Living Dead: Tooltip Errors and UI Design Considerations

[Lyth]

Living Dead tends to be a poorly understood ability, and a fair amount of the confusion about the action arises from errors in the tooltips.



Grants the effect of Living Dead. When HP is reduced to 0 while under the effect of Living Dead, instead of becoming KO'd, your status will change to Walking Dead.
Living Dead Duration: 10s

While under the effect of Walking Dead, most attacks will not lower your HP below 1. If, before the Walking Dead timer runs out, HP is 100% restored, the effect will fade. If 100% is not restored, you will be KO'd.
Walking Dead Duration: 10s

There are three errors in the description.

1. Your HP is never reduced to 0 while under the effect of Living Dead.
2. Some attacks just kill you outright, like enrages. The text should read "most attacks".
3. The goal is not to reach 100% HP (i.e. this is not a "White Hole" mechanic). The goal is provide an amount of healing equal to your total HP.

If a player with 10000 health uses Living Dead to survive an attack with 1 HP, and you heal them for 9999 back to max health, they still die. You need to provide 10000 HP of healing (i.e. the max HP value).

If you heal them for 10000 HP, but they take an additional 5000 damage in the interim, the effect is still removed, despite the fact that their HP is now 5000/10000.

The text should actually read:

You activate Living Dead. While this is active, most attacks cannot reduce your HP to less than 1. If you prevent a KO in this way, you gain the effect of Walking Dead.

While Walking Dead is active, most attacks cannot reduce your HP to less than 1. If you receive an amount of healing equal to your total HP while this buff is active, the effect will fade (along with its defensive benefit). If the buff is not removed in this manner before the timer runs out, you are KO’d.

What makes this problem significantly more difficult is that the tooltip information isn't really aimed at the player using it. If you activate Walking Dead on DRK, you can't do anything to save yourself. The person who actually needs to know how the tooltip works is your healer, who might not necessarily have your job unlocked, let alone know what all your tooltips say.

If you're a new player, you have time to sit down and look at your own tooltips. If you're a new healer, your first exposure to this ability might involve hovering over the buff icon to read the description:



Unable to be KO'd by most attacks. Status changed to Walking Dead in most cases when HP is reduced to 0.

It suffers from some of the errors on the original tooltip. HP is never reduced to 0. The phrase "Most attacks cannot reduce HP to less than 1" is probably more accurate. The description is also incredibly vague. What is "Walking Dead?" Well, we're about to find out, when it actually activates:



Most attacks will not reduce HP below 1. The inability to restore 100% of HP before the timer runs out will result in KO."

Surprise! Also, what does this even mean? "The inability to restore 100% of HP before the timer runs out" seems to suggest that you can't heal the DRK to full, and that you cannot do anything to prevent the KO.

It probably should read: Most attacks will not reduce HP below 1. If you receive an amount of healing equal to your total HP while this buff is active, the effect will fade (removing the defensive benefit). If the buff is not removed in this manner before the timer runs out, however, you are KO’d.

It should also make it clear that when the effect is removed by healing, the player is once again susceptible to KOs (i.e. the healer controls the duration of the defensive effect).

Human Factors
While you can change the tooltips to provide some clarity, it's still not very intuitive for newer players. It's also fairly intimidating. New healers are somehow expected to seek out the tooltip text (which is riddled with errors) by hovering over the buffs, read it, decipher it, and then use their remaining time to try and figure out how to remove the effect in a panic. It's also odd, because you'd expect a healing mini-game to save your tank's life to be a bit more explicit, as far as UI design goes.



Mash the healing button to save your tank? Y/N

For more experienced healers, you don't actually know how much additional healing you need, because there's no visual display of this. The only solution is to throw out heals until the effect disappears, which may result in the effect being removed too early or too late.

The easy alternative is to hold Benediction, but this is also not ideal, because it's on a 180s recast compared to Living Dead's 300s, and 300 is not a multiple of 180. So you actually lose 2/3 of a Benediction recast every time that you reserve it for Living Dead.

There was talk about having a shield resource bar next expansion to show how much shields you have left. I wonder if something similar couldn't be done with Living Dead. Turn the HP bar black to show that something bad has happened, and have the player convert the bar to green again with heals.

It's the classic DRK design problem of introducing an unnecessarily convoluted system that you have to work around, when a much simpler one could suffice. Writing these tooltips must have been a nightmare.

[Tint]

I suggest you to repost this in the Localization Forum. The people who write the tooltips will not find the topic here on the tank board.

