Dashofpepper wrote:
Not so sure about the idea of negative HP...but I think someone mentioned this before:
MOBS also play a part in this scheme. Avoidance tanks die more often because MOBS are structured to fight mitigation tanks. Is it fair for me to say that ALL mobs hit hard and not often? (presuming appropriate level con). There aren't really any mobs that are structured for an avoidance tank. That being...very low damage, but very high hit rate.
What we have now: Mobs hit hard on occassion. Mitigators will shrug off the hits and get healed. Avoiders will get beat down.
What we need: A new kind of mob that hits weak, very, very often. Mitigators won't get hit once per second, they'll get hit ten times per second...whereas an monk/bruiser would dodge around most of those low damage attacks.
Retribution - Befallen
You don't understand math dash. Consider the setup I mentioned before, 2 tanks, one who is hit one out of ten times(avoidance) and another who is hit one out of two times one fifth the damage(mitigation), and each tank with 1200 hp(though in practice the mitigator would have more than the avoider). Suppose instead the mob hitting for 100 damage once per second it hit for 5 damage 20 times per second. That's the limit of your proposed attack rate increase, just about. So the odds of the avoidance tank getting owned would be one in 10^240. An astronomically small number right? But the odds of the mitigation tank getting owned are one in 2^1200~10^361. So the life expectency of the mitigation tank is 10^121 times as long, that's 1 with 121 zeros behind it, or a thousand billion billion GOOGLE times as long. So what you propose would indeed up the life expectency of the avoidance tank, but it would up the mitigator's life expectency even more.
Of course both would have a long enough life expectancy that you'd never expect to see one die until long after the sun has burned out, so you could say that against mobs with low damage and a crazy attack rate, the two tanks would be effectively equal. If you got really extreme, you could talk about a mob that attacks a hundred times per second for one damage each: if the system rounds the fractions up then the guardian would get owned. Of course that would be the same as ignoring mitigation :p