Living dead must change

[DaulBan]

There is no job identity among tanks, its just 4 shades of WAR.

[Kabooa]

That's some tasty bait there.

Sure would be a shame if

Someone

Took it.

[Lyth]

I think invulns need to be sorely looked at by the development team now. This is especially true if they want to make a healer rework a priority in Endwalker. Tanking and healing are closely interlinked by necessity. Right now, raidwides are the primary healing 'challenge', rather than tank damage. Invulns are too powerful and too available.

Living Dead definitely needs to be looked at. If we're separating out healers into 'pure healers' and 'shield healers', then the rules will need to change for Walking Dead's heal or die check. Will shields count towards cleansing the effect? I'm not sure what direction this is going to go, but I'd love to see some dev thoughts on this.

Holmgang was changed this expansion. It no longer requires a target. It no longer roots you in place. It has a longer duration and a longer recast than it did previously, and it's enough that it's consistently better than Living Dead in every situation without having any associated drawback. Historically, there Living Dead's potential duration gave it some situational advantages over Holmgang. It was better suited for longer, multi-hit tankbuster sequences (i.e. Final Beam combo, Holy Scourge, Ultimate Embrace + Hyperdrive). Now it's pretty obvious that Living Dead is the worse choice all around.

There are a lot of technical issues with how Living Dead is implemented as well. You need to heal to prevent instant death, but healing paradoxically causes the cooldown to end early. Most of us have seen an early cleanse on a multihit tankbuster only to cause a death on a later hit. There's no gauge to let healers know how close they are to cleasing Walking Dead. And when you go the most reliable route, Benediction is three minutes and Living Dead is five. You're guaranteed to lose Benediction uses when you try to pair the two up. And don't get me started on the tooltip errors. There's no wonder why most of the playerbase doesn't know how it works.

In one of his early interviews, Yoshi-p mentioned that Invincible (Hallowed) was too strong, but that they couldn't really do anything about it given its history. The original Nisi cheese very nearly involved a PLD purely for the invuln, except for the fact that it was at a clear dps disadvantage. There have since been stealth nerfs (you no longer can use it to negate stack applications,) but it's still incredibly powerful. Living Dead and Superbolide try to tone it down some, but they still tend to overpower the rest of the cooldowns in their respective kits.

If Living Dead were to be reworked, what I would favour is this:

Shadowform: For the next 10 seconds, any incoming damage and healing is negated. Damage and healing prevented this way is converted into a temporary shield of up to X% of max HP.

This is essentially a modified version of Sigma's Kinetic Grasp.

As far as availability goes, I'd like to see 'higher difficulty' settings place team-wide limits on player access to invulns and rezzes. I think that Monster Hunter approach of having a shared 'pool' of deaths or resources forces you to play a bit more cautiously and work more closely with your team. If you could only invuln, say, three tankbusters per fight at a savage difficulty setting between the two of you (or two in an ultimate difficulty setting), then maybe cooldown management may become a thing again.

[AC9Breaker]

I can only hope to reach this level of genius.