How many more times must our Living Dead get griefed?

[AnjouMaaka]

In all my years playing FF14, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a healer grief a tank (including DRK's). It's an incredibly rare occurrence, presumably because the vast majority of players just want to complete content with as little conflict as possible. With it being such a rarity, the idea that it's consistently happening to you seems unlikely (unless you are somehow doing something to provoke the ire of your teammates).

Healing is not griefing; healing keeps you alive. Only not healing can be griefing. If you cast Living Dead and your healer heals you, congratulations, you're still alive, which is the entire reason you cast Living Dead in the first place. Unless there's some secret behavior of Living Dead that isn't described in the tooltip, it doesn't matter whether Living Dead keeps you alive or the healer keeps you alive; the result is the same.

It's almost certain that what you're considering "griefing" is just healers seeing that your health went below a certain threshold and switching from DPS to healing in order to keep the tank alive.

You are so wrong with this comment. This happens every single time I pop living dead, they go out of their way to ensure the invuln is wasted and then the moment they've seen that their griefing tactics are successful, they stop healing, and I get torn through like paper because they blew everything they had on making me waste my living dead, and I have no more mitigations to pop at this point. And I am not doing anything to provoke this behavior out of them. I don't even type in the in-game chat anymore because of how offended players get over the smallest things. So no, you have no idea how often this happens and as I stated before, I can't be the only one having this experience. I wouldn't be here with valid complaints about it if it wasn't unprovoked behavior.

[Ramiee]

You are so wrong with this comment. This happens every single time I pop living dead, they go out of their way to ensure the invuln is wasted and then the moment they've seen that their griefing tactics are successful, they stop healing, and I get torn through like paper because they blew everything they had on making me waste my living dead, and I have no more mitigations to pop at this point. And I am not doing anything to provoke this behavior out of them. I don't even type in the in-game chat anymore because of how offended players get over the smallest things. So no, you have no idea how often this happens and as I stated before, I can't be the only one having this experience. I wouldn't be here with valid complaints about it if it wasn't unprovoked behavior.

Are you sure?
Whenever a casual healer sees a tanks hp go low they instantly panic and spam heal, it's the entire meme around superbole. Every single time I say something along the lines of "I'll invun next pack" or "I'll invun next tb" in normal content the healer has always let me do my thing as a dark knight. This really seems to be a communications issue. If you don't communicate and look like you're about to die of course the healer will panic spam heal you.

[AnjouMaaka]

It is helpful to create a warning macro for the finicky invulns like Living Dead and Superbolide. Expressing intent to use them helps align attentive party members with you.

Something as simple as

/p Superbolide soon<se.5> (auto translate)

can make a world of difference.

If it was helpful to do this, then I wouldn't be here in the forums with valid and true statements that come from the frustration of my experience with the job as a whole. I shouldn't have to fear getting drug through the mud every single dungeon as a dark knight. Just cause YOU personally don't get that many bad healers when you play the job, doesn't mean my experience is invalidated or untrue.

[Scardrak]

I'm leveling my DRK right now (lvl 55) and I haven't pressed it yet. The tooltip doesn't make much sense to me either. I'll probably watch a video on it in a minute. I know if I play a healer and someone's HP drops to 1 I'm probably going to panic and smash every key I have. Now why they would stop healing after that is a mystery unless you're yelling to stop healing you during LD and they see it at that point and just stop healing. No clue man but I have my doubts everyone's out to get you.

[LilimoLimomo]

You are so wrong with this comment. This happens every single time I pop living dead, they go out of their way to ensure the invuln is wasted and then the moment they've seen that their griefing tactics are successful, they stop healing, and I get torn through like paper because they blew everything they had on making me waste my living dead, and I have no more mitigations to pop at this point. And I am not doing anything to provoke this behavior out of them. I don't even type in the in-game chat anymore because of how offended players get over the smallest things. So no, you have no idea how often this happens and as I stated before, I can't be the only one having this experience. I wouldn't be here with valid complaints about it if it wasn't unprovoked behavior.

I mean, I honestly don't know what to say. In all my time playing as a DRK I can't remember a single time when the healer has just let me die. I've never even felt like I needed to use Living Dead* on anything, including double-pulls. I'm sure I've wiped, but nothing about those times made me feel like it occurred out of malice rather than just "nobody's perfect", especially because yeah, DRK is a bit squishy so it can be trickier for a healer to keep up. And when I've run auto-matched content with DRK's, I'm similarly not seeing anything that seems out of the ordinary.

