Fixing Tank's Invulnerability Abilities Thread

[LeoLupinos]

After knowing the state of the actions, also knowing that current presented information is subject to change, let's discuss how we can bring the invulnerability abilities more closer to a fair balance.

Here is what they are as presented as the NA media tour 2019:

Holmgand: 6s Invuln / 180s cooldown. Bind enemy.
Hollowed Ground: 10s of invuln + imune to damage / 420s cooldown.
Living Dead: 10s trigger + 10s invuln + KO if not healed 100% / 300s cooldown.
Superbolide: Reduces HP to 1 + 8s Invuln / 420s cooldown.

Leave your suggestion and like whoever suggestion you like the most.

[Canadane]

I don't see what needs to be fixed.
Perhaps a slightly shorter cooldown on Superbolide as it's not quite what Hallowed Ground is, but still it's not like it's broken.

[LeoLupinos]

I will be direct for my suggestion, Holmgang and Hollowed Ground are too unbalanced and they can't be that far away from each other. I would like those tank ultimate skills to be the same cooldown and to feel as a emergency thing. I will remove the bad side of them and put them to the same level as Hollowed Ground.

Hollowed Ground: 10s of invuln to KO + imune to damage. 420s Cooldown.
Holmgang: 10s Invuln to KO. Increased Lifesteal +100% and Damage dealt is converted into HP. 420s Cooldown.
Superbolide: Invuln to KO 10s. Set a shield covering 100% of the HP for 10s. Nullified damage by the shield turns into health as long as the shield is up. 420s Cooldown.
Living Dead: Invuln to KO 10s. Damage received turns into healing for the duration of 10s. But received healing turns into received damag..no no no, no bad sides, just stop with that mentality already. 420s Cooldown.

This will offer to every tank a way to get another chance by themselves without relying on healers.
Paladin: Basically he does not lose HP, and if he uses Hollowed Ground when the HP is low he can just clemency to full HP easily since he does not lose HP.
Holmgang: Since WAR does lose HP then will need a better way than Clemency to recover HP. The lifesteal needs to be that useful.
Superbolide: Shield to not lose HP, and the heal mechanic since GBR does not have other better way like Clemency to heal up.
Living Dead: Can be your salvation, or can be nothing if used wrong, while being equivalent powerful as the other tanks.

Do you see how powerful Hollowed Ground is? Even with all this crazy overpower stuff, Hollowed Ground is the best one.

[Keagian]

Living Dead: 10s duration with 20% damage reduction, Walking Dead: 6s duration with 15% Increased Healing and cannot be damage, must be healed to half HP to remove death penalty, Invulnerability will continue for remainder duration of Walking Dead.

[blaen]

I don't see what needs to be fixed.
Perhaps a slightly shorter cooldown on Superbolide as it's not quite what Hallowed Ground is, but still it's not like it's broken.

What needs to be fixed is that many mechanics can be straight up ignored using holm due to its vastly shorter CD.

[Canadane]

What needs to be fixed is that many mechanics can be straight up ignored using holm due to its vastly shorter CD.

Yes that is the point of it. You are to use it much more often, with the degree of danger to the user presented. It has a much shorter duration of effect so while like DRK you need to be healed or you'll die [to the next auto] the healer has less time to help you out.

[Kabooa]

You fix them by getting rid of them.

[Lyth]

I've posted this in the Living Dead discussion thread as well, but there are some fairly big discrepancies when it comes to tank invulns. This is pretty important, because the invulns shared between your chosen tank duo dictate how easily you can trivialise tankbusters in a fight. This was true for the past two expansions as well, but Shadowbringers makes it that much more obvious.

