Originally Posted by
TouchandFeel
No, ShO has to be activated too, if you don't have it on and then activate it, it doesn't go back in time and negate damage that you had taken prior to activating it.
You are the one that brought the semantics of retroactive mitigation in to this which makes no sense as it does not exist in this game at all, unless you count healing as such.
Adding in the word just to your sentance simply changed damage taken from a general time in the past to a more specific time in the past and implies no specifics as to the state of the recipient of said damage. So it was as I surmised before and the intended meaning was not clearly stated.
I am not arguing that WAR doesn't take more damage than PLD because they do, however they also heal more than PLD. Basically they just have bigger numbers going in and out of their HP pool, which are larger to compensate for this as well as to provide an equal eHP starting point.
I responded to your post originally because I felt you were making a number of incorrect statements and so I chose two of them and provided counterpoints.
WAR and PLD survivability has been proven many times to be comparable, with WAR being better in some instance and PLD being better in others.
Both types of buffs have positives and negatives associated with them.
A % damage reduction effect is nice because it reduces the damage when it is taken and therefore provides more of a safety net for unpredictable spikes in damage such as getting hit by crits, but it also reduces the % reduction from other % damage reduction cool downs when used, making the reduction from that ability less than what is displayed in the ability description.
A % increase in healing may provide less of a buffer for instances of unpredictable spike damage, but it also takes advantage of the fact that heals can crit resulting in even greater survivability gains.
Basically ShO is good with dealing with HP reducing crits while Defiance is good with HP increasing crits.