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Warakus, do you have the Infenium plate helm? or Heroic bracer from there? they make it easy to test your theory.
Current theory on these boards that has a lot of support, is that your AC rating provides your 'raw' mitigation, while your Defense stat shows your 'adjusted' mitigation components, and those include things such as resists, block, avoidance, raw mitigation, etc.
Try this out:
1) look at your AC and Defense in Off stance, and Def stance. AC doesn't change, while Defense goes up by roughly 10% melee mitigation
2) put on and off any piece of gear with +X% mitigation on it. your AC will only be affected by AC of that item, and thus your 'raw' mitigation will only change in terms of AC variance b/c of item switch. However your Defense rating will distinctively show your mitigation go up by X + AC variance due to item ACs switch.
3) have a piece of gear on you, check Defense rating, than switch with comparable piece of gear but with a lot of resist stats on it - your defense will go up dramatically, but its mitigation portion will not change.
Basing on this, I think consensus is, that mitigation from AC rolls into mitigation from Defense, and Defense mitigation piece is the one that ultimately tanks should be judged against 1 another. Not defense rating overall, because it depends too much on resists and other things. However, Defense rating IS useful in terms of comparing because it includes so many things, you could argue that you can judge overall quality of gear by your total defense rating unbuffed.
I am not sure how level influences these numbers, except that with level included, your numbers will track how well you perform for your level range. So a lvl 25 DRK with mitigation 30% in def stance can be compared to lvl 45 DRK with mitigation 30% in def stance, however their Defense ratings over all are very different because of all the other things, and of course context of content they are able to play is dramatically different.
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