I want to get some peoples opinions about what they see as mitigation. I see mitigation as damage reduced or not taken. They take effect before the damage is reported Such as: runes (set amount of dmg taken) Vie lines (shinning line) and discs (reprove knight line) (% of dmg taken) parry/repost/deflection discs (100% no dmg for a certain time) What I don't see at mitigation is healing, I see this as survive ability. The reason I relate them this way is because you can front load someone with mitigation to help them survive the next round of hits. Healing will never do this, because its reactionary. What are some of opinions from other people out there, remember I am asking for opinions, you can support them with your own data and reasoning, but opinions are just that, not fact, this is more to know when dealing with others on the forums what their ideas are with relation to mitigation. Lets keep it civil and not attack others for their opinions.
Bad healers play reactionary healing. Good healers play anticipatory healing. Its a gray area though and all semantics. Damage is broken down more technically like so: Damage Base Damage Interval Every mob has 2 things when hitting a damage bonus and a damage interval. DB and DI from here on. The mobs hit are determined by DI+DB . Every mob has a different DI and DB setting some mobs have an extremely high DB and small DI, some have the opposite. For this example to make numbers easier we will take a 100k max hitting mob, and make his Damage Bonus 20k and his Damage Interval 4000. Every mob has 20 different DIs. What this means is removing runes/vies and things like clerics auras and specials the mob will have the following hit spectrum. 20.4 20.8 30.2 30.6 40.0 40.4 40.8 50.2 50.6 60.0 60.4 60.8 70.2 70.6 80.0 80.4 80.8 90.2 90.6 100(All of these values are in the thousands) Then you factor..... Avoiding Damage Avoidance allows you to completely avoid incoming damage. The cap for avoidance is 100. It is assumed that every 10avoid will give you 1% less hits. Falling in this category are Improved Dodge and Improved Parry. Both of these give us additional avoidance. Also in this category are the line of AAs combat agility. Many other unique AA and disc also have increases to Parry and Dodge, but keep in mind for example most of them have such diminishing returns that they do not correlate to parses. Heroics it is speculated at intervals of 25 do add to these checks; parse results have been small but noticeable. Mitigating Damage First we have shielding. Shielding takes a % away from the mobs damage bonus. The cap for shielding is 35. So with our example mob has a DB of 20000 this means with 35 shielding every time the mob hits you it hits for 7000hp less. Now we get to AC. AC has 2 values mitigation and avoidance. The avoidance mentioned earlier is the pure form of the avoidance found in AC. Avoidance in AC is considered to be slightly low. For mitigation level of AC, the higher your ac is the lower the mobs average hit is. What this means as your AC increases the mobs is more likely to hit for the lower DI. So back to the example mob. Let say we have 2 tanks both at 120k hp, one with 10000 ac and one with 13500 ac. Now what will happen is this the tank with 13500 ac will get hit for DI 4 or less for 50% of the hits. The tank with 10000 ac will be more likely to get hit for max hit every time. Now to add to this AC on a shield gets more benefit then other ac because it is above something called the soft cap, Hence we all put the best AC augs there. AC has a diminishing return and cap, which I have lost track of recently. Also here would be mitigation runes/vies. ------------------------------------ Healing Per Second Factoring in mitigation, then the moral of the story is... Once you can last one round, and cannot be killed in a single interval you have reached the required mitigation peak. At that point it becomes a healing game, which requires only specials to stay alive. Healing as I noted above can be anticipatory, so you can assume your taking XYZ dps, and can increase your ABC heals per second. The point is, as long as you outlast the single interval one round kill, you have effectively created a healing per second synergy that will mitigate incoming DPS. No amount of healing will save you from a single round death though.
