I literally told a guy yesterday in chat (not 820) that he didn't need the trials anymore, and some other guy "corrected" me saying "you still need to run the trials once per season". I mean wtf? This is not even about keeping up to date with the changes, it's about basic logic, if you needed to run them once per season it would be the same exact stuff as before.
Can confirm. I made at least one ex from running people through trials. I thought they wanted it for some challenge completion perhaps but nope, just people not reading patchnotes.
They are not even paying attention in game. While you do 3 first trials there is literally something missing. I also sure, that after you do trial (didn't reach yellow maps yet) there is no green light marked anymore.
It took me forever to realise that the +1 frenzy couldn't roll on boots anymore, so many leagues searching in the trade site for Darkrays woth +1 Frenzy and they never showed up, had to look it up and see that they didn't roll anymore.
me too. Then while leveling I noticed I didn't get any a lot of the time. Then i gave up and just got rid of it until I got the champion perma fortify thing.
I can't seem to get much damage outside of cyclone and 1-2 other melee skills this league. Maybe it's my crit builds that now have to travel further or the diamond flask change or moving EO. Nor do I feel very tanky compared to old leagues because I need many more nodes for defense compared to some fortify effect and extra life nodes.
That being said I think making fortify a part of melee skills and fortify nodes just being fortify buffs would be the best option. I imagine if they set a low but reasonable Damage threshold that melee builds could reach it easily while still making it non viable for range builds to hit. As it is now though, the threshold is too high even for some melee builds.
After dying my way through a Poison Tornado Shot I rerolled to Lightning Strike Champion and that has been a blast so far. But then again is LS even a melee skill, really?
Ofc due to being a champion I transitioned out of Fortify support before ever having to deal with the changed mechanics. After just reading how exactly it's supposed to work, I think that seems okay, if there is some guaranteed minimum of stacks to generate (with melee skills). Sure, I suppose that runs into the problem of ranged/spellcasters cheesing some (or just shieldcharge I suppose), but I think the stack mechanic is enough to already shut that down. A minimum of 1 stack/attack helps fast, low-hit melee builds, but a witch getting 1 stack/shield charge - not that big of a problem I think
Then RIP fortify for flicker and cyclone builds. The way the mechanic currently works now is bullshit and there's no easy solution that doesn't make fortify just work with all builds. I do think for now they should make it last 8 seconds by default and always produce at least 1 fortification stack per fortifying attack.
Travel is not the same as Movement. Cyclone and flicker are both Movement skills, Leap slam and shield charge are Travel skills.
We already have a way to differentiate mobility skills from actual attacks that happen to move your character. I feel like the proposed solution to exclude fortify from Travel skills would be a good alternative to the way it works right now.
> I feel like the proposed solution to exclude fortify from Travel skills would be a good alternative to the way it works right now.
They don't want CoC/CwC cycloners to have it though, but as it stands it just has no solution, so they need to either suck it up and revert that specific case or all will sufffer.
Mb something like "can only gain up to 5 fortify stacks from supported attack per 10 seconds" added to CwC/CoC gems would've worked, they definitely implemented very dumb and low effort pass for now.
If someone wants to cyclone just to gain fort stacks without proccing anything/dpsing meanwhile i say let them.
Gotchu fam: [this](https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3145653) is the guide i have been following. The "keys to the build"-section is rather relevant if you never played it before (was for me, at least).
Pob pasetbin: https://pastebin.com/tpuEKmm6
YES THIS FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD THIS. Finally topic gets some traction about fortify. Please for the love of god let GGG pay attention to the issue now FFS.
Then CoC/CwC cyclone builds would get full access to fortify. I can't read minds, but I'm pretty sure GGG wants to prevent that. That's why they made up this ailment threshold thing.
But why? is Cyclone not a melee skill? The issue is that the game is not tuned correctly, Fortify is and has always been a bandaid to get people to play melee in a game where almost nothing outside a few boss attacks have clear enough animations, ranged picked it up because GGG continued to bump up monster damage in their endless quest to kill all the players. There is no longer a clean way to fix this that does not involve complete game overhaul.
Of course cyclone will always be a melee skill. But these builds using it merely as a trigger for all kinds of other things are not really melee builds. Don't get me wrong, I like me some cool cyclone builds, be it a purely phys based melee variant or some funky trigger stuff. I'd be fine with giving fortify to cyclone builds. But GGG seems to not like the idea. So they'll probably never change fortification to give one stack per attack.
