Living Dead

[Chrono_Rising]

All of what you just said about swapping after a holmgang is completly dependant of the fight and assume that the WAR will take absolutly no damage in any way for an extended period of time.

Ok, I’m not sure what you are trying to refute as:

Option 2, tank swap after invulning or stop taking damage through other means (like cover). If you tank swap you can probably lower your healing requirement to something like an oGCD and regen, depending on mechanics following after, the healing requirement may be reducible to a regen and fairy heals (12 to 15 seconds should be about half your HP without other healing).

I admit this right in my analysis.

oGCD heal and regen is likely enough to get you through most damage, and works in 3 out of 4 turns this tier. Yes, it takes some coordination, but in doing content with a cotank and healers who you know and play with, which is also common, this works. And pairing this with cover is a way to force this to happen, which works in 2 of the 4 turns. The main point here is that Living Dead doesn’t offer even similar benefits of strategy because of its strict pass fail mechanic.

You also need good party coordination. These techniques are mostly moot in PF. Being able to pull it off and take advantage of it is actually the exception, not the rule.
Anyway, if you take the possibility of encounters where you don't need to heal your WAR after a Holmgang, I can do the same for cases where strong healing is required immediatly. In which case, Living Dead is, if not better, on par with Holmgang.

I also conceeded this point, if you are going to continue tanking after homgang then you will likely have the same healing requirement as Living Dead. I’m not sure what you are trying to refute as I admitted this right in my analysis. Also, sure to use things effectively it requires skill. Thats not an argument against the skill, it just means it has a higher skill ceiling for using even more effectively. And of course you can engineer situations which having 10 seconds of invuln is better than having 6. We haven’t seen nearly as much requiring long invulns, but they do come in handy in o8s.

Also, it's extremely frequent when a WHM is in the team to use Benediction after a Holmgang/LD. If bene is used, it actually doesn't matter if the tank is a WAR or a DRK. In fact, it's easier to bene a DRK under LD than a WAR under Holmgang, as the timing window is way shorter for a WAR. More on that below.
And when it comes to AST, they might be forced to use more tools and GCD to heal a DRK (Essential Dignity + Synastry + Benefic II. Bonus points if Convalescence is used), but the effort required to heal both tanks doesn't varies that much in the end.

I wouldn’t say extremely frequent, but given there are two healer spaces and 3 healers more parties have a whm than don’t I suppose. I really don’t think the window matters when it comes to benediction as far as who is “easier” to press a 100% heal on.

As far as the Ast heal plan you have you are still short about 20k without conva and 8k with conva on the dark knight baring a crit, in which case the warrior will survive this argument, if there is time for one more heal the dark knight will as well, but if you waited until 3 seconds were left on living dead the dark knight is dead in this example. Since in that example you need two GCD heals still from 1 healer that means you need to have started healing 5 seconds in advance of the 9 second cutoff for the debuff so we are down to 4 seconds of no healer intervention. A second healer can make it so you start this process later of course.

Still, my point remains relevant: healer intervention is usually required in both cases. And the difference in ressources needed to deal with a Holmgang or a Living Dead is actually not that big of a deal. At least, no way near as some people in this thread said.

I’m not sure when I disagreed with this.

Ok, lets be clear, a tank at 1 HP will need to be healed, which means healer intervention since no tank does self healing in a great way, my main point is the degree of healer intervention varies greatly depending on your strategy.

My point was that Holmgang has a variety of way in which you can pass the mechanic, and you have freedom of choice and strategy depending on what is happening. You don’t have that on dark knight. You must pass the healing requirement within the prescribed time or the dark knight dies.

The automatic proc guarantees the full duration of the 10 seconds "1hp" state no matter what happens.

Using your own ast plan for healing: Essential (crit) => synergy=> Benefict 2 (crit) debuff wears off. This will avoid the full ten seconds. The full duration isn’t set in stone.

Another example: plan to die to accumulated damage, pop living so walking is up for tank buster, healer panics sends heals, walking dead doesn’t trigger, Living Dead wears off, tank buster one shots us. Did the plan work? Sure it wasn’t your fault and it would have worked, but its no longer up to you once you put the plan in motion. Again, the full duration isn’t set in stone.

This is not something you have with Holmgang, which usually means that Holmgang will be effective for something like 5 or 4 seconds only. Or even less if the WAR has a tendency of pressing the button too early.

Popping buttons too early is in the war’s power to change as well. That is a key difference. And as I pointed out, if we have one healer dealing with healing off the walking dead debuff we also have close to the same amount of time to heal up the dark knight, using two healers can get closer to the max time. Regardless 90% of tank busters only need it to work for 1 hit. Yes, be mindful of when heals must go out, but thats like a mantra that should be engraved on every healing crystal.

