Living Dead: Problem List

[Lyth]

Update (Post Media Tour):
Living Dead has been the subject of a lot of discussion since its release. With the Media Tour revealing buffs to two of the other tank invulns, I think that it's a good time to revisit this subject now that it is objectively the worst defensive capstone ability on any tank by a significant margin.

Here are the key problems with this ability:

1) Implementation.
Walking Dead requires you to receive an amount of healing equal to your total HP to remove the effect. There is presently no way to track this requirement in game. This is not the same as healing to max HP. So your healers are either forced to use Benediction on it, or throw heals at it until the debuff icon disappears. At bare minimum, this needs to be communicated in the UI, with a HP overlay to show how much healing is still required to cleanse Walking Dead. You could have a black bar that sits over both your personal and party HP bars that progressively shrinks as you receive heals. It's a bit odd that we have job-specific UI elements for relatively unimportant things, like the duration of Living Shadow, but for not basic features required for survival.

It's also worth noting that the mouse-over tooltips for both the Living Dead ability and the Living Dead debuff have been incorrect on English localization since 2015, which is why there are surprisingly many players that think that you need to actually reach 100% HP like the standard Doom debuffs.

2) Synergy.
Living Dead really is on the wrong tank.

On balance, DRK has the worst self-healing capacity of any tank in single target. That was true this expansion, and will be even more true next expansion, when PLD and WAR both have significant gains in self-sustain. Even DRK's strongest defensive ability, TBN, has no interaction with this ability, because barriers don't count towards meeting the healing target.
The loss of Convalescence in Shadowbringers, as well as the loss of Sole Survivor, both removed any semblance of control that you had as a player over getting healed through Walking Dead. And while I know that not everyone enjoys solo content like single player PoTD (or the Bozja duels), it's frustrating to play a tank and not be able to use your capstone defensive ability at all, knowing that you're completely unable to heal through it. This is part of the reason why I also think that suggestions to 'ease up the healing requirement' don't really hit the mark. You really don't have any agency whatsoever to help survive the Walking Dead effect. This is an ability that really should be designed around a burst self-healing tank.

3) Healer Interactions.
The single best ability for addressing Walking Dead is Benediction. This is really the only way that you can guarantee a full 9 seconds of Walking Dead. Why 9? You die when the cooldown reaches 0 seconds. Otherwise, you're just throwing heals at it until the debuff disappears, which could be anything from 1-9 seconds.

Living Dead is on a 5 minute recast.
Benediction is on a 3 minute recast.

The problem here should be obvious. For two abilities that are seemingly meant to be used together, they sync up very poorly. If you want to always use them together, you need to hold Benediction for an extra two minutes every time, resulting in lost Benediction uses over the course of the fight. This wouldn't be an issue if Benediction instead was on a 2.5 minute cooldown (150 seconds). There's also the question of how costly this effect will be for other healers. Benediction, at the end of the day, is a single cooldown. Other healers may end up using multiple cooldowns to eradicate the effect. And again, without a clear visual indicator for the remaining healing requirement, it's easy to burn more cooldowns than you need to keep the DRK alive.

4) Duration.
The active portion of Living Dead (i.e. the part when you actually mitigate damage) is always less than 10 seconds. Living Dead and Holmgang only ever mitigate damage when you're at 1 HP. Otherwise, all the damage goes through. The active portion of Living Dead is Walking Dead, and Walking Dead only.

I'll let that sink in for a second. Anyone who claims that Living Dead 'potentially gives you 20 seconds of invulnerability' has no idea what they are talking about.

Just to illustrate this point further, let's say that Living Dead was a trait that automatically activated Walking Dead when you receive an attack that would otherwise kill you, up to once every 5 minutes. Would you claim that such an ability makes you permanently immune to death? No. The active duration only starts when you hit 1 HP. (It's worth noting that this design approach would actually be a downgrade to what we have).

The real advantage of the 'Living Dead' buff is that it allows you to precast your invuln. So if you know that a tankbuster is coming at a particular timestamp, you activate it 9 seconds earlier. This starts the recast timer ticking, which shaves off 9 seconds off. You could say that, if you time Living Dead correctly, it has an effective recast of 291 seconds.
So what's the real duration of Living Dead? It's something between 1 and 9 seconds, depending on when your healers give you an amount of healing equal to your total. Heal too soon and the death immunity effect ends early. Heal too late and you die. It's the only invuln with this problem.

5) Balance.
So let's get to the key balance problem that Endwalker has introduced.

Regardless of whether you like Superbolide or not, there's a basic trade-off that you see between PLD and GNB. Superbolide has a shorter recast (by 1 minute), but comes at the cost of a penalty. With the buff to Superbolide duration in Endwalker, both abilities are otherwise equivalent.
Death immunity is a bit worse than true invulnerability in that you only mitigate damage when you're at 1 HP, so it's a bit difficult to compare these two directly with Holmgang and Living Dead.

Let's look at Holmgang and Living Dead, though, since you can draw a direct comparison between the two. Holmgang has a shorter recast (by 51 seconds if the DRK plays optimally - see previous section). But Living Dead is the ability with the penalty. And with the buff to Holmgang to 10 seconds this expansion, the active duration of Walking Dead will always be shorter than Holmgang. It's just objectively worse, even factoring in all of the previous design problems that we highlighted.

Wrap-up.
I'm glad that we're lucky enough to have a development team that takes pride in 'actually playing' their own critically acclaimed game™. But I find it extremely worrying that they seem to be clueless to many of the most obvious sources of gameplay complaints.

