Living Dead

[Noldornir]

I agree you should alway be able to proc your own skills alone but wouldn't your change make LD much weaker tho? I mean:

PAL wih HG on= cant be wounded REGARDLESS of damage/number of hits received
WAR wit HOL= can be wounded but can't die REGARDLESS of damage/number of hits received

They'll both survive even 5 1 million HP worth hits:

A 30k HP PAL would receive no damage from any of those hit
a 30k HP WAR would be brought down to 1 HP with the first hit but then will receive no damage from the others (unless he gets healed but again that would just waste the healer MP and the WAR would be brought back to 1 HP with next hit but will never die)


While a 30k DRK would be:

1st hit: brought to 1 HP
Auto Heal from LD -> bring him back to 30K
2 hit: death

At any rate those skills are supposed to help you when a healer can't; it's pointless to make an healer need it: in 4 man if someone dies and the healer uses raise without having swiftcast available, even if it's an "oh shit" moment you can use em (as a WAR/PAL not very wise as a DRK tho).
If the healer dies an a smn/rdm is ressing him you don't want to use this skill as a DRK or you'll probably die as well.

[Cabalabob]

I agree you should alway be able to proc your own skills alone but wouldn't your change make LD much weaker tho? I mean:

PAL wih HG on= cant be wounded REGARDLESS of damage/number of hits received
WAR wit HOL= can be wounded but can't die REGARDLESS of damage/number of hits received

They'll both survive even 5 1 million HP worth hits:

A 30k HP PAL would receive no damage from any of those hit
a 30k HP WAR would be brought down to 1 HP with the first hit but then will receive no damage from the others (unless he gets healed but again that would just waste the healer MP and the WAR would be brought back to 1 HP with next hit but will never die)


While a 30k DRK would be:

1st hit: brought to 1 HP
Auto Heal from LD -> bring him back to 30K
2 hit: death

At any rate those skills are supposed to help you when a healer can't; it's pointless to make an healer need it: in 4 man if someone dies and the healer uses raise without having swiftcast available, even if it's an "oh shit" moment you can use em (as a WAR/PAL not very wise as a DRK tho).
If the healer dies an a smn/rdm is ressing him you don't want to use this skill as a DRK or you'll probably die as well.

Yes that is the major issue with the design, it means that DRK would be the only tank who can’t eat, let’s say, ahk morn solo, but outside of attempting to cheese mechanics like that, I can’t think of any scenario where the game throws multiple attacks that can 1 shot you in such quick succession and there are scenarios where current LD and hallowed work where holmgang doesn’t for cheese strats so I’d say it’s fair for DRK to have that too.

[Lyth]

I'm not sure why people are trying to figure out an appropriate penalty for Living Dead. Hallowed Ground doesn't have a penalty. It just has you ignore damage. It's powerful. It makes you feel good for using it. The recast isn't a penalty either. Invulns should be on a 5-7 minute recast at the very minimum. That's just good design.

Holmgang doesn't actually have a penalty. It prevents knockback. It has a stupidly low recast, to the point of being one of the single most broken abilities in the game. It's powerful. It feels good to use.

So why should we settle for having to have healers burn their cooldowns to save us from Living Dead? Simply for the privilege of doing what other tanks can do in their sleep? I'm sorry, but it's not acceptable.

If you want Living Dead to actually represent a "middle ground" between Hallowed and Holmgang, then two things must happen. First, you need a full 10 seconds of invulnerability, regardless of what happens. Second, when you hit 1 HP, you need some sort of a self-healing effect, either through your own attacks or your enemies', which starts making your HP tick back up. That's the middle ground between negating damage and preventing death. Stop penalising us for using our ultimate ability, and let it actually feel good to use.

And either way, there is no reason why Holmgang should be less than five minutes. The existence of a three minute recast invincibility is why progression raiders are laughing their way through your tankbusters. Stop trivialising the content.

[ValentineSnow]

Hallowed Ground doesn't have a penalty. The recast isn't a penalty.

Holmgang has a stupidly low recast, to the point of being one of the single most broken abilities in the game.

So recast isn't a penalty but holmgang's recast makes it too strong? Get your story straight.

All the tank invulns have benefits and drawbacks to them.

Hallowed has a long duration and powerful effect with the drawback being that it has a long cooldown lowering its usability to once maybe twice per fight.
Holmgang has a short recast with the drawback being it has an extremely short duration and only actually does anything if you hit 1hp requiring a lot better timing and skill to make use of it than hallowed.
Living dead has the highest potential duration with a cooldown between the other two, while sharing the 1hp drawback with holmgang while adding the healer requirement/death penalty on top of that.

the bolded is the part people take issue with, the longer duration benefit is made up for by the longer recast drawback. So there is no reason for there to be ANOTHER additional stipulation on top of that. The drawbacks of LD start to outweigh any benefits and make it not worth using.