Living Dead is much more stable and the outcome will always be predictable, meaning that the healer have full control on its timings. When it comes to Holmgang, that's not the case. The WAR plays a big role in how much time they'll give to their healers.

See above. It is as predictable as anything involving other people is, its not nearly as stable as you are making it out to be. You are overstating the reliability of Living Dead, to try and fight those overstating the healing requirement around holmgang. Having progressed through 4 tiers with 9 healers on dark knight I have seen many ways this skill can go wrong, even when people understand the skill and the strategy. Every invuln is susceptible to human error.

I like the fact that you took Neo Exdeath as an example, it's probably one of the lastest end game content where this difference is the most obvious. With Holmgang, your timing needs to be perfect. Even more so during the delta followed by a random laser that you need to avoid, which can be problematic because of the root. The chance for mistakes is quite high. With Living Dead, the chance of messing up is almost zero thanks to that safety cushion.

Living dead also has issues with thunder since healers may also need to dodge, which brings us into the early movement/removing walking dead debuff from pre-healing the debuff off. It was particularly bad for the second thunder buster. And if you had to time your LD for the thunder then you needed to pop it early on the first one, and if you popped it too early you would need to die to start the walking debuff and keep your invuln, which was possible provided you were not getting healed during that time. Be slightly late in use and it wasn't up when you needed it. Again, all skills have human error.

If suddendly Living Dead didn't had that automatic proc thingy, it's ease of use would drastically drop, both for the DRK who would now have to time it right, and the healers who would have less time to heal.
It's not only about being able to capitalize on LD, it's about how stable, convenient and predictable it makes this ability. Holmgang is pretty much the complete opposite in that regards, not even talking about the root.

Saying that it's not valuable is absurd. Reducing the possibilities for mistakes is something highly valuable in end game raid environment. The 10s safety cushion provides exactly that.

As I’ve pointed out, there are still errors that can happen, the cushion is not a panacea. Your points mainly lay on human error factors, the point is human error still impacts living dead. Again, most of the cushion value is in time management. And we are drastically overstating the difficulty of popping a cooldown at the last second to get additional benefits. For example holding Hallowed to catch two busters in o8s by popping it later in the cast, it is not particularly difficult.

[Lyth]

The number of people who think that a WAR doesn't need the healer to intervene for a Holmgang is damn to high.

There isn't smoke without fire. If you'll recall, WAR does have a certain reputation for both no healer and solo content clears.

It's not really a question of healer intervention. You'll need healer support after Hallowed wears off as well. What matters is the healing threshold. Holmgang's healing threshold is fight-specific. If you need to be above 50k HP for the next attack, you need that much healing. If there's no further outgoing damage on you for the next 10 seconds, you don't need to be healed for that time. In some situations, the healing threshold can be met by the tank themselves. In others, they need focused healing.

Living Dead's threshold is always your total HP. This requirement can never, ever be reached by the tank themselves, and gets progressively higher with every gear level. There is no visual guidance for your healers on how much more healing you require to hit this threshold. The effective duration is entirely determined by your healers. The one healer ability that is most suited to maximise the effective duration, Benediction, is completely out of phase with the ability (180s recast vs. 300s recast). It feels bad for everyone involved.

I don't want a shorter recast. I don't want a more powerful effect. I want to be able to use it with a consistent duration of effect (i.e. a full 10 seconds, not a variable 2-9 seconds), and address any bare minimum instant kill requirements myself. Everything else is in the hands of the healer.

The number of people who think that the 10s safety cushion before LD procs is worthless is also damn to high.

It's not worthless. It has a very specific value. When timed correctly, it shortens the effective recast of Living Dead by 9 seconds, so that you have it up at 291 seconds instead of 300.

The reason why Chrono specifically referenced Delta Attack is because the first and second Deltas are spaced somewhere around 297 seconds apart. So if you don't activate Living Dead early on the first Delta, you won't have it back up in time for the second one. This is no different from mistiming Holmgang.

It's also a bit of a niche case for when the effective recast makes a performance difference. For example, even if you precisely activate LD early enough before the first UE on O8S, you're still going to end up about 5 seconds short of being able to use it on the fourth UE. It requires a very particular set of circumstances.

Either way, it doesn't justify the two minute shorter recast on Holmgang, and it certainly doesn't justify the instant death penalty game.

