We really need to talk about Living Dead

[Chrono_Rising]

Speaking just from last tier, there were uses in each and every fight where Dark Mind could be used; tank lasers in E1S, Shadowflame in E2S, Depending on your tank comp and invuln use order you could use Dark Mind on the 3rd buster in E3S if you had to do a tank swap, as well as the mini-busters during Stormy Horizon, and it could also be used on the Dual Earthen Fists double buster in E4S (not Megalith, the buster that happens on each tank right before Megalith's stack buster). So, I think it's fair to say that Dark Mind has enough uses to count for its own position.

E1s: Heavens Sunder and Mana Slice (add cleave) were physical. The dot buster was magical.

E2s: Everything was magical.

E3s: Busters were magical, but were spaced far enough apart that you could invuln all but 1 of them in every comp.

E4s: Stone Crusher and Megalith were physical. Earthen Anguish was magical.

That's 4 magical busters, and 4 physical busters. 50% even. Dark mind is great when you can use it, and useless when you cannot. However, that said I do agree most fights have something you can use dark mind on. My point is mainly that half of the time you are using it, it is on a lower impact hit like a raid wide aoe.

If you really want to compare TBN to ToB, Equil, and NF, then fine. That said, however, I still think that comparing it against them more than just one at a time isn't a fair comparison to make.

To be completely fair, we would need to compare dark mind + TBN to all three skills.

Lets agree on a three minute interval since this is a reset of the warrior rotation that also lined up with the reset of TBN and Dark Mind. That gives us 3 uses of equilibrium, 2 uses of ToB, and up to about 6 uses of nascent flash, and also 3 dark mind uses, and 4 TBNs.

Equilibrium: 96k minimum healed, (up to 144k maximum)
ToB: 68.8k healed (not including bonus healing received or potential interaction with Equilibrium)

At minimum without including up to 6 Nascent Flash we have healed 164.8k.

As far as I’m aware optimal warrior play has you using two infuriates in trick attack along with a fell cleave. IC for me hits 66k on average, fell cleave hits 19k. In three hits you can do 151k damage or restore 75.5 HP. Since we can do this twice in three minutes that ends up being 151 hp restored.

During this time we also have an IR window where fell cleave will hit for around 40k. 3 hits will do 120k (if I’m clever I’ll also fit upheaval and onslaught into this for an extra 30k and 6k respectively) doings 156k damage. This allows me to restore 78k HP. At the start of the 3 minutes you can squeeze out an additional 91k from IC into IR with upheaval and onslaught, while likely wasted in the openner it isn't wasted at 3 minute marks.


Nascent Flash: 320k HP restored in the first three minutes (while only using 4 of these intervals to get this number I think we agreed that you could squeeze out 30k in healing from non burst Nascent flashes for an extra 60k restored).

Which just goes to show you why you need to do the math. Optimal use of TBN to optimal use of Nascent flash and Nascent flash turns out blowing TBN out of the water. That said, for warrior to use these heals effectively you do need to do some planning with your healers to keep you healthy enough to survive to those windows.

In a three minute interval I can therefore restore up to 485K on the low end, and up to 545k on the high end (without factoring in crit luck), on warrior while playing optimally the entire time. Warrior rotation is on a 3 minute reset time hence why I picked it.

Playing optimally on dark knight I can probably get off 4 TBN’s in this period without a serious loss. Thats 172k damage deleted.

Thats a difference of 313k HP deleted/restored, at minimum in optimal play. For Dark Mind to make up this difference in that three minute interval I would need to take 1,565,000 damage in three 10 second intervals. That doesn’t happen. If I wanted to make this up with TBNs I would need to push out 11 of them, which is about 4 per minute, at minimum this pushes 3 EoS (1500 potency) out of buff windows per minute, and it still comes up short. In most fights I don’t think you can pop TBN that often but lets leave that where it is.

To hit the high end of what warrior does I would need to pop 13 TBNs in 3 minutes, which is a TBN every 15 seconds starting with a TBN on pull I'm positive that is impossible, I think the maximum number of tbns in 3 minutes is 12 regardless, to pop that often, that leaves 1500 potency out side of buff windows per minute (IC is about 1425 potency per IC left out of a buff window when factoring in crit direct hit and average GCD). And to be super clear I think two of those 4 TBN's won't pop meaning we just straight up delete 1k potency/minute from our rotation.


TLDR; Warrior can heal between 485k to 545k while playing optimally, but takes planning with healers. Dark Knight can shield about 172k while playing optimally.

