DRK skill: Living Dead

[WhyAmIHere]

For me it's little to do with lore/thematics with these abilities and more that, in an encounter, they don't often add much to it and since they need to be designed and balanced around, they usually become uninteresting mechanically. Or reduce a mechanic that might, otherwise, be interesting into something incredibly trivial.

Be it negating the mechanical juggling of a tankbuster (ie: Titan Savage), or negating a reason to move for a mechanic and just eat it to the face anyway, or negating a sequence of mechanics (such as when people were adamant, for a while, about PLD Hallowed-ing the ranged baits in O11S) among others.

I just find them uninteractive, and not very interesting to employ in general, but they're often key CD's utilized in a lot of pieces of content and having some be markedly worse than others puts some tanks in spots where it just feels... detrimental.

That said, if DRK could heal itself like a WAR then LD itself might be more palpable. But Abyssal drain, outside of a dungeon mass pull, isn't going to really help much with the situation.

The only counter I can make, as this is one side to point, is that "if SE didn't want tanks using invulns, they either wouldn't design encounters where the invulns trivialize the mechanic, or they'd just remove invulns altogether." If it's there, people are gonna use 'em.

[Alaray]

The only counter I can make, as this is one side to point, is that "if SE didn't want tanks using invulns, they either wouldn't design encounters where the invulns trivialize the mechanic, or they'd just remove invulns altogether." If it's there, people are gonna use 'em.

It's not really a counter as, what I'm saying, is that the removal of them would be more interesting than keeping them.

Speaking for myself, not SE.

[Lyth]

Living Dead doesn't really make sense from a Final Fantasy lore perspective, either. Vengeance, Justice, and Tenacity are themes, sure, but Undeath isn't. Dark Knights are not Death Knights, and if we were, we'd probably have the self-healing to support the ability (WAR can, we can't). Someone was staring a little too hard at Warcraft for ideas when they tried to rip off Purgatory.



The best ability designs are simple and intuitive. In the case of invulns, they also have to be dps neutral (MP draining or generating concepts don't work because you either avoid the ability or try to proc it on recast). Living Dead is just too convoluted. It needs to be scrapped and redesigned from the ground up.

I think there is a broader problem with invulns, in that with 4+ uses per fight between two tanks, there's a ton of damage that you can simply trivialise, so much so that you don't really have to ration out the rest of your defensive kit.

If you want the healing and mitigation checks in fights to have more challenge to them, you need to put an upper limit on both invuln and raise uses per fight, shared across your entire team.

[AnotherPerson]

Living Dead doesn't really make sense from a Final Fantasy lore perspective, either. Vengeance, Justice, and Tenacity are themes, sure, but Undeath isn't. Dark Knights are not Death Knights, and if we were, we'd probably have the self-healing to support the ability (WAR can, we can't). Someone was staring a little too hard at Warcraft for ideas when they tried to rip off Purgatory.



The best ability designs are simple and intuitive. In the case of invulns, they also have to be dps neutral (MP draining or generating concepts don't work because you either avoid the ability or try to proc it on recast). Living Dead is just too convoluted. It needs to be scrapped and redesigned from the ground up.

I believe the lore behind Living Dead was somewhat related to vengeance and fighting past your limit to gain your sense of justice before finally dissipating into the abyss - the previous user (Frey) was hinted to be doing just that, getting skewered but still fighting on until after he dies completely. It was mentioned before you get your job crystal. Then again Dark Knights were also more edgy before and had to attune themselves to the Darkness with Dark Arts. A part of Dark Knight lore was the more damage they took ('more pain' they feel), the stronger their darkness gets and the stronger their abilities become.

Perhaps giving The Blackest Night having an added passive that removes the 'will completely die' effect of Walking Dead when used would be a good change - from both a storyline standpoint since it shows how we come to accept ourselves and the can embrace the darkest of the abyss while forging on.

[WhyAmIHere]

I believe the lore behind Living Dead was somewhat related to vengeance and fighting past your limit to gain your sense of justice before finally dissipating into the abyss - the previous user (Frey) was hinted to be doing just that, getting skewered but still fighting on until after he dies completely. It was mentioned before you get your job crystal. Then again Dark Knights were also more edgy before and had to attune themselves to the Darkness with Dark Arts. A part of Dark Knight lore was the more damage they took ('more pain' they feel), the stronger their darkness gets and the stronger their abilities become.

Perhaps giving The Blackest Night having an added passive that removes the 'will completely die' effect of Walking Dead when used would be a good change - from both a storyline standpoint since it shows how we come to accept ourselves and the can embrace the darkest of the abyss while forging on.