[Awful]

+1 for me thanks Lyth for being such great support for Drks everywhere.

[Lyth]

I've gone ahead and done that, but I think that the tooltips are only half of the picture. Even if a tooltip is relatively complicated, you have the opportunity to decipher it at your leisure out of combat. But the tooltip isn't directed at you, on DRK. It's directed at your healer. So they either have to know how the ability works from prior experience, or try to figure it out as it's happening. I would be extremely impressed if a new healer was able to figure out exactly how this ability worked on the fly from the buff tooltips alone.

Human factors design is really important. Nowadays, you can't expect someone to read the instruction manual, let alone one locked behind a completely different job. There has to be something that explicitly says "Hey! Living Dead is happening! This is what you have to do." FF6 is about 24 years old now, and even the developers back then understood that Doom effects were best understood by a big number counting down over your character's head. It was incredibly obvious that something bad was happening. Games like GW2 have red screens and big text boxes that scream "Fight for your life!" when you get downed. We have all this effort poured into dumbing down raid mechanics to make sure that there's a common language that players can understand ("this giant arrow symbol means that you stack!"), yet your healer is expected to mull through some badly written tooltips to understand how Living Dead works while the timer ticks down towards your demise. I read relatively quickly, but I don't think that I could have pulled it off without prior knowledge.

I can understand that the devs want to make every tank invincibility move feel unique. I'm sure someone on the dev team has an attachment to this trashfire of an ability. But at least put some effort into designing it so it's intuitive to newer players. My bar is set so low at this point.

[Zwynfalk]

What are you talking about? The tooltip text contains no errors. Sure, a couple things could be better worded for new players, but nothing is actually incorrect.

"1. Your HP is never reduced to 0 while under the effect of Living Dead."
No, it is. You just never get to see it because as soon as the server sees that the DRK will hit 0, it replaces Living Dead with Walking Dead, which gives the DRK a minimum HP value of 1. So a DRK pops LD, takes an attack that would reduce their HP to 0 or lower and in that instant, gets WD and has their HP set to 1.

"2. Some attacks just kill you outright, like enrages. The text should read "most attacks"."
Yes, because any attack that hits a DRK with Living Dead and would kill them gives them Walking Dead and that's the buff you quoted as saying "most attacks will not lower your HP below 1."

"3. The goal is not to reach 100% HP (i.e. this is not a "White Hole" mechanic). The goal is provide an amount of healing equal to your total HP."
This is widely known. Back in Heavensward, they had to hotfix Benediction to heal the full max HP value and not just the missing HP so that DRKs weren't getting left needing 1 more HP of healing. This is the one part that could use some clearing up in text, but it's not strictly wrong. A DRK with Walking Dead needs to be healed for 100% of their HP in order to dispel Walking Dead and save them from the Doom-like KO. The "bonus" is that if a healer is aiming to heal the DRK to full, they will achieve the dispel condition on the way.

And as for "being confusing to new players," that applies to everything. A brand new healer that hasn't read up on tank abilities won't know what Holmgang or Hallowed Ground or Rampart or anything is.

[Lyth]

I don't really follow. You say that there aren't any errors in the tooltip, but then immediately proceed to concede that there are problems with the wording. The problem is the wording.

It's not relevant if you've figured out how the ability works from prior experience and testing. Some people have done this. There are a surprising number of people who haven't. It's as clear as mud, especially if you're just starting out. Tooltips are important for newer players.

The first two points were relatively simple text fixes. They don't create a significant amount of confusion, but they're still incorrect, and might as well be fixed while we're on the subject:

1. If your HP visually reads 0, then you have been KO'd. Your HP never actually reads "0" at any point if the ability executes correctly. I know what the wording is trying to say. The common parlance for this is "cannot reduce your HP to less than 1". That's what Holmgang states. That's also what other parts of the same tooltip state (it's not even consistent across the text). It's just the one part of the ability on the tooltip and buff text that uses this misleading wording. I suspect that this is a localisation issue.

2. The phrase "most attacks" is another commonly used phrase. It shows up in Hallowed Ground's text. It shows up in Holmgang's text. It shows up in both the tooltip and the buff text for Walking Dead. It even shows up in the buff text for Living Dead, but, oddly, doesn't show up in the tooltip for the Living Dead section. This is another case of the tooltip not being consistent with itself.

It's an important caveat because there are some attacks that will ignore an invuln and KO you even if the ability is correctly executed.

The third point is the important one, because that's the part that a lot of players don't understand. Interestingly enough, I'm not even certain that you understand how the ability works based on your description.

