Damage mitigation and Vulnerable changes now live

Matt Cooper, Lead Live Designer, gives us detail on how damage mitigation and vulnerability has changed in the nexus.

Changes to the Pain-Train

In this post, Matt Cooper lays out the details on how damage is calculated to account for multiple buffs and debuffs. 

Previously, the single biggest damage mitigation buff (Hardened Shield) and the single biggest damage mitigation debuff (Vulnerable) were compared, making it so some abilities like Medic's Safeguard where left out of the equation, and probably leaving your hero dead.

Now,  the sum all of the damage mitigation buffs is compared against the sum of all the damage mitigation debuffs, making for a more accurate stacking of protection and vulnerability.

Why the change?

In the words of Matt Cooper,

 In the future, we are looking at giving some damage mitigation baseline to a handful of heroes —mostly Warriors. ”

This would likely help the more fragile warriors like Anub'arak in future patches.

Matt once again:

Once Warriors have some sort of damage mitigation baseline, we’d also like to look at the amount of healing Support characters can dish out. We don’t want to reduce healing drastically, but giving Warriors some damage mitigation baseline allows us to essentially reduce healing without making Warriors any less survivable. ”

Sounds like Blizzard is busy cooking up some exciting new approaches to tanks and supports.  The only real question now is, who will be first to test the most extreme protection versus the most extreme vulnerability comp?  Could be a fun new Brawl mode.

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