A living dead rework suggestion

[Matots]

It's well known among the tank players that LD is the most hated of all the invulns, mainly for the playerbase because both: A) it involves the player dying and B) this happening without any input from the tank player itself, who is solely dependent on their healers.

Setting aside the discussion of whether o not any other tank would survive post invuln without external aid (we can all agree that they wouldn't, or would, but not for very long), i wanted to to make a suggestion on the OF that i heard outside of it (idr the name of the original poster unfortunately), of a change that keeps it in line with its current goal, and deals with these two problems, in a few steps:

1 - Keep the effects of Living and Walking Dead, but make Walking Dead a true invuln;
2 - After the effect of Walking Dead expires, the DRK player deceives a DoT on him (idk, name it "Call of the Dead" or something like that), that will tick for 25% of their max hp every 3s, including when the dot is placed on them.

That way, both the time to mitigate it is extended, which relieves pressure on healers, and the drk player can actively interact with their invuln via TBN (for 25 or 50% of it, if timed properly), which keeps it in line lore wise, and playstyle wise, no other changes required.

[Quintessa]

So a DRK with 66k HP would be dead after 4 ticks / 12 seconds. So it's a "Get eaten alive by maggots" effect.

[Oizen]

Always thought the core issue with Living Dead was that its not useful at all unless You have a support who's actively paying attention for it.

Meanwhile Holmgang does not kill you and WAR has the tools to heal themselves, on a lower cooldown.

[Espon]

Or just make it so when the Walking Dead effect triggers, it grant full immunity for 10 seconds. There doesn't need to be a downside to hitting your invulnerability (ignoring Superbolide). You'll still need heals since you'll be at 1 HP, but you won't just crumple over at the end because you didn't get healed to 100%.

[RyuDragnier]

Always thought the core issue with Living Dead was that its not useful at all unless You have a support who's actively paying attention for it.

Meanwhile Holmgang does not kill you and WAR has the tools to heal themselves, on a lower cooldown.

Which makes one wonder why the hell they haven't swapped Holmgang and Living Dead, since at least WAR has the ability to heal themselves out of it.

[Sylve]

Why not just have it body swap you with Fray and make it so it's him taking the beating and not you?

Basically creating the summon like the damage cooldown does and transferring all damage taken by you to Fray, who has a health bar of his own.
If Fray dies, you start taking damage again as normal but Fray can't be healed.

Example being if you turn it on to survive a a hit that would do 100k damage, that gets diverted to Fray, who dies instantly, thus ending the effect.

It doesn't need a drawback outside of it being potentially ended early if sustaining a heavy enough hit.

[Shinimas]

Always thought the core issue with Living Dead was that its not useful at all unless You have a support who's actively paying attention for it.

Meanwhile Holmgang does not kill you and WAR has the tools to heal themselves, on a lower cooldown.

It's good design tbh. FF14 is a team game. I say leave that in, but make Living Dead good in other aspects.

[RyuDragnier]

It's good design tbh. FF14 is a team game. I say leave that in, but make Living Dead good in other aspects.

It's bad design because only one healer (WHM) has the capacity to pull off quickly and easily. All other healers have to struggle to do the same thing. That isn't good design, that's bad design.

Good design would be if Walking Dead was a true invuln that blocked all incoming damage, but also healing, and the DRK had to attack to gain back a portion of their max HP per GCD used (preferably up to 60-75%). THAT would be a better designed invuln because the DRK themselves have to put forward the effort to keep themselves alive.

[Dracosavarian]

Always thought the core issue with Living Dead was that its not useful at all unless You have a support who's actively paying attention for it.

Meanwhile Holmgang does not kill you and WAR has the tools to heal themselves, on a lower cooldown.

Agree with this 100%. It’s this issue as well as a few more key points, that illustrates how bad Living Dead is.

I’ll do my best to make these points succinct:

1: Is the only Invuln that has convoluted rules that govern how it works. Other tanks are fire and forget. ( They benefit from theirs immediately. )

2: Is not even guaranteed to work to begin with. Resulting in wasting your invuln entirely. ( Example: Healer freaks out when you press it and does not know how it works. So they immediately begin to heal you. Thus: You never go Walking Dead to begin with. Hence, invuln wasted. )

3: Is literally the only invuln that actively punishes both the Tank and the Healer. Tank is punished because Dark Knight has zero ability to recover out of Walking Dead state, and thus can die from their own ability. Healer is punished because unless they are a White Mage, they then have to devote serious resources to helping the Dark Knight not die.

4: Is the only Tank Invuln that outright REQUIRES a healer. Other tanks can use their kit to invuln then heal up.

5: Is the only tank not guaranteed to get the full benefit of their invuln. The other tanks always get the full duration of theirs. We lose our invuln as soon as Walking Dead is cleansed from us. Meaning our invuln can last literally 1-2 seconds in its entirety. ( This happened to me A LOT during fights against Hades Ex with my group, as I have my trigger macroed for LD and communicate over discord as soon as I enter Walking Dead’s state. )

6: Is an Invuln where some healers ( Not all ) feel that it is a far more efficient, and far better way of dealing with Living Dead is to just Swiftcast + Raise because it’s far less of a intensive drain on both mana and gcds, and time, to overcome the problem. To the point where it’s pretty much become a meme among some.


I could go on, but, yeah. Living Dead is horrible.

[Lyth]

I outlined a list of the issues with Living Dead a few months ago. Here's the thread. There was also some discussion of it on reddit at around the same time.

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.