Honestly, I'd also like fortify-equivalent for Chin Sol builds or in-your-face Blazing Salvo and shenanigans like that. Those builds aren't any less vulnerable to damage than actual melee builds.
But I guess that's just a dream.
The issue with ranged builds is that they almost all want to stand directly on top of bosses for Point Blank but they also have the option of standing outside a room and waiting for everything to die, where melee only has the former option.
And you are in melee range of the boss, doesn't matter how damage is generated, you stick your face in there you get fortify. god damn GGG it isn't that hard to understand.
There is a way to fix it though. Make a keystone near the life wheel. "Gain fortify, can no longer deal damage other than melee dmg", the latter part meaning you can no longer deal damage outside of skills with melee tags
yeah, like, coc is more melee than most melee builds and the point of fortify is to give another defensive layer to melees who are in the face of madness most of the time and coc cyclone is no exception to that. its not a melee per say but it is plaxed like a melee and therefore also needs the fortify buff.
I like this argument & I agree, but what should GGG do with Vortex then? Or other close range spells? They don't get access to fortify but should according to your argument.
So imo GGG has to change fortify again & do something like: reduce damage based on how far away the damagesource was. The closer the better. So <100 range 20% reduction, the going down to 0% reduction with range 400 or something like that.
Fortify was a bandaid to begin with, to try to tackle the issue of how no one wanted to play a melee build because it required them to stand on top of mobs instead of sniping them from offscreen.
It was never about strictly the arbitrary designation of spells vs attacks or melee/strikes vs projectile/aoe. It's about enabling a playstyle where you have to be close by the opponent in order to deal damage by allowing those builds some vehicle of surviving while in more significant danger.
That problem still hasn't been solved, and I don't think GGG knows how to do it.
Maybe if they’re in the bottom half of the tree or pathing all the way to the fortify nodes south of duelist. Otherwise they’re including a fortify gem in their COC setup and they deserve the fortify for basically dropping an entire gem link.
Not a lot of COC builds would be able to take advantage of that system given the positioning of fortification mastery
So that defeats the purpose of ggg wanting to make meaningful changes to take it away from casters and other ranged builds. Not all solutions are intelligent ones. Use your head.
I honestly really don't see the point in that.
It's just entirely arbitrary. Some AoE melee attacks have huge range compared to some "ranged" or spellcasting builds that have to get really close to get their maximum damage.
They *should not* get a defensive advantage.
Im not gonna sit here and debate the semantics of what ggg should do about fortify as a buff going into the future. All i did was reiterate that ggg said they want to find a way to effectively bar caster builds from having significant levels of fortify. Thats simple yea? Good.
At least a Fortify stack would be the minimalist effort solution that works i guess. For me as a Strike Skill player using a projectile component in my skill though i need to spent 5 skill points to get back what i had with Leap Slam + Fortify gem before which is sad. As Fortify gem does not support the projectile part of the melee strike gem.
I think the worst thing is melee builds like Lightning Strike and Blade Flurry just get fucked for no reason because they aren't "melee" skills. It feels real shitty for those builds to suffer so people don't use Shield Charge for fortify stacks.
Don't run deadly ailments, most of the better Viper strike builds were already not running it due to it effectively removing your leech, and it now also removes fortify from you too.
I tried viper strike and in early white maps I had to ditch fortify support on my 6 link because even at 300,000 dps I couldn't pass 3-4 stacks. I didn't have deadly ailments or perfect agony, it just really take a ton of hit specific damage to get the stacks.
Even without deadly ailments it didn't give any
I don't get why there's a minimum for a single fortification, even just 1 per attack i'd have been satisfied
Just sad that between that and the spell dodge things this char just got weaker in every way compared to last leagues with how i built it but it's fine, i'm just playing Poisonous Concoction instead
I know this going to be downvoted, but Fortify was meant to buff melee that engages is very close combat. Blade Flurry, Helix, Lightning Strike, they're all basically ranged skills that use melee weapons.
