We really need to talk about Living Dead

[Chrono_Rising]

I don't follow the purpose of this tangent, interesting as it is.

Its a long conversation flowing over many days so I don’t expect anyone to be following other than Lucy_Pyre, but I think Miminming has the right of it.

I believe that Lucy_Pyre primarily disagrees with over arching changes, or even the discussion of changes to Living Dead because like many people they see The Blackest Night as extremely power mitigation, which is both a commonly held sentiment and also true. Therefore the question of just how power TBN needs to be examined.

Evidence for me holding such a claim comes from finding agreement and freely sharing ideas culminating in:

Now, would I call TBN outright overpowered? That's not quite such a simple answer so I can't say with certainty. What I can say, however, is that TBN is by far the most powerful mitigation tool in the game (not counting invulns, obviously, nothing else can mitigate literal millions of damage). While Nascent is capable of healing for more than what TBN shields, the average healing amount over the course of a fight averages out to be less. TBN straight up just removes such a ludicrous amount of damage from existence over the course of an entire fight that, in some way, there has to be a trade off.

In the above post, I believe Lucy_Pyre is making the case that Living Dead is the trade off for such a powerful mitigation. Therefore the question we should critically examine is: how powerful is TBN in relation to the mitigation/self sustain kit as a whole and compared to kits of other tanks.

My argument here is that TBN is so powerful because it essentially is our entire kit, outside of shared things like rampart and the flavor text that is the 30% mitigation tool and invulns. If TBN provides similar mitigation/damage deletion as other cooldowns, then there is no need for it to be balanced with living dead because then TBN just is balanced with respect to other tanks cooldowns, while also being powerful in its own right.

In the above post I’m making the case that TBN functions to rival other tanks' cooldowns but as a single button. ToB, Equilibrium, and Nascent Flash heal back as much if not more damage than TBN + dark mind, but it does so across three buttons instead of two. I believe I proved my point above with napkin math, and then Launched made the fantastic suggestion to examine that with real data, which I verified in the next post.

TLDR; of a conversation that has been going on for many days: TBN is extremely powerful mitigation, but it is balanced with respect to other tanks kits without including invulns; what other tanks do with three buttons dark knight does with 2.