In the mean time, I did some cool testing. This is ~50-100 hits for each mit set, with one or two exceptions that still provided accurate information. These examples reference max hit because the mobs do have a max hit. Average hit will change with sample size, but once max hit is identified you can stop the tests.
These tests do not imply that there aren't further advantages to one mit or another with regard to average hits, but the data is there if you want to analyze that. They simply imply that the percentage change to the max hit is still a valid metric for assessing the curve, as it has always been.
I tiered myself 5 different mit values:
683 for Plate
482 for Chain
(midpoint between chain and cloth for leather)
278 for Cloth (don't forget, their avoidance is SIGNIFICANTLY worse as well)
78 for.. Starter gear
and then 0 to measure base damage
First, I confirmed the tooltips are accurate. Unfortunately, I confirmed that they are accurate for both white and
yellow mobs, which is not correct. More on that later.
Second, I confirmed that even with the tooltips being accurate, there is a substantial difference in incoming damage between "Plate mitigation" and
"Leather Mitigation", though substantial is subjective. I urge anyone reading to consider the impact of a 10% damage difference in an HP tug-o-war scenario in the same way you might consider gaining 10% dps when you're trying to keep up with waves of swarm adds. In practice, it can have a substantial impact. As is evident by how I could self-sustain 5x longer on some of these pulls by only gaining 20% more damage reduction.
Leather users take ~10% more damage per hit than a plate user.
Cloth users take 17% more per hit than a plate user.
Newb gear users take 53.8% more damage than a plate user.
0 mit takes 167% more damage than a plate user.
Where things get funky is against orange mobs.
I ran a test against a pack of 5 rats for another 1000 or so swings and 50 deaths, but my paint crashed and I don't feel like rebuilding it from imported logs. It DID show that the disparity between plate and leather was higher by 1% than this (~13% more damage taken for leather) but that could have been within the margin of error.
The problem is, not only wasn't the mitigation percent significantly LOWER versus the tooltip, but I was actually mitigation MORE damage than the tooltip versus a level 12 mob.
This is very not right.
Given that the DR against the yellow were damn near identical to the tooltip (which should technically have ALSO been overconned downward, since they're not level 12), I would expect that a difference between the tooltip and reality versus an orange mob goes beyond a sample size or statistical anomaly. I thought maybe it was just those specific orange mobs, since it was a heroic pack of solos, so I went and did some more testing.
I got the same results from the second test: 64.27% damage reduction in plate versus an orange 15 heroic. Tooltip says it should be 62% damage reduction versus an
even con. While technically speaking, that is within the margin of error if the target was
identical to the tooltip, the expectation is a measured mitigation value substantially
lower than the tooltip.
Here's some additional context from mid-2006
SO, the mitigation curve itself should still be looked at. Whether it is or isn't accurate to the era or balanced is debatable and can hopefully be confirmed pretty easily. That hasn't changed. It should be made as close to classic as possible, which we have been agreeing on this entire time.
We're also very low level and we will grow into this curve to some extent. For example, by level 30, our tooltip mitigation percentage on plate tanks was mid 50's in 2005. It's well above 60 right now, so no good way to know if gear quality will start scaling us back as we level.
Here are some good sources for old mit values and caps:
(This is the max level mit curve, but in theory, it should shift proportionally leftward, unless they destroyed the curve with the mit revamp before KoS I may be remembering)
I agree, there is a good chance the mit curve is likely not functioning well at low levels, either because it's not accurate to 2006, or because 2006 made it work poorly at the very low end, or because we simply haven't grown into it yet. Caith can probably answer that.
However, if all mobs are being treated as even cons (or worse, blue cons), the commentary about orange mobs shifting the mitigation curve is inapplicable, because that entire mechanic is not functioning.
This isn't an opinion, this is a bug as far as the eye can see. It also explains why it feels so easy to kill orange and even red mobs at level 12 for some reason.
I still believe that once orange mobs return to shifting the mit curve, the OP's concern about the plate/leather damage reduction disparity will evaporate. Completely
separate bug, but still good to unearth, so thanks for the impetus. Hopefully it draws some attention to this one as well.
