Damage mitigation: is it even a real thing?

[Vinkera]

With everyone in the team playing top notch, and as long as they can take a decent hit and not die they should be ok. (Barring spots of awful hit/evade RNG and fast double nuke.)

It's far from practical, but it should be possible. Adds totally hose that idea, too, because everyone instantly forgets about Beast completely until the adds are all dead xD

[McKnuckleSamwich]

Wow cratertina, that was a cool post!

Nice job!

Regarding evades tanking or whatever on beast, the problem with beast is his 100% reflect shield, imo, because anytime it's active the evade tank can't generate aggro while the healers are generating aggro and proc based mitigation isn't working (i.e. AB on doctor), furthermore nanos like DVP won't stay rolling on beast very long during the reflect because of the non-bug breakage problem.

The problem with evade tanks is somewhat obvious.

An evade tank (usually) mitigates a crap tonne of damage, but the damage that makes it through uses up a big portion of his HP. In opposition, a soldier, for example significantly reduces every hit to a manageable amount which is predictable.

I remember back in ely when I used to level there, and specifically when I was levelling my enforcer there. I remember that the trick was always to keep the damage that you ate to a manageable amount: that means, keep it about the same per hit, if possible so that the doc could gauge when he actually needed to use CH etc.

Well that's the thing that's nice about enforcers, is that once you stack up all the mitigation BEFORE absorbs, it gets to a steady amount, then when you add absorbs, notably Sfortify and ogre shield, you're effective reducing the final % mitigated amount by a pretty hefty direct reduction, which works better than a lot of people give it credit for. i.e (10000*0.4 - 1341) < (10000-1341)*0.4

Of course, vinkera brought up a valuable point as well, which is the adds and nukes. Nukes are likely not a huge problem, but a double nuke is on an evader (double nuke coupled with 1 hit could be a wiper), and adds are annoying because there's no way to aggro 2+ pinks on a bad add wave.

Advy in pit lizard might be able to tank beast, since it does have an area taunt.

melee advy in mostly CM/HP/AAD armor with a 15% scope and some decent crit gear might be able to generate a fair bit of aggro, has good HP, has an extra 5% reflects over enforcer, and has some decent temp boosts (scale regeneration, sharp scales, and corrosive cloud (AOE taunt), and practice incineration (single taunt))

Imo advy is a pretty good choice, really, because you've got a huge number of tools at your disposal to tank.

Damage mitigation is somewhat limited, but you've got pretty decent shield damage, really good base HP and boosted reflects and significantly elevated evades over, say, enforcer. But possibly the biggest boost is self healing with a CH /60s and BoL spam making the doc's life a lot easier.

Suppose the major problem is max HP though, since 30k doesn't really leave a lot of rom for error. With a HP setup though, you might get up to 35-36k without that much fuss.

MA could also do pretty well, Shade, as well. both of those really need to flesh out HP to make it work though, and neither of them have the 5% base reflect that advy has, nor has the big CH/healing that advy has. Advy also has coon to soak one and a half hits in a jam.

[Esssch]

Evades: Enforcer BASE evasion, given a reasonable tanky setup of 3000evades+AAD

Is that with crat/keeper buffs? If not, it seems rather high. My enf is missing items from DB3/PoH/Gaunt, but you can see his setup in my signature (also that nano research HUD is now a defensive research HUD). Checking with !stats ingame I've got 990 AAD selfed and slightly under 1600 evades (1583 evade and dodge), giving me slightly under 2600 evades+AAD self-buffed, and I'd consider myself to be in a fairly tanky setup.

Edit: We did Pande the other day with a crat/keeper in team. Our doc went afk+follow on me because he didn't have to heal anything until TNH. AAD has always been extremely powerful and it's been widely-known for years.