Its time for fortify+movement skill to die

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goetzjam a écrit :

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Serge91 a écrit :

I can't believe that people are trying to defend Fortify Support in its current state (which is the same since its introduction in 2.0).

That Support Gem is a fucking cancer. It made the game an absolute nightmare to balance.

Why do you think the damage of the monsters skyrocket since 2.0? Not just because of the existence of VP, but also because of this gem.
Everyone can benefit of a flat 20% damage reduction, even the non melee characters.

The Fortify buff was studied to only help melee characters. But with the introduction of the support gem that can be linked with all skills, this buff had become avaible for all types of builds.

That means that the damage of the new content is always balanced taking on account that every character has 100% fortify buff uptime (same with flasks bonuses).
Have you wondered why the latest introudced bosses (Shaper and Elder) deal damage over time? Thats because dots ignore the fortify buff.

Fortify should be erased, except from Champion: it should be an exclusive buff to the Champion ascendancy.

(sorry for bad english)

I think you bring up a fairly good point (before going all crazy about removing it completely) about how these new fights have introduced DOT mechanics, and dot mechanics are basically some of the more deadly ones to melee characters now.

I "suppose" melee can have high life regen and therefore mitigate the DOT better then some, but that isn't exactly completely true, for example slayers now take VP after the nerf of their bonuses, which means if they aren't leeching they are taking significant damage.


I don't think fortify should be erased, I think GGG made it clear that at least one other class should benefit from it (jug) by giving him the increased effect of fortify, although one could argue that GGG removing that from champion was a mistake anyway.


I'm mostly concerned with the removal of it from shield charge, WB and leap slam and giving people some slight incentive to use it on their main links, if they wish to increased defenses, but not necessarily be the best offensive link.


One could argue that people would work around this buy having a support use vigilant strike and the threshold jewel, maybe but that at least requires them to sacrifice a jewel slot, gem slot and go out of their way to gain the benefit.

Also the introduced labyrinth: traps deal damage over time the same way, so that fortify is useless.
Melee characters can sustain a bit better the dots with life regen... but the best defence for dot is life leech (except if we are talking about lab traps ofc). I remember last league i was playing a classic cyclone Slayer: the most dangerous things were the dots of the bosses, which they kill you in a couple of istants even with 600 life regen when in a situation that you cant leech safely.


Fortify Support Gem is punishing melee characters, who would like (and should be able) to facetank in some situation but they can't do even with fortify and other forms of defence (armour and EC), because the damage of the monsters has gone crazy.
Why then should i play a melee if i can offscreen almost everything with another build?

GGG knows they've done a bad movement. And in fact, they've never added another form of defence to help melee. Probably because they dont know how to help ONLY melee builds without making the buff viable even for the other builds.

Yeah i had said something i didn't want to mean before. I writed in hurry, needed to quit.
What i did wanted to say is: Fortify still have a place in the game, but the Support Gem honestly isn't.
Fortify needs to be a situational buff, it shouldnt be possible to reach 100% uptime (or maybe possible but with insane passive tree investment and choosing a defensive ascendancy, like Champion or Juggernaut). This buff alone makes the game hard to balance.
But i agree that making the support not working with movement skills would be at least an improvement. After all this alone would be a very very unpopular move.
I just wanted to say that non-melee builds that wanted to have Fortify need to go with Champion ascendancy.

The best option to handle Fortify was proposed by Regulator over two years ago.

To best make the fortify attribute part of the melee skill gems.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1527088

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Also the introduced labyrinth: traps deal damage over time the same way, so that fortify is useless.
Melee characters can sustain a bit better the dots with life regen... but the best defence for dot is life leech (except if we are talking about lab traps ofc). I remember last league i was playing a classic cyclone Slayer: the most dangerous things were the dots of the bosses, which they kill you in a couple of istants even with 600 life regen when in a situation that you cant leech safely.

The lab is fine, because you can use endurance charges, basalt flask, ect to mitigate the damage that the DOT traps do, as well as use mobility skills (ironically) to avoid taking that much damage from them.

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Fortify Support Gem is punishing melee characters, who would like (and should be able) to facetank in some situation but they can't do even with fortify and other forms of defence (armour and EC), because the damage of the monsters has gone crazy.
Why then should i play a melee if i can offscreen almost everything with another build?

That is the age old question in poe, why play melee when ranged is at less risk and can probably do more damage. Answer is really just what do you enjoy more.

I dont think just having fortify should make you able to facetank things, especially stuff you can dodge, but it should make melee characters take less damage, so that they can not be punished as hard for getting into range to use their attacks.

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GGG knows they've done a bad movement. And in fact, they've never added another form of defence to help melee. Probably because they dont know how to help ONLY melee builds without making the buff viable even for the other builds.

