[Balance] Unconditional/Permanent Fortify and why i think it is bad for the game in the long run

Hello fellow exiles and GGG,

After listening to the State of Exile podcast with Chris yesterday, which was very interesting by the way - thank you for doing that and getting my thoughts together i thought i post it here to maybe open some new perspectives to this highly discussed topic around the Champion Ascendancy and the availability of permanent fortiy in the game.


When fortify was introduced to the game it was considered a powerfull defensive buff for melee/close combat playstyle which pure ranged players (bow and wand users) can't obtain to even the playingfield a little and male close comat playstye more viable and less dangerous over all.

Fortify is a very strong buff because it was made conditional (you had to do a very specific thing to get it) - if it wasn't designed around beeing conditional, it wouldn't come to the game this strong. It is easy to keep up this powerfull on a melee attacking character or even with whirling blades as a caster, but there always will be a small downtime where it isn't up which can get you in dangerous situations - very well balanced.

With the 2.2 Ascendancy update suddenly bow and wand users are also able to obtain this buff on top of their other natural defences (aka "being ranged") which lead to a unbalanced and unhealthy high distribution of Champions in the current Meta, especially in Hardcore.

Champion is considered mostly picked for every single build which is located in the bottem right and bottem left side area of the tree over other ascedancy classes just because of its efficiancy.


Why is unconditional/permanent fortify so efficient?

- it only costs you 4 Ascendancy points
- it needs no other investments (gear/passive tree) to work at full effectiveness
- it is the most superior defense aspect in PoE at this point
- it is unconditional in comparison with regular fortify
- it is more effective (due to the fortify effect increase) than regular fortify



I would like to leave some numbers here for better understanding and then compare it to former passive nodes and mechanics which were intentionally removed from the game because they were too strong and were limiting game design in the furtere!

Champions Fortify provides the player with permanent:
- 24% physical reduction against hits (equivalent to roughly 7.5k Armour against endgame mobs)
- 6% to all elemental restances and chaos resistances against hits

6% to all elemental resistances is equivalent/better than the old "Elemental Adaptation" passive notable in the Marauder tree back in 0.10.4 or equivalent to the old Purity of Elements in combination with the old "Inner Fire" cluster.
Those notable got nerfed multiple times until the get removed eventually because they were considered too strong and bad for the game.
Once you got them on the tree you always had the buff without any further investment - it was "somewhat unconditional/permanent" you could argue...



Now in 2.2 you can basically get those old notables again but with the difference that you don't have to invest any regular passive points to get them AND you even get 7.5k additional Armour and 8% movement speed on top of it for free!

Doesn't sound that rediculous if you put it this way?



When you look at other defensive ascnendancy classes in this area of the tree in specific and compare them with unconditional buffed fortify... you get the point; you won't look at them anymore and pick Champion!



So why is this a problem now?

Permanent/unconditional fortify outclasses every other defensive choice because it is superior to most other defensive options and requires no further investment to work at all. Fortify itself isn't the problem - it's the unconditional and the additional buffed version of it provided by the champion class.

A harcore player will almost always want to pick a champion over any other class in this part of the tree if he can make it work - this is overall very bad for diversity in hardcore i feel and has to be ajusted.



I know that many players out there really like to have permanent fortify and would be really upset if it would go away by next balance update. Taking it away completly would be the wrong way to do it - making it "somewhat conditional" or a much weaker version of the regular fortify buff would be more appropriate i personally feel.
(if you look at the Juggernauts "Unrelenting" for example you can see a "somewhat conditional" solution which isn't hard to achieve at all for anyone out there - something like that for champions fortify would be very healthy for the game i feel)




So, now get at me and defend your Champions from the upcomming nerfs!

To my mind Perma Fortify is overratted at least for melee. It's more of a Qol choice for ranged Char but for melee char it's really dispensable as there are several ways to keep it up most of the time. For a heavy armor/end charge build it's only a small damage reduction for phys damage, as long as you don't face high elemental damage it is also dispensable.

Problem is with ranged char so if i had to nerf this perm fortify, i would change it that way -> Gain Fortify for 5 seconds when Hit or something like that.

Won't save you from server crashes, freezes, and other x-factors this game has. But yeah pretty op for HC. But no one was playing duelists now they are.

How about solving actual source of problem, like amount of damage mobs deal, evasion being garbage in endgame, and obscene amount of armour u need to mitigate large hits?

