DRK skill: Living Dead

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

What would be the downside if Walking Dead was adjusted so that any damage taken while under this effect is instead restored as HP to the DRK?

People keep saying "just add in a healing increase to walking dead! like convalescence!" Why settle for just that? It'd still be in line with DRK's lore of persevering through adversity. If anything for the sake of "balance" just make it so that you still die if you're not fully healed after WD's duration, or just inflict a penalty to WD that prevents you from being healed by anything but it's own effect while you're under the effect of WD.

The same downside that plagues half of the ideas for re-designing WD: It robs control of the ability and nerfs it hard in content where it's planned to be used.

Quick example why 'convert damage to HP' would make WD useless against mechanics that other invulns would have no trouble against:

-Golden bahamut uses Ahk Morn.
-DRK takes 100k damage out of their 60k HP, WD is procced.
-2nd Ahk Morn hit fully heals DRK, WD is dispelled
-3rd Ahk Morn hit kills DRK.
-4th & 5th ahk morn hits wipe party, where Holm/hallowed/Bolide would have no issues.

Same concept with any 3-hit+ TB, like Punishing heat + 3 divine spears, Ordained capital Punishment + Ordained Punishment, etc. The effect would also be useless against any needed use of LD where the DRK is currently the OT and not taking active damage (Homing Laser from UWU), or any TB that requires a tank swap which would be complicated as the DRK would have to hold onto the boss for an extra auto, where other tanks you just swap immediately. Or a TB followed by a phase jump/long cast bar where the boss can't deal damage to the DRK to heal them.

For an invuln to have Parity & balance with the others and not have that Tank be cast into the abyss of never being used in certain strategies ever again, its effect needs to either A) be guaranteed to be invulnerable for the duration specified (Hallowed/Bolide/Holm), or B) Have it's effect be controllable by the party to absorb however much damage its needed to without falling off prematurely. (Current WD)

That's why adding a Healing % modifier to WD is a common suggestion, since it tackles the issue of WD without compromising its use as an actual Invuln in any situation bolide/hallowed/Holm are used in. It is a very basic solution, but it would require the least work while making the ability more manageable by a single healer.

Honestly, if I were to redux WD to keep its flavor while letting it maintain parity, I'd do the following:

Walking Dead: While this effect is active, your HP cannot go below 1. While the effect of Walking Dead is active, 'Edge of Shadow', 'Flood of Shadow', 'Bloodspiller' & 'Quietus' recover HP based on the damage they deal (100% Convert ratio). 'The Blackest Night' will also heal you for 25% of your max HP during the effect of Walking Dead. Having 100% of your Max HP restored during the duration of Walking Dead will dispel this effect. When the effect of Walking Dead expires without being cleansed, the DRK suffers a DOT equal to 1/4th the difference between their current HP and their Max HP. DOT duration: 12s.

This way, WD keeps its aesthetic flair of needing to be cleansed, but at the same time, giving the DRK more power to assist the healer in cleansing it, while also making it so the effect isn't all or nothing: If the DRK only got healed to say, 80%, then the DOT will tick for 5% of their max HP over the next 12s (or 4 ticks), meaning its a lot more manageable for the healer(s), while still punishing if you barely heal them at all.

[Lyth]

...

Your posts illustrate the confusion surrounding this poorly designed and poorly described ability.

An ability only mitigates damage that it prevents. Hallowed Ground and Superbollide mitigate all incoming damage while they are active. Holmgang and Living Dead only mitigate damage when you are at 1 HP. If you stay above 1 HP, incoming damage isn't being mitigated and the ability does nothing.

When we talk about effective duration, it looks something like this:
Hallowed Ground: 10 seconds
Superbolide: 8 seconds
Living Dead: 0-9 seconds*
Holmgang: 0-7 seconds
*Note that this duration also depends on when your healer cleanses the effect. If they cleanse it early, which happens more often than not because there's no way to see how much required healing is left, the duration is much shorter.

So what is the point of the preliminary part of Living Dead? It reduces recast. A commonly used trick is activating an action early so that you start the recast timer earlier. Let's say there's a single hit tankbuster coming up, with no significant follow-up damage. I activate Hallowed Ground 9 seconds early. The tankbuster hits with 1 second left on Hallowed, allowing me to shave off 9 seconds on the recast timer. The effective recast is 411 seconds. When you know the timestamps of every tankbuster in a fight, this sort of planning helps out a lot to get you more uses out of your cooldowns.

Living Dead just means that your effective recast is always 291 seconds, regardless of whether it's a single hit or multiple ones. The effective recasts of the invulns are:

Hallowed Ground: 411-420 seconds
Superbolide: 351-360 seconds
Living Dead: 291 seconds
Holmgang: 232-240 seconds

The main difference here is that when you compare Holmgang and Superbolide, you're trading off a shorter recast (60s) for a 2 second longer duration and an additional penalty.

