Mitigation question

Oky a bit of a newbie question but does healing equal mitigation? I keep seeing post saying healing is a mitigation tool. Prime example is the WAR skill NF. So could some one please explain to me how healing equals mitigation?

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Originally Posted by cjparmen

Oky a bit of a newbie question but does healing equal mitigation? I keep seeing post saying healing is a mitigation tool. Prime example is the WAR skill NF. So could some one please explain to me how healing equals mitigation?

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mitigation
/mɪtɪˈɡeɪʃ(ə)n/
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noun
the action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something.

No.
1) healing is primarily done by healers, you are simply making sure your HP is at a level to surivive. That's part of the surival, not mitigation.
Mitigation is what you do to reduce damage. You can have as much HP as you can, but if the hit exceeds taht hp you need to reduce the hit.
2) Self healing from NF is classified as sustain. Its useful to use if you know you will live from a tankbuster with cooldowns, then go ahead and use NF to help self heal/sustain after the hit.

NF, Aurora & co. help you to stay alive while tanking mobs for example - but mitigation actually means reducing or preventing dmg, not regenerating.

It depends on how you view things.

Some people, take "Mitigation" to mean exclusively reducing incoming damage to your HP bar (So Damage Reduction effects or Shields)

Others can take the notion that "Mitigation" means to simply reduce the effect of an incoming attack (For example, "Mitigation is anything that contributes to a Healer needing to heal you for less")

With the second interpretation, Healing can be included in mitigation.

An example would be if 3 tanks with 100,000 HP take a hit of 90,000 damage and:

• Tank A did nothing and ate the entire 90,000 damage and is now left at 10,000 HP
  
• Tank B used a CD that reduced incoming damage by 50%. This means he gets hit for 45,000 damage and is left at 55,000 HP
  
• Tank C eats the entire 90,000 damage, but then uses a CD that heals for 50% of his maximum health and so is left at 60,000 HP

In these situations, both Tank B and Tank C have effectively reduced the severity of this attack and thus can be considered to have "Mitigated" it.

The one caveat with Healing as mitigation, is that it is ineffective at preventing you from dying outright to a particular source of damage. I.e. If in the above scenario the incoming attack did 100,000 or more damage, Tank C would die before he could self heal. (This particular caveat was a primary issue with 2.0 Warrior, who was focused more so on self healing and thus struggled in a particular fight that would one shot them)

Healing isn’t mitigating any damage, it is recovering from damage already sustained. This is why warrior was so bad in 2.0, it had no mitigation, it survived purely on recovery. So what did that mean for mechanics that one shot the warrior? Death, because they had nothing to mitigate the damage.

There is a case to be made however for thrill of battle. A move that grants you a +20% increase to max hp and heals you for the amount it increases your health, this will essentially always give you a 20% hp buffer no matter when you use it, even at full hp, working similarly to a mitigation tool (though not quite as effective as actual mitigation).

So no, healing is not mitigation, does that mean you shouldn’t use it? No it doesn’t. If you can provide healing that doesn’t take away from your dps (equilibrium, storm’s path, nascent flash on the MT) there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be using it, you’re helping keep yourself and your tank alive at no cost helping your healers conserve their mp.

Healer have some mitigation tools.
But healing itself isn't mitigation.

As others have said, mitigation and healing are separate things.

Think of it like this: Mitigation is the shield that minimizes injury for you, while healing is the first aid kit for the scrapes that got past your shielding (or of course bigger injuries from either not using shield when you should or just plain unavoidable damage).

From a literal definition viewpoint, mitigation just means lessening or decreasing the effect of something, usually with the connotation of the thing being lessened being negative or harmful. In that sense healing could be seen as mitigation against the effects of the harm or damage done. It really depend on what you are conceptually trying to mitigate, the harmful thing itself or the harmful effects of the thing, where trying to mitigate the thing itself would be framed as preventative while trying to mitigate the effects would be framed as being a reaction to the thing already occurring.

However, in MMO lingo mitigation tends to refer specifically to preventative measures to lessen or decrease incoming damage. Healing is done after the damage is done to recoup the loss of health, and thus is not preventative and is often classified as being "sustain". So within the context of an MMO, it is best to stick to this commonly accepted classification.

It depends on the context.

Healing isn't damage mitigation. It has no impact on the amount of damage you'll take. This is in contrast to a skill like rampart that reduces your incoming damage.

Healing can mitigate your risk of death, so it is mitigation in the broader context of tank survivability; however, it's worth noting that when people talk about mitigation, they're usually talking about damage mitigation.