The easiest comparison is between Hallowed Ground and Superbolide. They're identical, except that Superbolide has a 2 second shorter duration and also comes with a penalty that reduces your HP to 1. Setting side the obvious risk in which you fatfinger the cooldown and send your healer into a panic, it just doesn't offer anything that Hallowed doesn't. Even if this was set at a 6 minute recast, I don't think that it would be worth the penalty over Hallowed. Both Xeno and Merri mention that Yoshi-p thinks that Hallowed is too powerful, but is afraid to nerf it because it might make people upset. Personally, I think that's their fear of "upsetting people" is why they keep putting out progressively worse iterations of tank balance.

Holmgang and Living Dead is another fairly obvious comparison. The most obvious point is number of uses per fight. Holmgang gives you double the number of uses per fight over Hallowed and Superbolide. That means that you can cheese double the number of tankbusters. Living Dead is somewhere in no-man's land as far as recasts go, where it sometimes gives you an extra use, and sometimes doesn't.

It used to be that the main drawback of Holmgang was that it required a target (sometimes you have an untargetable boss) and that it rooted you in place. That's gone now. Holmgang is the only one of the old tank invulns to get a rework, despite the fact that it was already the single most powerful invuln in the game. It no longer roots you in place, just your enemy. The description also seems to suggest that selecting a target is optional. Meanwhile, Living Dead's penalty remains the same, and still is probably the single least liked and least intuitive abilities in the game.

Even if you felt that the instant death penalty on Living Dead was warranted (it isn't, and it makes even less sense now than ever given how little burst healing DRK has to offer), the implementation is terrible. I've gone over them at length, months ago:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Considerations
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ns-Tank-Forums

It's also obvious that this is an ability that a lot of people take issue with:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...d-not-removed?
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...r-s-nightmare.
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ead-QoL-Change
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Dead-QoL-buff
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-a-little-more
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ion-Discussion
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ng-Dead-in-3.2
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ead-suggestion
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ed-Living-dead
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...rovement-ideas
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...and-suggestion
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Dead-feedback
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Sole-Survivor

I'm also pretty sure that I explicitly flagged the issue in the feedback thread that the dev team supposedly translated and reviewed, prior to the proposed DRK reworks:
Dark Knight Feedback Thread

And this is just looking at direct Living Dead feedback. I can't even begin to mention how many times it came up in the middle of other discussions as well. What was that? Ignore four years of negative feedback on the ability and buff Holmgang instead? Good idea. Wouldn't want all those WARs cancelling pre-orders on you. They definitely wanted that Dark Knight statue. I mean, you do get that odd WAR who claims that Living Dead is fine. But then let them take the instant death penalty. They're the ones with all the self-healing buffs. That way they can actually put the new Thrill of Battle buff to good use.

It's kind of impressive that Xeno had to actually point out to Yoshi-p that Holmgang was more powerful than even Hallowed. I mean, what ability did you think was trivialising your tankbuster design? Genius. And he's afraid of nerfing Hallowed because of the potential backlash? You might as well forget ever seeing any sort of parity on Holmgang, then. If he's afraid of even the PLD community, there's no way that he's going to take on WAR mains.

I've said this before, but I'll settle for them just fixing Superbolide (and Camouflage) at this point, because I have little to no faith in their ability to balance or even respond to feedback on older skills, especially given what we've seen in the Stormblood media tour. If Shadowbringers has anything in common with Stormblood, the DRK tooltips are going to look even worse after we get the final versions of these actions. GBR looks like something that I'd like to play if they'd just fix the personal cooldown suite.

I've said it before: this is the problem with partial homogenization. Tanks get picked based on the differences between abilities, not their similarities. I found it hilarious that even looking at the 30% cooldowns, despite making them nearly identical, they couldn't resist making Vengeance better by keeping in the damage reflect. If you make the tanks nearly identical, it's these supposedly "small" differences that lead to large variations in pick rates.

[Launched]

Superbolide needs some changes, Holmgang/LD/Hallowed are balanced.

[Jandor]

Superbolide: Reduced HP to 1 + 8s Invuln / 300s cooldown. (down from 420s.)

Doesn't last as long as Living Dead potentially can, but also won't kill you.