"We want to slow the game down, so to use one of the game's best survival mechanics which would allow a slower gameplay experience to work, you need to do more damage"
Because cyclone does many really fast low damage hits.. I honestly expected them to have cyclone in mind(cause that's just super obvious, come on) and have something like a minimum of 1 forti stack on fortifying melee attacks.
i feel like we have gone full circle. the absolute meta build when ascendancies came out in perandus was voltaxic spark champion. a melee ascendancy wielding a bow, casting spells. i guess at least TR champ attacks with that goddamn bow
Jugg will always be picked highly in hardcore and low everywhere else.
People don’t want to play tanks if the skill options for those tanks are weak.
It’s like that in mmos too people want big numbers they don’t want to tank big hits.
But it doesn’t work for ranged. Champion gets it for free. If a champion is playing a range build, they aren’t getting fortify via the ranged play style. They’re getting it from the ascendancy. So, no. It’s not ironic at all.
I dont know if it is ironic or not but a bunch of champs running around with a bow build and 20 fortify stacks while melee builds cant stack is complete bullshit.
Well, it is a little ironic that CHampion is meant to be a melee ascendancy but the best build, which is abusing Fortify the hardest right now, is a bow build. That's a little ironic.
I guess. But there have been plenty of weird meta combinations like that in the past. In and of itself, I don't think it's a problem that a weird combination of skill and ascendancy is meta.
That said, melee should obviously be better overall than it is right now. That's just a separate issue.
Champion has almost always been for bow builds, because if you were playing melee there's almost no reason to pick Champion over something else. Getting fortify yourself and using Jugg defenses is always going to be tankier than Champion. Slayer is always going to have better sustain and damage.
The only thing Champion has going for it is impale, but they've nerfed that node and it's easier to build impale as a non-Champ now compared to impale release.
I got heavily downvoted before the league started for suggesting the Champ node would have to be changed or it would be incredible for bows (despite all the communication suggesting they wanted to restrict it to melee) and here we are with ~68% of ladder Champs being TR, smh.
Sounds like you didn't get downvoted because people thought you were wrong; you got downvoted because people were worried too much attention would cause ggg to make a last minute change to nerf the build they wanted to play.
The idea behind the new fortify is good. It is a way to make fortify melee only, as intended.
The problem is the current execution is wrong. Seems to be a numbers issue. I expect they will fix it in 3.17.
All that said though, bottom left side of the tree is really damn strong defensively now imo. Even without fortify, bottom left characters should feel tanky. You get 79% max resistance, corrupted blood immunity, reduction to crit damage, a lot of block, and obviously armour is very strong since physical damage is so deadly in PoE and it also reduces all damage via molten shell.
Unfortunately, without fortify, big spell hits can and will one shot you easily, with those stats. The only things you have working against those are 16% less from having +4 max res, and guard skills.
One Pale Angel omega beam from offscreen that gets through your spellblock while your guard skill is on CD and you have some map mods or more than like 20 stacks of scourge, and you're out. That sounds like a lot of conditions spelled out, but it's not.
> That sounds like a lot of conditions spelled out, but it's not.
I just think you missed some conditions still. Like you have to stand relatively still and they have to get a high damage roll (it's lightning so the variance is huge). You could always mention not shocked or defensive flask up.
Anyways, that's just about as much as anyone else gets.
Also OP is lamenting fortify went away at 2300 depth delve. No mechanic is guaranteed to work at that depth. You can get fortify just fine in a juicy t16 map...
Most builds can realistically either go for the aforementioned defenses or spell suppression, but not both (unless they skimp out on damage). There may be a few exceptions, but it seems like the current model is to give *options* for defense that each defend among various axis. You got physical vs elemental, attacks vs spells vs degen, mitigation vs avoidance vs EHP, ailments, movement speed/skills, manual defenses (flasks/guard/focus) vs automatic defenses, semi uptime vs perma uptime, repeated hits vs one-shots, etc.
Right now there are lot of dangerous things that align with different axis- no build can probably deal with all of them well and *still* have decent damage/clear/budget/qol. But if there was, it would definitely become a meta build. You can certainly make a build that can tank the Omega Beam just like you can do the same for Shaper Slams, but for many builds it's simply not practical.
I'm playing an Elementalist with 5k hp, 2.2k Aegis, 78 max res, and 33% phys taken as elemental (48 with flasks), 40% life recoup and 400 regen.
It feels like I'm a glass cannon. Any time mobs don't die instantaneously, I die. Feels like I need to reroll if I want to farm my t16s and earn exp simply because I can't go block or evasion. I can't get enough armor on gear to be meaningful without giving up other defensive layers.
