So, the dicussion of damage mitigation came up today and with this in the tank channel came the topic "How exactly does Defensive stance work?" in terms of damage mitigation. Most people probably know that defensive stance gives a 10% bonus mitigation to both spells and physical attacks. There are two possible situations that i can think of. Either defensive stance will add directly to the mitigation armor adds, so if you had 61% damage mitigation vs a level 60 mob, defensive stance would make it 71%. The other would be to calculate either the damage mitigation from armor first then the damage mitigation from defensive stance or vice versa. This changes the amount of damage mitigation defensive stance gives relative to the damage mitigation armor gives.

For example:
Before any mitigation you take 1000 damage from a level 60 mob and have 61% damage mitigation because of armor. There are two options:
1)Defensive stance would remove 100 damage leaving you with 900 damage left unmitigated. The armor would then mitigate 549 damage leaving you with 351 damage taken. This would amount to a total of 64.9% damage mitigation.

2)Defensive stance would add its 10% mitigation to the 61% mitigation of armor giveing you 71% mitigation against physical attack. so you would take 290 damage in the above example.

Since this has just come up and I have not had the chance to personally test it I thought I would post it to see what other people thought.

Going under the assumption that the first example is true as well as the 75% cap in damage mitigation that would make the actual cap for a warrior would be 77.5%.

Yes it is number 1 in the case above. As for the mitigation going above 75% I'm not sure on that. There might actually just be a hard cap on mitigation at 75%, regardless of stance. But I don't know for sure.