Too many are fixed on the idea that mitigation is exclusively damage reduction.

Let's be completely real here, this is all about NF's purpose, and to that end people have worked out the math that it's outright superior to RI so long as the incoming damage isn't lethal. That said, it should be noted that NF isn't a forced choice between healing or damage reduction, you can have both from traditional CDs in combination with NF, and why not use them in tandem? It's free real estate.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

It depends on how you view things.

Some people, take "Mitigation" to mean exclusively reducing incoming damage to your HP bar (So Damage Reduction effects or Shields)

Others can take the notion that "Mitigation" means to simply reduce the effect of an incoming attack (For example, "Mitigation is anything that contributes to a Healer needing to heal you for less")

With the second interpretation, Healing can be included in mitigation.

An example would be if 3 tanks with 100,000 HP take a hit of 90,000 damage and:

• Tank A did nothing and ate the entire 90,000 damage and is now left at 10,000 HP
  
• Tank B used a CD that reduced incoming damage by 50%. This means he gets hit for 45,000 damage and is left at 55,000 HP
  
• Tank C eats the entire 90,000 damage, but then uses a CD that heals for 50% of his maximum health and so is left at 60,000 HP

In these situations, both Tank B and Tank C have effectively reduced the severity of this attack and thus can be considered to have "Mitigated" it.

The one caveat with Healing as mitigation, is that it is ineffective at preventing you from dying outright to a particular source of damage. I.e. If in the above scenario the incoming attack did 100,000 or more damage, Tank C would die before he could self heal. (This particular caveat was a primary issue with 2.0 Warrior, who was focused more so on self healing and thus struggled in a particular fight that would one shot them)

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Perfect answer. Thread should've ended here honestly.

Yes, Yes it is.

At the end of the day, its your Effective Health points (EHP) that matters.

If you have 1000 health base, and you use rampart, that's 20% or 200 damage mitigated, meaning you had an effective HP of 1200 once you used it.
To use the same example, and a regen ticks on you just after the hit, your EHP is 1000+however much the regen healed you for, same could be said of any other heal.

An easy way to understand it is with shields, like adlo. Same example - 1000 health base, healer uses adlo for 500, your EHP is now 1500. A shield is mitigation. Same can be applied to the defense stat of your gear, or from tenacity (somewhat), or from your average parry/block rate.

In the end, your best mitigation tool is having the health to survive something - Vit is king, and so by extension a heal is mitigation, because it gives you a larger buffer than if you didn't receive that heal, it gives you more EHP than you had before you were healed.

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Originally Posted by cjparmen

Prime example is the WAR skill NF. So could some one please explain to me how healing equals mitigation?

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Well Nascent Flash provides damage reduction on the target.
If isn't usually used to provide self-healing only. Some cases perhaps, but it has a shared cooldown with Inner Release which is the warriors self mitigation.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

Well Nascent Flash provides damage reduction on the target.
If isn't usually used to provide self-healing only. Some cases perhaps, but it has a shared cooldown with Inner Release which is the warriors self mitigation.

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I think you mean Raw Intuition...

Also, Nascent Flash is actually often used for self healing instead of Raw Intuition. Since, it's far superior when used correctly and there are no attacks that currently NEED Raw Intuition's mitigation in order to survive them (Given that Reprisal, Rampart, Thrill of Battle, Vengeance and Holmgang exist. To say nothing of outside sources of mitigation like Critlo, Divine Benison or the OT's "Ally" skills...)

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Originally Posted by Kalise

An example would be if 3 tanks with 100,000 HP take a hit of 90,000 damage and:

• Tank A did nothing and ate the entire 90,000 damage and is now left at 10,000 HP
  
• Tank B used a CD that reduced incoming damage by 50%. This means he gets hit for 45,000 damage and is left at 55,000 HP
  
• Tank C eats the entire 90,000 damage, but then uses a CD that heals for 50% of his maximum health and so is left at 60,000 HP

In these situations, both Tank B and Tank C have effectively reduced the severity of this attack and thus can be considered to have "Mitigated" it.

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This is a very bad illustration of mitigation. Healing and Regens are not mitigation because it can not help you survive an attack, Healing can only help you recover from attacks.

