Thread: ToO: Resistance or Tactical Mitigation

As the thread title already indicates I would like to expand my knowledge of the LotRO game mechanics, particularly regarding what exactly Resistance is doing. Tactical Mitigation seems clear to me.

So maybe you can help me to answer the following question. Against which sort of attacks does Resistance give a chance to nullify them? Is it only fears/stuns/etc... or also the usual tactical damage based attack?

And as a corrolllary, would it be worth it to slot Resistance virtues for ToO in order to reduce the incoming dmage?

The way I saw a dev explain it once is if it's not a physical attack, it's tactical. So yes, Light would potentially be resisted.

However resisted is all or nothing, and so many tactical attacks are thrown at you, most seem to consider resistance valueless. IE, really high resistance? You'll still get stacked with things, it just might come a second later than someone with no resistance.

Meanwhile, tactical mitigation reduces the amount of damage from all those things, really helping survival, especially from tactical attacks that might one-shot others.

Another perspective is tactical mitigation of 50% is practically like having twice the morale pool. Resistance is like gambling that a shot might not take out your morale pool, but there'll be another shot that probably will coming.



"Sometimes survival comes down to not being hit. Actually, most times." -the chicken skill, Bob and Weave

Tactical mitigation first and foremost.

I don't think you can outright resist a tactical attack. I think you can only resist the *effects* of attacks, especially dot ticks. For that reason I think tactical mitigation is much more valuable, especially with all of the high direct-damage tactical attacks in Orthanc (exploding slugs, lightning boss raid-wide damage, F&F grim AoE, damage from acid, geysers and adds in Acid boss fight, attacks from central Saruman + lightning clones, etc).

the above answers give the right conclusion for the wrong reason.

Orion confirmed a while ago that post RoI resistance rating does indeed allow you to mitigate all tactical attacks. This includes fire/ice/lightning attacks as well as the pre-RoI suite of wound/poison/disease/fears. The trick is that the vast majority of tactical damage sources in a raid fight are specifically coded to be unable to be resisted. So while resistance rating is in theory useful in avoiding tactical attacks, because so few in practice (and basically none of the dangerous ones) can be resisted, it's actually pretty useless. I think there are some examples in ToO of resistable tactical attacks, I think the limrafns in the lightning wing do a small lightning based attack that can be resisted (not their big explosion), but for all intents and purposes you should only stack resistance rating if you're going to be hit with a whole lot of dangerous non-curable wound/poison/fear/disease DoTs (eg. roots of fangorn would be a good example).

Originally Posted by RJFerret

Another perspective is tactical mitigation of 50% is practically like having twice the morale pool.

... and let's not forget it effectively doubles the incoming healing ...

Very basic maths below:

Assume a mob hits for 2k

20k guard with 0% tact mit
- takes 2k hit
- healer uses bolster for 2k which heals the base hit

10k guard with 50% tact mit
- takes 1k hit
- healer uses bolster for 2k which heals for double the base hit

I know which guard I'd rather heal.

Originally Posted by wasteland

... and let's not forget it effectively doubles the incoming healing ...

Great point!



"Sometimes survival comes down to not being hit. Actually, most times." -the chicken skill, Bob and Weave

I think they are both very valuable. On my grd i run a lot of tactical mitigating traits and also 2 to resist attacks. With resistance soup i resist almost 1/4th of all tactical attacks while mitigation is very high as well, especially when the LM got it's raven out. And i think the cpt rift set gives tactical mitigation with motivate as well.

I believe B/P/E and resist chance are based off whether an attack is ranged/melee/tactical still. Many of the attacks in orthanc seem to deal tactical damage but can be B/P/E'd.

Originally Posted by Smugo

I believe B/P/E and resist chance are based off whether an attack is ranged/melee/tactical still. Many of the attacks in orthanc seem to deal tactical damage but can be B/P/E'd.

Yes, if you fight a monster in melee with shadow damage and it hits you in melee then it counts as a melee attack that goes through shadow mitigation. If a monster does an attack from a distance and it's shadow damage it's a tactical attack that can be resisted, and goes through shadow mitigation.

Also lightning bolts in Lightning wing or purple pools in shadow wing are tactical hits that can be resisted and mitigated.

There is no "OR" here, tactical mits always 1st, but it is still good to stack resistance.

I don't sacrifice tactical mits for resistance, but I still stack resistance. My warden has cap mits with 10k resistance unbuffed.

I always eat resistance food before ToO T2 (wings and saruman) for extra +1400 resistance.

i'd always prefer tactical mitigation over resistance, since it protects you against shadow/lightning/etc. damage.
Correct me if i'm wrong but as far as i know resistance only works against tactical damage.
The shadow damage from the giants for example is melee shadow damage -> tactical mitigation reduces it, but you cant resist it.

And Saruman for example has pretty high finesse, so you won't be able to resist a lot up there, so there's a pretty big diminishing effect, you'd need to stack a lot of resistance to even get any resists on his bigger spells. Thats just not worth it imo, since you can reduce the incoming damage significally by stacking tactical mitigation.

Originally Posted by sdf-blarelius

And Saruman for example has pretty high finesse, so you won't be able to resist a lot up there...

Another great point, resistance is kinda' moot with finesse around.

And just because I have it in my copy/paste buffer from just replying in the thread in General:

Originally Posted by Graalx2

In general, skills (including monster skills) will either have a chance to be resisted completely or they can be blocked/parried/evaded. The Lore-masters Burning Embers skill can be resisted and if it is no damage at all is done. Only if it is not then the Tactical mitigation comes into play to reduce the damage.

"Sometimes survival comes down to not being hit. Actually, most times." -the chicken skill, Bob and Weave

Already many good points here on why both are useful and why Mitigation is still the most important of the two.

I just wanted to add a point that Resistance does not diminish heavily on the return to scale for Light and Medium armour users, as does Tactical Mitigation, just as there is no armour-based cap on it.

Luckily Resistance is relatively easy to boost, so it need not be either Mitigation or Resistance, but possible to keep Resistance a close second to Mitigation. In particular for Light/Medium armoured as a subliment to their otherwise limited mitigation (especially once the Mitigations is capped). Resistance might not rule out the nastier boss effects, or be very unlikely to, but it still helps in smoothen out the overall damage in some boss encounters.