Sneakpeak into damage mitigation and their CP next patch

superryan94

After a lot of mentions on the pts forums to not do it, it seems that the devs have chosen next patch to buff tanks slightly with the new CP regardless.
I went to Olms in vAS to test out the difference the new CP actually make. Especially bracing anchor gives you god mode when you block with a damage shield enabled.
I make a new character and use a skill respec scroll to remove every skill and passive I could have.
Than I slot only the Bracing Anchor CP.
Lastly I unlock the obsidian shield skill on my DK.

When I use obsidian shield(1966 dmg shield) and block I get hit for only 15351.
When I don't block or use a shield I get hit for 155478.



After that I looked into how much I can actually mitigate in there.
On veteran mode I could bring that 155478 hit of olms when he hits you fully buffed up all the way down to only 320

which comes down to 99.8% damage mitigation.

Block mitigation cap seems to have been increased slightly to 4259.8% in case 100% is not enough to help you stay alive.


The Bracing Anchor CP will give a 40% increase in damage shield strength, twice the amount the tooltip says.

After several attempts to bring it to the attention to the devs that ward master does not work properly it seems that it's supposed to sometimes have only 2 stages rather than the 5 it shows in the CP tree.

Troodon80

Having tried this as well, it's insane how overpowered this CP is.

A couple things to mention/iterate:

1. The block mitigation increasing to over 100% is a visual bug only and increases each time the player dies while blocking (it's still a bug and should be fixed; block mitigation should be capped at 90% as per ZOS's own rules).
2. The CP enables you to take 10k-15k hits from Olms naked with no weapons (no one-hand and shield mititation, no frost staff mitigation; just the CP slotted). Naked. I can't stress that enough. There was a time when even medium armour tanking Olms meant you had to be very careful and dodge every swipe.

With all passives unlocked, CP slotted, gear equipped, etc. You'll be taking around ~6k hits from Olms (less when you factor in maims and other damage reduction effects) in light armour and ~5k hits in heavy. As if tanking vAS could get any more boring or trivial as main tank. I can only imagine how trivial this would make Lord Falgravn, where some tanks can get high enough mitigation and damage reduction that they don't even need Guard while solo tanking boss and mini. I tried a magDK setup for this running Z'en+MK on "tank" and worked surprisingly well.

So far as vAS goes, there are a limited number of options for a main tank to run. Yolnahkriin requires your group be in range and if you do a bad proc as kite is happening you'll then be on cooldown and your uptime will decrease. Same thing as Warhorn usage, Worm, etc. Alkosh isn't generally needed (depending on the group composition). PA on main tank won't reach. Same with Drake's Rush and Arkasis (which again only feeds into the Warhorn usage/uptime on group if used selfishly). Other sets could be used for other situations/compositions. But just to stress the point about taking so little damage... in light armour: you could nerf this CP in half and still be able to tank it in light armour. It's crazy. I don't know what ZOS are thinking.

Granted, I understand from a design and development perspective that content does, eventually, become trivialised once it ages enough, coupled with power creep (whether intended or unintended). This is for the longitivy of the game so that relatively newer players can still clear that content. But this CP breaks almost all content outside of DoTs like Death Touch (Rockgrove) and Blitz (Dread Cellar) in one fell swoop. On the topic of Rockgrove, Xalvakka's heavy attack is also trivialised into a light slap on the wrist with all the other mitigation you can stack. This CP could be halved and still make most incoming direct damage trivial.

Bearing in mind, we're talking specifically PvE here... but this also has an affect on PvP, too. All those time to kill statistics that have been bouncing around, the mitigation via Battle Spirit that you've been looking at... and because it's a red CP slottable, you can also bump up the blue CP damage output while removing any of the mitigation you had there. And that's only scratching the surface of this.