Living Dead

[Gemina]

I can count with the fingers on one hand the amount of times I've died to walking dead because I did not receive healing. I can even remember the specific instances that it has happened. Two of the occasions I died to it didn't even happen in battle, but because WD was still active after the fight/pull was over and tick-tock-tick-tock-dead. It's actually kind of hilarious because the healers were always all, "WTF!?" However, the amount of times it has saved my tail FAR outweighs this little mishap. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've been left alone to eat a stack marker in PUGs. It's ridiculous.

I'm not saying it is a perfect skill by any means, but I don't share the frustration I am reading in a lot of the posts here. If I was to change anything about it, I would give it the shortest cooldown of all the invul skills because of the potential for WD to not even get triggered. WD status doesn't change the fact that you were dead anyway had you not used LD.

As a healer main, I will never, ever buy into the excuse of forgoing the responsibility to heal the damn tank, ESPECIALLY in favor of getting a few more GCDs in to deal damage. They need to be paying attention to the status bars and the fact that a tank is sitting at 1hp for several seconds. They don't need to understand how LD/WD works, they only need to understand that tunnel visioning will almost always lead to a tank death. If a DRK dies to WD it is on the healer for not paying attention. Period.

[Lyth]

...

I think there are multiple factors at work here.

The implementation of Living Dead is terrible. You're reliant on another player to survive the use of the ability. You're also reliant on the fact that, despite playing a different job, said player came in understanding how the ability works. The English tooltips are flat out wrong and unreliable. The devs reworked the entire UI system in Stormblood so that buff timers and effects were more explicit, but yet we still don't have any sort of HP bar visual cues that show that the effect is active or how much remaining healing is required. Your healers often are forced to expend their own cooldowns, either to save you, or to gain the full effect out of Living Dead.

And all these things could be worth it. Just maybe. If Living Dead provided some sort of unique advantage or benefit over the other two invulns to offset all this, you could try to overlook these things. Yet, it's the single worst cooldown out of the three.

Living Dead gets ignored for four years, without any attempts to fix the ability's multiple problems or even an acknowledgement that they exist, despite complaint after complaint from the community. I think that half of all DRK feedback threads take issue with the ability in some form or the other. WAR mains complain about how crit reliance makes their FFlogs look less pretty? Instant fix. You can see why we'd be annoyed.

[Gemina]

I think there are multiple factors at work here.

Agreed, but I believe the factors I see are different from your own.

The healer that suffers the most from using resources to patch up WD is SCH. And this is because their strongest healing comes via aetherflow and it is a limited resource unlike GCDs. However, as SCH I've never had any trouble dealing with WD simply by using Emergency Tactics along with Adlo and letting Lily take care of the rest. This can be further assisted with Rouse prior to getting Aetherpact @70, but once SCH has it, it is the only resource that uses up the fairy gauge. It is maximum HP that needs to be restored, and not healing the DRK to full. As WHM or AST, WD is hardly an inconvenience at all. Again, I will never buy into the excuse of healers having to perform their primary function during duties.

LD/WD does not change at all that tanks are reliant on healers to survive an encounter. This is honestly a very poor excuse at saying it is poorly implemented. ALL tanks need to be healed, or they will drop. If you die to WD, you were dead anyway because your healer tunnel visioned. It really is as simple as that. They don't need to read or even understand DRKs tooltips when it comes to LD/WD. They only need to know that their tank is about to die if they don't heal them; LD/WD actually buys them a little more time to get this done if it indeed does get to the implied emergency scenario.

Hallowed Ground is very strong, with only the extremely long CD as its weakness. Holmgang doesn't require as much healing as LD/WD but requires a target and bind, making it far more effective on bosses than on trash. These are VERY distinctive disadvantages in my book that DRK does not share with its invuln skill. DRKs invul is on a shorter CD than Hallowed Ground, and is equally effective on bosses and trash unlike Holmgang. I can't speak for other DRKs out there, but I'm not complaining about it. Again, I am not saying it is a perfect at all, but its reliance on a healer to do what they should be doing anyway isn't even what I would call a "disadvantage".

To expand on what I would change about it, I would actually have a reduced CD if WD does not trigger. I was going to say a full on reset, but that would be too much. In it's current state without a healing requirement, it becomes a better Hallowed Ground and a better Holmgang. Is that what you really want?

