Living Dead

[Mahrze]

Please do share how you think this skill works.

It was explained twice, with nuance. Saying it lasts up to 20s is already a ludicrous statement, since LD by itself does nothing, its the WD part that is the actual buff.

I think the fact that there's so much confusion on how the ability actually functions is a reflection of how poorly designed it is.

Living Dead only mitigates damage after you drop down to 1 HP. The maximum effective duration is from the time when Walking Dead activates until the time when your healer cleanses the effect. This can be anywhere from one to nine seconds. Anyone who is citing numbers in the 19 second range doesn't really understand how it works.

If you want to get the full effective duration out of Living Dead, you almost certainly need to use Benediction. The ability gives no indication to your team about how much healing you have received until this point, so you can't reliably heal up to just before the requirement and wait. But the problem with using Benediction is that it's on a 180 second recast, while Living Dead is on a 300 second recast. So you lose 60% of a benediction use every time that you reserve it for Living Dead.

In practice, without Benediction? You're probably going to mitigate one or two big hits with it and frantically race to full. So we're usually talking about an effective duration that's much shorter than nine seconds.

So what's the significance of the ten second preamble? Well, if you know the fight timings, you pop it early and shave time off of your recast. So while the effective recast of Holmgang is somewhere between 175-179 seconds, the effective recast of Living Dead is going to be 291 seconds, assuming that you time it correctly.

If you want to assess how powerful an invulnerability ability is, you need to find out how many tankbusters you can mitigate with it. This depends on two factors.

The first factor is the total number of casts you can make with the ability. There's no point in having a two minute shorter recast on Living Dead than Hallowed if it doesn't result in an extra cast. Casts are always discrete numbers. The reason why Holmgang has a clear edge is because its recast is more than half that of Hallowed. So you will always have the potential to use Holmgang twice as often as Hallowed.

A second factor is the total number of tankbuster hits you can mitigate with a single cast. An example of this is the Ultimate Embrace/Hyperdrive combo that you see in O8S. If your invulnerability lasts for about 7-8 seconds, you can mitigate both hits. Situationally, this can provide an advantage. But do you know what's much more consistent? Having a 180 second recast invulnerability. Recast trumps duration.

Someone listed Holmgang's root effect as a disadvantage. That's usually not the case. More often than not, it just allows you to double up its utility as knockback negation. Bonus points when it does both at once, like during Head On in O5S. If you really need to work around the root effect, it's worth noting that you can still be re-positioned using Rescue.

Fun fact: The root effect from Holmgang historically also let you interrupt otherwise uninterruptible spells, such as Dreadwash during Leviathan Ex. If you jumped away from your target after using Holmgang, it would move the target, forcing the spell to cancel. Its versatility is that even its "weaknesses" are strengths.

As far as the target requirement is concerned, I'm kind of struggling to think of a recent example of a tankbuster that occurs with no active target on the battlefield. No Ravana Ex double prey cheese for you, I suppose.

A big part of the problem here is that Holmgang is just flat out too powerful. But that's a story for another day.

Either way, the devs are not going to overthrow WAR's four year reign of dominance over tanking simply by fixing Living Dead. It'll just help the few people still left over playing DRK enjoy their job experience a little more. Pick your battles.

Its really not 20 seconds of no healer attention, especially if you don't have a white mage. The first 10 seconds: If your healer knows you are going to holmgang or hallowed, there is no point to healing those classes before activation either, let regens work on Hallowed, and the Warrior HP is going to be dropped anyway so why not let them drop in the time before the buster? My point is the Living Dead time really shouldn't be counted as unique "invulnerability time" the others just don't have this safety net of automatically popping at the appropriate time. The 10 seconds in walking dead could be 10 seconds if you have a white mage, but if you don't, or they don't have benediction ready, you will need heals starting at least 3 seconds before the timers pops from both healers + an oGCD, so we are looking at more like 7 seconds of no healer attention.

The big issue in my mind is that Living/Walking dead have numerous weaknesses without great benefit. I can give a few personal experience stories of how I've been killed by living dead, all because people didn't understand how it worked/random chance of fairy healing. And this was in a static context with voice and multiple explanations. For massive hits it isn't an issue, for smaller frequent hits you can take a stray shield and fairy heal (or regen ticks by accident) and not die then your living dead timers runs out and you die to an auto attack, the benefit of autopopping means you don't have control over this potential weakness.

Living dead's strength as compared to holmgang is its duration for taking multiple hits/prolonged hits. This also comes with weaknesses. Iirc, A12S had the holy scourge attack into chastising heat needed early healing to lift living dead in time if you didn't have a white mage, a random two crit heals and LD status lifted, but busters continued resulting in death. More recently o8s has chained tank busters one of which applies a bleed, the less mitigated you are the more damage the bleed does. The bleed unmitigated does around 8000 damage a tick over 21 seconds, meaning you will need healer attention to remove your walking dead status, and you will need healer attention afterwards because you took the full bleed.

Compare this to holmgang's weakness of rooting, which becomes a strength when you don't want to be moved. Holmgang also shares a recast with benediction, which indirectly helps both as it is much more natural to line these two abilities up. Holmgang also shares a synergy with paladin's cover. There are multiple places where you can cover your warrior to give them addition time to be healed up after holmgang is used giving additional time for regens to restore their HP. This list of synergies and weakness is clearly skewed in one direction, these skills really are not balanced.