Was bored and had thoughts about LD

[Osteichthyes]

So LD isn't that great, million topics about it, so here's another.

I propose two potential "solutions".

1) When Walking Dead is activated, the player is granted 5 Walking Dead stacks. These stacks need to be healed off, and each stack is 20% of the player's maximum HP. This would make it so that they DRK wouldn't need to heal bombed in the lack of bene but instead could be healed one (or a few) stack at a time.

2) When Walking Dead is activated, LD button becomes Transfuse. When transfuse is used your blood gauge is set to 0 and you are healed by the same percent as the blood gauge consumed (20 Blood Gauge = 20% max health restored) and the effect of Walking Dead is removed. Careless use of transfuse could lead to the DRK not having enough health to survive upcoming damage and would take some forethought to use correctly.

Just some ideas I had and would love to hear any and all feedback.

[Canadane]

The first one is exactly how it works now.
You don’t need to be healed to full, you only need to be cured for the amount of your max hp.

[Lammas]

The first one is exactly how it works now.
You don’t need to be healed to full, you only need to be cured for the amount of your max hp.

^this

The second suggestion has all kind of problems too. Tie your survivability into your damage resource and nobody will like it.
That said, I'd gladly pay 10 or 20 blood to end the effect without it outright killing me because that's the change I want for it anyway; for it to just not kill me. I don't care if it''d leave me at 10 % either if there was no immediate incoming damage and if that's the case then that's the healers problem.
That's a very complicated solution for just removing the healing requirement to begin with.

[Rasikko]

The first one is exactly how it works now.
You don’t need to be healed to full, you only need to be cured for the amount of your max hp.

It's difficult for AST and SCH though, or well it is for me on AST. 1 -> 140k HP, D:

That's about 6 casts of Benefic 2, assuming both EDs are down.

[Aurelius2625]

Honestly just give it a 50percent heal requirement, or a mantra like effect where healing is increased from all sources and actions by 20 to 30 percent. Solved. Not very impressive or creative but it works.

Or, have a DA proc be able to instantly dispell it by having the LD skill change and if you have a proc it lights up like BS does when you have 50 blood, it's a 500 potency loss but I mean, it's there if your healers are total derps and you are PFing something, it's a guaranteed, "you will not die situation".

[shao32]

LD needs a convalescence effect or a way to remove the debuff by yourself

[TouchandFeel]

The lowest impact "solution" is to just simply remove the "you die" part and keep everything else the same.
It would then basically be just like Holmgang with a longer recast, an up to 10s buffer at the beginning, but with the caveat that if you receive front-loaded burst healing that equals 100% of your HP pool you could cut the duration short by dispelling Walking Dead.
Give a little wiggle room to the activation period while taking some from the deactivation period.

Boring but at least it should be easy to implement and it gets rid of the biggest issue with LD.

While a "Convalescence" type effect being added to LD lessens the healing strain, it still has two major drawbacks. First it doesn't really solve the "you die" situation, it makes it easier to avoid but that spectre of doom still hangs over your head. Second, the easing of healing then comes with the trade-off of making it easier to prematurely cancel the Walking Dead state.
So on one hand it helps, on the other it hinders. Whether the helping part outweighs the hindering part, well that is up for debate.

... That is what the issue with living dead boils down to, so the simplest fix would just be to make it work like holmgang ...

As I said above, all they really need to do to make it basically like Holmgang is to remove the death aspect and keep everything else the same. The other aspects like the 10s Living Dead before Walking Dead buffer plus the Walking Dead effect being removed if 100% healing is reached should be enough to differentiate LD and Holmgang.

[Cabalabob]

The problem with LD is just that it requires input from someone else other than the user, the DRK has no way to heal through walking dead on their own it HAS to be the healer who potentially doesn’t even know what living dead is since levelling DRK is completely optional to playing healer. This game is not designed around moves like this.

From level 1-50 there are NO moves that require you know another jobs kit and in the entire game there are only 2, divine veil and living dead. Nothing about this game suggests that you need to learn the move set of another job. In divine veil’s case it’s not so bad, the PLD can proc it themselves if need be and if it’s not proced you’re just wasting the CD and not getting a shield, no big deal. In the case of living dead it is much more severe, your main tank DIES.

