Update Discussion: November 6, 2020

[Yaffy]

I would just like to make another feedback post about tanking, since I've gotten some more time to play through Wintertide with a variety of groups. This was all done through Unarmed/Shield, just for context.

1. The change to elemental ward removes the ability to cheese out large groups of enemies (Ex. Pull 10 enemies at once in the cold area and being invincible via elemental ward) since it no longer has long term invincibility which is great.

2. Bulwark mode seems to apply before flat mitigation, this makes it scale a lot better with flat damage bonuses. This is also why it allows you to reduce the damage of mobs affected by elemental ward so much (Fire/Cold/Darkness). This honestly makes the flat mitigation from elemental ward way more helpful than I thought too.
For example, if someone has the 25% darkness meditation resist, bulwark mode and +54 darkness resist from elemental ward and they get hit by an Ensign which does 247 damage with a normal attack and ignoring armor, the result looks like this:
247 *0.75 *0.73 -54 = 81 damage

Slap on flat mitigation from armor, a darkness resist potion and thick skin, and you can easily reduce Ensign damage to close to 0 damage. Honestly I thought that Unarmed's darkness passives were what was reducing the damage by so much, but in this scenario it's shield doing most of the work due to Bulwark mode applying before flat mitigation. Unarmed's darkness resist applies last, so in the same scenario if you had both darkness resist mods you would just be reducing the 81 damage to 44, which isn't that impressive considering you would get the same result by just having a darkness resist potion and 500-700 armor or so. This is why in cases like Celerity's Unarmed/Shield is able to tank so many Ensigns at once. This also happens against elemental mobs if you're stacking fire/cold resist as well, which works especially well with elemental ward blocking 99 flat damage. However if you don't have a lot of flat mitigation then Unarmed's darkness resist gets considerably more helpful.

I'm a bit iffy on nerfing Bulwark mode because it's Shield's main option for reducing damage universally which it seriously needed to be anything more than a utility skill, but I think in this case a good way to tone down scenarios like this would be to make all percentage based mitigation apply after flat mitigation, similar to how Unarmed's works. I'm guessing inherent vulnerability works the way it does because it makes more sense for enemies to reduce damage that way, but on players it can be combined with flat damage mitigation to hit single digit damage numbers much more easily.

3. Elemental Ward having no effect (Aside from the first three seconds) on DoTs makes damage over time effects much more dangerous. Before you could use it to negate 10 seconds of burning DoT, and the old Poison/Trauma resistance mods let you use it for posion/bleeding to a lesser extent. Now it's very hard to build mitigation for DoT effects outside of getting the fire/indirect damage meditations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because it puts more importance on DoT cleansing effects or effects that specifically target indirect damage, but I do think there could be some more options out there. For example on Shield I switched over to using the fire shield indirect damage reduction mod which works great, especially in combination with fire resist bonuses. I do kind of like how there's some variety in that Shield is good vs fire while Cow is good vs Poison/Trauma, but aside from the one mod each of those skills can get there isn't too much else (I don't think staff has anything!). You can chug consumables, Unarmed has poison resist and Generic/Endurance has some stuff here or there, but I wouldn't mind seeing some more options to handle indirect damage types spread around since I have to assume we'll be seeing more of it.

As an additional note, the nerf of nimble shoes makes the Droach burning damage significantly more noticeable, since obviously you'll be set on fire more often. This is also why indirect damage is a bit more important to try and mitigate.

4. Trolls in WinterTide continue to be the most difficult mob to pull too many of, with things usually getting dicey at tanking 3 at once even with lots of support because of knock down damage stacking + crits creating the potential to randomly get gibbed even from high life. Ensigns or Fire mobs can be a joke if you build for it as I've mentioned in point 2, although the fire mobs can still be difficult if you aren't able to mitigate burning damage. I stand by the point that the acid elementals really don't do a good job at encouraging me to get someone else to pull them, because their armor damage isn't really a big deal and it's pretty risky sending someone else in who might get blown up by Ensigns/Cocks. The Minotaur/Bear area could be kinda dangerous and similar to the trolls with their knockdown + health cutting, but usually the mobs are pretty spread out here so it's not a problem, I'd say they're slightly less dangerous than the trolls.
The nightmare creature level is hilarious. I know they aren't meant to be terribly damaging, but with lots of healing and support it's possible to tank a ginormous number at the same time, and I assume with a staff build you could easily be invincible vs them and pull the whole section, probably by yourself. It's a complete waste of time simply because it takes way too long to kill them in those numbers, but it's really fun!

Edit: Fixed some typing mistakes