The issue with Living Dead prior to the hotfix in early Heavensward was actually the fact that it ignored overhealing. I'll use the double prey cheese in Ravana Ex as an example. Let's say that you took double prey with Living Dead. The first hit gives you vuln, and the second does lethal damage, bringing you down to 1 HP and activating Walking Dead. Your healer uses Benediction to bring you back to full. The problem is that because you were at 1 HP originally, you received 1 HP of overhealing. So your total healing received is Max HP - 1. So you still need 1 HP worth of healing to cleanse the effect.

The catch was that there was no outgoing damage for the next 10 seconds. Ravana does an outer fire circle and an inner slash as a follow-up. So you were stuck at max HP but couldn't be healed for that last HP. So even if you threw out plenty of additional heals, your DRK would die because it was all counted as overhealing. But there was a work around, even prior to the hotfix.

The solution was to deliberately eat one of the avoidable AoEs after being healed up (i.e. the outer fire circle). This dropped your HP below max (and gave you a vuln stack), but it also allowed your healers to heal the remaining 1 HP that you needed without it being counted as overhealing. Once again, the effect was removed without you needing to be at max HP. We tested this back in the day to figure out what was bugged.

Likewise, Vit pots used to create some funky effects with Walking Dead if they fell off mid-buff, because your max HP value changed.

Living Dead doesn't work like most "Doom" debuffs. You don't have to get to maximum HP. You just need to provide an amount of healing (overhealing included) that is equal to your maximum HP, while the buff is active. The effect can be cleansed with you at max HP, but it can also be cleansed with you at half HP. It just depends on whether you've received damage in the interim.

As for newer players, well, just look at this:


and this:


This is exactly what you ideally want in an ability like this. Simple. Succinct. "You are impervious to most attacks." "Most attacks cannot reduce your HP to less than 1." Not only that, even if you didn't read the text as a healer, you'd still understand what's going on.

It's interesting how these two very important abilities have some of the shortest tooltips in the game, while Living Dead has one of the single longest.

Don't get me wrong, there is still room to improve on both these abilities as far as UI design goes. Depending on how the new shielding resource is displayed, you could have Hallowed change your HP bar to visually show the player that they aren't taking damage.

In the case of Living Dead, however, your healer's understanding is essential to the functioning of the ability. Tooltips are part of the picture, but I also think it needs to be supported with intuitive UI design.

[Derio]

Honestly I just want to change it to

*Most attacks heal you for duration of the effect*

They can put it on 10s to match hallowed or 6s to match Holmgang

But it needs to be reworked.

[Zwynfalk]

1. If your HP visually reads 0, then you have been KO'd. Your HP never actually reads "0" at any point if the ability executes correctly. I know what the wording is trying to say. The common parlance for this is "cannot reduce your HP to less than 1". That's what Holmgang states. That's also what other parts of the same tooltip state (it's not even consistent across the text). It's just the one part of the ability on the tooltip and buff text that uses this misleading wording. I suspect that this is a localisation issue.

Ah, here it is. There's your problem. You think that Living Dead is the buff that gives you invulnerability. It's not. Living Dead only does one thing. If you would be reduced to 0 HP, it replaces itself with Walking Dead. Now, since Walking Dead only ever exists when Living Dead is triggered, it gets described in Living Dead's tooltip, just like MNK's Brotherhood or PLD's Divine Veil. And we all know that Walking Dead says "most attacks cannot lower your HP below 1."

It's fairly clear. There's no localization issue. It does what it says. The only possible change I could see being made is changing "When HP is reduced to 0" to be "If HP would be reduced to 0" but it's still perfectly understandable as is.

(I'll admit I forgot that overhealing used to not count, but that was years ago and I forgot one point. Sue me.)

[Lyth]

There is a significant difference between "When HP is reduced to 0" and "If HP would be reduced to 0"/"Most attacks cannot lower your HP below 1." That's the nature of technical writing, unfortunately.

[Shougun]

I feel if they made some effect on the hp bar to show hp that needed to be healed to release walking dead that could be helpful, perhaps helpful enough (the effect only vanishing entirely once they're A ok). Like the empty portion of the dark knight bar becomes a hazy red, and that portion shrinks as the hp is filled up (the negative space of the hp bar becomes colored/animated). Paladin's hp could become gold to show they're in hallowed ground.

I know a healer can already see if someone is low hp lol, but in this case they can also see something is further wrong with their hp. Just getting dark knight to safety amounts and going onto the next target wont be enough, it's still hazy! Something like that.