For those confused on how the above plays with the two primary kinds of defensive disciplines. DI only mitigation Warriors have the innate DI, 5% on only the DI incoming but will not impact DB. Final Stand is also pure DI. If anyone is curious about a tools type on lucy DI is listed under "base1" in raw data. The new knight defensive is also DI based for example. DI and DB mitigation: Mantle style mitigation such as Brightwing Mantle actually are "Mitigate Melee Damage by 35%, 979500 total" this will mitigate DB also. So when your factoring the above calculations I mentioned note that it would not only remove incoming damage from your DI, but also remove that DB. Whereas the final stand and new knight defensive only remove the DI damage. The reason you might see some warriors complain about knight defensive under this category is because as you reach higher level raid mobs with higher hit values they often also have very high DB. The difference in 35% mitigation of DI and DB, vs the 45% DI only can actually be very small in many circumstances. Reprove also falls under this category. "Mitigate Melee Damage by 90%, 28072 total". It affects DI and DB. I personally think reprove is the reason why, when knights and warriors are going toe to toe raid tanking, the gap has closed so substantially to that math point of that 5-10% I was talking about. This is not a class warfare post, I don't mean to strike any arguments over this figure. I merely want to point out where the math geeks come from. If you look at the above warriors sitting at roughly 50% + a few specials, which almost only accounts for DI, not withstanding a couple very bad rune style activates. Knights are more effectively removing DB which has become more relevant in today's game. So if knights hit their DI + their DB stuff they are getting in some cases the best of both worlds. Not to mention there are various other types of damage runes block outside of DI that DI mitigation wont account for. (not factoring in healing of course). (SIDE NOTE ABOVE). When I was scaling example mob hit for current content I should have carried the decimal over: For this example to make numbers easier we will take a 100k max hitting mob, and make his Damage Bonus 20k and his Damage Interval 4000. Every mob has 20 different DIs. What this means is removing runes/vies and things like clerics auras and specials the mob will have the following hit spectrum. 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 68, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, 92, 96, 100 (All of these values are in the thousands) **I should also add I don't recall if they ever changed the 20 possible hit values over the last few years.
yes, mitigation is preventing damage from being applied to you. Some people are conveniently forgetting that to cry foul about other tanks self healing. They are not the same, cause you can't heal a corpse if it took to much damage.
I have a theory that these abilities stack, at least partially: Skill Damage Taken (-X%) Increase Melee Mitigation Mitigate Melee Damage I believe this from non-comprehensive in game testing. If this is true, this gives warriors a bigger advantage in mitigation than many of these warrior vs knight threads would suggest. My non-comprehensive testing showed considerable gains when stacking abilities with FS compared to FS alone. Again, this could be completely wrong, but if it's right, that would nullify a lot of the knight vs warrior mitigation debate. The biggest problem with "disc stacking" is defensive procs. All 3 tank classes got defensive procs in DoDH. Our line was the weakest, the least practical, and continued to be upgraded at the slowest rate. The power, stackability, and practicality of paladin ward line and SK skin line is much higher. If we had an counterpart to SK skin line instead of the atrocity that is Aura of Runes line, it would go a long way to making our mitigation stacks stack up against each other.
And a lot of them partially stack. Generally speaking if there is a % base, EQ takes the highest and does not stack them. If there is a numerical, then they stack. The synergy on the core defensive's for all classes are relatively the same.
I guess i should clear it up some. Most everyone knows about DI/DB etc, there are tons of threads on that, also not really talking about stacking. I want to know which types of things people consider to be mitigation abilities and which ones survival abilities. And try to give justifications.
Mitigation = Healing ONCE/ONLY you are past the point of 1 Rounding. Let's Keep the Math Relatively Simple. 100k Tank. Warrior 10% Mitgation Advantage. Mob does 10k DPS Sec0 100k warrior 100k knight sec1 91k warrior 90k knight sec2 82k warrior 80k knight sec3 73k warrior 70k knight If in those 3 seconds the Knight Self Heals for 3k. They have exactly the same hps. Now all of this is right out the window if the mob is able to do 100k round. a 100k round on a warrior becomes 90k, becomes warrior lives to be healed, and kills the knight. With Knight New Discs + Little Inflation (Gear in T1 was what under 10% over VOA?) + Raid Tuning more towards the middle instead of to challenge ROI and what happens.... No more 1 rounding = the difference between Mitgation and Self-Healing is gone. Again, week 2 of new content, our second Luclin Kill and MA rotation was flawless but War Pal War. ((Again same combo above but even less t3 inflation)) Also keep in mind that even when 1 Rounding is possiblble. Self Healing can still be more advantageous than Mitigation IF a) Spell Damage is a large part of the equation since it's not mitigated, but is self-healed.