Taking your experiences at your word, my best attempt at fitting both of our narratives into a cohesive singular reality is to wonder if there's some kind of meaningful cultural difference between the Primal and Aether datacenters. Maybe on Primal, lots of people actively hate DRK's, while on Aether that's just not a thing? Or maybe healers are significantly worse on Primal? My brain says that both of these possibilities are unlikely, but I have to admit that unlikely isn't the same as impossible.


*I've never liked using Living Dead because of how risky it was back in the day, and even though I know it's more reliable now, old habits die hard.

[AnjouMaaka]

I'm leveling my DRK right now (lvl 55) and I haven't pressed it yet. The tooltip doesn't make much sense to me either. I'll probably watch a video on it in a minute. I know if I play a healer and someone's HP drops to 1 I'm probably going to panic and smash every key I have. Now why they would stop healing after that is a mystery unless you're yelling to stop healing you during LD and they see it at that point and just stop healing. No clue man but I have my doubts everyone's out to get you.

First off, you've barely touched the job. I'm not out here saying everyone is out to get me. It is a legitimate complaint about the dungeon experience for the job. And it's not only when I play dark knight in dungeons. I've yet to see living dead not be griefed at all regardless of whether I'm the one playing dark knight, or someone else. I have experience as a healer as well. I certainly wouldn't do this when the tank is a dark knight, but I also don't put them in a situation where they feel like they need to invuln in the first place. Huge difference between not needing to invuln at all and being drug through the mud so hard that you come out feeling like a rung out and reused condom.

[ConantSivrha]

snip

Understandable. I do see what you mean about the emphasis on successful uses of Living Dead over just finishing pulls without incident.

I’m not sure what to think about their suggestion of “a debuff that prevents outside healing during Living Dead”. It might sound like nonsense at first, but it’s actually a fairly common suggestion (though I’ve heard “turn the amount healed into a shield that gets deployed after the invuln ends”, or other variants that delay the healing or convert it into a beneficial effect, more than just “prevent healing”).

Most of the time, when a healer prevents me from dropping to 1 HP during Living Dead, I’ll still be on life support by the time Living Dead ends. If they hadn’t healed me, and Walking Dead activated, I assume I could’ve healed as much or more without the healer having to expend resources. (Though, admittedly, I’m not personally familiar with the experience of successful Living Dead uses.) An effect that prevents outside healing is different from the healer understanding what’s happening and willingly pausing their healing, however.

I’ve experienced situations, while playing healer, when I’m healing a tank and their HP is dropping at the same rate (or faster) than I can heal them, so it looks like the healing is doing nothing. Unless a healer knows what Living Dead does and knows that you’re currently using it, an effect that blocks healing will probably make them think “this tank is taking damage so quickly that my heals aren’t even making a dent in it, so I’d better press everything at once”.

Blocking healing would allow the dark knight to use Living Dead “successfully”, but depending on what the healer was doing during the time their heals had no effect, the party might be in a worse position overall. I assume this is why people prefer to ask for the healing to do something useful. (Personally, I think it would be funny if the healing “reflected” off of the dark knight and somehow turned into AoE damage on the surrounding enemies. Disgustingly unbalanced, probably, but funny.)

[Alice_Rivers]

Most of the time, when a healer prevents me from dropping to 1 HP during Living Dead, I’ll still be on life support by the time Living Dead ends. If they hadn’t healed me, and Walking Dead activated, I assume I could’ve healed as much or more without the healer having to expend resources. (Though, admittedly, I’m not personally familiar with the experience of successful Living Dead uses.)

I can confirm that a successful Living Dead use in a pack of enemies is glorious, watching a DRK outheal a WAR is truly one of my favourite experiences. But it also shares the same weakness as WARs healing options - In that with only a single target it can be a bit iffy as to whether you'll make the 100% HP you need to survive, especially if your timing is bad.

Blocking healing would allow the dark knight to use Living Dead “successfully”, but depending on what the healer was doing during the time their heals had no effect, the party might be in a worse position overall. I assume this is why people prefer to ask for the healing to do something useful. (Personally, I think it would be funny if the healing “reflected” off of the dark knight and somehow turned into AoE damage on the surrounding enemies. Disgustingly unbalanced, probably, but funny.)

You're right here, it would be funny and a neat opportunity for a little team coordination: DRK pops LD and everyone lays on all the healing they can for 7 GCDs and subsequently nuke everything in a 10 yalm radius.

[Purrnauskis]

There shouldn't need to be any kind of communication for LD in a dungeon considering it has a VERY OBVIOUS sound cue and it shows on the buff lists. It's only inexcusable if you are still new to the game/sprout and don't know any better.

Then again, I have it on a macro that will ping and post in the chat but healers will still benediction me the first chance they get.

[Derio]

The soulution is to play WAR. They look at player numbers. If no one is playing DRK then they will look into seeing why people arent playing it.