Why would they add anything else, when they haven't addressed the fact that fortify doesn't just work for melee, it works for anyone that can shield charge? If they can't keep one mechanic in check and balanced, of course they arent going to add another.

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Yeah i had said something i didn't want to mean before. I writed in hurry, needed to quit.
What i did wanted to say is: Fortify still have a place in the game, but the Support Gem honestly isn't.

Again I don't mind the gem, it just needs to not work with pure movement based skills.

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But i agree that making the support not working with movement skills would be at least an improvement. After all this alone would be a very very unpopular move.
I just wanted to say that non-melee builds that wanted to have Fortify need to go with Champion ascendancy.

Even if its unpopular, its the right move to make. Its an absolutely disaster in terms of design and IMO the largest issue with the current version of poe we are playing now.

And yeah its cool that some people would want to play champion just to get fortify if this was changed, but as it stands now, if they can just play a better class and shield charge to get it, why would they bother playing champion now.

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Turtledove a écrit :

The best option to handle Fortify was proposed by Regulator over two years ago.

To best make the fortify attribute part of the melee skill gems.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1527088

Also his suggestion is invasive and expansion level of change\testing needed, while mine is simply unfucking the mess that is giving anyone and everyone access to fortify without any real cost of investment.

The best thing to do with the fortify BUFF to help those that should be helping, meaning tanky melee characters, would be to make it scale of you Armour and Evasion. More detailed:

1) Remove it from movement skills altogether

2) Remove the gem

3) Make it inherent in melee skills and make it work like this:

a) While you start attacking it would give you an instant buff calculated like that:

- Amount of total Armour + evasion /1000 * 0.75 and that's your instant damage reduction with a hard cap of 30%. Meaning if your combined Evasion and Armour is 30K you will get an instant of 22.5% damage reduction. Essentially with combined armour and evasion of 40K you reach the cap.

- Then while you are attacking STATIONARY, you get an additional /1000 * 0.10 of your total armour + evasion for every second up to 5 second max, making essentially up to an additional /1000 * 0.5 of your total amount of armour and evasion, making it worth while to invest even further than 40K AR/EVA, and worth while to stack Ar/Eva flasks instead of just DPS ones.

So again if you have 30K of Armour and Evasion total you will get 22.5% instant reduction while you are attacking with the potential of getting an additional 3% every second you are attacking stationary with a cap at 5 seconds meaning 15%. The total if you are attacking stationary with 30K defenses would be 37.5% reduction.

This way it will really help melee characters that invest in defenses, particularly Armour and Evasion which are shit, and not casters, ranged characters or DPS oriented melee users with stat sticks.

This is seriously the best change i can think of.

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astraph a écrit :

The best thing to do with the fortify BUFF to help those that should be helping, meaning tanky melee characters, would be to make it scale of you Armour and Evasion. More detailed:

1) Remove it from movement skills altogether

2) Remove the gem

3) Make it inherent in melee skills and make it work like this:

a) While you start attacking it would give you an instant buff calculated like that:

- Amount of total Armour + evasion /1000 * 0.75 and that's your instant damage reduction with a hard cap of 30%. Meaning if your combined Evasion and Armour is 30K you will get an instant of 22.5% damage reduction. Essentially with combined armour and evasion of 40K you reach the cap.

- Then while you are attacking STATIONARY, you get an additional /1000 * 0.10 of your total armour + evasion for every second up to 5 second max, making essentially up to an additional /1000 * 0.5 of your total amount of armour and evasion, making it worth while to invest even further than 40K AR/EVA, and worth while to stack Ar/Eva flasks instead of just DPS ones.

So again if you have 30K of Armour and Evasion total you will get 22.5% instant reduction while you are attacking with the potential of getting an additional 3% every second you are attacking stationary with a cap at 5 seconds meaning 15%. The total if you are attacking stationary with 30K defenses would be 37.5% reduction.

This way it will really help melee characters that invest in defenses, particularly Armour and Evasion which are shit, and not casters, ranged characters or DPS oriented melee users with stat sticks.

This is seriously the best change i can think of.

I doubt they would remove the gem, they seem to think its better as a support, then it is an inherent ability of a gem (aside from vigilant strike) I think maybe that would be the best idea, I think the natural transition would be first to make it a lesser more multiplier gem, so its useful for melee builds at the cost of not having one of the better multipliers.


I think the buffs while stationary are also counter intuitive to the purpose of adding mechanics to fights. For example AA is fairly useless because while it might mitigate damage if your stationary it does nothing really for you while your moving and you want to move to dodge many of the high damage abilities in the game.

