Shaman Totems vs Paladin Blessings

[lemekim]

You do realize that even talented Devotion Aura is at max going to be maybe 2% more mitigation, that's about 20 damage less against a tank from a 1k hit. The top end Shaman totem that directly drops damage, can't remember the name, does more than even Talented devotion aura for a tank (which is mainly where the aura is going to be run).

Devotion will provide roughly 2.5% increased mitigation actually - listed. So warriors listed mitigation will go up from, say, 60% to 62.5%. However, the mitigation from those additional 2.5% is not 20 damage on a 1k hit. The damage taken from a hit went from 40%, to 37.5%, 6.25% reduction.

Example:
Your tank gets hit for 1k damage with 60.0% mitigation - the actual hit was for 2.5k, but 1.5k was mitigated.
Now, with 62.5% mitigation, your tank will get hit for 937.5, or 62.5 less damage (again, 6.25% reduction in damage taken)

That might not seem like a lot, but consider that this reduction scales with damage - so it works best against spike damage, in situations where you need it most, e.g. a crushing blow following a critical hit, a thrash, etc. Let's take a look at an extreme example - Patchwerk's Hateful strike, which hits for 22100-29900 damage. Against this, Devotion Aura will reduce this by 2.5%, or 552-747 damage. But this is an example of extreme spike damage of course.

Stoneskin totem suffers from two problems - it doesn't scale, and it reduces damage before the mitigation is taken into effect. So talented Stoneskin totem reduces damage by 36 - however, the actual reduction in damage that the tank will see with 60.0% damage reduction is 14.