Mitigation is better understood with the following examples of Tanks with 100k hp dealing with a 110k damage "tankbuster" attack:

• Tank A uses an ability that reduces damage taken by 20% for 10s. They survive with 12k hp.
• Tank B uses an ability that increases their max hp and current hp by 20% for 10s. They survive with 10k hp.
• Tank C uses an ability that generates a 25k shield for 10s. They survive with 15k hp.
• Tank D uses an ability that prevents them from dropping below 1 hp for 10s. They survive with 1hp but are unlikely to survive any follow up attacks without healing once the ability fades.
• Tank E uses an ability that heals 5k hp every 2 seconds for 10s. They die.
• Tank F plans to use an ability that will heal 25k hp after being hit. They die

Heals and Regens are sustains which are better illustrated by an example where the previous tanks need to deal with 5 21k attacks over 10s:

• Tank A uses an ability that reduces damage taken by 20% for 10s. They survive with 16k hp.
• Tank B uses an ability that increases their max hp and current hp by 20% for 10s. They survive with 15k hp but then die when the ability fades and their hp returns to normal.
• Tank C uses an ability that generates a 25k shield for 10s. They survive with 20k hp but the shield was consumed by the first 2 attacks.
• Tank D uses an ability that prevents them from dropping below 1 hp for 10s. They survive with 1hp after the 5 attack hits but are unlikely to survive any follow up attacks without healing once the ability fades.
• Tank E uses an ability that heals 5k hp every 2 seconds for 10s. They survive with 20k hp.
• Tank F plans to use an ability that will heal 25k hp after being hit. They survive with 16k hp they over healed the first attack by 4k hp.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

This is a very bad illustration of mitigation. Healing and Regens are not mitigation because it can not help you survive an attack, Healing can only help you recover from attacks.

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Which you'll note I mentioned in my post.

For attacks that deal more than maximum health of damage, healing does not help to mitigate it.

However, for damage that is lower than maximum health (I.e. Literally every single attack in the game, provided you use a relevant CD), healing will then mitigate the effect of it.

It has been a long time since 2.0 when there existed a particular boss and a specific Tank kit wherein one-shots where an issue to the point of nullifying healing as a form of mitigation. With Tanks now having a plethora of CD's that bolster their EHP so as to prevent one-shots.

As such, there is more value in self-healing, if you can self heal more than what an additional CD would provide (This is basically only notable for WAR as they are the only Tank with a choice between damage reduction (Raw Intuition) or healing (Nascent Flash)). This becomes compounded when you factor in potential CD stacking and its effect on the Diminishing Returns of damage reduction effects:

I.e. Rampart + Raw Intuition isn't 40% damage reduction, it's 36%

Thus, if there was a case where a Warrior with 100,000 HP is facing a 110,000 damage attack then;

With just Rampart for 20% DR he'd take 88,000 damage and be left with 12,000 HP

With Rampart and Raw Intuition for 36% DR he'd take 70,400 damage and be left with 29,600 HP

Meaning that this RI usage is only worth 17,600 HP and thus, if he could heal more than that with NF (Which is easily done, simply NF + Infuriate + IC is at least 60,000 healing) then the healing is superior mitigation given that he'll be surviving the attack even without RI/NF and simply Rampart.

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Originally Posted by Kalise

Which you'll note I mentioned in my post.

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You mentioned it but your example implied the exact opposite. In your example Tank C still took 90k hp in damage for 0% mitigated damage. They then recovered 50k. This is not the same as surviving an attack with 60k hp. This is my problem with what you are posting. You are mangling terms. Mitigation comes before the results of an attack to reduce the effects. Recovery happens afterwards to resolve the resulting effects.

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However, for damage that is lower than maximum health (I.e. Literally every single attack in the game, provided you use a relevant CD), healing will then mitigate the effect of it.

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That does not make self-healing mitigation. Self-healing is recovery. Contributing the amount of healing a healer needs to do is not mitigation. Having more Heals does not increase mitigation because whether a heal comes from the MT, OT, a Healer or a DpS does not change that it is adding to the total amount healed.

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It has been a long time since 2.0 when there existed a particular boss and a specific Tank kit wherein one-shots where an issue to the point of nullifying healing as a form of mitigation.

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The 2.0 Warrior is a perfect example of why self-heals are not mitigation. The Warrior was unable to reliably mitigate Twintania's tankbusters (they might get lucky and proc a parry but those are RNG). If others mitigated the damage from the attacks Warriors were able to recover from the Tankbusters much faster than Paladins.

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With Tanks now having a plethora of CD's that bolster their EHP so as to prevent one-shots.