[Mycow8me]

The 10 second safety cushion doesn't "provide" anything but a transfer into walking dead. If its planned, a DRK can use it 10 seconds before the attack or right before it nothing changes. If its an unplanned use, there is a chance that the healer won't even let it proc and it was wasted, since it has such a high cooldown, in this situation a war was much better off. A warrior can be brought back up to speed with a single cure following deathblows, single healer situation, emergency situations. A DRK requires full HP after the fact and has no tools to assist unless they socket convalescence which really isn't going to save an emergency situation. Honestly WAR has more synergy with living dead than darknight does just because of its HP grab skills which is ridiculous. Wanna trade Invulns? I didn't think so.

In terms of Usability Living dead is not 10 seconds, it is always below 10. At 10 you die anyway. I'd like to meet the healer with balls of steel that let it go to the last tic on purpose. It gets to a point that waiting for the last tic doesn't even matter cause only hits at 1HP are being mitigated and any healing being done is mostly just to get rid of walking dead while hits are still going out which can sometimes cause a panic overheal.

I feel like the people who are giving living dead so much credit are the ones who have not had bad experiences with it.

[Izsha]

As far as a safety net argument, this comes down to a good healer/bad healer argument. A good healer is likely to know the strategy and take advantage of the ability to not heal the tank before they invuln, a bad healer is likely to not take advantage of this ability.

If you Holmgang a tank buster at 66.5k HP or 1 HP or anywhere in between, it doesn’t matter, if you Hallowed a tank buster at 66.5k HP or at 1 HP, it does not matter. A good healer is going to capitalize on this regardless, so I see little value in the automatic proc. Yes, we can engineer a situation in which this has more value, but in general I don’t see this as an issue. Contrast this with a bad healer who will not take advantage of the safety net. Well in that case you have gained nothing, because the main advantage in this argument is for someone who does not capitalize on it. Tl;dr the safety net argument advantage doesn’t hold water, good healers already realize the safety net before any tank invuln exists in a strategic sense, bad healers don’t and don’t capitalize on it.

Really just want to foot stomp this point. The 'good healer/bad healer' working with your immunity is the keystone that makes these valuable. If a healer doesn't work with the drk, they can really waste the value of LD by healing back to fast. There is actually the opposite problem with HG. I cant count how many times I have seen my healers 'forget' I am going to holmgang a tank buster and as I drop under 50% BEFORE the buster they panic and lustrate me or whatever to top me off, only to have me holm the buster 2 seconds later. In cases like that, they undo the supposed healer benefit as I get get panic cured before the buster, then bened after (my static has a whm, and my astro seems to have HP bar anxiety lol). Like the 1st buster on clown kefka. You really get a lot of value letting a Drk sit AFTER the buster at 1 HP for 8ish seconds before a bene the same as you get value from letting a war sink a bit BEFORE they use HG. When a healer actually leverages those things, they feel really strong and get a ton of value closer to a hollowed, but the uncoordinated healer can just waste so much of these immunities potential.

The repercussion is worse for drks in DF as you can actually die, but in the coordinated raid setting you can really get a lot more mileage if your healer is working with you freeing up GCDs before the buster for holm or both before AND after on drk.

I think the fundamental difference between my opinion and a lot of people is that I don't think relying on your healer to get more value is a BAD thing. Hollowed is a self contained EZGG button, but I don't see relying on your healers is inherently bad. It is just one more place for players to express their knowledge and skills. With all the 'simplification' going around since SB, I like the areas that still remain. Or maybe its my crotchety old man get of my lawn feelings after playing FFXI for a decade where relying on other people was a fundamental staple of the game. Teamwork doesn't make a skill bad imo. It just gives it opportunities to be even stronger (why LD and HG have much lower timers than hallowed, but nearly as effective with good coordination).

[Chrono_Rising]

Really just want to foot stomp this point.

Though you may have wanted to foot stomp my post, I feel you have made my point for me. LD is reliant on your healer, and lets face it, we are always reliant on our healer, but this skill is too reliant on healer input. Once you put this skill into motion, you are entirely within your healers control, nothing is up to you anymore. Its up to the healer to let it proc (you could be healed right through and never see the proc), and its up to the healer to get you up before the 10 seconds runs out. There are very few instances in which this skill has an advantage over the other invulns, and it needs work.

That said we should rely on our healers, and they should rely on us to do our jobs. But LD isn't healer reliant, its healer dependent.

[Duskane]

Hows about
4 min CD
Status last 7 seconds and during that period instead of taking damage you heal from it
Making up for having the worse self healing capabilities and just fixing it all together

[Izsha]

Though you may have wanted to foot stomp my post, I feel you have made my point for me. LD is reliant on your healer, and lets face it, we are always reliant on our healer, but this skill is too reliant on healer input. Once you put this skill into motion, you are entirely within your healers control, nothing is up to you anymore. Its up to the healer to let it proc (you could be healed right through and never see the proc), and its up to the healer to get you up before the 10 seconds runs out. There are very few instances in which this skill has an advantage over the other invulns, and it needs work.

