Monster defenses and crushing blows

Probably extremely controversial suggestions ahead

I think delirium was a first step to rebalance this game.
Monsters attacks do a huge amount of damage and shot gunning, and they're pretty much unavoidable, so you had to get alot of defences in place to survive, but they were also really resilient, so eventually killing them before they see you starts becoming an increasingly dificult task as you get deeper into the fog.

People have complained constantly about this league being especially full of 1 shots, and pretty much always, the dominant answer is get more damage to kill them quicker. this has always been the mentality of most people playing poe, and historicaly it worked out really nicely, which i think is bad.

Having less defences meant dying less than having more defenses(which is completely non intuitive and really bad), while having less damage meant killing enemies slower(as it should). So, what does more defence gives player? Precisely dying more often than not.

Its a little more complicated than that, since there are unofficial thresholds of defence and damage a build needs to pass to be able to play the game and once you get enough defence you do start dying less often, but by the time you git that threshold, your damage will suffer and feel bad. Only exception being broken builds, like the "immortal" herald stacker.

GGG tried fixing this problem multiple times by giving monsters more hp, more defence etc, but this just meant players would get even more damage.

So, my suggestion is, instead of giving monsters even more hp and damage, lets give them a new, reverse armour-like stat(armour is more effective against small hits, so this would be more effective against large hits). With this new stat, getting endlessly more damage would become inefficient, killing a boss would actually become a meaningful achievement again for veteran players, new players with bad builds wouldn't suffer too much, definetely alot less compared to buffing monster hp and defense, and player defences actually start having their intended role again, keeping the player alive.

Ofcourse, if someone wants to stack endless damage and kill bosses really quick, they should be able too, so this new resistance should be carefully optimised to not be too harsh, just give some diminishing returns to endless damage.


My other suggestion, not linked to the first one at all, crushing blows from Diablo 2 to Path of exile.

a Crushing blow in D2 is a hit that reduces a targets hp pool to half of its current value, not maximum value, regardless of defences.

So, if i hit a target with 100hp with a crushing blow, it drops to 50, I hit It again, It drops to 25.

That would certainly be overpowered in poe, so It should only remove only 5-10% of targets curent hp plus whatever damage the hit would normaly do, ignoring defences, with an internal cooldown, that is lowered by CB effectiveness, and it should stun the target(could be 100% chance to stun with fixed duration, lower chance to stun with variable duration affected by stun duration, could be another combination etc)

Stun currently is really worthless unless you build heavily around it, and then it becomes decent, so we should certainly see some love for stun either way.