What is the point of Fortification?

This is like the 2nd or 3rd time they will be buffing the Fortification that we gain per damage dealt. So at this point... most melee skills will probably instantly get 20 stacks or nearly get 20 stacks. The top tier bosses.. we'll have to see on that.

My point is why bother with formula at all? If we have to keep buffing how much we obtain then why not just go back to getting 20 on melee hit and having fortify effect to increase it. If for whatever reason, this buff still sees melee struggle to get 20 stacks, they will have to buff it again anyway.

Also why would you tie a big defensive mechanic to damage dealt. This still perplexes me. Characters that are weaker are the ones that need it the most.

All this to what... stop casters from gaining easy fortify with shield charge? I'd rather have that and my old fortify then this bizarre fortification stat.

They didn't like ranged being able to maintain 100% fortify uptime with hit and run tactics. What they thought the ailment threshold mechanic being shoved into the equation would do to solve this, I don't know.

they are trying to make a mechanically interesting solution to a problem usually addressed in a fairly lazy way.

Like lets get this out the way, the D3 less damage taken if melee is the lazy way but its also predicated on those characters being tightly controlled to prevent them being "ranged"

Gotta say though I think they lose sight of the objective in trying to make the journey to the objective mean something. The result is multiple leagues now where fortify is significantly worse than before they reworked it. Its actually pretty strong if you can build it up but it requires 10 passives to get there which gets you similar damage reduction elsewhere anyway.

They should have just disabled it on movement skills. If casters want to vigilant strike a boss they should be able to its a risky play for a payoff.

Again I get it, the point is to give melee characters the tools to just wade in the thick of the action by bringing the damage and playing aggressively. Its just too expensive. its still too expensive to justify more than 4 pts if you go right past the wheel and then its 3 passives and auto fortify mastery.

Melee are already extremely passive starved this doesn't help.

GGG could just build fortification into various skills and have the uptime percentage reflect the amount of time a character spent in close melee (not some totem, ranged attack stuff).

Maybe the game database only allows so many widespread applications, and they are running out of slots? If so, it would explain a lot of the balance problems, since they would have to remove major aspects to add widespread balance.

Formula is there so casters wont get 20 stacks with single shield charge.

Since the beginning I've been saying that fortifying hits should give maximum fortification and then it would fairly rapidly decay. Hit and run would hardly help at all and those in melee, regardless of their build's specifics, would be able to maintain 100% full effect uptime.

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kaijyuu2 wrote:

Since the beginning I've been saying that fortifying hits should give maximum fortification and then it would fairly rapidly decay. Hit and run would hardly help at all and those in melee, regardless of their build's specifics, would be able to maintain 100% full effect uptime.

Wrong. You would need those stacks to decay in like 1-2 seconds for it to matter at all. Have you forgotten how caster gameplay looks like with Shield Charge as a movment skill? People dont even WALK anymore, they use shield charge for moving so they literally spam it every second (and in maps with good density it also means they hit monster with it every second)

They should have just buffed Fortify support gem for 10% more damage so it's not garbage.
Add "gain Fortify on melee hit" line.
Remove melee tag from Shield Charge.

It was simple as that.

I mean they could've made Fortify a base 10%. This would nerf casters from gaining access to a powerful version. Champions auto fortify would be weaker.

Then give melee nodes around the tree access to higher fortify effect, giving them fairly easy access to getting right back to the 20 mark or even 30 with some investment.

Currently there is either going to be situations where some skills just can't maintain fortify and they'll have to consider a further buff or all skills will easily get fortify which means nothing has changed.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with other archetypes gaining access to fortify to begin with. There is a reason the skill tree and gearing is so open in PoE. Just allow the main archetype of it (melee) to have the best version.

I guess this isn't really a big deal in the end since if they buff it to a point where melee hits gain 20 fortification easily then I suppose we are right back where we were anyway. I just kind of wish they did more interesting things with fortify rather then this. It's boring and investment into it feels like a melee tax just to hit what we had before.