Nexus Clash

If the soak of a target is greater than the attack damage, have a chance to deflect that damage (i.e. Phasing)- 5% per point of excess soak. This would both nerf "tickle damage", especially from pets (and conversely, make extra-high soak values useful), and also make incremental damage improvements important even if they don't bust through soak (important if you have abilities that raise damage floors).

though it does mean that a 31 soak advo who ordinarily wouldn't have phase has 90% phase vs standard 12 damage pets

stuff like extreme mitigation is why i raised the acc floor of pets (but also players) to 10% not just a jab at urban dead

If complete mitigation is too much of an issue, the effect could be capped at 50%. Having more than 10 more soak than incoming damage would be generally quite rare anyway after all.

I feel like this reduces the decision space for tanks to “always go soak” instead of spending time going for defense/dodge.

Like I think it makes the game more interesting that there can be dodge tanks and soak tanks and that at least sometimes the dodge tank isn’t completely out-classed by the soak tank (I think anyways)

I also think that if someone gets downed by “tickle damage” like… they should be downed. If you’re going down to tickle damage there are probably like 70 pets or more (and that’s already assuming the big ones do more than tickle damage). And that’s the point where maybe you should try stutter-step sniping/tanking one down (or have another tank split aggro) instead of trying to eat all the pet attacks.

I guess if there were consistent ways to buff pet damage to counter it this would make sense, but I'm not sure if nontanks would appreciate 30+ damage pets running around.

This seems really complicated to do with a lot of unknown downstream effects.