Targeted mitigation often does not work

[Deceptus]

It also never feels like basic healing mitigation ever works either. Things like AoE mitigation to protect the party. It never really feels like it does any mitigation at all, and is just there to cast, yet do nothing to help. I am sure it's helping in the grand scheme of things, but it never really just feels like it does. You can see Reprisal numbers just off watching the damage ticks that are built in game. You can watch a mob hit you for 2k, then apply a mitigation and see that number average drop for the duration. I wish the same would apply on a mitigated strike that a healer put on to show it, but I have yet to see anything to tell.

Worst thing is the way shields are applied. They're not applied to everyone all at once because of the sh!tty netcode / game engine.

Nope, they're applied from the top of the party list to the bottom one at a time.

So if you're not fast with your cast you can literally have certain people get the mitigation and some not. Sometimes it can take a whole second from the time your cast goes off until party member 8 is shielded. Which make party order super important for a healer!

I honestly think that mitigation is similar. If you to time it RIGHT before the ability goes off, even if it shows the debuff icon on the boss, the game might not register it always due to netcode latency.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the game basically does a coinflip on the Ultimate End cast. Sometimes it comes from Thordan, and sometimes, it comes from one of his untargetable knights, despite Thordan always being the actor who casts Ultimate End on the enmity list. This makes all debuff based mitigation totally useless sometimes on one the hardest hitting attacks in the entire fight, placed right before you need every member alive to take advantage of Thordan's damage taken up debuff.

I wonder if that's intended or not (a bug perhaps?), because that seems extremely cheap on a mode that is supposed to be tightly balanced.

Hell, damage shouldn't even be abled to have a "high roll". It should be static. Consistent. You know what to expect and how to properly plan your CD's appropriately.