[TouchandFeel]

snip

I would disagree and say that Holmgang is at least as effective in large trash pulls as Living Dead, you just need to use and time it appropriately.

Basically you can use it by not popping any defensives, letting your HP get really low and then popping Holmgang, maximizing the up-time and effect of Holmgang. You then immediately follow up with a bunch of self-heals like Equilibrium and your normal IR+Steel Cyclone spam and you should get yourself pretty much back to full health by yourself, no outside healing needed. It's super effective and the only potential difficulty is syncing up with your healer so that they don't freak out when you let your health drop so low.
Basically, used effectively Holmgang can be a short-term period of invulnerability and a place for the over-healing from IR+Cyclone spam to be put to use. It's especially useful if you need to reapply Storm's Eye at the beginning of a big pull as it buys you the time to do that and then go into IR+Cyclone.

Now you can do the same thing with Living Dead as with Holmgang and it is mostly the same asides from two major differences.
First is that you have a bit more of a pre-cast cushion because of the auto-trigger when you hit 1 hp, which makes it require less precise timing than Holmgang.
Second and most importantly, DRK doesn't have the self-heal capabilities to pull themselves back from the 1hp brink effectively like WAR does and the healing requirement just exacerbates the issue by instilling a hard penalty of death on something that you can't overcome by yourself. While you are likely to receive healing after using Holmgang or Living Dead, DRK doesn't have the self-reliability of WAR to pull off things like what I outlined above for using Holmgang in mass pulls.

When you look at the two abilities in an isolated fashion, yeah they can seem fairly comparable, but when you take into account the way the rest of the jobs' kits and how they interact with Holmgang and Living Dead, LD's limitations and awkwardness really show.

I wouldn't suggest altering the recast time for Living Dead since it is balanced with the rest of DRK's defensive kit, but the way it works definitely needs to be changed.

[Gula]

So um, when should I use Living Dead? There's a lot of mixed messages in this thread.

[TouchandFeel]

So um, when should I use Living Dead? There's a lot of mixed messages in this thread.

Living Dead's most effective use is in higher difficulty end game content where you use it by itself to survive a really powerful hit from a boss, known as a "tankbuster", that would normally kill you in one hit from full health.

Outside of that it depends since there are a lot of variables in play, hence the "mixed messages".

[Izsha]

So um, when should I use Living Dead? There's a lot of mixed messages in this thread.

Anything except hallowed is a gamble to use in dungeons. But you also shouldnt really need invulns in dungeons/24 mans/story mode raids/etc. The base defensive kit for tanks is really overdone for normal content. The only tim you should worry about LD/HG is for savage raids where they are planned out WITH your healers as a cooldown. My healers know which tank busters I holmgang so they dont top me off before it and the whm saves benediction for those allowing me to save CDs for other stuff and the healers can dps as my hp falls before the buster and use a single ogcd after.

That's the purpose of invulns kn this game. As part of a coordinated effort for savage content. That's why there are mixed messages. If you try to just pop LD or HG in a dungeon you are pretty likely to die afterwards or not even hit 1hp yo use either one in the 1st place. Or try to use it as an "oh $%&#" button and still die after.

They dont really work well without communication and this they are great in coordinated savage raids and junk anywhere else. But tanks are so overpowered in everything else it doesnt even matter tbh. I mean were already pulling 10+ monsters at a time when they are designed to be faught 2-3 at a time.

Just save the invulns for raids and they all start to look more reasonable.

[Sylvain]

When I see how our war struggle with holmgang on ifrit tb in UwU, I wish he'd have access to living dead....

[Phoenicia]

Snips.

When I see how our war struggle with holmgang on ifrit tb in UwU, I wish he'd have access to living dead....

That's the thing, WAR (and even PLD) wouldn't have a problem with LD. DRK does.

As mentioned many times before, WAR has no trouble at all getting out of 1HP and back to full health simply by critting an Equilibrium and 1 or 2 Inner Beasts. They also have Storm's Path and Thrill of Battle for added healing should they miss a bit. That's without IR, imagine having IR too! WAR is the self-healing tank, it has less problems dealing with healing requirements. Heck, even PLD can remove a similar penalty on its own casting 2~4 clemencies on itself. 2 if Requiescat and/or Convalescence are available.