[Lucy_Pyre]

-post length snip-

I generally avoid assuming that I'll make use of NF during IR just because fight timings of major damage and IR's CD aren't always the best of friends, especially with it having a 90s CD unlike most things that are 60s or 120s. If you can use IR to heal a huge amount of damage it's incredible, just sadly isn't always so nice. As for Thrill, that's not quite so simple to just add up the health it gives since you *lose* that extra health after ten seconds. Even moreso depending on exactly how you use it; e.g. popping it at full health just before a buster hits you and then immediately after using Equil &/or NF. To really accurately track ToB I would argue one would need to actually go through and calculate how much bonus healing each use of it generated since, again, the health buffer it grants goes away ten seconds later. Aside from those two points I don't really have much of a disagreement with what you said, but I do think those two points make a major difference.

[Launched]

TLDR; Warrior can heal between 485k to 545k while playing optimally, but takes planning with healers. Dark Knight can shield about 172k while playing optimally.

Theorycrafting is nice, but we have access to a ton of real data from actual fights and I don't think it agrees with you.

In general, WARs and DRKs trying to maximise healing heal nearly identical amounts personally (including the healing to other people from Nascent Glint/TBN). I'm not going to exclude the healing from Path/Souleater because it's a decent chunk of healing on both jobs. Natural regen should be very close on both jobs too.

The top numbers for each fight:

E5S: WAR 5218 HPS - 1708 HPS from SiO = 3510 HPS personally, DRK 3435 HPS
E6S: WAR 4772 HPS - 1873 HPS from SiO = 2899 HPS personally, DRK 2980 HPS
E7S: WAR 4027 HPS - 1468 HPS from SiO = 2559 HPS personally, DRK 2493 HPS
E8S: WAR 4589 HPS - 1633 HPS from SiO = 2956 HPS personally, DRK 2755 HPS

If you want to look at the average of each fight instead of the max amount, WAR is usually around 1000 HPS higher than DRK, and Shake it Off averaging 1000 HPS is pretty realistic so again the personal healing amounts should be about the same.

In a three minute interval I can therefore restore up to 485K on the low end, and up to 545k on the high end (without factoring in crit luck), on warrior while playing optimally the entire time. Warrior rotation is on a 3 minute reset time hence why I picked it.

Playing optimally on dark knight I can probably get off 4 TBN’s in this period without a serious loss. Thats 172k damage deleted.

I looked at the first 3 minutes of the logs the E8S numbers above are from, and it's not really different there either.
WAR: 5311 HPS, 955.9k HP healed total (3238 HPS and 582.8k total HP excluding SiO)
DRK: 3288 HPS, 583.3k HP healed total (7 TBNs were popped)

Overall I'm just not seeing anything that makes me think WAR is actually better at healing than DRK. WAR with all its sources of healing (optimised Nascent Flash, Thrill, Equilibrium and Storm's Path) just matches DRK's healing (TBN, Souleater, and a small amount from Abyssal Drain) in actual fights when people are actually trying to make good use of it.

[Chrono_Rising]

WAR with all its sources of healing (optimised Nascent Flash, Thrill, Equilibrium and Storm's Path) just matches DRK's healing (TBN, Souleater, and a small amount from Abyssal Drain) in actual fights when people are actually trying to make good use of it.

I took a look at a few of these of the top ones. If you take a look at hps in things like ToB and Equilibrium they are slightly higher than you would expect from the numbers I gave. This makes sense since I picked an underestimate for the number of uses of ToB and underestimated the heal from Equilibrium (assuming no crits). Any discrepancy would come from how nascent flash could be used. But lets use their HPS to calculate the expected healing in a 3 minute interval to see how well it matches my calculation, I’m using e5s as reference.

Top dark hps from TBN: 2077.0
Extrapolating this to a 3 minute window > 2077.0*180 = 373,860 health restored

In the first 3 minutes he used 9 TBNs. Fairly good agreement but this of course pushed things out of raid buffs. The point wasn't that we couldn't add more TBNs to keep up, it was that it can come at a loss because it causes EOS to be used out of raid buffs.

Top Warrior removing SiO Glint and Storms path and regen: 2,353.7
Extrapolating this to a 3 minute window > 2353.7*180 = 423,666 health restored

I predicted between 485k and 545k, so what gives I’m off by 60k. Looking at the first 3 minutes Nascent was only used on the 4 out of 6 times possible times. And the last one used was used on a non burst rather than holding for the 3 minute burst as the napkin math I did would suggest.