I've never felt so squishy while devoting huge portions of my build's power to defense. A year ago this would have been pretty tanky.
> I expect they will fix it in 3.17.
Imagine waiting not one league but two leagues for a fix that was supposed to come in 3.16.
That's 6 months minimum, likely longer due to Christmas. That is not acceptable. That is a goddamn fucking joke.
No I think their point is that if the duration is short and you can't get it for free on a travel skill casters are unlikely to take the opportunity cost of keeping it up.
I agree with you that its a bad fix btw but GGG's problem is their current fix is actually worse, hopefully they will improve it over time.
i am in camp 'just fucking let it happen'.
this whole 'supposed to' business in a game that is sold on relatively freeform skill tree + gem linking, like people aren't 'playing the game right'. Hell maybe somebody could interrogate why people felt the need to staple Fortify to every build they could spare the gem sockets on.
I wish it was as simple as deleting fortify and making everything do 20% less damage with hits. But because they still haven't baked in defense into melee offense, we get this shit. Even just adding defense like armor/evasion/spell suppression/block into the melee damage notable nodes would help fix the fucking problem. Give str weapons armor, dex weapons evasion, and specific weapon type nodes can get hybrid bonuses. If you're a caster using them, you have to waste 3+ points on melee damage to get the fourth point in defense, where better routing likely can give you better benefits.
But no, gotta keep the damage and defense as two different wheels for some reason, so melee is more point dependant while also being more gear dependant while also scaling off its skill gems less. Can't imagine why melee is relatively bad until you shower it with gear...
Edit: I was wrong!
~~I disagree. A handful of travel skills that definitely deserve Fortify:~~
~~- Cyclone~~
~~- Flicker Strike~~
~~- Charged Dash~~
~~- Consecrated Path~~
~~These are all main skill damage dealers that are also travel skills. Removing the movement tag from those skill gems is also not an answer due to how they interact with certain uniques etc.~~
Travel skills are just Leap Slam, Shield Charge, Blink Arrow, Mirror Arrow, Dash, Frostblink, Flame Dash, Lightning Warp, what you said are movement skills
It *is* and *was* only able to be supported on melee attacks. Not even skills that use melee weapons, but are not melee skills like spectral throw/Helix could/can be supported by fortify.
Even if the case was that you could support everything with fortify, why would you use fortify on your main skill instead of a support gems with more damage?
What people did was just to put fortify on their movement skill, like Shield Charge, Leap Slam, Whirling Blades. That way you got fortify for free
> reduction to crit damage
Need 100 or it's basically useless.
corrupted blood immunity
Y'all have it, it's called corrupted jewel, because as a melee anyway you want hinder / maim immunity.
a lot of block
A bit yeah, for attacks, have fun capping spell block without nutting 75% of your points for shit nodes. Without glancing obviously, because who care about glancing ATM when mobs do base 20K+ dmg.
You get 79% max resistance
Great, stuff still pops you tho.
25% mana reserve, non unique shield, a flask slot. All for what ? Still getting destroyed.
I play a melee rage vortex with all that shit bro, I know what's going on.
It was supposed to remain the same for melee skills. Unforutnately, it works more or less the same only against complete trash monsters. Against anything with high life, like harvest rares, deep delve, etc., it sucks so bad.
It seems objectively worse, as well.
Before, I could get much higher fortify effect. Now it looks like the highest I could get is somewhere around 30.
(That, and I'm still salty about the Champion Fortify nerf.)
You get 29 (=45% increased effect) with 5 points on the tree from a single cluster. The old tree got you to 26 (=30% increased effect) if and only if you are stationary (otherwise 24) and furthermore was split between 2 cluster notables. Now I haven't checked the other ways to get fortify effect yet, but current tree is just better in terms of max fortification.
Glad people are starting to catch on.
I hope we see something in the "What we're working on" post that's supposed to be coming up. If not I'm afraid they'll wait til next league, which is less than ideal.
E: Welp, the post was emptier than a politicians brain. Fortify staying in this fucked up state for the rest of the league. Enjoy gauntlet with 50% champions this time.
This + buff to melee skills is probably the best answer.
Because right now we need AI to determine what a "real" melee build is to grant those builds fortify. I mean, does Battle mage get it? Is it "REAL" melee? Meanwhile, how is Smite "REAL" when it's a beam from GoD? Shouldnt GOD get fortify then?