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Having a plethora of mitigation cooldowns does suddenly turn Self-Heals into mitigation. Fights are pretty much now all choreographed so that all Tankbusters can be mitigated by a rotation of a tank's 2 min 30% mitigation cooldown and Rampart.

Pretty much every single modern Normal/Savage Raid and Extreme Trail Tankbuster requires mitigation at min/expect ilevel to avoid a one shot. A Warrior will not survive a Tankbuster just relying on Nascent Flash and Equilibrium.

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As such, there is more value in self-healing, if you can self heal more than what an additional CD would provide (This is basically only notable for WAR as they are the only Tank with a choice between damage reduction (Raw Intuition) or healing (Nascent Flash)). This becomes compounded when you factor in potential CD stacking and its effect on the Diminishing Returns of damage reduction effects:

I.e. Rampart + Raw Intuition isn't 40% damage reduction, it's 36%

Thus, if there was a case where a Warrior with 100,000 HP is facing a 110,000 damage attack then;

With just Rampart for 20% DR he'd take 88,000 damage and be left with 12,000 HP

With Rampart and Raw Intuition for 36% DR he'd take 70,400 damage and be left with 29,600 HP

Meaning that this RI usage is only worth 17,600 HP and thus, if he could heal more than that with NF (Which is easily done, simply NF + Infuriate + IC is at least 60,000 healing) then the healing is superior mitigation given that he'll be surviving the attack even without RI/NF and simply Rampart.

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While your conclusion (NF's self-heals are more beneficial than RI's mitigation) is mostly correct, the logic you used to reach you conclusion is faulty.

Right now all Tankbusters are tuned to deal approximately 115% a properly geared tank's max hp before mitigation, this means that mitigating 20% of the damage allows a fully healed tank to survive the tankbuster to recover. Any further mitigation is just decreasing the amount of healing needed to fully recover. With the tankbuster mitigated enough to survive, further mitigation (RI) can then be compared to self-healing (NF/Equilibrium) to determine which action best reduces the amount of external recovery is needed to recover enough continue surviving.

Mitigation can help you survive an attack by modifying your Effective HP. Self-heals can not help you survive an attack but can help you recover to the point where you can survive the next attack by modifying your Actual HP.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

You mentioned it but your example implied the exact opposite. In your example Tank C still took 90k hp in damage for 0% mitigated damage. They then recovered 50k. This is not the same as surviving an attack with 60k hp. This is my problem with what you are posting. You are mangling terms. Mitigation comes before the results of an attack to reduce the effects. Recovery happens afterwards to resolve the resulting effects.

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I'm only "Mangling" terms, if you're one of the people who believe that "Mitigation" only applies to preventative measures.

There are other people who believe "Mitigation" applies to anything that lessens the effect of the incoming attack.

As I mentioned in my first post, Tank C can be considered to have "Mitigated" the attack.

No-one gives 2 hoots if he went down to 10K HP then healed up to 60K HP instantly or if he just took 40k damage from the otherwise 90K damage attack. The end result is the same.

The only time that healing won't have this same end result, is if the damage is enough to instantly kill the Tank before they can heal. But in this game, there is none. Not when literally any CD will cause it to become non-lethal.

The end result is what matters for mitigation, rather than the means. Another example would be Tank D using a skill that gives him a temporary 50% max HP boost, meaning he goes up to 150,000 Health and then takes the full 90,000 damage and goes down to 60,000 Health. He has also "Mitigated" the attack despite not having done anything to actively reduce the damage of the actual attack. This is the same premise for Shields as "Mitigation", bolstering up your EHP to make the attack "Weaker" relative to your EHP total.

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That does not make self-healing mitigation. Self-healing is recovery.

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The 2 terms are not mutually exclusive. Self-healing is mitigation. Self-healing is recovery. Self-healing is sustain.

Just like, other types of mitigation can have multiple terms. Shielding is mitigation. Shielding is sustain. (Though, people also like to argue that latter point. However, it is nontheless true as it prevents your HP decreasing thus letting you sustain more damage and with enough shielding you can simply not take damage at all *Cough*Stormblood Critlo*Cough*)

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The 2.0 Warrior is a perfect example of why self-heals are not mitigation.

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As I've said REPEATEDLY, the only time healing does not work as mitigation is when an attack outright kills you.

It's a small caveat, but doesn't negate healing as mitigation outright. As the same can be said about any other form of mitgation. I.e. Getting a shield only works so well as your total EHP survives the attack. Damage reduction only works so far as it reduces the damage of the attack to below your health total.