Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
At absolute bare minimum, Living Dead requires the creation of a UI overlay to show healers what healing requirements are left for you to survive. It's actually less effort to just change the action effect then it is to try to tweak it into something usable.

And that's ignoring the balance issue as well. Executed perfectly, Living Dead becomes Holmgang on a 51 second longer effective recast and 1 second shorter effective duration, and to actually attain that it comes at the cost of 2 Benediction uses per invuln due to the mismatch in their recasts. What happens when you try to address that? The reasonable thing to do would be to give Living Dead a shorter recast than Holmgang. But Holmgang's recast is absurdly short to begin with. Do you reduce Living Dead's recast to 3 minutes? Or do you swap Living Dead and Holmgang's recasts and risk incurring the ire of WAR players? Neither of these are great solutions.

And all this ignores the core issues. This is a really badly designed action. It doesn't feel fun to use, and you have no agency over whether you survive the effect. DRK has nowhere near the self-healing capabilities of WAR or PLD. And if you're a new healer and this is your first time encountering the action, you're required to mouseover and read through vague and incorrectly written tooltips. The actual Doom mechanic is more clearly described than this. Compare the size of the tooltip on Living Dead to that of any other invuln in the game. Keep it simple.
Ok you got me here. Yeah making the UI changes to communicate this for one particular ability does seem unlikely since UI doesn't appear to be square's strong point. I'm an app and web developer by trade and some UIs are easy to alter, such as web-based UI, and other UIs are an ungodly clusterf*q to work with and alter, and the feel of FF14's UI leads me to believe that it is based on some antiquated hell technology like winforms or worse.

To really do WD justice it would be integrated into the tank's healthbar UI somehow, like barriers are, but red or something. With a visual time (loading) bar backdrop, like a dark red loading bar filling in the drk's group-window element background.
Like you said the introduction to WD to new healers is, they died without explanation and that tank probably sucked.

At the same time I think true invuls also would be nice to have a similar invulnerability loading-bar backdrop, but in the reverse. SB and HW turning the tank's group-window element with a golden background, but drains over the 10 seconds. Warriors could be orangish-red and drain as well.
But with DRK theirs gets special attention. Theirs filling instead with an ominous attention grabbing dark red.

Admittedly this is even less likely in 6.xx than just turning WD into holmgang, which would be square surrendering and admitting defeat.
I honestly don't think turning WD into holmgang would make it overpowered or anything, just less interesting, wasted potential.
Holmgang is only holmgang because its on a warrior, so that'd be a silly complaint for them to make.

It all seems pretty unlikely though. Imo I think the most likely thing is no change at all. Second most likely thing is that they'd consider tweaking the numbers. Removing WD risk would be a blow to pride, a cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Equally unlikely I think are UI changes or turning it into holmgang.