I don't really care at this point if they shaft DRK for a third consecutive expansion to inflate their new job numbers, but it would nice to see a few actual fixes on a problem that has been a thorn in players' sides for 6 years now. Acknowledging and admitting that there are major problems with this ability just the starting point.

[Sylvain]

Well that's a good post

I agree with the penality being too arsh. I have no issue with the whole "you gotta heal me" in a raid environnement, but the clunkiness of it when Benediction is unavailable is indeed bothersome at least.
First, as you pointed, it is quite annoying to not know how much heal is required
Second, even if you don't mind healing, in multiple TB scenario, you kinda throw heal out of the window because you can't just wait until the last second to heal it up. You have to start topping your DRK which get hit again thus negating the heal making your DRK still low hp once Living Dead wears off after receiving the required amount of healing.

To me the only benefit of Living Dead over Holmgang is its failproofness, you can't fail a Living Dead since you can precast it a whole 10s ahead of the TB. This is very handy for new players but it falls short very quickly.
The 10s duration would be a perk if the first issue wasn't one (for instance you keep healing and the DRK stays at 1hp until the debuff is removed, then he gets all the healing done in one go).

Finally, the way living Dead work can in itself be detrimental and cause wipe.
For instance, taking E4S TB which is a multihit TB, you have to be very careful to not overheal your DRK before the second hit land otherwise you effectively kill him. (Obviously this is mostly an issue for WHM-less party)

As I said, I have no issue with the flavor of the skill requiring healing (in a raid environnement, your concern of soloplay are quite valid), but it does feel quite weak for no / very little benefit. (Longer duration for those very rare double TB, but kinda needs a whm to work properly)

If Living Dead were to have
1- Shorter CD (at least on par with holmgang)
2- UI elemental showing how much heal is required
3- An effective 10s duration of invincibility no matter what (so that your healer don't accidentally kill you) and ideally a way to not waste the healing done as explained before

Living Dead would probably not be considered so weak and would in fact be a great alternative to Holmgang, both having their pros and cons

[Danelo]

I’m sure it’s a great write up, again, on LD, but I can’t be brought to read it. You know who else won’t read it? SQEX/Yoshi/dev team.

[whiskeybravo]

+1 for good luck

[Liam_Harper]

DRK is straight up my least favorite tank to heal in Savage. They're "fine" but I find myself mentally wishing they'd reroll and play any of the other tanks, which isn't a good sign. In many cases immunes are the easiest way to handle a tankbuster because it saves resources, but DRK demands them. Even if I'm a WHM, you're locking me out having freedom on of one of my strongest single target oGCD's.

Holm and Superbolide aren't too much penalty because you don't have to heal the tank to full. If they're swapping, you just need them above the threshold of the next raidwide, which deal less to tanks anyway, then raid heals take care of the rest. I don't even panic at random Bolide's in dungeons because, hey, I have 8 (soon 10) sec of comfort time. Bolide is especially comfy because they aren't taking damage for the full duration. Holm is the best raid immune in the game due to the recast time, allowing multiple tankbuster uses that other tanks won't get.
It's a good point too that you rarely get the full 10 sec from LD. As soon as you're healed, it's gone. Other tanks will always get 10 sec now.

TBN is just overrated at this stage. It seems to be the sole crutch for DRK, "oh we might be bad in 10 different ways but we have the best mitigation cd!". It's obviously strong, but abilities like Nascent flash are amazing too, far easier to use and to ensure they're dps neutral. This is only made worse in Endwalker where the other tanks will get even fancier toys and stronger self-heal while DRK is putting so much weight on that single crutch it's going to snap.

[Shin96]

Good call on making this thread.

But I think the best feedback is them screwing over this job much enough until everyone has a problem; that's when they will take any action.

If Living Dead is indicator enough, it will serve as evidence DRK has become their least favourite job in terms of any development associated with it.

[Mortex]

Easy fix would be a informative how much I still need too heal in form of a indicator and maybe if walking dead status is active heals from any source is increased by 100%. And maybe reduce cd by 1 minute. Holmgang is better and has lesser cool down and there is no downside aka heal 100 % hp or die.

[Cabalabob]

Acknowledging and admitting that there are major problems with this ability is the starting point.

From letter from the producer live 23:

Q9. Compared to Hallowed Ground and Holmgang, there's more burden for healers when Living Dead is used. Do you have plans to adjust this effect?

A9. This is up for consideration, instead of adjusting this action alone, we’re looking into this as if we need to adjust the special characteristics for the dark knight job. We’ll check the overall performance from 3.05 and continue looking into this.

They’ve know there was a problem with it literally since it’s implementation, they just don’t care.

[ICountFrom0]

If you want this to actually get seen, you'll have to have a professional translator sit down, make it into Japanese, and then you'll need somebody who already has an account with the proper kind of name for posting there to post it. They can't be new either, needs to be at least a year old of an account with solid reputation.

[Mekhana]

This is going to sound crazy but what if they kept the top off part but we got something else besides invuln.

Maybe it resets TBN cd or it gives you a dmg buff or crazy lifesteal. That why it doesn't break the class lore but it gives you sort of D&D class theme to it. The dmg buff for instance would only trigger under Walking Dead status.

It gets some identity beyond unliked and might get used in certain ways. Now I know some people might complain DRKs or tanks shouldn't treat invulns as mitigations (or a buff in this case) but why not?

Deep, deep down it is another long cooldown. Just like cooldowns, if someone uses them badly its not because there's something wrong with the cooldown its because the player needs to learn how to use or play his job better.

Either way, eventually they will learn.