#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Kayokane]

Let's just remember that the only reason Living Dead on DRK was given a massive healing on attack, was because healer were unwilling to heal the drk. It wasn't aboit being unable to do it, seeing as healers are constantly complaining about having too many heals for how much damage goes out.

[ty_taurus]

Let's just remember that the only reason Living Dead on DRK was given a massive healing on attack, was because healer were unwilling to heal the drk. It wasn't aboit being unable to do it, seeing as healers are constantly complaining about having too many heals for how much damage goes out.

"Unwilling" is a very misleading term to use. It implies that healers were intentionally ignoring Living Dead and letting their tank die on purpose, but that wasn't the issue. There is no indication that the Dark Knight needed to be healed to max HP at all. No visual queues, no telegraphs, no audio cues... Nothing. The same is true for Doom. The game does jack all to teach you that mechanic or tell you when its in effect. You have the debuff icons, but they are microscopic and drowning in a sea of icons on the party list. Yes, a decent player can pick up on that once they've learned what that does, but that quite frankly isn't good enough.

In other words, healers weren't "unwilling" to heal a Dark Knight. Many of them either didn't know they were supposed to heal the Dark Knight, knew about the mechanic but didn't realize the Dark Knight used it, or realized too late and couldn't heal them in time.

[Evergrey]

"Unwilling" is a very misleading term to use. It implies that healers were intentionally ignoring Living Dead and letting their tank die on purpose, but that wasn't the issue. There is no indication that the Dark Knight needed to be healed to max HP at all. No visual queues, no telegraphs, no audio cues... Nothing. The same is true for Doom. The game does jack all to teach you that mechanic or tell you when its in effect. You have the debuff icons, but they are microscopic and drowning in a sea of icons on the party list. Yes, a decent player can pick up on that once they've learned what that does, but that quite frankly isn't good enough.

In other words, healers weren't "unwilling" to heal a Dark Knight. Many of them either didn't know they were supposed to heal the Dark Knight, knew about the mechanic but didn't realize the Dark Knight used it, or realized too late and couldn't heal them in time.

True, there's no real que that the DRK had to be healed for 100% of their base HP (if I'm remembering it correctly).
But even after people made Macros, even typing manually in chat mentioning that when Living Dead was activated that they needed to be healed, healers more often than not still didn't do it.
Was it because the healers didn't pay attention to the chat?
Or was it that the healers were busy elsewhere?
Regardless, I can say that I died more times than survived the Living Dead due to the lack of healings.

I switched to RPR when they came out, so I never really played DRK when Living Dead got the self heals to experience it in action.
I just lvl'd DRK to 90 due to my DRK retainers.

[Eorzean_username]

Let's just remember that the only reason Living Dead on DRK was given a massive healing on attack, was because healer were unwilling to heal the drk. It wasn't aboit being unable to do it, seeing as healers are constantly complaining about having too many heals for how much damage goes out.

You do not seem to understand what actually occurred in the past regarding Healers and "Living Dead".

In fact, Healers that actually comprehended the mechanic (either by leveling a DRK themselves, or being informed externally, since it offered no clarity whatsoever to non-DRK players, otherwise) were divided into 2 categories:

• White Mage — Resolved entire mechanic in 0.75s by using Benediction
• Astrologian and Scholar — suddenly had to slam the brakes on whatever else they were doing, and dump as much Healing Potency as they could into the ~7.5-8s window that they had left to fix it once it became clear the DRK was "coding".

This basically provided a type of Healing demand — unpredictable random massive spike damage ~equal to an entire HP bar — which FFXIV explicitly does not design its Healers to "handle", and in a time-frame that FFXIV also does not typically expect Healer toolkits to be able to comfortably-resolve.

It was a mechanic that would be at home in the faster GCDs and burstier Healing toolsets of WOW, for example, but it was an awkward burden in FFXIV.

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FFXIV almost-always divides its encounter damage into predictable bursts, interspersed with mostly-trivial piddle, and FFXIV also explicitly makes GCD Heals underwhelming, especially in terms of Healing-per-Unit-Time, and especially vs. single-targets — since FFXIV has engineered itself for Healers's "purpose" to mostly be about undoing AOE damage.

There is a significant difference between the Healing patterns of the vast majority of the game's content, and situations encountered with that 1 specific Action which had an extreme and sudden Healing demand attached to it.