Unfortunately a lot of people don't seem too these days, especially in terms of how the math impacts their actual in game results. With that said, some of the multiplicative effects of new skills certainly could use some updated testing. There are so many factors going on now days to account for that its almost critical to run live game tests for good results. Live game numbers are obviously based on these core concepts, which even seasoned players should brush up on from time to time.
This is what happens with the new concept of designing around "the masses." If a raid mob is meant to be tanked by a Warrior that isnt in the best gear/max AA/proper support etc then a Knight that is in the best gear (20 guilds now farming T3?) will reach that threshold and tank just fine. The Knights utility/healing/etc then makes them superior in every way. The better mitigation of a maxed Warrior that is meant to offset that utility isnt needed and wasted. This holds true for average/max groupers vs group content as well. Consequence (unintend or intended?) of a decision the Devs made. Piesto said it himself in the Warrior/Knight comparison before he locked it. To Paraphrase: Warriors are important to average guilds, not so much for upper tier guilds were knights can fill their role. Tanks in those guilds may not be needed on some of those events at all, try it on alt night! To Paraphrase other dev posts: No worries tanks, there is only 1 kind of DPS (no more burst/sustain) and the hope is that all DPS classes will be interchangeable in the future. Cant wait to see those threads when that starts. O wait...
I don't think you fully read my post. I was specifically referring to %-based abilities of different mechanics, specifically, Skill Damage Taken (-X%), Increase Melee Mitigation, and Mitigate Melee Damage. The testing I did showed significant decreases in max hit via stacking abilities with FS than FS alone, so I personally think it's more than just a little of the DB shaving. This would suggest that FS (Mitigate Melee Damage) will stack to a considerable extent with anguish BP (Skill Damage Taken (-X%)) and/or ROF BP (Mitigate Melee Damage), as an example.
That is correct not just in observed non-comprehensive theory, but extensively parsed historically. However, we can agree to disagree on the point that it nullifies anything. All three tank classes have similar tools that provide relative synergy with their primary mitigation lines (not factoring health recovery). The cumulative result has been a much narrower gap in pure mitigation between the three tank classes.
Wrong. That is only true in a world with infinite healing (which outside of some people's concepts of knights doesn't exist). Ripostes, AEs, and many other things also damage the tank. And these things are not as regular as the normal melee round. To kill a tank, the mob needs to do more damage than the tank currently has. The more mitigation, the less damage you take. This reduces your chance of dying from hits (especially if your healers screw up, get distracted, you get several ripostes, or aes). Mitigation NEVER ever is the same as healing. They are completely different. Tying them together is being used as a tool of class envy. Nothing else.
Francisco. you are entitled to your opinion but you are dead wrong in how you are presenting things. There is current HP's, damage avoidance, damage mitigation, and healing which influences whether you live or die. Call them Survivability Factors. A mob hits damage sponge for their maximum hit of 1K HP's every 10 seconds. If the damage sponge's HP's are 10K, avoidance is 0, and their healing is 0 then the damage sponge lives for 10 seconds. If the damage sponge's mitigation is raised to 100% they live forever. If the damage sponge's healing is instead raised to 1K every 10 seconds they live forever. For the purposes of assessing Survivability, Mitigation Francs and Healing Marks can both be exchanged for Survivability Escudos. If A=B and C=B then A=C. (Yep, E=mc^2 doesn't really mean that mass and energy are the same thing [at least in this discussion. Yes, I know about mass-energy equivalence but does anyone think most EQ forum users do??]. It only means that they can be exchanged for the other and c^2 is the exchange rate - I thought I'd throw that in there if I was too patronizing in the paragraph above). Yes healing and mitigation are not the same thing, but they are currency that can buy the same thing, Survivability. I do appreciate the smoke and mirrors though - good try. If a Monk with low mitigation but high avoidance is tanking a raid boss mob and someone says, "Whoa that Monk is tanking a raid boss mob!" Is he "tanking" it any less if some ......... says, "Not at all, he's avoiding."? Of course not.