For Living Dead and Holmgang, you're trading off a potentially longer duration (maximum 2 seconds, and only if Benediction is used and timed correctly to the very last second of the cooldown) for a longer recast (60s) and an additional penalty (and a really, really bad one at that). What.

It shouldn't take much effort to figure out that this is an extremely poor trade-off. And that's setting aside how badly this action is implemented and written up as well.

But yeah, any time that you see "Living Dead" and "20 seconds", you can pretty much guarantee that anything that follows is going to be completely misguided.

...

Damage to healing can work as an invuln. You just make it such that once you hit 1 HP, you stop taking damage and a portion of what you would have taken slowly causes your health to tick back up for the remainder of the buff duration. That's kind of like an inverse Superbolide.

I think the "heal X damage or die" is going to be poorly implemented regardless of the amount of healing required. That's especially true if meeting the healing requirements early ends the invuln early, as it presently does.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Damage to healing can work as an invuln. You just make it such that once you hit 1 HP, you stop taking damage and a portion of what you would have taken slowly causes your health to tick back up for the remainder of the buff duration. That's kind of like an inverse Superbolide.

I think the "heal X damage or die" is going to be poorly implemented regardless of the amount of healing required. That's especially true if meeting the healing requirements early ends the invuln early, as it presently does.

It completely depends on how the skill is designed. The version as suggested by the person i quoted wouldn't, as it robs complete control of the doom condition from the party and leaves the DRK at the mercy of the enemy and would doom them to die in multiple situations, which I outlined.

There's only one way 'damage to health' would really work while maintaining parity with the other invulns. And that's how you described it; hallowed ground lite (0 damage taken, only its better than bolide because in many instances LD is used, the DRK would be receiving a benediction from the boss mechanics its blocking, saving the healers from having to spend any resources whatsoever. Like how divine spears deal 1mil +damage with the magic vuln, even 10% of that would be a 60-70% heal per spear.), no doom condition, no falling off early for the 10s(or you run into the ahk morn situation I put described.). At that point though, Bolide and LD would need to swap CD timers lol.

That being said, out of literally thousands of pulls during world prog through the years, LD has only ever been cleansed early twice. In a planned usage, it won't ever fall off before it needs to, unless someone fat-finger's benediction. The changes to LD are more to tackle its issue with solo & non WHM comps to make it a bit nicer.

[Lyth]

It'd be an easy enough fix to have an overlay meter (much like the shield gauge) showing how much required healing is left.

...

My point moreso is that a shorter recast has more value than a longer duration, and I think it's fair to say that Holmgang is unconditionally better than Living Dead.

If you did damage to HP as described, the recast is going to be a function of how much HP it restores. If you have something that restores 100% of incoming damage, it could easily be stronger than Hallowed on a multi-hit tankbuster, so would have to have a longer recast. If each HP absorb was hard capped, then there may be situations in which Superbollide is on par or even better. Either way, if you balanced it appropriately, you could easily design it such that you have Holmgang at 5 min, Superbollide/Living Dead at 6 min, and Hallowed at 7 min. To go one step further, I wish that they'd place a team-wide limit on invulns (something like 3x/fight across both tanks) simply to force more planning on how to ration out your standard cooldown pool instead of invuln-swap-supercooldown-invuln-swap.

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

my personal idea for Living Dead is to trash its current design, just burn it to ashes and give up on it, and re-birth Living Dead into its function being different.

first, a question. invulnerability aside, what is the actual purpose of these skills? immune to all damage?
no. the point is to "avoid KO", and "survive what would KO you".

as for the actual idea, my first thought is to re-name Living Dead, because my intent is for Living Dead to function in a very different way, while my actual thoughts are that Living Dead could be a ability that activates a permanent passive self-buff that just sits on the Dark Knight like a Tank Stance and does naught with itself. its special effect will come into play when the Dark Knight is about to be KOed, as its passive effect would be:
"upon receiving damage that would reduce your HP to under 1, the damage is negated and (new name of the ability or name of its passive effect) is removed, while your HP is immediately restored to 50% of maximum HP, and (new name of the ability or name of its passive buff) is then replaced with (name of a different passive effect, like how Living Dead becomes Walking dead), which reduces all damage taken by 50%, for (??)seconds."

other than, obviously, having a big (???)second CD that starts when the permanent passive self-buff is turned on, the ability would also have a large initial MP cost(5000?), as this is a "investment" to the skill paying the Dark Knight back later, when the Dark Knight would have been KOed, but instead was able to stay on their feet; and "cost" 100 MP per 5 seconds, as the permanent passive self-buff would be slightly eating away at your MP a bit, as the "price" for/of its "permanence".

what do my fellow current Dark Knight hater - old Dark Knight lover Dark Knights think of this?
would this be a good KO-avoid skill and also "fit with" Dark Knight?

in the case that any person may be wondering, the inspiration of this idea is that Dark Knight uses "Blood magic", along with their Dark magic,
and this KO-avoid ability is a "Blood magic" spell.