Quote Originally Posted by Kalise View Post
Which you'll note I mentioned in my post.
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.

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.
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.

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.
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.

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