Especially when the problem was allowed to fester for such a prolonged time — about 7 years, actually — because players would, if possible, just pair a DRK comp with WHM, allowing Benediction to just cancel the entire Living Dead mechanic for free, vs. forcing AST/SCH to hemorrhage disproportionately-heavy Damage / Resources to try to fix it.

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Furthermore, the complaints were about the difficulty of spontaneously handling DRK Living Dead for non-Benediction Healers — again, because FFXIV has evolved its Healer designs to be unremarkable for single-target heavy burst healing, especially on SCH.

An AST/SCH comp, for example, would not actually struggle to deal with Living Dead in a planned-out healing plan, because sufficient charges of Aetherflow / Essential Dignity / etc, would simply be reserved for it.

But "Surprise Living Dead" could be a serious time / resource issue.

And these issues were especially-exacerbated when you had only a single Healer (eg, Dungeons, Deep Dungeon, etc) — because alone, that Healer suddenly needed to dig their DRK out of a hole equal in size to the DRK's entire HP Bar, without a co-healer helping.

That sort of thing was a significant and uncomfortable ask for SCH, for example, especially if the DRK went Zombie Mode while Aetherflow was already dumped on other uses.

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Actually, that's another issue — FFXIV's lethargic and carefully-spooned-out pace of incoming damage lends itself to using OGCDs to snooze through it all, because it doesn't really matter if your Party is at 25% HP if they're not going to take any damage for the next 30 seconds anyway.

Players are either "Dead" or "Alive", and if you know an encounter's pattern, then "Almost Dead" is basically safely-equivalent to "Alive".

Now compare this to Living Dead, where "mostly healthy" wasn't good enough. Even if no further incoming damage was arriving, that Dark Knight still needed a fixed amount of healing equal to their maximum HP, or they'd just die instantly anyway, even if they were at 50% HP.

And you had < 10s to do it.

That is a very strange sort of mechanic in the context of FFXIV's overall healing-system, and it left AST/SCH trying to dig themselves out of an uncommonly-deep hole compared to what FFXIV Healers are engineered to handle.

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Now, compare that to other Tanks.

WAR Holmgang or GNB Superbolide is about to expire? Who cares, even if they're at 25% HP they'll be fine, as long as you know the pace of incoming damage. The important thing is that they already-ignored whatever "super-damage" they had used their Invuln to evade.

DRK had the unique issue of first getting knocked to 1 HP by "super-damage" (or just cumulative damage of some sort), and then going into "Medical Emergency Mode", where they absolutely required their entire HP Bar worth of healing in order to not just experience "Improved Death" 10s later.

If you had a WHM around — this mechanic didn't even exist, you just canceled it with Benediction and DRK's Invuln was basically like any other Tank.

If you did not have a WHM around — this mechanic became a significantly-heavier burden compared to other Tank Invulns, to the point of being actively-annoying for everyone involved.

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Oh, and another thing, pre-6.10 Living Dead could actually just fail to do anything productive at all if your Healer was too aware and too helpful.

• You'd first put up Living Dead, acting as 10s of "insurance policy".
• If you were reduced to 0 HP at any point during those 10s where your "insurance policy" was active, you'd enter "Walking Dead", restarting as a new 10s timer.
• During the 10s of "Walking Dead", you basically had Holmgang active — can't be reduced below 1 HP — except with the additional bonus of, "You must receive 100% of your max HP in total healing before this effect ends, or you'll die anyway".
• Except the problem is, if you did receive the requisite amount of Healing — for example, if your over-eager Astrologian tried to do her job well, and immediately started dumping Essential Dignities into you...
• ...then Walking Dead would just end as soon as you reached the Healing threshold. No "Undead Rebirth", nothing, just... poof, gone.
• Meaning that if you were healed too well, your Invuln effect would just vanish before its maximum potential duration of 10s had elapsed — and if you had a WHM around, that could mean that you were only "invulnerable" for < 1 second total.
• ...Which means that you might, for example, get insta-smooshed by the next follow-up Tankbuster that you were expecting to Invuln-through.

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...So yeah basically everything that you said is "confidently incorrect".

Living Dead was changed for a lot of reasons, but, "Healers refused to heal their DRKs" is pretty low on the list of actual explanations.

"Did not like Healing their DRK out of Living Dead" ?

Yeah, that seems factual. It was annoying for a lot of reasons, and inconsistent with the behaviour of other Tank Invulns.

"Refused to Heal their DRK out of Living Dead" ?

Other than rare "drama story" cases being exaggerated for memetic reasons... No.