That is what the issue with living dead boils down to, so the simplest fix would just be to make it work like holmgang, can’t drop below 1hp for 10 seconds (the trade off being the extra minute on the cooldown).

Yes homogenisation blah blah blah blah.... But frankly I’d rather have a move that’s the same and does a decent job than a move that’s unique and is terrible. They can figure out how to make it unique in the future while actually making it a good move, but until that day comes, give us something functional.

Edit: as for my personal thoughts on what living dead could be. Living dead: 5min cooldown, 15s duration. For the duration the user’s HP cannot drop below 1. The user can’t be healed by outside sources (the healer, potions). All the user’s weaponskills restore 100% of damage dealt as HP for the duration. (Stacks with souleater).

And even this idea I recognise is not perfect, in situations where you can’t attack the target you’re putting yourself in a lot of danger by removing the ability to be healed entirely which will leave you at 1 HP when it wears off (ruby weapon comets).

[Cabalabob]

As I said above, all they really need to do to make it basically like Holmgang is to remove the death aspect and keep everything else the same. The other aspects like the 10s Living Dead before Walking Dead buffer plus the Walking Dead effect being removed if 100% healing is reached should be enough to differentiate LD and Holmgang.

You have to look at it from SE’s perspective of “balance” the 10s duration of WD is offset by the 5min CD, the 10 second leeway to activate it is offset by the risk of death and apparently the removal of the effect from a full heal (or not triggering at all due to never hitting 1 HP) is not considered as a positive or negative.

So, if they remove the death penalty then a boon has to go too. And I’d rather lose that activation leeway than the longer duration on the effect.

[TouchandFeel]

You have to look at it from SE’s perspective of “balance” the 10s duration of WD is offset by the 5min CD, the 10 second leeway to activate it is offset by the risk of death and apparently the removal of the effect from a full heal (or not triggering at all due to never hitting 1 HP) is not considered as a positive or negative.

So, if they remove the death penalty then a boon has to go too. And I’d rather lose that activation leeway than the longer duration on the effect.

I get where you are coming from, but I would argue that it is currently not balanced and that removing the death penalty and not adding any other negative would actually be more balanced compared to what we have now and that the whole death part is really just excessive in comparison to the other tank invulns.

By simply removing the death penalty, you potentially get extra time at the beginning due to the up to 10s of Living Dead before Walking Dead is activated with the trade-off losing time from being healed too quickly.

Let's look at the extremes of this.
- You somehow time Living Dead perfectly and get ~9s of buffer time.
- You pop LD right before a buster and get ~1s of buffer time.
- Your healer times their heals and maximizes Walking Dead's uptime giving you about 9s of its effect.
- You go into Walking Dead and immediately get Bene'd and only get ~1s of it.

Now you could get get the ~9s buffer and the ~9s of Walking Dead, just like you could ~1s of buffer and ~1s of Walking Dead. Realistically it's going to most often fall somewhere between those and approximately balance out to being about the same as an ~10s Holmgang.

Also that up to 10s buffer is really not that different than just timing your Holmgang well. If the damage is coming in slow enough that you would be getting ~10s of Living Dead before you hit 1hp and Walking Dead activates, you can probably pretty easily just wait until you get low on hp before popping Holmgang. In fact you have more flexibility with Holmgang in this regard compared to Living Dead. With Living Dead you pop it and are locked into the 10s buffer, don't take enough damage in those 10s and the ability is wasted. With Holmgang you could just wait a little longer and then pop Holmgang, surpassing the 10s limitation of Living Dead.

Essentially Living Dead is automated but more restricted, while Holmgang is more flexible but requires more skillful execution.
That's the trade-off: a 60s longer recast in exchange for an ~2s longer effective duration and being harder to mis-time, versus a ~2s shorter effective duration and requiring more skillful timing in exchange for having a 60s shorter recast.

That seems better balanced than what we have now.

That and only an extra 2s of not dropping below 1h just doesn't seem like enough to warrant a whole extra minute of recast imo.

I'm also pretty convinced that the whole dying part of Living Dead is not really a "balance" thing but a conceptual flavour thing. The way that they seem so reluctant to change that aspect just smacks of it being a flavour thing because in my experience I have found game devs to be much more reluctant to change a flavour aspect to something than something they deem as just a balance issue. There just tends to be more emotional attachment to the "style" of something than the numbers behind it.