We really need to talk about Living Dead

[elioaiko]

I'll say this. DRKs shouldn't have to be afraid to use their invuln skill in other content besides Savage (where it would be useful). Like some others have said, it is highly unlikely that you will get the full duration off due to it mostly being used for TBs or cheesing mechanics. They are very far inbetween.

The only time I could ever think of LD's duration being useful is Titania EX's tether mechanic where a DRK can eat all of the blasts.

It's just too risky and in most content, the DRK will likely die be it a new healer or a lack of time to recover from it.

And also, healers complaining about healing goes far more than having to stop to cleanse LD so don't pick and choose what healers shouldn't be angry about. Having to pause everything to heal through LD is quite annoying as even WAR and GNB only need 1 oGCD to actually survive whereas LD requires either Benediction, Synastry + Essential Dignity and possibly a Benefic 2, or whatever oGCDs SCH has available.

Point being that LD is not only annoying but it ends up more healer resources that could be used toward other things.

If they wanted a simple fix, then increase the incoming healing by 50% or lower the required HP recovered.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Point being that LD is not only annoying but it ends up more healer resources that could be used toward other things.

If they wanted a simple fix, then increase the incoming healing by 50% or lower the required HP recovered.

Sorry for snipping the post - you are generally correct with what you said, but I wanted to highlight something that is a bit off.

Generally with how DRK works, he is more demanding when using Living Dead, but is generally less in need of heals when rotating cooldowns well, including TBN as a solo cooldown. A good DRK doesnt need more heals, he shifts the heal requirements with well placed mitigation or potentially lowers it.

[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.

[Vyrerus]

Stuff

Yeah, and we already have the U.I. Element we need for that. HP bars in the party list. You're asking for a stylized gauge that pops up on the healer's screen or everyone's I guess when Living Dead activates. While not unfeasible, that's not gonna un-muddle a new healer's first time with Living Dead any more than the tooltips, buff icon, or communication do now.

I didn't make that claim.

It does, because once you activate Living Dead, at any point during its duration, you may take lethal damage and then trigger the second effect, where damage no longer matters. And once Living Dead is active, as long as you take fatal damage, then you no longer need to be healed for the duration. That gives it a far greater wiggle room, the opposite wiggle room from shorter duration invulns. Contrast with Superbolide. You activate Superbolide and take your remaining HP - 1 in damage to gain 8 seconds where damage doesn't matter. As long as the damage is fatal for DRK, then you have an effective period of time that is longer than any other invuln where no one needed to support you(and if they did it probably screwed you over).

While we won't be seeing it as much since they increased its duration, the most notable comparison of duration comparison was against Holmgang when it was six seconds. Holmgang had the opposite problem, particularly for multi-hit TBs like Ahk Morn, Thunder III, and Stonecrusher. Where you practically had to wait until the cast bar was 80% full before you activate your invuln. You can think of it as a grace period, I guess. But basically since the, "mitigation" phase won't trigger until you take lethal damage, I reiterate that this is a whole 10 seconds where the only thing that matters about damage done to you is that it is lethal.

[Lyth]

I recommend that at absolute minimum, there be a bar similar to the shield gauge that appears under your HP bar when Walking Dead is active to show you how much more healing is required to cleanse the effect. Alternatively, give every healer job UI a place-able element that shows when your tanks' invulns are active, and along with a "cleanse bar" for DRK. I also think that it's fair to ask for the tooltips to be absolutely explicit in how the action works. I wrote up an example of how this could be done in the thread that I linked. The onus is on the writer, not the reader, to communicate how it works.

I don't think either of these things will make it completely user friendly to a new healer. But that's a overall problem with its design.

Let's say that a tankbuster occurs 20 seconds into a fight. You activate Living Dead at 11 seconds. Walking Dead activates at 20 seconds. Benediction is used at 29 seconds. Living Dead is back up at 311 seconds. You've mitigated 9 seconds of damage, so that's the effective duration. The ability is back up at 291 seconds after you start mitigating damage, so that's the effective recast.

Now you're on PLD. You activate Hallowed Ground at 19 seconds. Hallowed is back up at 439 seconds. You've mitigated 10 seconds of damage, so that's the effective duration. The ability is back up at 420 seconds after you start mitigating damage, so that's the effective recast.

Pre-casting Living Dead shortens your effective recast. Most invulns and other defensive cooldowns can also be precasted, though, if you don't need the full duration.

[Ftail]

Recited Excog and Emergency Adloquium could probably do it, I would imagine, assuming you don't use Faerie abilities or Dissipation.

According to this person from this thread, I was reading last year you'd need more then that. https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...15#post5087215

I was actually having this very same discussion with the tanks in my FC about the invulnerability abilities last night. We all came to the agreement that DRK now has the worst invuln due to the amount of healing you need to do to get them out of Walking Dead is immense.

In case anyone is wondering, and taking Deceptus' example above:

Recitation + Emergency Tactics + Adlo = (300 potency)*(1.4 crit bonus)*(3.5 for healing and shield bonus) = 1,470 potency
3x Lustrate = 1,800 potency

Total potency is 3,270 which is still short of the needed 3,600 one has to hit to heal a tank from 1HP. You'll actually need to Dissipation and probably Lustrate at least once more to keep your DRK from dying.

Depending on how the HP curve grows in relation to the healing power curve, this value could become even wider.

This will be easier in a raid scenario where there are two healers available, for in a 4-man instance, the DRK invulnerability is really painful to deal with if you aren't a WHM.

Posted: 07-19-2019 12:24 PM

It's a bit outdated, but it still gets the point across... The running gag is the only way to save a DRK as a SCH in 4 man content is Swiftcast + Rez.

[aodhan_ofinnegain]

It does, because once you activate Living Dead, at any point during its duration, you may take lethal damage and then trigger the second effect, where damage no longer matters. And once Living Dead is active, as long as you take fatal damage, then you no longer need to be healed for the duration. That gives it a far greater wiggle room, the opposite wiggle room from shorter duration invulns. Contrast with Superbolide. You activate Superbolide and take your remaining HP - 1 in damage to gain 8 seconds where damage doesn't matter. As long as the damage is fatal for DRK, then you have an effective period of time that is longer than any other invuln where no one needed to support you(and if they did it probably screwed you over).

Living Dead is more akin to Divine Veil in that you can pop it 10 seconds before you need it to shave 10 seconds off the next recast, but the actual invuln is the Walking Dead that comes from otherwise dying. Likewise you need a GCD heal to trigger within the 30 seconds of Divine Veil which then applies the shield on the party. So if you pre pop veil 30 seconds prior to needing the shield then activate it via GCD heal 29 seconds into the duration, the next Divine Veil recast is only ~60 seconds away.

If anything Living Dead is a buffer to give people leeway to timing their invuln, something that Hallowed Ground, Superbolide and to lesser extent Holmgang (more responsive) don't necessarily suffer.