Living Dead

[Saeno]

Living dead, as it currently is, is fine. What would be nice, though, is to give the DRK a buff for surviving it. Giving a "reward" to the party whose healers were able to keep the DRK alive through the storm.

Something like this:
Return to the Living: Activates when Walking Dead is successfully removed. Decreases damage taken by 10% while simultaneously increasing damage dealt by 5%. Duration: 10 seconds

Or something like that. Just flinging ideas here.

I think the issue with Living dead is moreso on how annoying the buff itself is to deal with compared to the others. Living dead requires attention, Hallowed and holmgang require nothing immediately while Living ill sometimes requires hard cast heals which means a DPS loss for the healers. Adding a reward to dealing with Living dead is a bit of a bandaid fix.

[WhyAmIHere]

The only thing that needs removed from it is the complete reliance on another player to not die. WAR has means of gaining HP on their own (that is not tied to their tank stance, although they have means that also are. but they've options in both scenarios), and at the end of Holm you're not immediately killed for not meeting an arbitrary breakpoint.

[Mahrze]

The only thing that needs removed from it is the complete reliance on another player to not die. WAR has means of gaining HP on their own (that is not tied to their tank stance, although they have means that also are. but they've options in both scenarios), and at the end of Holm you're not immediately killed for not meeting an arbitrary breakpoint.

Basically this.

[DaulBan]

Living Dead: 120s CD, 10s Duration

After receiving Fatal damage be restored to full health.

Pros

Shortest Immunity CD
Full heal afterward is potentially more healer-friendly than even Hallowed
Fills a slot for mitigation on DRK that the job could use

Cons
Very much so a 'use it well or get wrecked' ability. Mistiming it or dying ahead of time would be not so good. Mitigated by popping it late.
Useless against multi-hit attacks

Or something like that. Honestly it'd be a very different take on an immunity that would be kinda bad in some circumstances where you're getting hammered with damage but it working as a self-bene on a short CD would also be pretty good. A lot of the benefits of Holmgang only you trade the 7s duration for a full heal. Maybe change the name to something like 'Rise Again' or something edgy but more descriptive.

I didn't wanna read through all 8 pages before this though so someone might have already described a solution similar to this.

[Izsha]

Living Dead: 120s CD, 10s Duration

After receiving Fatal damage be restored to full health.
...

Cons
Very much so a 'use it well or get wrecked' ability. Mistiming it or dying ahead of time would be not so good. Mitigated by popping it late.
Useless against multi-hit attacks

After all the QQ about holmgang thread still on the 1st page, there is no way a 10 second safety net window that combines holmgang and benediction on a 2 min CD is going through. If holmgang is "overpowered", holmgang with a free benediction attached and a 10 second window on 66% of the recast is batshit stupid broken. Why even have tankbusters anymore.

Those cons are inconsequential. Its not useless against multi hit attacks unless each hit could 1 shot you since you are at max health after it triggers. Lets say theres a 5 hit tank buster that could be survived via conventional mitigation (~50% or so mitigation to comfortably live. TBN+Wall. IB+Defiance+rampart, Vengence+ToB etc. This is a VERY hard hitting tank buster by conventional measurements requiring all this to live). 50% mitigation means you have 200% effective HP. So you would die on the 3rd hit, get fully healed and take the last 2 hits with 20% life. Holmgang would also survive this, at 1% life. Hallowed is hallowed. The only way this new holmgange+Bene combo is 'bad' is one specific scenario. Cheesing shared tank busters that have multiple hits. That is an EXTREMELY specific weakness and only applies to shared tank buster akh morns which only appear in 2 fights I can think of, one of which is level 50.

Holmgang at 6 seconds (not 7) generally takes the tank buster and the follow up auto attack, then requires a heal. You are proposing something that functions better requiring no heals (buster>100% HP>Auto>80ish% HP) on a 2 min timer. Look at every complaint about holmgang, then square it. Way past broken.

[Dualgunner]

Living Dead: 120s CD, 10s Duration

After receiving Fatal damage be restored to full health.

Pros

Shortest Immunity CD
Full heal afterward is potentially more healer-friendly than even Hallowed
Fills a slot for mitigation on DRK that the job could use

I would put this at a 3 minute at the very least, if not 210s--have to consider that Shadow Wall itself has a 180 second cooldown as well. That aside, I like the concept of this; it's a free and easy get out of a tankbuster free card that has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. It could be used to cheese things like Flash Gale ala Hallowed as well, come to think of it.

