amen tastian
While parsing out defensive skills is easy in theory, in practice it's a lot harder to do then parsing out offensive skills. There's a number of mobs in-game that don't fight back. When testing a offensive skill you can just stand behind them, hit auto-attack, turn off the monitor and go to bed. In the morning you'll have a nice large samplesize. And you've got very good control over the conditions (haste, str etc). If you're testing an activated ability or the effect of some spell that requires more user interaction, but you can still do those parses with only half an eye on the monitor. I usually combine them with some household work. And sometimes, when you have a good baseline parse, you can straight out calculate what an ability or spell will do, no parsing necessary.
Not so with defensive skills parsing, they require constant user attention. Parsing during normal xp sessions doesn't work very well, because the conditions may change midfight (buffs fading for instance), xp mobs usually vary in level, etc. All that adds to the statistical variance of the parse and as a result you need a huge samplesize. I tried to do this myself, but the results were so depressing i just gave it up.
The best way to do it is to pick a single mob and let it hammer on you, but without fighting back yourself cuz you dont want to kill the mob. So you'll need constant healing (and making sure you never drop below 20% health) and still stay on top of the mob's agro list. And while there are blue con mobs that, once slowed, can barely scratch my natural regen, slowing the mob is counterproductive because it also slows the sampling rate. You have to realize that to parse out the relatively small effects of the defensive skills you need samplesizes of the order of 10000 swings. Even for unslowed mobs, that's several hours of per parse. You can do with less, but that can make the variance in your results so large that you often can't draw hard conclusions from them. So its hours and hours of parsing in which you have to pay constant attention to your hp bar and don't get anything in return but your parse results. As Tastian said, it's annoying not to mention boring. You have to sacrifice a lot of time that could be spent otherwise which is why good defensive parses are sparse.
And you have to get it right from the start, there's no going back once you've acquired a defensive skill as happened to me. Once you've got the baseline, you'll have to do the parses of the defensive skills under the same conditions. But it could take months to get all the necesssary AA points, during which a lot can change, your own gear, changes to the game engine, even revamps of zones so that the mob you started on is no longer there (this happened to my paladin's fav parse mob).
In short, it takes a lot of hard work and deducation to parse out defensive skills, and people that are willing to do so are to be highly commended. Even if their samplesizes are limited because of time and don't provide hard numbers, it still adds to the overall qualitative picture of the defensive skills.
To make matters worse, no one really knows for sure how SoE exactly defines avoidance and mitigation. They sure aren't using the definition the rest of the world uses. And because of that, we can't simply calculate what the listed effects will do from a parsed baseline either. When it says that CA3 will increase your avoidance by 10% that doesn't mean you'll take 10% less damage. As far as people have been able to determine from CA parses the mob will miss 10% more often, but total avoidance also includes ripostes, blocks and dodges. So the effective damage reduction is less then 10%. (note: and keep in mind the parsed numbers have considerably uncertainty to them).
With CS its even less clear what SOE means with a 10% mitigation bonus.
So the best we can do is make educated guesses based on numbers with relatively large uncertainty. And while i have made such educated guesses in the past (i like to think im good at educated guesses, i do alot of that professionally), i'm not going to post them here because i don't want to risk them being considered as hard numbers
Hmmm, got a bit long-winded again did I?
/hugs
