We really need to talk about Living Dead

[DWolfwood]

No, even now DRK is the MT tank of choice...

Btw you say this, but do you even raid? PLD and GNB are the "best" tanks right now.

That isn't the issue though. Fixing a skill on one job means only good things for the other tanks.

[cactuarzzzz]

1. The DRK's HP bar is the gauge that denotes that. There's always overhealing if you're healing anyone to full. Healing potencies vs. HP totals haven't ever been mathed out in a way to prevent that. It doesn't need any special gauge denotation because you can rule of thumb it by just filling their HP bar once.

DRK HP can still drop to 1 again after receive the heal during walking dead if there're still an incoming attack. Also the healing could Cri.

[Lyth]

...

Your post itself demonstrates how poorly people understand Living Dead. It's not your fault, the tooltip is terrible. You don't need to be max HP to cleanse the effect. You only need to be healed a total amount equal to your HP total. You'll occasionally even find experienced tanks and healers who don't fully understand how it works, surprisingly.

As a tank, you're continuously taking damage. You'll be taking damage while Walking Dead is active, too. Let's say you get healed for 75% of your health during the first 5 seconds of Walking Dead, but drop back down to 10% from incoming damage. You then get healed to 35% of your HP by 8 seconds into the cooldown. The Walking Dead effect ends, with you at 35% HP after 8 seconds total. You're not at 100%, but the effect is cleansed. It's also cleansed early, which means that the duration is contingent on when you receive that final HP of healing.

The reason why a gauge is required is two-fold:
1) it makes it more obvious to your team that the effect is taking place (wasn't that the reason why they introduced those massive picture gauges back in Stormblood just to make extra sure that you don't forget about Huton?)
2) To allow your healer to control precisely how much healing they're giving you, so that they know how much further they have to go, and so that they can pop the effect when it's safe to do so.

I agree that the tooltip is poorly worded. Another way of saying this is that it's wrong. These are equivalent ways of saying the same thing. And it's not just the main tooltip that you can see. It's also the buff/debuff text that your healer can see if they try to hover over the icon. The whole set of text blocks are incorrect.

Superbollide syncs up exactly with Benediction. 360 seconds is a multiple of 180 seconds

The duration argument doesn't make any sense. The effective duration of the ability only takes place when Walking Dead is activated. That means that its effective duration is anywhere from 1-9 seconds. If you hit 10 seconds, you die. Meeting the healing requirements early means that the ability ends prematurely. So if you get Benediction with at 1 second, the effect duration is 1 second. On average, when cleansed appropriately (i.e. tank does not die from the effect), it is the shortest duration invulnerability in the game, with the harshest penalty attached. The recast makes no sense whatsoever.

But once again, all these problems can be solved much more simply. Remove invulns from the game. The development team is incapable of salvaging this action. Just burn them all to the ground, and call it even.

[Vyrerus]

Condescending post.

I know how tanking in this game works, thanks. I've been tanking in it, in the endgame since 2013. Originally you did need max HP and to take damage and have further healing still, which they fixed. The filling of the HP is a good rule of thumb.

Your hypothetical situation doesn't jive with the situations you hate invulns for. In almost every tank busting situation, aside from high powered multi-hit tank busters, Walking Dead eats 1 lethal hit, and then it's preferable to remove it with healing right away. Yes, of course, since it doesn't make you truly invulnerable, your HP might not be full afterwards. That also applies to Holmgang and Superbolide.

1) Your gauge reasoning is flawed. They added gauges to jobs for the express purpose of personal assistance to players as invidividuals, not for the other players in the party. Once the gauges were added, you could no longer see whether or not someone had buffs like Huton up at all.
2) All healers need to do to know how much healing you require for Living Dead is to look at your total HP value before the fight starts. They know how much they heal for with each GCD and oGCD. If they're going to plan the fight meticulously for precision GCD use, then they will know exactly how many heals they need to give you, before the fight even begins.

I don't know why you respond in this way. I didn't agree with you, so we're not at consensus. I believe you have poor reading comprehension, judging not only by your response, but by your judgment of the tooltip texts. They tell you exactly how it works, and you can verify it in gameplay.

Ok, new gimp-Hallowed is on point with Bene. Woo.

Wrong. Just flat wrong. The effective duration of Walking Dead is 19 seconds. You have a 10 second window for it to be triggered, and then you get to ride 9 seconds of immunity to death. This lets you milk against the recast time, being rewarded for precise timing of WD being triggered. The usefulness of this, like most things, varies fight to fight. If you are with WHM, you can communicate with them, something you keep ignoring as a factor in gameplay, that you want them to cleanse WD just before it expires. If you aren't with WHM, then you hope that they have a plan to snap you up, and aren't expecting a duration optimization.

Doesn't need to be salvaged. Wouldn't hurt it to be improved or for them to raise DRK's offensive capability to compensate for its more demanding nature. Invulns are a good thing. Get off your high horse.

[Lyth]

????

Actually, even at Heavensward's release you needed to be healed for a total amount equal to your max HP. You didn't actually have to be at max HP, any more than you do now. The problem was that it previously didn't count overhealing, which is why Benediction previously wasn't enough on its own. You had to take a tick of damage so that the last bit of healing wouldn't be disregarded as overhealing.

