Originally Posted by
eyogar
I think the main idea behind the absorb portion of Smite is to make it more useful for smaller size content (dungeons down to solo) without making it too strong for raid sizes (with higher numbers of Atonement). The absorb amount scales poorly (not at all!) if the enemy is using abilities on a lot of targets unlike the Atonement portion, which you can scale arbitrarily. On the other hand, it gives solo capabilities in PvE to Discipline currently it's almost funny.
Of course, this is useless if we end up spamming Shadow Mend on any higher difficulty small size content in the end...