[347SPECTRE]

snip

I'd keep the original cooldown for something like this.

[DaulBan]

Now, in my defense I wrote that post at 4:30 AM my time so I wasn't exactly lucid, so I wasn't really thinking about cooldown time. I probably meant to put 180s but we'll never know because I barely remember writing the post in the first place. That said...

I would put this at a 3 minute at the very least, if not 210s--have to consider that Shadow Wall itself has a 180 second cooldown as well. That aside, I like the concept of this; it's a free and easy get out of a tankbuster free card that has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. It could be used to cheese things like Flash Gale ala Hallowed as well, come to think of it.

The main benefit of fully ignoring a TB like Hallowed but without the crazy long cooldown is pretty big, there's also the fact that an MT DRK can just... Die and get full HP. Healers basically can ignore them and get a free bene. To me at least a perfectly timed bene at 180s for one specific job is perfectly fine.

After all the QQ about holmgang thread still on the 1st page, there is no way a 10 second safety net window that combines holmgang and benediction on a 2 min CD is going through. If holmgang is "overpowered", holmgang with a free benediction attached and a 10 second window on 66% of the recast is batshit stupid broken. Why even have tankbusters anymore.

I meant 180s (probably) when I wrote it. Also, and this might just be me, but saying 'something ignores tankbusters' isn't a legitimate reason to dislike something. Tankbusters are some of the easiest to manage parts of Savage fights so long as you have the free time before raid to look at a timeline and scribble down some notes. Holmgang has become a popular bug-bear for the OF and Reddit where people complain it somehow breaks fights... But... That's... Not... True... Holmgang in 8S allows your OT to not stack with you which is fine but with maximized Holmgang usage they only have to take one or two embraces. Their entire cooldown suites is instead used on wings of destruction which is just stupid given the fact that regardless of whether they're a DRK or a PLD they could easily manage the damage better. Healers don't have to heal a PLD with Sentinel+Sheltron as much as they need to heal a WAR that's gone down to 1 HP, particularly if there are follow up Ultimas or such. Having more HP after a tank buster is legitimately useful. Having two tanks stack when one is going to be healed up with AoE anyways is functionally indifferent to using holmgang and depending on your healers may actually be easier.

I can think of precious few examples where having Holmgang actually made a significant difference over doing it the intended way and that's the double lightning mechanic in Exdad because you couldn't for sure skip the last dualcast lightning and unless you had a WAR it was kinda annoying. That's the power of Holmgang. Avoid kinda annoying.

Those cons are inconsequential. Its not useless against multi hit attacks unless each hit could 1 shot you since you are at max health after it triggers. Lets say theres a 5 hit tank buster that could be survived via conventional mitigation (~50% or so mitigation to comfortably live. TBN+Wall. IB+Defiance+rampart, Vengence+ToB etc. This is a VERY hard hitting tank buster by conventional measurements requiring all this to live). 50% mitigation means you have 200% effective HP. So you would die on the 3rd hit, get fully healed and take the last 2 hits with 20% life. Holmgang would also survive this, at 1% life. Hallowed is hallowed. The only way this new holmgange+Bene combo is 'bad' is one specific scenario. Cheesing shared tank busters that have multiple hits. That is an EXTREMELY specific weakness and only applies to shared tank buster akh morns which only appear in 2 fights I can think of, one of which is level 50.

Holmgang at 6 seconds (not 7) generally takes the tank buster and the follow up auto attack, then requires a heal. You are proposing something that functions better requiring no heals (buster>100% HP>Auto>80ish% HP) on a 2 min timer. Look at every complaint about holmgang, then square it. Way past broken.

Specific mechanics I was thinking of that work poorly for this are Neo Exdad's Delta Attack (If you're stacking enough magic resist to survive the fire + lightning you may as well be swapping), A12S TB, A7S TB (though in this case it would help with healing you I suppose if you didn't get grinded by the autos), those sorts of things. In current content there are few examples but in the past the devs have implemented Tank Busters that would make this immunity either useless (doing enough damage to kill you multiple times over) or forcing you to stack mitigation and immunities (which kinda negates the point of having an immunity, ignoring damage).

Having to pop mitigation along with an immunity is astonishingly bad because it means that you're taking mitigation away from parts of the fight that you can use it. Immunities by and large are designed so that you can move your mitigation away from a part of the fight that's high damage. That's why they're called immunities. Saying 'A multi hit TB wouldn't kill you if you used mitigation' is the same as saying 'this doesn't act as an immunity this is basically just a heal'. And if it's just a heal and you're still having to pop a lot of mitigation to deal with a mechanic then it's bad for that mechanic plain and simple.