That said we should rely on our healers, and they should rely on us to do our jobs. But LD isn't healer reliant, its healer dependent.

I don't disagree that it is out of the Drk's hands. I just fundamentally don't see a skill that requires coordination to see value as an inherently negative trait. But that's probably from being raised in FFXI where few things stood on their own without a group and group cohesion was a larger factor in success or failure. But I know I'm in the minority on this one.

[Chrono_Rising]

I don't disagree that it is out of the Drk's hands. I just fundamentally don't see a skill that requires coordination to see value as an inherently negative trait. But that's probably from being raised in FFXI where few things stood on their own without a group and group cohesion was a larger factor in success or failure. But I know I'm in the minority on this one.

I believe you misunderstood my point. My rebuttal to the "cushion" argument isn't about whether or not it is reliant on the healer, its that the cushion exists already on all the tank invulns, its just whether or not the healer decided to use it. Yes, using the pre-tank invuln time to deal damage takes skill and coordination, and yes that is about player skill, but the fundamental argument is that it is still there.

In another thread someone talked about Holmgang not having a huge benefit in o5,6,7 because the tank busters aren't even reducing them to 1 HP. So I looked at a random run of o7s and what was holmgang used on and it appears that the player actually didn't need healing for up to 30 seconds before their use of holmgang. And in this case the healers actually healed up all the remaining damage before the tank buster and shielded for the tankbuster and then healed the same damage a second time, which is exactly the point you made. What could have happened:

30 seconds before the tank buster, healers could have ignored the tank with maybe a regen to keep them from getting too uncomfortably low (even this would have been unnecessary), getting down to 10% or 20% HP, let the tank invuln, giving up their remaining HP, and then the tank could have been oGCD healed (using the oGCDs which were previously used to heal in anticipation of the tank buster), shielded, and regened to get back up wasting relatively few resources and buying the healers multiple damage GCDs or time to watch the bleeds on the dps.

Would the 10 seconds of "cushion" on the dark knight invuln have changed anything significant in that example? No, maybe it would be up earlier later on, but thats the real value of the "cushion", timing. It takes skill to use, and it takes coordination, but that doesn't make it bad. My argument is having the cushion is not the huge benefit it was being made out to be, not that it is bad because it relies on healer skill.

[Izsha]

Snip

Ah. Yeah that makes sense. I have never considered the 10 second window before the invuln part of LD needs to trigger as very valuable. It doesn't have any defensive benefit. All it does is make it harder to 'screw up' with miss use and the extremely rare situations that using it early allows you to use it 1 more time in a fight which is terribly specific to call a 'benefit'. That's akin to saying Awareness is OP because if you use it around 15 seconds before the pull in Delta 3 it will be up like 2 seconds before another critical hit!!! Awareness OP! No....the timing happened to work out for 1 fight. That's not some inherent benefit of the skill lol.

I never saw the 10 second cusion/window BEFORE LD triggers as anything more than a QoL so it is nigh impossible to use it 'to late' and die. LD will never have the shelltron problem. ie: pop shelltron for buster, AA 1 second before buster procs it and you die to buster. Or a few of the REALLY narrow holmgang windows trying to invuln a string of damage or position before HG and not being to early or to late on say on an akh morn where the damage is around 5 seconds and you have 6 seconds to work with +human reaction+lag. Or the 1st thunder in neo ex where the party is stacked and everyone spreads while hes casting thunder and if you HG to early you don't make it to your spot and kill someone (bind), if you HG to late you die to thunder. The 10 second LD warm up has no defensive value, just makes it easier to use without screwing up.

IMO the value of LD is the 10 second invuln window that the healer needs to be prepared to leverage. Same duration as hallowed, much less restrictive timing (for the tank to use) than either HG/HG as the invuln only starts when the hit actually happens. No wasting the CD on the front end, but moved to the back on the healer end. All 3 invulns absorb a mega hit. All 3 can be levereaged BEFORE the buster by letting the tank HP drop. The only difference is what happens after the hit and that is healers problem lol.

[InfiniDragon]

Hows about
4 min CD
Status last 7 seconds and during that period instead of taking damage you heal from it
Making up for having the worse self healing capabilities and just fixing it all together

That's actually damn good, too good actually. SE would do something like make it do a full Reverse where damage heals you, but heals hurt you and you can still die, so a panicked healer who sees you at low HP kills you with their OGCD heal bomb trying to save you at low health. XD

But planned, even that would be better than the current LD. Especially if it was like you're suggesting where heals and damage both healed the DRK.