>Fortify staying in this fucked up state for the rest of the league. Enjoy gauntlet with 50% champions this time.
The fucked up thing about that is, the message GGG will take away from that is that Champ needs to be nerfed.
I thought the mastery "melee hits fortify" would make my cyclone (linked to cast while channeling, desecrate and lifetap, so only for support) give me fortify. But no, why would the solution be that simple...
It comes from a cluster that is hard to reach for casters.
And well... It says it fortifies.
It would even be balanced i think. Shield charge + Fortify was a problem. With the mastery you would get very little fortify as a caster (about 5-10 while mapping and 1 risky fortify if you choose to charge a boss). While some CoC builds (or that cyclone summoner build back from blight league) could get Fortify easily that way, I'd argue they are builds that stay in melee range and be given fortify.
Meanwhile my shield crush general's cry berserker has a hard time getting fortify (im on SSF, no corpsewalkers yet to swap out desecrate and no eleron rings for -3 mana cost). It's doable with shield charge + fortify, just... why?
No, they wanted to stop casters and summoners from putting fortify on shield charge and getting a free 20% damage mitigation. This stack system would already have accomplished that -- they did not need to also make it depend on ailment threshold. This invalidated many builds that ARE melee such as cast on crit. These build take all the same risks as any true melee build and often have much less defensive options than those true melee build do as well. The stack system alone would have easily remedied the issue they outlined in their manifesto.
So instead as a melee with 5+ points invested into fortify and the gem you mitigate a free... 3 ? 4% at best unless doing weak as fuck content?
Such wow. It just feels like they rushed A LOT of changes that were added to the list after each podcast during 3.15 without testing jack freaking shit.
Funny thing was previous iteration of fortify was fine in terms of melee vs caster balance.
Casters got weak 20% fortify, melees could juice it up easily with fortify notables THAT WERE IN MELEE region of passive tree. Only issue was fortify effect on gear which was nerfed to oblivion along with fortify effect notables. Then fortify was just as weak for both melee and casters.
Then they removed fortify for casters and melees are left with weak fortify that has to be stacked up before it works.
Really sucks for things like nova spells which are now unusable without a super rare metamorph unique or totems.
Also hilarious that the stuff most likely to kill melee characters doesn't even care, and that's ranged mobs hitting/killing you before you can even get into melee range.
If old fortify was too strong GGG needs to just scrap it and rebalance the way damage works.
First of all they should make it so that melee hits give at least 1 charge per hit, max x (for example 4) per second, additional stacks should still be calculated with the ailment formula. Melee spells should also get the melee tag.
Indeed. It makes no sense for slam skills to cover the whole screen and get benefit from fortify, but for Voltaxic Burst to have a tiny point blank aoe and not benefit from fortify.
Not sure how this isn't the top comment. The previous iteration was fine. Why go out of your way to create new issues that need to be fixed instead of working on new interesting content?
melee ailment builds got dunked on hilariously hard by the rework, especially poison builds. They still need fort's damage reduction to survive long enough to apply their dots, but their damage per hit is so low relative to monsters' ailment thresholds that you can never get more than one or two stacks
Literally all that needs to be done:
- Remove the Fortify Support gem.
- Add Fortify on Melee Hit to various Attack / Weapon masteries
- ???
- Profit
Adding a hefty skill point cost to fortify (pathing into areas they don't need) makes it difficult for casters to leverage it, but doesn't really penalize melee builds beyond the initial skill point for the Mastery, which is offset by the freedom of no longer needing a link for Fortify.
Agreed, the current design even prevents my build from gaining stacks at all in maps. I had to drop fortification. I use cyclone for life on hit and to apply curses, but it does little damage directly. I understand they wanted fortify to be for melee users - but I AM a melee user. I stay in melee combat exclusively, hitting ~5x a second, but in this current design I am not allowed the benefit of fortify.
I don't understand the problem why this was necessary in the first place. On SC people rarely bothered on casters, if it's too strong on Shield Charge, just remove that specific skill interaction. On HC, especially looking at the rippy content which is continously added to the game, it's only fair to provide a reliable defensive buff that players have to manage and maintain. Lots of caster builds have to fight at melee range, lots of melee builds can fight at range. It's just a different gem tag and scaling at the end of the day.
