Shadow wall needs an additional effect.

[Lambdafish]

Holmgang=Hallowed=Living Dead -> these skills have balance. Holmgang is short and spammable but requires strict timings to make extremely effective. Hallowed Ground allows you to Yolo any 1 mecanic in the game and not have anyone worry about your raggety ass. if the fight is long enough you can yolo 2 mecanics. Living Dead can be abused to provide a 12-18 sec invuln windows with only the need for a benediction or ED to get ya back up. If your a SCH well it sucks to be you really shoulda played a real healing class XD +1 all

I agree with everything except this. I think you are overestimating the balance of these skills, and you are not taking into account the disparity in their cooldowns and what that means for combat. Lets look at the skills in detail:

Hallowed Ground:
- God tier mitigation
- Lasts 10 seconds
- 7-minute cooldown. You get 1 of these per fight* (I have never had two).

Holmgang:
- Invulnerability at 1HP
- Lasts for 6 seconds
- Binds for 6 seconds
- 3-minute cooldown. You get 2 per fight, 3 in longer fights*.

Living Dead:
- You don't die from HP hitting 0
- Lasts for 10 seconds
- Needs a large heal or else you die
- 5-minute cooldown. You get 1 per fight, maybe 2 if used early*.

*based on a 9-12minute enrage timer

So lets break this down. For ease of analysis we will take hallowed ground out of the equation, it is the best skill with a massive cooldown, you get one per fight which means you have to plan around that fact. It is strong but not versatile in the slightest.

Comparing Holmgang and Living Dead we need to look at the drawbacks of the skills, namely the bind and the need for a heal: The question is, how detrimental is the bind and how detrimental is the heal? I would say the bind is not all that detrimental because it is rare for a tank buster to require movement at all, meaning that the bind is not a detriment at all, in fact, if SE ever puts in a scenario where an enemy can be bound to the partys benefit, then Holmgang is far far better than living dead in every way.

Oh, and to counter your pros about Living Dead, while it is true that you can abuse it, it does require coordination with the healer, and for them to save skills that could be used elsewhere (benediction is on a 3-minute cooldown, lustrate requires aetherflow).

This is all without mentioning that WARs superior self-healing directly affects the functionality of holmgang.

So we see above that the bind and the requirement for healing both have pros and cons, and are pretty balanced against each other. So why is it that holmgang has almost half the cooldown of living dead? Put into perspective above, in most cases DRKs will only get as many living deads as PLDs get hallowed grounds (a far superior skill), when WARs get two Holmgangs guaranteed with more option of a third than DRKs have option for a second Living Dead. I have seen this be relevant first hand on exdeath savage first phase, where WAR can cover the 1st and 3rd Thunder III, whereas parties with a DRK/PLD comp need to swap to cover their longer cooldowns.

So even here DRK loses out and I would say that your score should be +1 WAR/PLD, +0 DRK making your final DRK score a pitiful 3


Edit: A simple way to perfectly balance these skills is set living dead to a 4 minute cooldown, but until they do that DRK loses out.

Making them equal wouldn't be fair, althought we can move while the debuff is active.

How relevant is the movement 90% of the time?

[Sipherous]

Id have to disagree, maybe to for people with less experiance these skills are an issue but at a high level of play that becomes mute. Since I avoid casual play Ill get right to my points.

Hallowed Ground can be used twice in most fights that need it. O4S you can use it three time due to the fights nature but more specifically in the neo phase u use it for the first double fist and third double fist. O3S you pull and burn it on the first critical rip and then u have it up and active for the giant ninjas phase, alternatively use it for the white wind and burn it on a critical rip after giant. In Shynryu you use hallowed for first ahkmorn then again for a tetra slash. Many fights in alexander and coil had strats around useing 2 hallowed grounds, especially in midas and gordias. Coil was similar for the final 2 fights of each tier. Burning hallowed for a mecanic in the beginning allowed for my DPS from healers.

Holmganging something is preferred universally to negating a tankbuster or mecanic by many healers as there is no fear from the WAR actually dying to the hit. they dont need to shield them dont need top them off until after the hit goes off and those heals are already planned well in advance of the hit connecting. If they aren't your healers are bad or lagging.

Living dead needs planning yes, but it also allows for the greatest room for recovery. You over estimate how hard it is to recover from it because it instills a panic when u see the effect. A WHM should always have bene on hand for a DRK. Its law when running with on and even if you dont tetra and 2 cure 2's cover it just as well, 2 GCD's at the most with an oGCD. Astros have ED and maybe an aspected benefic to get them topped off, thats at most 2 GCD's if the first aspected benefic sucked. SCH are the only healer that have issues with this skill because they hate useing aetehrflow stacks for heals. If a healer prioritizes DPS over heals then they deserve to be forgotten.

Coordination is a mute arguement anyways because if your raiding or doing any high end content you know, then you need to have things planned before hand. No healer/tank goes into content and hit there CD's all willy nilly, its planned before hand and if its not you better learn fast before u get killed or dropped by your group.

[Lambdafish]

Burning hallowed for a mecanic in the beginning allowed for my DPS from healers...

...Coordination is a mute arguement anyways because if your raiding or doing any high end content you know, then you need to have things planned before hand. No healer/tank goes into content and hit there CD's all willy nilly, its planned before hand and if its not you better learn fast before u get killed or dropped by your group.

This is the thing though, we are talking about versatility. Experience doesn't matter because if it did then all of the effects would be negated and all we would be left with is the cooldown.

I will concede that perhaps you can use two hallowed grounds but the 7-minute cooldown still causes versatility problems. The fact is that in order to get 2 hallowed grounds, the first MUST be used at the beginning. There is no room to save it for a mechanic in the middle of the fight because then it will not line up for a mechanic at the end. You have two choices in this case, 2 Hallows (beginning and end) or 1 Hallow (anywhere in the middle). Possible, but not versatile.

DRK suffers similar issues and still has the issue of coordinating with the healer. You say that bene should always be left up for a DRK, but that's the point, bene needs to be kept up for a DRK, whereas PLD and WAR don't need it, and it can be saved for high outgoing damage and emergencies. It isn't about the difficulty of planning, it is about what is needed for the plan to succeed, and it impedes on the versatility of not only itself but also the healer's skills.

Like we have both said, homgang is preferred for its versatility, you get more of them in a fight with almost the same amount of combined uptime (18 seconds to negate three tankbusters is far better than 20-24 seconds to block two) and the bind is less impactful than the healer needing to save skills in order to optimise living dead.

Living dead is a good skill, but it is not 2-minute cooldown better than holmgang.