DRK skill: Living Dead

[Melichoir]

If someone is planning to use LD for an anticipated fatal hit though, like I said, there is no difference between activating LD immediately before it or activating it 10 seconds prior. Either way, you can stop healing them until WD is triggered by the tank buster or whatever. Again, any time before WD activates, LD is doing nothing for you, ergo it does not count as artificial extended "invuln time".

The 20 seconds thing is a myth, whether you care to believe that or not. I understand that it is a flawed invuln skill and that people want to desperately cling to any sort of thing they can that will make the ability sound better than it actually is, but the 20 seconds thing just isn't it. It's easily refuted.

and....

As for the "it lasts 20 seconds!!"

It doesn't.
Living Dead lasts for 10s, and Walking Dead lasts up to 10s. You can have LD shift into WD at any point in those 10 seconds, and WD can be cleansed almost whenever in those 10 seconds. Holmgang's one deficit to it's duration is more felt in multi-enemy situations if used on a target that dies, whereby you lose Holm. Learned that the hard way. Living Dead doesn't do jack-all but allow WD to trigger. "But it's a sign to your healers to not heal you!" So? I've been not-healed by my healers enough to say LD isn't any more an incentive than anything else for me to just be left sitting with a regen and TBN on me.

Christ Crispies...

...In the most ideal situation, it would be roughly 10 seconds in the activation phase so no heals necessary, take fatal damage at the last moment which activates Walking Dead, about 10 seconds of that before you get the necessary HP to stop WD from killing you. This gives you technically around 20 seconds of 'invuln', or rather 20 seconds of time where you technically cant be killed IF timed perfectly....

You have, at max in the most ideal of situations, a 20 second window where you cannot die to most mechanics in the game once you press Living Dead and activate the skill. The only place to go is not die (wasting the WD phase) or take fatal damage and pop WD and not take further fatal damage for 10 seconds. You no longer need to mitigate for yourself at that point, nor do healers need to be concerned with your HP for a temporary period of time. This means they can spend their time doing other things, like getting in a few GCD damage spells or handling other mechanics.

The question is does it play out that way where you get a max effect out of it? Usually no. Normally you would use it before a fatal tank buster cause it's easiest used that way, but you could pop it earlier than the buster and not worry about other damage so long as you dont take fatal damage before you need to. As for cleansing WD, yeah you can do it whenever, but if you got a WHM with Bene, theyre a bad WHM if they pop that bene the instant WD procs. There is no need to do it then. Normally most WHM will wait till around 2 seconds remaining on WD to pop bene. Other healers might have to start healing you sooner cause of the nature of the skill, but thats a separate issue.

Im not defending the skill cause I think its fine, but rather this concept that "Oh, its only a few seconds" or "its not really that long a skill" or what not isnt accurate. The reason why the skill has that heavy burden of being healed for a value equal to your HP is solely because of the potential effect the skill has. The fact you can essentially stop receiving heals for 20 seconds at most would be a pretty big boon in most fights. Conceptually it is incredibly strong, but how it actually plays out is another story. People dont abuse the LD phase because of how jank it is to begin with. A random SCH shield or reprisal from your cotank can mitigate enough damage where you dont take the fatal hit like you plan, LD falls off, and you get critted at low hp and die. The fact its harder for SCH and AST to heal you up, while WHM is just push Bene and win makes it unusual, or the fact that you can actually wipe out the invuln effect early through healing (of all things) makes it a liability as a invuln. Pair this with the fact that DRK has some of the best mitigation as a tank thanks to TBN, its really not an ideal Invuln. It doesnt synergize with it's own kit.

Frankly with how the DRK kit is currently, it would actually make more sense (kit wise) for DRK to have Holmgang, and WAR to have LD simply cause DRK can TBN themselves at the end of Holm gang as to not take fatal damage at 1 hp, and War actually has the ability to self heal up to 100% hp when LD pops. Even thematically it feels like it might make more sense - Lashing yourself to another target, refusing to go down in a brutal act of attrition for DRK, and refusing to fall and coming back from the brink of Death as a Warrior through bloodlust.

Point is skill is jank. It offers up the longest 'invuln' period of all the invulns, but only on a technicality. It is easily the worst invuln of all 4.

[Floortank]

quick suggestion, just wanna see what the community thinks.

I would like to see Living Dead made into a passive trait. all of its skill text and actual application is fine. i believe it should simply be a passive trait, instead of active use

This would make the DRK unkillable as his Doom could be cleared every time he hits 0 hp and Living Dead procs.

[Fynlar]

This would make the DRK unkillable as his Doom could be cleared every time he hits 0 hp and Living Dead procs.

Presumably, it would still have a cooldown. The only change proposed was that you wouldn't have to manually activate LD.

[Lyth]

...

Your posts illustrate the confusion surrounding this poorly designed and poorly described ability.

An ability only mitigates damage that it prevents. Hallowed Ground and Superbollide mitigate all incoming damage while they are active. Holmgang and Living Dead only mitigate damage when you are at 1 HP. If you stay above 1 HP, incoming damage isn't being mitigated and the ability does nothing.