Yeah but then that just adds more unneeded complexity to the skill.
"If The Blackest Night is active while under the effects of Walking Dead, [x] instead of [y]." Plus i'm sure that'd be a nightmare and a half to figure out what to do, let alone code.
I'm all for just a redesign to something that isn't as punishing on the user for other players misplays.

[Shurrikhan]

....

The sad thing is that the Purgatory design, or nearly the same ("Just make it let me go negative HP for 10 seconds..."), has been requested for... how long now? Whether "undeath" fits or not, at least that form of the immunity would be simple and intuitive.

A part of Dark Knight lore was the more damage they took ('more pain' they feel), the stronger their darkness gets and the stronger their abilities become.

That can more easily and effectively be achieved through a general job mechanic, though, rather than making one skill in particular convoluted af.

[RyuDragnier]

Perhaps giving The Blackest Night having an added passive that removes the 'will completely die' effect of Walking Dead when used would be a good change - from both a storyline standpoint since it shows how we come to accept ourselves and the can embrace the darkest of the abyss while forging on.

While a nice idea, the skill is already bloated and confusing as is. It definitely needs a complete rework somehow.

[Vyrerus]

Living Dead doesn't really make sense from a Final Fantasy lore perspective

Wrong.

The first Dark Knights to appear in the series are in FF3 as, "Mystic Knights." They wield Swords of Darkness that prevent monster "splitting" which is essentially monster cloning. That's all.
The next appearance is in FF4 where the main character is a Dark Knight. He can perform Dark Wave, which is what Flood of Darkness is based off of. His standard attacks deal minimum damage to Undead monsters, and it is implied that Blades of Darkness cannot hurt true evil(though mechanically Dark Wave can hurt them just fine) because a Blade of Darkness is of the same evil. This is part of his impetus to become a Paladin. So this is the first DRK lore in FF history, and it is implied that DRKs are on the same level as the Undead.

There are no DRKs in the series after this until FFXI. In FFXI DRK is unlocked by slaying 100 enemies with the Chaosbringer great sword. The Job's 2hr ability is Blood Weapon, an ability that makes all hits drain HP for 100% of the damage dealt. The job goes on to acquire the Drain and Aspir spell line as well as attribute absorption spell lines. Drain spells and hits within FF lore started in FFII, and were unique to undead monsters and the Blood Sword. Furthermore, within FFXI, DRK gains Arcana Killer as a trait, which is a trait intrinsic to Undead in the game as Undead <-> Arcana, both intimidate the other.

Within the DRK Artifact armor questline there is a DRK related blacksmith who stops the flow of his soul's time, in order to pass on his memories, by imprisoning it with darkness. That's a bit of a form of undeath, if you ask me.

[Flay_wind]

There are no DRKs in the series after this until FFXI. In FFXI DRK is unlocked by slaying 100 enemies with the Chaosbringer great sword. The Job's 2hr ability is Blood Weapon, an ability that makes all hits drain HP for 100% of the damage dealt. The job goes on to acquire the Drain and Aspir spell line as well as attribute absorption spell lines. Drain spells and hits within FF lore started in FFII, and were unique to undead monsters and the Blood Sword. Furthermore, within FFXI, DRK gains Arcana Killer as a trait, which is a trait intrinsic to Undead in the game as Undead <-> Arcana, both intimidate the other.

Surprise! FF X-2 had a Dark Knight class Dress Shere which was likely an inspiration for FF XI and XIV DRK.
It used a great sword as a weapon and it was a tanky class (iirc it had the highest health and defensive growths in the game, but was somewhat slow) with emphasis on status effects, both status immunities and status inflicting spells like Confuse, Bio, Break and Doom under Arcana ability. They also had Drain spell and a Darkness skill which sacrificed some hp for a powerful non-elemental attack to all enemies. Also they had Charon aka Self Destruct.

[Vyrerus]

Surprise! FF X-2 had a Dark Knight class Dress Shere which was likely an inspiration for FF XI and XIV DRK.
It used a great sword as a weapon and it was a tanky class (iirc it had the highest health and defensive growths in the game, but was somewhat slow) with emphasis on status effects, both status immunities and status inflicting spells like Confuse, Bio, Break and Doom under Arcana ability. They also had Drain spell and a Darkness skill which sacrificed some hp for a powerful non-elemental attack to all enemies. Also they had Charon aka Self Destruct.

Ah, cool. Though it didn't serve as inspiration for XI's. XI's came out first 2002. X-2 Came out in 2003.