Self mitigated damage is a post-game statistic in games like League of Legends that tracks how much incoming damage your character reduced or absorbed through armor, magic resistance, shields, and damage reduction abilities. It represents damage that was aimed at you but never actually hit your health bar because your defenses softened or blocked it.
How Self Mitigated Damage Works
Every time an enemy attacks you, the game calculates two numbers: the raw damage of the attack and the actual damage your health bar loses after your defenses are applied. The gap between those two numbers is your self mitigated damage. If an enemy fires a 300-damage ability at you, but your armor reduces it to 180, you just self mitigated 120 damage. Over the course of a full match, these reductions stack up into the thousands or even hundreds of thousands.
The stat accounts for several types of defense. Armor and magic resistance passively reduce every hit you take. Shields (whether from items, abilities, or teammates) absorb damage before it reaches your health. Damage reduction abilities, like percentage-based effects that cut incoming hits by a flat rate, also count. All of these contribute to your self mitigated total.
Why It Matters More Than “Damage Taken”
At first glance, “damage taken” seems like the obvious stat to check if you want to know how much heat you absorbed for your team. But damage taken only records what actually got through your defenses. That makes it misleading. A squishy, low-defense character who gets focused by the enemy team can easily show higher damage taken than a tank, simply because they have no resistances reducing the numbers. They took more real damage precisely because they couldn’t mitigate any of it.
Self mitigated damage flips the perspective. Instead of showing what hurt you, it shows what didn’t hurt you because of your build and positioning. A tank who mitigated 100,000 damage in a game was doing their job well, soaking hits that would have destroyed less durable teammates. If your self mitigated number is low as a tank, it usually means you either weren’t building enough defensive stats, weren’t positioning in the frontline, or weren’t using your abilities effectively.
The Term in Different Games
League of Legends is the game most associated with the “self mitigated damage” stat, showing it on the post-game scoreboard. But the underlying concept appears across many games under different names.
Overwatch 2 uses a stat called MIT (Damage Mitigated) that replaced the older “Damage Blocked” metric. The change was significant because Damage Blocked only counted damage absorbed by shields, while MIT also tracks damage avoided through abilities that reduce incoming hits without fully negating them. Shields, damage reduction effects, and temporary health all contribute to your MIT score. The stat is especially relevant for tank players tracking their contribution, and it also feeds into challenge progress for the battle pass.
In MMOs like World of Warcraft, combat logging tools let players analyze mitigated versus unmitigated damage to evaluate tank performance during raids and dungeons. The raw, unmitigated damage of a boss ability is the number before any of your buffs, debuffs, or shields kick in. Comparing that to what actually landed tells you how effectively your defenses performed.
Mitigation vs. Avoidance vs. Reduction
“Mitigation” is sometimes used as a broad umbrella term, but in game design it sits alongside two related but distinct concepts. Damage avoidance is all-or-nothing: you either dodge the attack completely or take the full hit. Think of a dodge roll or a parry. Damage reduction is a flat, consistent subtraction, like armor that always removes 50 damage from every hit regardless of how big it is. Mitigation typically refers to percentage-based reduction, where your defenses cut incoming damage by a proportion rather than a fixed number.
In practice, self mitigated damage as a stat usually bundles all three of these together. The game isn’t distinguishing between the damage your armor passively reduced, the damage a shield absorbed, or the damage a temporary buff negated. It sums up everything your character’s defenses prevented, giving you one number that represents your total defensive contribution.
How to Use the Stat
If you’re playing a tank or frontline role, self mitigated damage is arguably your most important post-game number. High mitigation means you were absorbing pressure that would have gone to your teammates, which is the core job of a tank. Compare your mitigation to other tanks in the same match or across your recent games to spot trends. A sudden drop might mean you’re not itemizing defensively enough or you’re avoiding fights when you should be engaging.
For non-tank roles, the stat is less central but still informative. If you’re playing a damage dealer or support and notice unusually high self mitigated damage, it could mean you were getting hit more than you should have been, but your items or abilities bailed you out. That’s a signal to work on positioning rather than relying on defensive stats to compensate.
One thing the stat won’t tell you is whether your mitigation was useful. Soaking 100,000 damage sounds impressive, but if you were taking unnecessary poke damage in lane and healing it back without any real threat, those numbers are inflated without meaningful impact. The most valuable mitigation happens during team fights and critical moments where the damage you absorbed would have killed a teammate or swung the fight.