Yep lets nerf fortify/taste of hate/lightning coil it will make game better and pretend that shit like village ruin boss or excavation trio doesnt exist

Champion is likely to get nerfed or the other part of the class buffed. If you watched the podcast you would have heard Chris say they intended for 1 class of each to be the most popular and one class to be the least popular, this was done by design and even though the strength of the class doesn't always indicate the popularity that doesn't mean that lower played ones might not need changes or that higher played ones are "picked too often"


The unconditional benefits of fortify is no doubt the best reason to select the class, without the unconditional part it goes from being the top selected HC class to likely the worst of the duelist classes and likely worst then "its competition" in every single way.


People obviously want to live in HC, the unconditional part helps, frees up gem socket and or weapon swap shenanigans, but things like ranged characters taking it being the problem, I mean did you miss the meta of daggers + wb or people weapon swapping to get fortify. The issue is people think it is always worth taking champion, while my current alive character is one, the previous character my deadeye ranger was higher level and did substantially more damage, not to mention a lot more fun. I could have selected champion instead of deadeye but I chose deadeye because the synergy with the build I was going was extremely high.


IMO a lot of the ascendancy classes are strong, instead of utterly destroying the most popular ones, like GGG does with skills, lets hope they focus on reducing or encouraging the alternate paths of those classes, even if champion is selected, if people do the taunt route instead its essentially like they are another class. If GGG is reading this I would LOVE to do a slayer build taking any 2 of the 4 nodes in slayer. Like if I wanted the rare\unique monster and the melee splash or the over leech and the rare\unqiue monster bonus damage. Right now the pathing is super restrictive and holding back the class for no reason.

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How about solving actual source of problem, like amount of damage mobs deal, evasion being garbage in endgame, and obscene amount of armour u need to mitigate large hits?

Yep lets nerf fortify/taste of hate/lightning coil it will make game better

I think people think if GGG nerfs LC\fortify\ToH that they will be forced to lower the monster damage as well. But the thing is they haven't indicated that they would do it and LC\ToH really only helps against the physical damage, while fortify helps against all but DOT effects (including the physical lab traps, only a few of the traps actually "hit")

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Problem is with ranged char so if i had to nerf this perm fortify, i would change it that way -> Gain Fortify for 5 seconds when Hit or something like that.

If its conditional its useless to me, without a doubt would never select that class again.

Providing one option that is more convenient is not a problem. Perhaps the power level of it is- in comparison to other options- but that's pretty much all Chris said.

I think it's just and oversight that you can get fortify with ranged attacks, even Scion's mini Champion grants that bonus only to melee hits.

But then again, we have bullshit like whirling blades fortify so who knows.

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Raudram написал:

I think it's just and oversight that you can get fortify with ranged attacks, even Scion's mini Champion grants that bonus only to melee hits.

But then again, we have bullshit like whirling blades fortify so who knows.

Champion Fortify is fine, I don't see any issues with it and I don't even use Duelist.

One the other hand, you mentioned Scion Champion's mini Fortify? That is shit, no one will use it for the mini Fortify, don't make me laugh.

All Ascendancy classes removed gem pressure.

Maui got 40% more damage (Like Melee Phys), Ranger got +1 Chain without downside (+2 chain and 75% Base damage is the gem), Templar got Inevitable Judgment/Illuminated Devotion (Removes Penetration Gem, makes your 4L to a 5.5L), Shadow got all that crit shit (we dont need to discuss here, how much gems those nodes are equally), Duelist got Melee Splash (Slightly Weaker) and Fortify.

So, i personally dont see a problem with this.

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Astarte911 написал:

All Ascendancy classes removed gem pressure.

Maui got 40% more damage (Like Melee Phys), Ranger got +1 Chain without downside (+2 chain and 75% Base damage is the gem), Templar got Inevitable Judgment/Illuminated Devotion (Removes Penetration Gem, makes your 4L to a 5.5L), Shadow got all that crit shit (we dont need to discuss here, how much gems those nodes are equally), Duelist got Melee Splash (Slightly Weaker) and Fortify.

So, i personally dont see a problem with this.

The problem is that permanent fortify doesn't just replace the gem, it replaces the need to use melee skills to get fortify.
If the node said:

Fortify on Melee hit.
50% increased Fortify Duration.

Or something like that, then it would be fine. You don't need to link fortify any more, and all your melee attacks now have fortify. But permanent fortify means you don't even need to use a melee skill at all, and you still get fortify.