Living dead must change

[Beddict]

Hahaha when did that happen?
Dang, guess I really haven't played WAR in high end content in awhile...
I'm glad it got buffed. Good for them.

That got changed in Patch 5.1 and was the second major change to Holmgang in ShB. The first was in Patch 5.0 which changed the whole chaining the WAR to the target. It still exists if you cast Holmgang when a target is selected, but a simple <me> macro will cast Holmgang on the WAR resulting in no chain so the invuln doesn't get canceled early if the target dies or disappears or whatever. The one big downside to Holmgang is gone leaving it with the shortest recast, same duration as Superbolide, and it doesn't inflict Doom on the WAR. Honestly kinda disgusting when compared to Living Dead.

[shao32]

I haven't caught him directly comment on it.
What has he all said?

It was on the SHB event where some youtubers and streamers have been invited to try and review all the jobs changes before the expansion launch, Xenosys vex asked Yoship about living dead being what it is a black hole of resources and if they could change it, Yoship answer with living dead being a important part of DRK lore but they will look at it or somethig similar, i remember it specially bcs i was totally offended by that answer, i was like and the rest of the kit wasn't? the MP management,? dark arts? the whole Darkside stuff?
they destroyed DRK gameplay that did more to make DRK feel like his lore resemble it was and preserve the most annoying skill that have recived the biggest amount of complains that was specially against it.

[Cabalabob]

Hmm... I'm with you. I can see the high risk they're going for. But I wonder what kind of high reward we could attach to an invuln? Especially one that wouldn't upset your healers if you're hitting your invuln to drop into living dead as often as possible.

As I said, the theory of living dead works, the basic premise is it’s the longest duration invuln with one of the shortest cooldowns but to balance that power it comes with a built in risk.

The premise behind living dead doesn’t need to change. It’s the execution that’s lacking. The longer duration is meaningless and can even be cancelled out and the risk is too great and out of the hands of the user.

Part of this is that living dead by design doesn’t mix with DRKs kit. It requires a full heal on a tank with very low self healing potential. Living dead as it is would work better (still not necessarily be good) on WAR or PLD who have the power to heal themselves effectively.

If I was to change things, I’d change DRK and GNB around. Make DRK the high cooldown invuln and GNB a low cooldown one. GNB’s superbolide would be a 15 second duration holmgang that lowers your HP to 1 on a 5 min cooldown, it’s straightforward and balanced against holmgang.

I’d change living dead to something like: Grants you a 100% HP shield for 10 seconds, if the shield is fully consumed grants walking dead which would be changed to 8 seconds of invulnerability. If the shield is not fully consumed the remaining shield is dealt to the DRK as damage. 6 min cooldown. All the elements are in tact, potentially the most powerful invuln, with a built in risk and a shorter cooldown than its peer (hallowed ground), with the added bonuses that control over the risk is placed entirely on the user and that it suits DRK’s identity better by sharing elements with TBN in being a shield that you want to consume.

[Burningskull]

Why not just remove invulns period and force people to do mechanics.

[Lyth]

I wish I had a gil for every time a player in the forums claims that Living Dead is the longest duration invuln. The maximum effective duration of Living Dead is 9 seconds, and only when you couple it with Benediction. You die at 10 seconds. Holmgang gives you up to 8 seconds. Superbollide is a full 8 seconds. Hallowed Ground is a full 10 seconds. Living Dead is mediocre in all aspects of its design.

Living Dead doesn't need a penalty attached.

Why not just remove invulns period and force people to do mechanics.

This is actually the best solution, as it requires you to ration out your cooldowns and know how much damage each tankbuster hits for. A surprising number of players are against this idea, and I suspect that they would likely struggle to clear content on tanks if this was implemented. You get similar pushback if you suggest limitations be placed on instant cast rezzes. It's interesting how dependent FFXIV players are on these crutches, when compared to a game like Warcraft.

[Cabalabob]

I wish I had a gil for every time a player in the forums claims that Living Dead is the longest duration invuln. The maximum effective duration of Living Dead is 9 seconds, and only when you couple it with Benediction. You die at 10 seconds. Holmgang gives you up to 8 seconds. Superbollide is a full 8 seconds. Hallowed Ground is a full 10 seconds. Living Dead is mediocre in all aspects of its design.

