And how would you convey how well a "reduce the chance the mob hits you hard" is working or not? It's a difficult thing to make noticeable given that the distribution of miss/glance/normal/heavy/crit is normalized - these types of skills are skewing that distribution one way or the other. We can't crank it up to 11 because the skill also needs room to grow. Unless you are analyzing hundreds of hits you're not going to get a large enough sample size to determine the distribution, much less if the distribution is skewed.
I think this is going to be an ongoing tension issue, simply because at this point it's hard to know a skill is being useful and so far the best you've been able to provide is "it's working, you just can't see it." And that can be frustrating for players to hear.
I don't know if there's an obvious solution, but I do know there's going to be some player angst over this simply because players want to push a button and see a thing. Without clear conveyance that a skill is actually working, it can be a letdown to push a button and not actually see a concrete gain other than an icon on my buff bar confirming I really did push that button. You can tell us it's working and something is happening and we just can't "see it" and that's not always going to be an answer that satisfies the masses that want to visibly see themselves acting stronger. I wasn't all that excited to get my Dodge skill when I hit 18 on my MAR because I wasn't sure I'd be able to tell it was noticeably better than my level 4 Defender Resilience skill, and this turned out to be the case. I shelved my level 18 skill that took days to earn for the level 4 skill that took me hours to gain simply because Resilience had longer duration and less cooldown and those were the only two aspects of the two skills I could tangibly compare.
I don't know what the answer is for conveying how a skill with actual benefit is providing that benefit in the web of systems you have going on, I just know it's a bit of a letdown not being able to ascertain said benefit and I doubt you could easily add combat logging that says something like "you avoid this attack while your Dodge skill was active" or "you took less damage from a Weakened mob." The only other thing I can think of is something like you'd see from DnD: a rulebook that explains how all the stats work and how they're connected and how gains and negations can be beneficial. We just don't know what all these things are doing.
Another issue is it can be hard to tell just how information is being conveyed, such as Rev thinking -30 hit was 30% reduction in hit chance, because there are other skills that will say something that shows a plus/negative and it actually is a percentage. Hopefully this is something that can be better clarified eventually.
We have all these interesting stats and components to the stat system and I can see how with all these minute aspects of the system, having a clearly noticeable impact while we're lower level toons could go down the road of stat bloat, but it's definitely frustrating trying to figure out the benefit of one stat over another in a given instance and the universal conclusion of every player I've talked to is "no idea." If we have all these stats and we can't even feel them making a difference until we're finally high level toons, players are going to feel like they're not actually getting better.