What can DRK do to help healers with Walking Dead? Go into Grit to add healing to a 20% weaker Souleater? And a very fidgety timing to use Sole Survivor, which may not necessarily line up with LD as it is also a DPS gain? Then let's not forget Souleater does NOT ignore tank stance like Inner Beast, nor does DRK have increased crit chance to get "lucky", or any actual healing "burst" for that matter. Outside of VERY limited ways to heal itself, DRK is literally in trouble with a self-induced "get healed or die" mechanic.

This is not to be mistaken, Living Dead is a VERY strong ability. When Walking Dead is triggered, it already did its job of preventing an eminent death just like Holmgang would have. During Walking Dead you are in a pseudo-invincible state, granted healers don't panic and knock out right out of it with a benediction or Essential Dignity crit. On its own, it sounds stronger than either of the other two abilities with some advantages over them (No target requirement like Holmgang, shorter CD than Hallowed, longer potential maximum duration than both).

Living Dead alone is NOT the problem, it is how the whole kit works together. Since its inception, DRK has been in this weird place where it just can't identify. It has both a damage reduction and self-healing tools (and in Heavensward, evasion too), but it's not strongest at either. An example, Shadow Wall has been the weakest of the "big defensive" category for 3 years, sharing Sentinel's CD and duration, but only 30% reduction and only reason it stayed that way was SE's notorious stubbornness for it to mirror what the PLD has. This is what gives it the feeling of having a very "disconnected toolkit". You can also look at how they had dodge (Dark Arts + Dark Dance) and ability to blind mobs (DADP), yet it wanted hits to land to get MP with Bloodpact, which SE had no problems nerfing as well.

Living Dead is not the issue, the fact it applies a heal-or-die condition on the one tank that can't heal itself is. The fact WD can be "dispelled" early is a bonus issue, but the fact it procced in itself means it did its job so one can let it slide.

DRK adds unnecessary stress on healers that neither WAR nor PLD do. And there isn't a justification for it. DRK isn't pulling half the sh*t WAR does when main tanking to alleviate healing pressure outside of TBs for example.

When a PLD uses Hallowed Ground, all tank-healing pressure is on pause along with its HP for ~10 seconds. Heck, we gain a huge advantage simply by leaving regen on it.

When a WAR uses Holmgang before a swap or something, we simple toss him a small heal. When I heal, I simply leave a regen effect on the WAR and let AoE heals, regens and their Storm's Path take care of the low HP threat. They won't die to next AoE.

DRK proccing Walking Dead means my Benediction/Essential Dignity is simply reserved for DRK. Even if no further dangerous damage to be taken. You simply can't "leave the DRK to AoE heals and Regens" like you can a WAR.

Personally, I am a healer who mains tanks so I know how they work, and having tanked those fights also means I know the damage patterns. But for healers who do not share my knowledge, it is just a panic-trigger. I know a lot of healers that take issue of having the WAR+DRK pairing simply because they don't have 2 benedictions. We have to keep in mind that various levels of player skill should be taken into account.

This is a non-issue for WARs because they won't die from simply using the skill. What will kill them is running out of HP. And yes, you are right, if after 6 seconds of sitting at 1 HP and they are not healed and still die, it's on the healer. EVEN if WAR "could" get back to full, there is no reason to due to the DPS loss. Usually WARs are not banking on the healers not topping them off.

On the other hand, DRK will die for simply using the skill. It isn't only a question of "I sat down at 1 HP for x seconds", but it's also a question of "I wasn't healed for 80k in the last 10 seconds".
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On a tangent:

I have been messing around A LOT in Eureka. I have toyed with a lot of logos action combinations and I have to admit, having the ability to enter Living Dead and leave it on my own felt REALLY good. By taking Bloodbath and any damage increasing logos (Double Edge didn't work in AoE, but it did in single target), I could do crazy pulls and when nearly dead I could using Living Dead and stay at 1HP for a few seconds then bring myself back to full health.... a few times over!

I think taking something similar to the main game where a DRK can abuse LD and get out of it at will wouldn't be so game breaking. LD is still a 5 minute CD and if the healing "burst" is a CD that matches then it isn't more "broken" than Hallowed's invincibility.

[Mortex]

Or you know Paladin could cover him for the 3 tankbuster like we do it so he holms the first 2 and gets cover for the 3. Easy going