As I said before, living dead gives you a free 10 second window to drop to 1hp, every second of walking dead is time you’ve been at 1hp, so while the maximum potential duration is 9 seconds when paired with a bene the maximum potential duration of all the other invulns is their duration minus the time you spent using it before the attack. Let’s best case scenario it and say you popped your invuln exactly 1 second before a tank buster, that’s still 1 second off your duration that wasn’t doing anything. Making holmgang and superbolide 7 seconds and hallowed 9 seconds and that is best case scenario, not even considering the animation delay or ping which makes it likely you’ll use it 2-3 seconds before the Buster.

[Lyth]

Hallowed Ground and Superbollide work for their complete duration, factoring out latency, reaction time, etc. which are going to be universal to all tank cooldowns. You might just be mitigating autos with them, but all incoming damage is negated for the entire duration. Holmagang can work for the complete duration, but you only actually mitigate damage when you're at 1 HP. The effective duration is going to be between 0 and 8 seconds, depending on latency, etc. What about healing? Well, you don't need to have any healing if there's no outgoing damage at the end of the 8 seconds. The boss could be animation locked for the next 15 seconds trying to cast a raidwide. You can stay at 1 HP for a bit, if you dare.

Living Dead operates on a similar principle to Holmgang, except that you must terminate early with healing. The latest you can cleanse this is 9 seconds, because you die when the timer reaches 0. So it's never going to reach 10 seconds, even before latency etc.

What about the fabled 10 seconds of auto-activation? That would be interesting if bosses surprised you with tankbusters and the timing was up in the air. But this game is completely scripted, and even the most grossly incompetent raid tanks knows that tankbuster 3 occurs at, say 7 minutes, 21 secconds, and 15 milliseconds after the initial pull. So what do we do with those 10 seconds? Same thing as any mitigation tool. We precast it to catch the tankbuster at the tail end of the cooldown, so that the recast timer activates earlier. You do the same thing with Hallowed if you're only using it to mitigate a single hit. Activate, say, 9 seconds earlier than you need it (based on your understanding of your own latency, reaction time, etc), effective recast is now 411 seconds.

So Living Dead universally has an effective recast of 291 seconds rather than the listed 300 seconds. Whoop-de-do.

[shao32]

Mmmm i agree that removing invulns will make us have some real mitigation management and spice things up in that department, it's ridiculous how basically all savage has been just superbolide half of the tank busters and the rest of the mitigation skills have to being used randomly to don't waste it despite i barely didn't need it at all.

But at the same time Invuls represent basically with the extra CD most tanks have the biggest diferences betwen mitigations kits and removing it would make feel more obvious that tanks are heavely homogenizated in that department, all tanks are basically rampart or sentinel + shelltron variant and that's it, WAR can play a bit more thanks to nascent flash and thill of battle allowing them to play around and have a more unique aproach to his mitigation department but they can fall in to that mold too with raw intuition and i personally hate that there is no real execution diference betwen tanks right now, and despite i consider invuls being removal being necesary, or desing encounters better over all to force players to use they defensive kits way more often im very worry that making all tanks the same still be a thing, we need more adjustments than just remove the invuls otherwise we are not progresing and we make a current problem more severe in my opinion.

[DaulBan]

I agree that removing Invulns probably isn't a bad idea.

That said, I think it could be used reasonably to distinguish different tanks. Like if GBR and PLD had them, while DRK and WAR didn't (excepting current tank balance) that might be reasonable if the former have weaker on-demand mitigation and the latter has much better on-demand mitigation. If your argument is that DRK has the best personal shield and WAR has the best personal healing, whereas PLD or GBR didn't (for whatever reason) it can be sensible.

That said, I'd prefer it if invulning things actually was more useful than just 'don't take damage'. Since so many effects now are 'on hit' as opposed to 'on damage' it's not like you can do anything too crazy. I also think having invuln 'checks' as a way of forcing people to do something else might work (chastening heat A12S) might not be a terrible idea. Like saying 'sure, you can pop this invuln for prog, but it's not going to help you three minutes later in the fight when you gotta do something insane'.

Again, all that said I'd prefer we had more tools we could use in more interesting ways with more damage coming in than the way it is now with a glut of tools (usually) and pretty minimal incoming tank damage.

[Lyth]

Let's make invulns PLD/GNB exclusive in order to make them unique!

This is an exceptionally bad idea. It's difficult to determine if you genuinely aren't aware of how powerful invulns are, or if you believe that the rest of the forums isn't clued in to it. At bare minimum you would make this tank combination mandatory for progression, if not in most content.

I think that if you want to limit the impact of invulns, then you need to address the issue universally, rather than by giving special privileges to certain tanks.