Thoughts on fortify from when it was first introduced and up until now (6s feels horrible)

When fortify was first introduced, in the marketing material (trailers, discussions, etc) it was described as "a defense for melee". I was excited, because melee did need a free defensive buff to get on equal footing as the rest of the builds.

Even on first release, fortify required a bit of opportunity cost to obtain: a support gem, or having to use vigilant strike.
After that, fortify was "abused" by builds which were clearly not melee and still managed to dip into it with relatively low investment, and fortify was changed to be based on a "stack" system that lasts 6 seconds.

This post is not arguing whether melee is strong right now or not, clearly there hasn't been enough time for that. I am instead pointing out that, for melee builds that are on the east side of the tree (shadow/ranger claw/dagger builds), fortify takes quite a lot of an opportunity cost to get for a somewhat unreliable source of mitigation (if you need to dodge something for 6 seconds or simply travel around the map picking stuff up, you are at higher risk of being one shot).


I think fortify should be "nearly free" for melee builds. I believe this would both help newer players who lack the knowledge to get it and make it work, and also feel easier to get than endurance charges' level of investment (I understand they are multiplicative with eachother, but if you only pick one, I believe endurance charges to be a lower opportunity cost (enduring cry), more widely accessible (more items, tree and gems) and have more uptime (10s base vs 6s)).

I understand and respect the appeal of having non-melee builds being able to spec into fortify if they find clever ways to do it or with high investment, so with that in mind here are a few ideas that might solve both of those things:

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Make fortify last longer by default (e.g. 6s -> 20s), but if you deal non-melee damage (or if more than 20% of your recent damage is non-melee), drain from stacks/timer.
OR,
Make fortify last longer by default and remove stacks, but give fortify a cap on how much damage it can absorb based on melee damage, balanced so that this cap would easily be reachable by a melee build but not as easily by non-melee builds.
OR,
Make all melee hits fortify fully, simply by virtue of using a melee skill gem, storing its DPS in the fortify buff. Any other non-fortifying hits would substract their DPS from the fortify buff. If at any point, the fortify buff has a negative DPS, this would indicate more non-melee DPS than melee, and the buff would disappear (and perhaps initiate a cooldown so that you can't regain the buff for 30s, somewhat similar to elusive).
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(another idea I have excluded due to still being abusable is making fortify last longer the more stacks you have)

Additionally, I wish there were more opportunities to invest in fortify beyond just the 2 wheels on south-west of the tree. Ranger, shadow and templar sides could make use of that extra fortify investment, and the opportunity cost from the distance is very hard to overcome, despite doing melee builds.
Fortify is associated MUCH more with duelist/marauder than it is with melee (or so I believe from the builds I have seen).

Thank you for coming to my TED talk!
Pls no comments about balance, I'm more interested in discussing what fortify should be, such as whether or not most melee builds should have it, how does it feel, etc.

The Fortify cluster below Duelist also been useless for a long time.

The notable (Rampart) is good, but the 4/2 nodes leading to it are dead nodes.

Yeah, unless Fortify have 100% uptime, they are kinda meaningless. The reason being bosses with phases WILL hurt you.


The champion change is great, coz stun immunity is easy to access from duelist anyway