Gauges exist to provide you with information. You could have a friend with a calculator sitting over your shoulder and furiously punching in heal values to add them up as they pop up on screen. But that's why gauges exist in the first place. By that same token, there's no reason why we need gauges showing current HP or current MP values. You just need to know the max values and watch the floating text to calculate the current running total. Why don't we do that then? UI elements exist to make things like this less cumbersome.

There are plenty of situations in which invulns are used to mitigate more than one attack. You can't make the claim that invuln duration doesn't matter. It's one of the factors used to balance them against each other.

Living Dead doesn't have an effective duration of 19 seconds. The effective duration is the period in which the invuln mitigates damage.

[ForteNightshade]

Invulns aren't fun to you, but for a lot of people they are. They allow for solos that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Rare clutch moments, as well as the knowledge that each tank has one skill that will make them unable to die for a short time, making the player feel tough. All of them have tangible draw backs except Hallowed. The only thing that needs to change relative to this, is PLD needs a slap to its DPS potential.

Except using invulns for "clutch moments" isn't how they're utilized once you understand tanking. They're used to cheese mechanics. Look at E8S. Tanks use their invulns are Morn Afa, which is supposed to be a party shared AoE. It isn't even a tank mechanic but healers don't want to deal with the amount of damage. So we pretend it doesn't exist. As Lyth alluded to, there have several fights where tankbusters don't even exist because you invuln all of them. Even in dungeon pulls, you pop your invuln on the biggest wall pull so the White Mage can spam Holy. Not exactly something I would describe as "clutch" gameplay.

[Lyth]

...

Agreed. To add to your point, Living Dead cannot be used to 'solo' or 'clutch' your way through anything. PLD makes you invulnerable for the duration. GNB can use the period that they are invulnerable to heal back a health buffer with Aurora and their standard combo. WAR has a lot of burst healing options at their disposal once they hit 1 HP on Holmgang. Living Dead cannot be used without the support (and often dedicated focus) of your healers.

And if you want to look at 'solo' in the strictest sense, if you ever activate Walking Dead on a solo PotD or HoH run, it's the only invuln that guarantees the end of your run.

While I can appreciate the aesthetic behind invulns, I think that both invulns (and raises, for that matter) are much too accessible in raid content. It would be fine if there was a party-wide cap on these abilities. But I think tanking would be more interesting without invulns.

[Vyrerus]

Agreed. To add to your point, Living Dead cannot be used to 'solo' or 'clutch' your way through anything. PLD makes you invulnerable for the duration. GNB can use the period that they are invulnerable to heal back a health buffer with Aurora and their standard combo. WAR has a lot of burst healing options at their disposal once they hit 1 HP on Holmgang. Living Dead cannot be used without the support (and often dedicated focus) of your healers.

And if you want to look at 'solo' in the strictest sense, if you ever activate Walking Dead on a solo PotD or HoH run, it's the only invuln that guarantees the end of your run.

While I can appreciate the aesthetic behind invulns, I think that both invulns (and raises, for that matter) are much too accessible in raid content. It would be fine if there was a party-wide cap on these abilities. But I think tanking would be more interesting without invulns.

It's true that Living Dead can't be used like the other invulns for soloing through lethal mechanics. But it can be used to help you win, even in POTD and HoH. If you know you're going to die, while it won't guarantee that you live, you may use it to try and get to another chest. If the chest contains a Raising Pomander, then the time it allotted you may lead to victory.

I think tanking would be more boring without invulns. Fights would just punish groups more if one tank was off sync or died. It might feel novel at first, but people would just outcry that they wanted invulns back, that having to share every major multi-hit tank buster was too much work or too wonky, and they would also miss being able to have clutch moments/make up for others' mistakes.

[Vyrerus]

Except using invulns for "clutch moments" isn't how they're utilized once you understand tanking. They're used to cheese mechanics. Look at E8S. Tanks use their invulns are Morn Afa, which is supposed to be a party shared AoE. It isn't even a tank mechanic but healers don't want to deal with the amount of damage. So we pretend it doesn't exist. As Lyth alluded to, there have several fights where tankbusters don't even exist because you invuln all of them. Even in dungeon pulls, you pop your invuln on the biggest wall pull so the White Mage can spam Holy. Not exactly something I would describe as "clutch" gameplay.

Except, not every fight or situation is an optimized CD sharing Savage/Ultimate scenario for players. Invulns are used to change the course of fights, generally dynamically, what you describe in Shiva is an example of that. Just because they aren't normally called upon to clutch a win, doesn't mean that they can't be or aren't. Example: Group of friends takes people through Thordan Extreme about the time Nidhogg Ex was out. I try to turn off Cleric Stance too early to heal up the group, my bad timing results in deaths, and these deaths on top of other deaths lead to us not killing Thordan before Ser Zephirin comes out in the final phase. With people dead he gets off a nearly full powered Sacred Cross off, killing everyone except for the DRK, who is now in Walking Dead. Thordan is so low that he kills him as he dies. Clutch Victory. Did it have to be, no. Was it? Yes.

[DWolfwood]

My personal, simple suggestion to remedy LD is change it so that:

DRK loses 50% of their HP every tick for 3-4 ticks. During which time the DRK cannot be reduced passed 1HP.