When we talk about effective duration, it looks something like this:
Hallowed Ground: 10 seconds
Superbolide: 8 seconds
Living Dead: 0-9 seconds*
Holmgang: 0-7 seconds
*Note that this duration also depends on when your healer cleanses the effect. If they cleanse it early, which happens more often than not because there's no way to see how much required healing is left, the duration is much shorter.

So what is the point of the preliminary part of Living Dead? It reduces recast. A commonly used trick is activating an action early so that you start the recast timer earlier. Let's say there's a single hit tankbuster coming up, with no significant follow-up damage. I activate Hallowed Ground 9 seconds early. The tankbuster hits with 1 second left on Hallowed, allowing me to shave off 9 seconds on the recast timer. The effective recast is 411 seconds. When you know the timestamps of every tankbuster in a fight, this sort of planning helps out a lot to get you more uses out of your cooldowns.

Living Dead just means that your effective recast is always 291 seconds, regardless of whether it's a single hit or multiple ones. The effective recasts of the invulns are:

Hallowed Ground: 411-420 seconds
Superbolide: 351-360 seconds
Living Dead: 291 seconds
Holmgang: 232-240 seconds

The main difference here is that when you compare Holmgang and Superbolide, you're trading off a shorter recast (60s) for a 2 second longer duration and an additional penalty.

For Living Dead and Holmgang, you're trading off a potentially longer duration (maximum 2 seconds, and only if Benediction is used and timed correctly to the very last second of the cooldown) for a longer recast (60s) and an additional penalty (and a really, really bad one at that). What.

It shouldn't take much effort to figure out that this is an extremely poor trade-off. And that's setting aside how badly this action is implemented and written up as well.

But yeah, any time that you see "Living Dead" and "20 seconds", you can pretty much guarantee that anything that follows is going to be completely misguided.

...

Damage to healing can work as an invuln. You just make it such that once you hit 1 HP, you stop taking damage and a portion of what you would have taken slowly causes your health to tick back up for the remainder of the buff duration. That's kind of like an inverse Superbolide.

I think the "heal X damage or die" is going to be poorly implemented regardless of the amount of healing required. That's especially true if meeting the healing requirements early ends the invuln early, as it presently does.

[HeulGDarian]

Hey lads what if, just a what if, Living dead could be applied to others as well, like you can choose to use it on another tank.

[Lyth]

That depends on how much you dislike them.

[Fynlar]

I wouldn't mind other people using Living Dead on me. It doesn't do anything to you unless you were going to die anyway.

Now Rescue, on the other hand...

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Damage to healing can work as an invuln. You just make it such that once you hit 1 HP, you stop taking damage and a portion of what you would have taken slowly causes your health to tick back up for the remainder of the buff duration. That's kind of like an inverse Superbolide.

I think the "heal X damage or die" is going to be poorly implemented regardless of the amount of healing required. That's especially true if meeting the healing requirements early ends the invuln early, as it presently does.

It completely depends on how the skill is designed. The version as suggested by the person i quoted wouldn't, as it robs complete control of the doom condition from the party and leaves the DRK at the mercy of the enemy and would doom them to die in multiple situations, which I outlined.

There's only one way 'damage to health' would really work while maintaining parity with the other invulns. And that's how you described it; hallowed ground lite (0 damage taken, only its better than bolide because in many instances LD is used, the DRK would be receiving a benediction from the boss mechanics its blocking, saving the healers from having to spend any resources whatsoever. Like how divine spears deal 1mil +damage with the magic vuln, even 10% of that would be a 60-70% heal per spear.), no doom condition, no falling off early for the 10s(or you run into the ahk morn situation I put described.). At that point though, Bolide and LD would need to swap CD timers lol.

That being said, out of literally thousands of pulls during world prog through the years, LD has only ever been cleansed early twice. In a planned usage, it won't ever fall off before it needs to, unless someone fat-finger's benediction. The changes to LD are more to tackle its issue with solo & non WHM comps to make it a bit nicer.

[Starkbeaumont]

would already help if the incoming healing would be increased so all non whm players would stop complaining. after all war and gnb also need to be healed when using holmgang or superbolid.

now give LD a visual indicator (red health bar that turns normal when getting healed) and that should be fine.

on the hand as war and gnb are closer to drk than pld, maybe hallowed ground should be changed for balance purpose

[Lyth]

It'd be an easy enough fix to have an overlay meter (much like the shield gauge) showing how much required healing is left.

...

My point moreso is that a shorter recast has more value than a longer duration, and I think it's fair to say that Holmgang is unconditionally better than Living Dead.

If you did damage to HP as described, the recast is going to be a function of how much HP it restores. If you have something that restores 100% of incoming damage, it could easily be stronger than Hallowed on a multi-hit tankbuster, so would have to have a longer recast. If each HP absorb was hard capped, then there may be situations in which Superbollide is on par or even better. Either way, if you balanced it appropriately, you could easily design it such that you have Holmgang at 5 min, Superbollide/Living Dead at 6 min, and Hallowed at 7 min. To go one step further, I wish that they'd place a team-wide limit on invulns (something like 3x/fight across both tanks) simply to force more planning on how to ration out your standard cooldown pool instead of invuln-swap-supercooldown-invuln-swap.