Fixing Tank's Invulnerability Abilities Thread

[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.

[whiskeybravo]

snip

Indeed, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Too scared to change Hallowed, too scared to change Holmgang, and also apparently too scared to listen to last 3 years of DRK feedback lol

If they are in fact removing the bind & target requirement from Holmgang then I suppose it's worthy to reconsider it's CD. Yes it has the superior recast now but it's simply not as flexible as the others regardless of how you slice it, the most obvious for me is that it was practically unusable for large dungeon pulls. It's still not a meaningful duration for dungeons, but at least now maybe we won't get rooted in aoe. Additionally, since we've had all our fluff mitigation taken away I imagine it'll see more use.

From a raid perspective, planned LD usage isn't really an issue anymore than Holmgang. But much like how unusable Holmgang is/was for dungeons, LD is borderline unusable there as well. Removing or adjusting the healing requirement is mainly a QoL adjustment more than it is asking for anything to be buffed, but if they aren't going to remove it then the cooldown does indeed need to be adjusted.

I don't particularly like the suggestion of making them all equal cooldowns of 7 or 5 mins or whatever, because - all else being equal - people are still going to gravitate towards the one perceived as the strongest. So all the effects would have to be the same, too. They need to have their own advantages and disadvantages and cooldown & duration should properly reflect that. Perhaps one of the problems holding them up on LD is the 20 sec duration, 10 sec to die and 10 sec to be rescued. It's a fairly long invulnerability but it can also be cut short with quick heals, or of course not proc at all with too many heals. A longer cooldown in light of such duration would make sense on the surface, but it doesn't play out that way in reality. Hallowed by comparison you always get 10 sec regardless. Holmgang you always get 6. GNB will always get 8. Maybe they can find some middle ground here to re-consider that DRK isn't always enjoying a 20 sec window on his CD, or the 10-sec invulnerability window, and that it's simply not an advantageous cooldown in all situations because of the way it actually functions. I mean, if you get one or 2 of these a fight they better be worthwhile, right? They are supposed to be OUR ULTIMATE SKILLS.

Cooldown for Living Dead needs to be reduced, or the effect needs to be adjusted to compensate for actually having as long of a cooldown as it does. Period. I don't have any great suggestions to offer but it's pretty obvious that if they don't do something that DRK will be doomed for the 2nd expansion in a row. And it's supposed to be the poster boy for this one lol

[Lyth]

...

The main problem with invulns as they stand is that you're bringing two tanks, each of which has their own. So you're easily knocking off 4+ tankbusters per fight. So either you need more tankbusters per fight, or you need certain tankbusters that flat out ignore the invuln. Now that I think about it, the latter would be a really interesting solution to the problem - your invuln would be something that you use to rescue a run, rather than simply being used to take a mechanic out of the fight.

From a balance perspective, it really doesn't make sense that you have invulns that can be used twice as much as that of another tank. But if you make them too long, then it's a button which you just press once per fight. I think the 5-7 minute range is the best compromise.

I also think that you need a bit of consistency when it comes to the design of these. If you want it to be about trade offs (i.e. you gain the benefit, but it comes at a price), then this needs to be consistent. At the moment, GNB and DRK are the only ones who have drawbacks, and it's to achieve an inferior effect. Likewise, if the point is to give you invuln + another benefit (like it is on WAR), then that should also be consistent.

In the case of Living Dead, the duration is often quoted incorrectly. The active time is Walking Dead, because that's the only time that you're actually mitigating damage. So that will always be some duration less than 10 seconds (i.e. whenever the effect gets cleansed). And if you're busy healing the DRK, their HP is greater than 1 and they're not mitigating any further damage. So outside of a timed benediction, the effective duration of Living Dead is usually shorter than Holmgang.

I think if they wanted to keep Living Dead as it is, they should have incorporated it into the gauge system. If they were able to rework the bars for shielding, they could have at least made it obvious how much remaining healing was required to cleanse the effect. This was pure laziness.