It's recently dawned on me that there are very, very few people who understand damage mitigation, and why it is so incredibly important in Todays AO (18.8).
Gone are the days of: "hur dur we need reflects"
Gone are the days where the aggro target could simply load up on HP and it was a given that the doctor could invariably fill his HP anytime it got low.
Let me tell you a quick tale about the utter devastation that is endured when damage mitigation is not properly understood. this was a pickup team with some veteran Omni players, a veteran player on a new toon (crat), and a guy from komodo, my feeling is that while each of them may have been OK at another prof, they simply didn't understand how to effectively mitigate damage properly on the profs they brought.
MATH
Here is the basic rundown, math wise, of the true breakdown of damage mitigation in the above scenario.
I'll just throw it out there, I estimate that Beast has about 7500 AAO (7500 AR) and I'd roughly approximate any 1 point of AAO drop with about a 1.5 damage reduction in beast's "weapon" damage.
Beast dual wields and beast weapon damage unmitigated is about 10000 per hit meaning he does about 360000 dmg/minute if every hit lands, but this doesn't count nuke damage, add dmg or NCU wipes which actually do a huge chunk of damage on enforcer and other profs. We can't really talk about damage mitigation of nukes or NCU clears, but we can talk about raw weapon mitigation.
Enforcer BASE evasion, given a reasonable tanky setup of 3000evades+AAD
Chance to hit: 7500/(3000+7500) = 71% chance to land a hit on a non-buffed enforcer 360000*0.71=255600
Base AC's: 10k 10000-1000=9000 base damage (10% mitigation, 15% with Gift) = 255600*0.85 = 217260
Reflects: 29+3=32% = 32% mitigation 217260*0.68 = 147737
Here you can see that we've already reduced original damage by half, and these really aren't all that complex mitigation strategies - but, the hits are still coming fast and hard. A doctor would STILL need to be chain casting BI (14 casts per minute) in order to outheal this damage. And that is why more damage mitigation is absolutely essential.
Lets talk about the REAL mitigation, because from here, everything else starts to be really significantly reducing the total damage taken.
First up: malaise+wasted limbs, reducing hits from 36/minute to about 25/minute a 31% mitigation 147737*0.69 = 101938
Here, we're still taking a lot of damage, and doc is still pretty furiously managing enforcer HP.
Second: DVP and other evasion. Yes, DVP breaks occasionally, but if the engi is spamming it, it has a pretty solid up time.
First, lowering beast AR by 1210, next add 410 AAD from crat+100 on CP+75 on ICRT, and -500 from shade, we get an adjusted hit rate of:
(7500-1210-500)/([3000+410+100+75]+[7500-1210-500]) = 5790/(3585+5790) = 0.62
0.62adj hit rate /0.71 orig hit rate = 0.87 (or a further 13% mitigation)
101938*0.87=88672 dmg/min
Next, we include reduction in weapon size: total debuff = 1210+500 = 1710 1710*1.5 = 2565 dmg loss per hit
2565/10000 = 25% damage reduction on potential beast damage
88672*(1-0.2565)= 65971 dmg/min
and finally.. we take into account absorb spam, which removes a FLAT 1371 damage PER landed hit.
assuming 36 hits/min, and a land rate of 0.62 adjusted land rate from debuffs, we can expect 22 hits to land/minute.
If the enforcer uses a constant casting regime (mongo/Sfortify/Sfortify/mongo/Sfortify/Sfortify/mongo) This will keep mongo running full time and give you loads of taunt as well as getting you fresh shields every 10/12 seconds, meaning, we could expect out of those 22 hits to have 22*10/12 = 18.6 hits to get a FULL reduction from absorb spammed.
18.6*1371 = 25482 direct damage reduction... AND your FINAL DAMAGE, FULLY MITIGATED IS....
65971 dmg/minute - 25482 dmg/minute = 40489 dmg/minute
that's 4 casts of BI/minute... But, if the enforcer can keep mongo running, mongo running full time is 550 HP/2s +3% of max HP every 10s which is actually popping every 6s on average because the second CD is negated by recasting at 12s... Now, if the enforcer could keep his max HP up (say, 60k HP to be conservative) we got total healing (WITHOUT THE DOCTOR!!!) of:
550/2s *60s = 16500
3%*60000/6s *60s = 18000
HD = 250 *30s = 7500
Total enforcer healing PRE PERK of 42000
Ta da!!!!!!! 42000enforcer using proper Sfortify cycling+mongo > 40489 beast fully mitigated dmg/min
So, mathwise, enforcer COULD tank beast without a doctor, if only everyone knew how to mitigate damage appropriately.
Note that I haven't included keeper watch ward which reduces init debuffed damage by a further 26%
But here is how things actually went:
Crat didn't get in range of beast for DMW
engi didn't get in range of beast for DVP
engi didn't spam DVP
engi didn't cast Gift on enforcer
enforcer didn't watch NCU so lost 20k HP
enforcer didn't spam absorbs
shades didn't debuff beast AAO
shades didn't use degeneration of haste
other shade didn't use quintessence of stupification
crat had a hard time landing malaise not to mention wasteful limbs (note was his own fault)
So.. now, enforcer has 36k HP, not 30k+20k+1000+3000=60k
beast weapon is max size
reflects are terminated due to NCU wipe
enforcer not spamming absorbs
and beast damage/minute is closer to 250k-300k
Doc with 160% heal eff, BI heals about 9000*1.6 = 14k
BI has 3s CD
60s/3 = 20 casts/min
14k *20 = 288k healing/minute
ICH didn't matter because it only healed about 20k if I caught enforcer at 16k HP (about half), any less was dancing on the edge of insanity because if I had a 0.5s ping lag (common in aus), tank would die, in fact, that's how he died the first time.
Conclusion
This is a protracted discussion on damage mitigation centred around an experience I had recently, as a veteran healer in a maxed healing setup, essentially babysitting a group that placed the blame solely on the doctor for not being able to heal effectively, when the problem can be proven to be STRICTLY the damage mitigation, not healing.
So, the lesson here, is if the enforcers HP is JUMPING... it's a damage mitigation problem, and EVERYONE needs to jump in and help sort it out.