Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here it goes.
A few days ago I was SotM-ing with some friends. All I remember specifically was that We had Legacy (with his DR-1 and 'Lead from the Front' out) and Unity (with Stealth-Bot) on the team. The villian did an attack of (if I remember corectly) 2 at Unity. Legacy jumps in to take the damage, but then Stealth-Bot does the same. As far as we could tell, this reduced the damage down to zero.
After this a thought occured to us. "If Legacy and Stealth-Bot just keep bouncing back the damage to one another, can they reduce any level of damage down to zero?"
Can I get a ruleing on this? Is this allowable, or are we just thinking about this wrong? If it IS allowable, I think we just found the best combo since Ra+Imbued Fire+Flesh of the sun God+Solar Flare...
Legacy would redirect the 2 damage and soak 1 of it. If stealth bot redirects from legacy, it would take the original 2 and soak 1 as well. So it doesn't matter in that sense.
Legacy gets to reduce the damage by one only if he is to take the damage. Once that damage is redirected to someone else, he is no longer taking the damage, and thus is damage reduction does not apply (damage modifiers typically stick to the damage dealer and taker, not the damage itself).
Stealth bot and legacy both have 1dr. You don't carry that DR over when you redirect damage. You have to recalculate the damage bonuses for the new target.
I was under the impression that a single source could only redirect a particular instance of damage once. So even if you did have some way to reduce the damage independent of its target (like Smoke Bombs) you couldn't chain it around forever.
Otherwise you could use Smoke Bombs for an infinite reduction if everyone has the same HP.
True, but that ruling's not even necessary here; since we're not dealing with reduction due to redirection, it wouldn't matter if you could redirect it forever, you'd still end up with only 1DR.