TLDR; The theory crafting (more like napkin math) gives a fairly good match between predicted values and optimized view at least in this fight. The napkin math is a highly idealized version of reality, how it is done in practice may be different (and it does look different in e6s and e7s if you look through the history closely), that just means asking why there is a discrepancy and can we get closer to the ideal. It is also possible that the ideal is unnecessary, you might just not need that much healing regardless of if the potential exists.

[Lyth]

I don't follow the purpose of this tangent, interesting as it is. It's great to put out more healing per second, but it only matters if the damage healed or prevented is translated into a raid damage gain or prevents a wipe. How can we guarantee that?

It also doesn't change the fact that Living Dead is a poorly designed action, which is the point of the thread. WAR had the best offensive and defensive toolkit for a good part of Stormblood, and players still complained about Shake it Off at release until it was changed. The argument "Oh, but look at these other great skills," doesn't hold water.

[Miminming]

I don't follow the purpose of this tangent, interesting as it is. It's great to put out more healing per second, but it only matters if the damage healed or prevented is translated into a raid damage gain or prevents a wipe. How can we guarantee that?

It also doesn't change the fact that Living Dead is a poorly designed action, which is the point of the thread. WAR had the best offensive and defensive toolkit for a good part of Stormblood, and players still complained about Shake it Off at release until it was changed. The argument "Oh, but look at these other great skills," doesn't hold water.

Because disscussing a job skill enterily seperatedly with the said job other skills is a guarranted balance breaker, you can't and wasn't supposed to discuss LD without TBN.

[Chrono_Rising]

I don't follow the purpose of this tangent, interesting as it is.

Its a long conversation flowing over many days so I don’t expect anyone to be following other than Lucy_Pyre, but I think Miminming has the right of it.

I believe that Lucy_Pyre primarily disagrees with over arching changes, or even the discussion of changes to Living Dead because like many people they see The Blackest Night as extremely power mitigation, which is both a commonly held sentiment and also true. Therefore the question of just how power TBN needs to be examined.

Evidence for me holding such a claim comes from finding agreement and freely sharing ideas culminating in:

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.

In the above post, I believe Lucy_Pyre is making the case that Living Dead is the trade off for such a powerful mitigation. Therefore the question we should critically examine is: how powerful is TBN in relation to the mitigation/self sustain kit as a whole and compared to kits of other tanks.

My argument here is that TBN is so powerful because it essentially is our entire kit, outside of shared things like rampart and the flavor text that is the 30% mitigation tool and invulns. If TBN provides similar mitigation/damage deletion as other cooldowns, then there is no need for it to be balanced with living dead because then TBN just is balanced with respect to other tanks cooldowns, while also being powerful in its own right.

In the above post I’m making the case that TBN functions to rival other tanks' cooldowns but as a single button. ToB, Equilibrium, and Nascent Flash heal back as much if not more damage than TBN + dark mind, but it does so across three buttons instead of two. I believe I proved my point above with napkin math, and then Launched made the fantastic suggestion to examine that with real data, which I verified in the next post.

TLDR; of a conversation that has been going on for many days: TBN is extremely powerful mitigation, but it is balanced with respect to other tanks kits without including invulns; what other tanks do with three buttons dark knight does with 2.

[NobleWinter]

I'm a Scholar Main and Living Dead is not my favorite ability to put it mildly. If I could just redo the whole skill over Living Dead would cause you to gain Walking Dead status immediately upon execution and last 12 seconds with the benefit of keeping most attacks from killing you. It would also cause your damage to be reduced by 20% since you are a zombie while simultaneously increasing the potency of any healing you receive by 20%. The requirement to be healed for a total of your max hp to remove the effect or death after 12 seconds if not achieved would be much more manageable. It's a window healers could work with in a dungeon that would actually help the DRK stay alive. In Savage you would have to play around the benefit of the invuln compared to the damage lost. Ending it by healing as soon as it is no longer necessary to get back to full power would be the point of contention for groups trying to maximize.

The fact Living Dead has two separate icons with two separate descriptions bothers me immensely. If all you ever saw was the Walking Dead symbol it would be easier to learn as a new healer. The red debuffs means my heals are stronger and they die in 12 seconds if I don't step up. The mandatory death seems to warrant increased healing potency received but I would be so thankful for a little bit more time to cast the necessary spells to make it useful.

[Lucy_Pyre]

It would also cause your damage to be reduced by 20%

I cannot explain in words how much I ***HATE*** this suggestion, but this will have to do. In XIV damage is king. If you made Living Dead do this it would literally never be used, EVER, unless the DRK was literally forced to hit the button to avoid an otherwise 100% unavoidable death.

[Lyth]

...

I think that you absolutely can and should discuss an ability in isolation when it is badly designed.