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.

[Claire_Pendragon]

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.

Never going to happen. DRK is the only job with its extremely popular weapon choice, and the only tank with its extremely popular aesthetics. Those 2 visual elements are the sole reason DRK remains so popular. Yes ppl play it for being super easy 123 job, or for TBN on learning content, but they are 100% the minority of DRK players.

SE looks at jobs being played, and jobs being ignored. This seems to be ONE of the main ways they determine if they should do anything about a job. The last time SE said they would fix DRK, DRK was being played, but the SECOND way to get their attention, was that PuGs were preferring WAR/PLD for cheese strats, and DRK had none.

I've had another direction I'd like to see Living Dead go --

*slow clap*
Absolutely amazing design. Not only in functionality, and UI QoL updates, but also for that classic FF feel.
Currently GNB is the only tank with a "Sacrifice HP" for a benefit design, which should have clearly been DRKs.
With your suggestion, you may not be sacrificing HP, but that loss of HP comes extremely close, as it is a "cost" of sorts. Almost making DRK feel like a classic DRK, rather than Lineage 2's Magic Tank.

[Shin96]

Never going to happen. DRK is the only job with its extremely popular weapon choice, and the only tank with its extremely popular aesthetics. Those 2 visual elements are the sole reason DRK remains so popular. Yes ppl play it for being super easy 123 job, or for TBN on learning content, but they are 100% the minority of DRK players.

SE looks at jobs being played, and jobs being ignored. This seems to be ONE of the main ways they determine if they should do anything about a job. The last time SE said they would fix DRK, DRK was being played, but the SECOND way to get their attention, was that PuGs were preferring WAR/PLD for cheese strats, and DRK had none.

I'm not going to disagree with the gist of this statement, but that feels super self-defeating. They are going to do it when we annoy them just enough. You essentially have no justification for the butchering of this job, even more so with the addition of strange enhancements in 6.0. There will come a point when this is not a go-to tank anymore. The thought of having enhanced Unmend will put off some people as well.

Jobs being played doesn't necessarily imply there's a grain of satisfaction. The whole point of picking a main is being comfortable and having fun. So when people clearly dislike parts of this job, does that give them a right to patronize us into submission? Not sure that's the actual issue at play here.

[Claire_Pendragon]

-dont give up-

Im essentially saying dont get your hopes up. Im still not playing the class. Back before it came out, I said, no matter how complex a 2h sword tank would be, id play it and master it. I want it too badly... well here we are, where the opposite is true, and its just too boring to play. So if im already not playing it, theres not anything I can do about others playing it. Im not going to tell them they cant enjoy it.

semi unrelated story...
Ironically, me and a friend returned to the game after 2 years, and we talked about changes from SB, and if WAR or DRK was the easier tank. 5 people left the LS because they thought I was insulting them as players, by saying its mechanically easier to use a oGCD to get your dmg buff, than it is to go through a GCD combo to refresh your buff. I never mentioned them, or said ppl who play DRK or WAR were bad players. I just said IF someone was struggling, DRK and WAR are good options for doing harder content. (along with exceptions as to how WAR/DRK might even be harder, in the right circumstances.)

[Shin96]

Im essentially saying dont get your hopes up. Im still not playing the class. Back before it came out, I said, no matter how complex a 2h sword tank would be, id play it and master it. I want it too badly... well here we are, where the opposite is true, and its just too boring to play. So if im already not playing it, theres not anything I can do about others playing it. Im not going to tell them they cant enjoy it.

I think some people have been invested in this job. The lack of identity is a real issue with DRK. It doesn't set out to be different or unique its in own way.

Here's the thing. No one is trying to diminish the enjoyment others take out of DRK. Of course I would wish for it to be similiar to 3.0 in most aspects, but they took a different route. Let's say this is your main for any specific reason. It's unreasonable to just take things as they come. Look at 6.0 DRK, it's sorely disappointing. I mean people aren't asking for much (maybe I do), but realistically giving this job more self-sustain options isn't a bad choice. Well they didn't this time. It's too bad I got emotionally attached to this job, otherwise I'd probably complain about nothing else, since for the most part I'm fine with this game.

If things remain this way, I can only safely hope Reaper won't walk in the same shoes as DRK did. If Reaper turns out to be worth my time, I might be willing to let go of my greatsword. All those relics will be worth nothing, maybe you can see why I grew so much towards this job.