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goetzjam a écrit :

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Turtledove a écrit :

The best option to handle Fortify was proposed by Regulator over two years ago.

To best make the fortify attribute part of the melee skill gems.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1527088

Also his suggestion is invasive and expansion level of change\testing needed, while mine is simply unfucking the mess that is giving anyone and everyone access to fortify without any real cost of investment.

While true that the Regulator "fix" would be more effort, it's payoff would be much greater than just nerfing some movement skills. It would be a good buff to melee. Which is probably it's more important attribute.

I think the game has a lot of problems that are wound together into a hot mechanical mess. Removing or displacing fortify would be a step in the right direction, and there are lots of possible ways to do it written in this very thread. Since they give the all-powerful fortify, the melee movement skills are so much better than the rest that it's ridiculous.

A lot of other stuff could use a rework too - particularly charges and warcries which are currently strong but so clunky that most players simply ignore them (nearly any build would benefit from using enduring cry, but most people skip it because it's no fun).

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kujutwo a écrit :

I think the game has a lot of problems that are wound together into a hot mechanical mess. Removing or displacing fortify would be a step in the right direction, and there are lots of possible ways to do it written in this very thread. Since they give the all-powerful fortify, the melee movement skills are so much better than the rest that it's ridiculous.

A lot of other stuff could use a rework too - particularly charges and warcries which are currently strong but so clunky that most players simply ignore them (nearly any build would benefit from using enduring cry, but most people skip it because it's no fun).

Technically speaking I guess bow movement skill is technically the worst out of all of them in terms of cooldown and utility, but its still used because its an option for them.

I think flame dash is pretty close to being good, not sure if less duration works similar on it as it does lightning warp, maybe that is something I need to test out. Honestly, if all movement skills worked in similar fashion to this skill it would be in general pretty ok.


Lightning warp can be good with a 4 link, one minor thing I would change is for any duration tag skills, if supported by less duration, ignores all other forms of increased skill duration a character might have. Seeing as they always work counter-intuitively.


I was always a believer that immortal call should have been something that required manual casting and that war crys should have been something that worked with CWDT. You can already automate or get charges from many other ways, allowing CWDT immortal call to be strong, but making it a manual cast only would remove the cheese with peoples setups and make them time it on their own.


One could hope they do any of the ideas in this thread for the next patch, but its not something I've seen any GGG member indicate that they viewed it as problematic.

Well Fortify in itself is not so much an issue, the issue is that it is pretty much fixed and not very flexible as a mechanic right now.

What I would do is reduce the protection given by Fortify on its own. Because technically using Fortify should require some tradeoffs and while Archers hardly have access to Fortify besides Champion Ascendancy as a caster using Fortify should bring the penalty of not being able to use Wands, which oddly enough isn't actually a downside.

So the first thing I would change is give casters an incentive to use Wands, something they have that Daggers and Sceptres have not. With a reduced basic Fortify effect you can then look at changing the way you get a higher effect.

1. Resolute Technique should not only give Fortify on Melee Hit, it should also increase your Fortify Effect.

2. Shields should have notables to give Fortify Effect and Armor/Ev Shields could get Fortify Effect as an implicit. They still have Block Recovery, which is kinda bad compared to Flat Life of Armor Shields and Movespeed given by EV-Shields.

3. Some Melee Skills should provide Fortify as a baseline or with a jewel that provides more than just that (basically a good version of the cleave jewel). To be more precise namelocking skills should have Fortify with high effect increases, while Sunder should propably not even have Fortify.

4. There should be another support that grants Fortify, most notably one that requires a Shield and provides more Melee Damage in addition to Fortify.

Because Movementskills are not the only issue. If you compare the same skill and look at Dualwielding vs. Shield usage having a Shield is almost universally worse. This doesn't solve the issue that 2hs kinda suck, because they have neither block nor a statstick in the offhand, but it does make 1h + shield more competitive.

And to be fair I don't actually think that Movementskill + Fortify is too much of an issue. First there are some obvious issues with builds that use Shieldcharge or Cyclone to actually damage enemies and not allowing them to Fortify is stupid. Second a caster with a sceptre hardly has any issues switching Shieldcharge with Sunder to Fortify, while an actual melee champ is hurt much more by not being able to Fortify with Shieldcharge because he is forced into Fortify, this is actually still true if Fortify is on Melee skills by default, because again nothing keeps the caster from using such a melee skill.

So blocking Fortify from Casters is basically impossible. Because you cannot block them out of Melee skills. However you can make that less desirable and actually offer different defenses to them they might choose instead and also give melee more ways to improve their fortify over that casters use. And while putting Fortify on all Meleeskills might not help, having it on Heavy Strike should work because it is kinda hard to see a caster using that just to get Fortify.