Huh? Knights can use their vie disc OR their defensive disc... not both at the same time. We can. We're also the only class in the game with Skill Damage Taken (-X%) abilities. We can achieve far higher mitigation via stacking than knights. The way our abilities are setup also provides us more practical benefit from shining bastion than knights.
I don't want to get insulting. But you are making it way too tempting. Your line "especially if your healers screw up" shows you completely missed the point of healing=mitigation in the example I posted. Because the only heal being compared dude is YOU the Knight. Self-Healing vs Mitigation. a mob hits 100k and a warrior takes 90 and a knight takes 100 then heals himself for 10. You are at the same hps. If you screw up by not healing yourself, that's no different than a warrior dieing with flash up, or other things. Again, I'm a healing main. Not a warrior or sk. Long as you are not one rounded. There is zero difference to me if I have to heal a warrior 90k or a sk 90 (because he took 100 and self healed 10)
The difference is that the warrior will always take less damage, but the SK can not guarantee a self-heal on that combat round which means he can die vs the warrior will live, if he gets quaded at low health. Some people think a SK healing is just as fast as a monks mend, and it is not even close to the same. A monk can time his mend a lot better than a SK can time his life taps. My twink monk was my tank for names during underfoot, and I loved how mend would save him, so I started a SK thinking his heals would be just as powerful and boy was I wrong, it was not even close.
Of course there's no guarantee but theres also spell damage to account for. 100k damage could be 70k physical and 30k proc So warrior takes 93 vs SK taking 100 and healing 10 and actually ahead Or the Warrior and SK could both be 2nd Assist at the time. Take an AE or Wild Ramp just before the Tank dies while Im healing MA. The SK can heal themselves, the warrior is down waiting. Now tank dies. So the SK is full health, and the warrior is 70% and dies when mob turns before reacting to hit flash. While Self Healing and Physical Damage Mitigation are not identical (especially if a mob can 1 round) for all intents and purposes they are the same with some variation and what if stories favoring each side
What do you consider FAR? I don't disagree with you that we can achieve a higher number in almost all circumstances though. We probably disagree on what "far higher mitigation" actually is though. As I mentioned above there are loads of things that play into the extra mitigation on all three classes (not starting to go into the healing debate). My point is the numbers in practice are averaging from 5-10%, it dips under 5% sometimes, and on some fights it is mathematically possible it could reach as high as 15%. As many have pointed out, this 15% number will likely be seen in guilds attempting content out of their gear level. The 5% number will be more common in the top tier guilds. When I have a bit more free time I can present some better merge data here for all of the skeptics. At our peak we aren't awful, and current skilled end game warriors get by just fine in those three minutes, especially if they properly know how to leach off other classes. The whole debate here is that the gap has gotten so small, that the "far higher mitigation" has become less than it once was to the point its alarming in the context of our overall usefulness. In that shift we have been uncompensated in ways to compete, and being "slightly better" in mitigation alone does not make up for all that is missing; those three minutes of slight better is just not enough anymore. As so many have proposed, the fix is not to take this top tier of mitigation and make it LARGER. The key is to improve the class so that we have something to offer outside those three synergistic minutes. How can we keep the edge going into long fights. Proposals have ranged from shortening some timers, unlink some things that lock out non tanking utility we have, etc. The creation of a few more tools that improve upon our non final stand mitigation. etc.
i just need to throw this out there... because you've posted something like this a couple of times now. it really doesn't - i think many of you are seriously overestimation how powerful reprove is. please keep in mind that at rk3 reprove is 3 *hits* only. the 29k listed cap is a max for a single hit, regardless of how much that hit actually lands for. maybe i'm misreading you and you honestly think that 90% off the damage of 3 random hits every 15 seconds accounts for some huge amount of overall mitigation, but um... seriously, it doesn't.
