Thread: Living Dead and other DRK QOL in 5.3

Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate. If either that Excog crits or either Lustrate crits Walking Dead is completely cleared or damn near cleared. And that doesn't even consume all of your resources because you still have Dissipation to get a second stack of Aetherflow and Seraph to bring out. I swear, trying to debate things with people who are utterly incapable of understanding is tiresome. Honestly, I'd suggest you take some time to actually learn how to play the game properly before coming onto the forums to complain about things.

I semi-regularly use SCH and I didn't know this.
This is actually good to know, thank you.

I think when an ability requires the rest of the team to read the poorly written manual just to make it work, there's a design problem here. Rather than making rotations easier to make gameplay accessible to new players, why don't we just address problems in actions that have a legacy of being poorly designed?

Originally Posted by Cyatheales

...

Yeah, I don't understand why there are people arguing against a Living Dead gauge. It doesn't change the action at all. It just gives healers needed information to plan for an ability that they're expected to know about and respond to.

Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

...

You're right in that Living Dead presently accounts for overheal. When it didn't do this, it was actually a big problem, because there were often sections in fights where there just wasn't any outgoing damage. So you had to be creative and deliberately take damage (sometimes taking vuln stacks in the process) in order to take that extra 1 HP of damage that could then be healed up. This ability has a history of bad design decisions attached to it.

Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

You realize that SCH can solo heal Walking Dead from 1hp to full in two GCDs, yes? Like, you do understand how much of burst healing SCH can do, right? Excog, Recitation + Emergency Tactics Adlo, double Lustrate.

You do realize that you've just confirmed the statement you tried to argue against, right..?

Yes, LD is cleanseable on any healer, nobody is saying it's not, neither did anyone say that SCH needs "all" resources to do it - just a lot and you've just listed 3 cooldowns, 2 Aetherflow stacks and a GCD(you're also forgetting that weaving 5 ogcds will mean you need to replace 3 Broils with Ruin II, 2 if you have a Biolysis refresh coming, which is even more losses). Just because you can do it quickly doesn't make it not costly. Invulns are meant to save resources like tank/healer cds and reduce overall healing requirements - when you have to toss so many things at the DRK to deal with LD you're failing to do that and are better off not using the invuln.

I was actually defending LD back in Stormblood when topping a tank off was pretty easy and(imo) worth the benefits of 5 minute cd with up to 19 second duration, but with how bloated tank HP pools are now it's become too hard. I don't mind it not being usable in solo or whatever, but LD really could at least use a healing buff and some kind of gauge for how much healing has already been done would really help making most of the duration without ending it early. I've proposed it in the past in one of my DRK rework posts - make Walking Dead a true invuln(this would make DRK's hp bar the gauge as it won't go down during the buff) and give it a healing received buff.

Or, you know, just get rid of the invulns altogether while reworking entire mitigation system, because it's overall pretty trash at the moment.

Originally Posted by Satarn

You do realize that you've just confirmed the statement you tried to argue against, right?

No, no I haven’t. Resources in actually difficult content (savage/ultimate, +/- EX) are almost entirely planned out. This means that not only does the SCH have a second healer aiding them to clear Walking Dead, but even if they were to solo cleanse it, that resource usage was still planned out that way to begin with and leaves the other healer with all resources available should an emergency arise.

Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

No, no I haven’t. Resources in actually difficult content (savage/ultimate, +/- EX) are almost entirely planned out. This means that not only does the SCH have a second healer aiding them to clear Walking Dead, but even if they were to solo cleanse it, that resource usage was still planned out that way to begin with and leaves the other healer with all resources available should an emergency arise.

Just because it was planned, doesn't mean it was planned optimally. The point is that if you had to spend so much then it's likely it would be more efficient to just use something else for the TB/mechanic and exclude LD from your plans entirely. Of course if you're in raid, then you should spread the burden on both healers, but that just means you'll have to replace some of these SCH cds with AST ones - you're still spending a lot of your combined healer resources, which is how you should be thinking about them.

Originally Posted by Satarn

Just because it was planned, doesn't mean it was planned optimally. The point is that if you had to spend so much then it's likely it would be more efficient to just use something else for the TB/mechanic and exclude LD from your plans entirely. Of course if you're in raid, then you should spread the burden on both healers, but that just means you'll have to replace some of these SCH cds with AST ones - you're still spending a lot of your combined healer resources, which is how you should be thinking about them.

Except, there's a couple of things you all just keep conveniently forgetting here. First of all is the fact that healer resources are not the only thing to take into consideration; you must also consider the combined resources of the two tanks. One tank invulning a buster and then swapping is a significant resource gain over both tanks using normal mitigation like Rampart/Vengeance and swapping in between each hit of the buster. Not only does each tank now gain an additional cooldown during each of their turns holding the boss with which they can mitigate auto attacks +/- raidwide damage, which is a significant stress reduction on the healers, but the amount of healing that will be required on the tanks is roughly the same regardless of whether they invuln or mitigate normally. Almost every buster in savage/EX hits the tank for a minimum of half of their HP through proper regular mitigation (example: Dual Earthen Fists buster in Titan savage hits for around 105-110k through Rampart). If we factor in this happening twice, once to each tank with a tank swap and both of them using normal mitigation, that equals out to each tank needing to be healed for half of their HP; or one full tank's worth of health. If we instead have one tank invuln the entire buster before tank swapping, we now have the same amount of health that must be restored, one full tank's HP worth of healing, but we have gained resources on both tanks; allowing each of them to gain a use of Rampart/Vengeance which they would not have had were they to mitigate it normally that they can now use to mitigate auto attacks and raidwide damage which, as I already said, is a significant stress reduction on the healers. So in other words, in most situations invulning is simply the better choice. Unless the healers are having difficulty keeping people alive at a later time in the fight before their resources come back up there really is no reason to not use the tanks' invulns on a buster, as it simply is a net resource positive for the tanks and overall easier time of keeping the tanks up for the healers over the course of the entire fight.

Originally Posted by Satarn

save tank and healer cds and reduce overall need for healing

Which LD does just the same as every other tank invuln. Mitigating a long string of auto attacks from both tanks, especially if there are multiple invuln uses over a fight (which means multiple of these strings of auto attacks to mitigate with the saved CDs) totals out to saving the healers work over the course of a fight. So therefore, by your own reasoning, LD is completely fine.

Originally Posted by Lucy_Pyre

So therefore, by your own reasoning, LD is completely fine.

I mean, sure, if you ignore the entire rest of my post which explains why that is not always the case, yeah.