What I'm saying is that if what gets people antsy about holmgang is the fact you have an option to not use cooldowns then the fact that this version of LD would still require you to use cooldowns means it's probably balanced right?

[Izsha]

[QUOTE=DaulBan;4666514]snipQUOTE]

I did forget about Exdeath lightning. But in the history of the game, there are only a handful of tank busters that would 'beat' this immunity making the default "Immunity on a 2 min CD" and therefore absurdly powerful.

I wasn't talking about using CDs AND an immunity. That's utterly stupid. The example was of a multi hit tankbuster that you 'could' survive with CDs (because a tank buster has to be survivable...) is easily replaced by your proposed Holm-bene move. Even one powerful enough to barely survive throwing STRONG mitigation at it (50%+) would be easily taken point blank by yours, despite listing multi hit busters as a 'downside'. And do so better than holmgang. If a multi hit is powerful enough to eat 200% of your HP (including the overkill that triggered it so really OVER 200% HP), then traditional mitigation would require 3-4 CDs to survive comfortably and nothing actually hits THAT hard in this game as of now. The idea that regular (read not shared/weird thunder mechanic cheese) multi hit mega busters is a downside doesn't hold water when nothing strong enough to kill through this even exists.

The worst case scenario for yours is matching holm (surviving with very little HP after a multi hit buster). The best case scenario is the equivalent of holm+bene (survive and end 100% HP after ANY 1 hit buster, which is nearly all of them) on a 2 min timer. Which is ludicrous considering multi hit tank busters are pretty rare and have never been that strong to eat 2x HP bars. They are even less common once shelltron was introduced as it only takes 1 hit. The only downside is inability to cheese shared multi hit busters which is highly unusual/rare and oddly specific.

You made a holmgang that is WAY better than homgang, put it on a 2 min timer (by accident or not), and expected it to just be fine? Even at 3 it would set a new precedent for the most powerful defensive action in the game.

[DaulBan]

snip

I'm not saying that the ability wouldn't be really good because you're right, for 99% of the high damage mechanics in the game it would work just fine. However, in the scenarios where it does not work it will be absolutely terrible. A12S Holy Scourge/Chastening Heat combo, Dualcast lightning, these might not be common but for DRK should they be a major part of a fight they would render my version of LD useless.We live in a world where Sheltron is on a 25s cooldown and mitigates 30% of any hit you take, and the single thing that stops it from being absolutely balls to the wall nuts is that A it might get eaten by an auto if the boss has an untelegraphed cleave (A9S, A12S, Last Kiss) and that even with Bulwark you can't be certain you're going to block 100% of the hits you could take from Akh Morn and similar attacks. On every single hit telegraphed tankbuster you get 30% free mitigation as a Paladin assuming you have gauge, which you should. Every 90s then you have 50% mitigation on a single hit from just Rampart/Sheltron with no party benefit, or 60% with reprisal. If you're using Sentinel every 180s you get 80% mitigation.

That of course isn't how mitigation works in the game, the real values a bit lower than that but you get this gist. If PLD can have ~80% mitigation every 180s with 2 CDs (one of those being sheltron) and a reprisal we're already at a frankly insane amount of mitigation. DRK is in a similar spot with DM and TBN where if you go full turtle on magic you can 30% mitigation from DADM and an additional 20% HP from TBN. It's a mana sink but there you go, another insane method of taking a TB that reduces your incoming damage astronomically.

We already live in a world where on-demand mitigation has never been higher but the job that has the most difficulty handling mechanics is DRK when everything is physical. At two minutes the ability is busted, sure, but for me personally 180s being a Holm+Bene instantly isn't too insane when we already have things like 80% mitigation PLD wandering around blithely. Is it OP? Sure, but there are a lot of mechanics in this game that are OP and given that Holmgang, as I said, doesn't break anything in the game, I doubt that a 180s Living Dead with my description would substantially change how the game works. Debuffs that apply on hit will still exist, tank busters will still be around, DRK would just have one of the best defensive kits in the game which would not hurt tank balance anyways.

If anyone thinks this version of LD is OP, they're right, but the concept of the magical block is already OP enough to make mitigation in this game kinda dumb. There's obviously a range on how long the cooldown can be up to 5 minutes. That said as far as I'm concerned the game is already in a state (and has been since block could handle magic damage) where the tanks already have a plethora of incredibly strong mitigation options regardless.