While we can certainly speak of damage avoidance separately from damage mitigation, it's somewhat harder to speak to them in a combined sense (except to say "the tank", which brings an entirely different concept to mind). As such, I make the claim that a damage attack that is either prevented or avoided is effectively 100% mitigated. With this, we can say that damage avoidance is a strict subset of damage mitigation. Thus, stealth (a way of preventing attacks entirely) is a form of damage mitigation.
As an object example: consider making your way towards a point on the map through a horde of enemies. If you make your way without stealth, you will take X damage. If you make your way with stealth, you will take 0 damage. You prevented, or mitigated, X damage from happening. And ultimately, if even that offends you, there is no way to say it other than "assassins have the best tank in the entire game, until they choose to drop it".
Regarding my so-called agenda... you're right. I absolutely have one - a good and balanced game for everyone. I feel that my name is worth quite a lot (5+ years and an incredible number of forum posts with it), and I try to make myself a good source of information and advice about the games I play.
Regarding balance: in my opinion, its not the median, but the extremes, that need examining when doing balance. Certain considerations need to be made for the difficulty of engineering a favorable encounter - a mechanic that generates an extremely high chance of a favorable outcome should have a lower expected outcome (where expected outcomes are not really binary 'yes', 'no' but rather on a sliding scale). Remember: by definition, any mechanic that makes it extremely easy to generate a highly positive outcome is overpowered.
Thus, the reason I'm so against having the assassin (the stealth soul) also be the gank soul is because it is quite literally faceroll easy to engineer a positive outcome with stealth. Gank DPS should go to some other soul... maybe one that's not used very often right now. Now, please bear in mind that I'm not saying Assassin shouldn't do reasonable burst DPS - that door swings the other way too. It being exceptionally hard to generate a positive outcome is also a bad thing.
-Liang
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