LD doesn't need a drastic rework, if it didn't have the healing requirement and walking dead was just a 10 second holmgang then it would be completely fine. It is simply the healing drawback that pushes it over the edge.

[Phoenicia]

So recast isn't a penalty but holmgang's recast makes it too strong? Get your story straight.

All the tank invulns have benefits and drawbacks to them.

You say that, and then you say this:

while sharing the 1hp drawback with holmgang while adding the healer requirement/death penalty on top of that.

So you want others to consider Recast as a penalty, then LD would have Holmgang's "penalty" of dropping to 1 HP, Hallowed Ground's "penalty" or being only usable once/twice in an encounter AND have the heal requirement/death penalty on top? Lyth already did a very good job explaining how this "extended duration" you're penalizing me for isn't even in my hand nor does it ever get as long as Holmgang (as I probably also did in another post, probably on another thread).

I mean... If WAR having its invulnerability matching 2 of the PLD's, and until 4.4, 1 of DRK's, regular CDs doesn't stroke you the wrong way, I don't know what will.

While I don't think simply taking Holmgang and pushing it's CD to 5 minutes is the best way to fix it. I'd rather they split the root effect on a separate CD and give WAR another mitigative crutch (#FreeInnerBeastFromDefiance) to lean on instead of how it heavily relies on hg, I still believe Holmgang truly is what needs to be fixed to tone WAR a bit down. The only other ability I can think of that is as overpowered as Holmgang is Trick Attack.

Regardless, I hate discussing WAR on non-WAR topics, I'd rather we get back to LD. The simple truth is, LD doesn't have the CD of Hallowed, nor the "restrictions" of Holmgang, yet it manages to be worse than both. And thematically does NOT fit "DARK" knights. More often than not, I find myself looking for an alternative ability to replace it entirely instead of fixing a way to remove its penalty.

After all, it is VERY annoying to see my static's WHM (of all the healers) getting disgruntled when I use DRK (my main) over PLD (the more convenient tank) all because of 1 ability. Even when out of said ability, DRK's personal mitigation out-mitigates PLD and WAR on 3 out of 4 fights, if not all, this tier.

[Lyth]

The single most important feature of an invulnerability cooldown is the number of tankbusters that you can mitigate with it per fight. Generally speaking, this is determined by recast. When you look at Living Dead and Hallowed's recasts, you're generally not going to get an extra use of Living Dead over Hallowed. Why? Most fights are about ten minutes long. So as long as you can invuln a tankbuster in the first 3 minutes, you're probably going to get the same amount of uses out of Hallowed as well. If you contrast this with Holmgang, which has less than half the recast of Hallowed, it becomes quickly obvious that you will get an extra use out of Holmgang on every fight.

Living Dead only mitigates damage when Walking Dead is active. Because the effect gets cleansed by a healer, the maximum possible duration is 9 seconds. More often than not, however, this effect gets cleansed much sooner for a few reasons. First, not every group has access to Benediction, and your healer has no way of knowing how much remaining healing you require if they're manually removing the effect. So you're going to get spammed with heals until the effect disappears, generally well before 9 seconds. Second, most healers just aren't comfortable waiting until the last possible second to remove the effect. The end result is that Living Dead, on average, tends to have a much, much shorter duration than even Holmgang.

Living Dead does need a rework from the point of view that it's a badly designed ability. But that's a DRK-specific issue. Holmgang needs a longer recast simply because the existence of such a short recast invincibility move trivialises content. That not just an issue that impacts WAR, it impacts how all groups run content. Before they do anything else, they need to push the invuln recasts back to at least 5/6/7 minutes for WAR/DRK/PLD. Possibly longer.

[Derio]

DRK is the only tank where the healer has to be on their toes after you use your invulnerability move. I have had my fair runs where the healer fell a few thousand HP short of healing me to die to LD.

I hope DRK rework fixes LD. The other tank invuls have a huge advantage over LD.

[Mansion]

DRK is the only tank where the healer has to be on their toes after you use your invulnerability move. I have had my fair runs where the healer fell a few thousand HP short of healing me to die to LD.

I hope DRK rework fixes LD. The other tank invuls have a huge advantage over LD.

Well. Holmgang bringing you to 1HP does expire after some time, so if there is an auto-attack coming after you'll be happy to get some healing too. And the healers have 6 seconds to react.

The only "bad" thing about Living Dead is the 100% healing requirement. If it wasn't there, Living dead would just be a looser version of Holmgang where you can move, but you'll still need some form of healing after it.

[ElazulHP]

I didn't realize while leveling DRK how much I would end up hating this skill. I end up dead almost 100% of the time I use it with randoms so I just removed it from my bar lol...

[Canadane]

I think a lot of the time people use it when it's not planned to use it.
Hallowed Ground, Holmgang, and Living Dead all benefit from planned use rather than an emergency failsafe button.
This is why there's a delay on all of their activation. Same delay Benediction has. It's part of the defensive cooldown rotation, not used in emergencies only.