So I may be close to alone I guess in thinking that lots of dam redux doesn't = deadliness. While there are certainly advantages to survivability its not the be all end all of mage success.

I know this is a super duper longshot but I would be curious if maybe an imm would be willing to put in a change or two to put a metric behind the need for dam redux.

The data to capture would be whenever a player lands a kill the % of total HP they currently have and the % of dam redux they have across the board (its just simpler to disregard situational dam redux like protection/giant resist/elemental resist).

so in the end we will have two numbers. If the average dam reduction is 50% and the average HP when killing is 70% then we see that in general people are over prepping and a lot of this we need ABS talk is in reality unfounded. If we however see average dam redux at like 40% and average HP at 15% then it will substantiate the "we need ABS to compete" argument.

There are of course other factors at play like gear retention, ganging, yada yada but this would be a failry solid estimator of the general level of need for dam redux in PK.