existence over the course of an entire fight that, in some way, there has to be a trade off. Since a properly used TBN gives a Dark Art's proc that cost isn't damage output, as TBN thus becomes DPS-neutral. The trade off isn't in non-TBN mitigation, as DRK has the same 'regular' CDs as every other tank and even a bonus one to use on magic damage.

The site which may not be named helps here if you look at healing metrics. If you really focus on healing per second warriors are pushing out nearly 5k hps. Dark knights look like they peak out around 3.5k healing per second. Both are exceptionally tanky. And is probably why both do bottom tier damage. However, you can also look at the population data to see that the highest amounts are telling the general story, warrior hps is way higher than dark knights.

This is of course messy because Thrill double counts as healing and as an HP boost, and as a received healing boost. I think if you read one of my earlier posts really really closely, I make the case for gnb being nearly as tanky as drk when played correctly. If you change the gnb cooldowns to War cooldowns, drk and war are basically equivalent in terms of erasing damage.

The difference is TBN is the single button drk presses to delete damage. GNB and especially WAR press 2 or three buttons for this one, but they end up in nearly the same place. Its the kit as a whole as you have noted earlier. It also glosses over using TBN that much to achieve those numbers means not using TBN in things like trick attack, chain strat, battle littany or any other group buff, which means doing less damage overall to the boss.

The odd one out in terms of mitigation here is actually Paladin, which is bizarre if you ask me. The one with a shield is the least tanky except for hallowed ground.

[Lucy_Pyre]

-snip-

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that WAR isn't hilariously easy to heal. I do think that ToB skews the actual healing number a little bit in terms of slight inflation, especially if you pop it at full HP prior to taking a buster as I'm fairly certain that HP increase still counts towards your healing total even though you effectively lose that HP that the initial activation granted you after 10 seconds. That aside though, I would argue that while WAR and DRK remove a *comparable* amount of damage from existence, that the edge remains with DRK for one reason; that being that NF is directly tied to the WAR's damage output at any given moment.

Since WAR's rotation is almost entirely burst-oriented, most of its non-IR time is spent on your normal Storm's Path/Eye combos. Since you only use Fell Cleave outside of IR in order to avoid overcap you're more than likely going to have at least 50 gauge to use one when you need to use NF, so for our 'average' Nascent usage we can reliably allot a Fell Cleave, Maim, and Storm's Path, which gives us the following.

Fell Cleave: Averages a 18k hit, 9k healing.
Storm's Path: Averages 11.5k, 5.7k heal on top of the 6.7k heal attached to the ability
Maim: Around 8.8k-ish damage, around 4.5k healing
Auto attacks: Around 3.9k damage, you'll get two during NF, so 4k healing

This totals out to a roughly 29.9k, or 30,000 HP heal if nothing crits. Now, it's been a bit since I calculated the numbers, but if memory serves TBN in current gear shields for around 43k HP. This leaves our average NF usage a whopping 13k health in the red, which can add up quite a bit over an extended period. Now since the WAR rotation typically tries to keep an Infuriate charge ready to go at most points in said rotation, you could potentially dump an IC into NF rather than either that Fell Cleave or, more likely, Maim. This changes our total healing value from 30k to a whopping 52.4k health (IC average of 54k hit with 27k healing), or 9.4k health ahead of TBN. This does, however, present one downside to it; you now no longer have that Infuriate charge to use on IC when the party's raid buffs come back up. With Inner Chaos being such a huge chunk of damage at 920p, this does amount to a moderate DPS loss; a scenario that the DRK does not, in any way, have to entertain with TBN. The DRK also has another slight advantage when considering that, while TBN and NF can be used with relatively equal frequencies, the WAR will most certainly in a few of those NF windows be able to put out nothing but a Heavy Swing, Main, & Storm's Path/Eye, while DRK's mitigation value is consistent across each use.

TL;DR - Both WAR and DRK are easy on their healers, and NF is capable of outright blowing TBN's shield out of the water in some scenarios, in an average use TBN will still come out with a bit of a lead in terms of damage dealt with.

[Launched]

The site which may not be named helps here if you look at healing metrics. If you really focus on healing per second warriors are pushing out nearly 5k hps. Dark knights look like they peak out around 3.5k healing per second. Both are exceptionally tanky. And is probably why both do bottom tier damage. However, you can also look at the population data to see that the highest amounts are telling the general story, warrior hps is way higher than dark knights.

Shake it Off is a big chunk of WAR's healing, and that's raidwide mitigation, not personal healing/shielding. It can be 1-1.5k+ of WAR's healing.

[Lucy_Pyre]

Shake it Off is a big chunk of WAR's healing, and that's raidwide mitigation, not personal healing/shielding. It can be 1-1.5k+ of WAR's healing.

Even without SiO contributing WAR can still hit 4k HPS pretty easily (not counting for downtime, obviously).

Is that the best respond you can come up with?

You've yet to give anything competent to respond to.