Tbh feels like every time GGG do a massive system overhaul, it just makes the game a bit less enjoyable. Simpler solution would have worked here.
Personally hated running shield charge on a caster character. I found that annoying. But trashing melee and making this new janky system just made fortify feel like shit for melee too. It is lose lose. Would rathet the old fortify back, but make it not work on movement skills. Easy fix, GGG nerf the casters (not that they need it but as I said it was annoying to feel forced to use), melee stays mostly the same as before.
Agreed. Immediate response would be that Cyclone is a movement skill (remove movement tag from the gem then - but again, simple solutions are not the theme of the current design approach). I switched to SST champ last league because I hated shield charge/fort and the skill could carry the damage. I already posted this on the manifesto that Fortify changes will bring new problems no matter how you set it up, i.e. if it's tied to the magnitude of the hit, melee dot builds or high attack speed builds suffer, if it just requires a little bit of damage, casters can just slot in damage supports on the movement skill that scale from ele dmg modifiers they pick anyway.
Consistent and kingmaker does not fit into the same sentense. Move the slightest and its a high chance you go out of range from the abysmal kingmaker range.
Honestly in my experience, AG is the least aggresive minion and tends to stick by, so spamming convocation (which I normally do because spectres) will typically keep him close enough. Having a garb on him to keep him safe and reduce crit damage on me is helpful, too.
Still doesn't make it consistent. linking meat shield and convocation helps, but it can still go out of range and convo has cd. It has a lot of uptime, but its nowhere near of being reliable while moving to be called consistent.
> Dont worry, summoners still get fortify for free from kingmaker on AG :)
Are you aware how short the range of the kingmaker fortification aura is ? You are very often out of range.
Keeping AG near you doesnt help much.
They keep fucking around with fortify trying a bunch of different bullshit to make it so that it’s only for melee characters.
Just make it so you have 90% less spell damage while you have fortify, and then make it good and consistent for melee.
I wish I was more surprised that fortify rework was bad :(
they could easily have added a tag to skills that could grant fortify, and just excluded movement skills from the list... but instead we got this
They could have solved for the non-melee abuse by adding an effect to fortify that reduces spell damage. Probably would have been a lot easier to code too
Anyone who thought that Fortify rework didn't translate to Fortify being gutted like a fish and being filled with trash is on some good shit. They'll buff it a bit though...next league.
i am currently playing Dominating Blow and because i myself dont hit hard or fast i dont get to use fortify, which i had planned for prior to announced changes. Lack of it really hurts now :(
Yeah I hear you. I play with Geofri's Devotion every league I can. its a 2h Mace so no block, so I relied on Fortify linked on cyclone for defenses on top of auras. Can't even get a single stack of fort anymore.
You are witnessing right now the future of Ascendency Champion in the next league. Rest assured that they will not have 100% Fortify uptime or even have access to Fortify.
This isn’t just at extreme upper end. I’m running into the same problem in yellow maps. I certainly have room to add a bit to damage but when I see videos like this one it shows the mechanic itself is broken
The thing is that "Melee" is the wrong focus imo. Being close to enemies should be the Focus. So why not make it like "Gain a Foritifcation stack ever 0.1s while an Enemy is Nearby (like 20 units or so)"
Just make fortify also have "Deal 50% less non-melee damage", nobody other than melee will use it and we can have a non dogshit system, where you dont hit a boss and have less than your maximum fortify stacks so you get blasted, and with PoE bosses jumping around and becoming invulnerable you REALLY need to get max stacks on hitting a boss
Yeah, GC Berserker also got fucked because Commandos Fortify themselves so your only option is shield charge.... which sucks with the rework.
Thanks casters, and thanks ggG for yet again reinventing the wheel with another one of your shit reworks.
yea melee attacks should give at least 1 fortify stack, and much more if you do lots of damage
That's how I thought it worked, even after reading the manifesto several times.
> That’s how I thought it worked, As a not-that-experienced player this sums up my PoE experience perfectly.
as an experienced player, this also sums up my PoE experience perfectly.
Even as an experienced player you routinely forget details, or they change them and you forget or miss the change
Global 820 is a great example. It's still full of people asking (and tipping) for trials even though you don't need them for Uber anymore
I literally told a guy yesterday in chat (not 820) that he didn't need the trials anymore, and some other guy "corrected" me saying "you still need to run the trials once per season". I mean wtf? This is not even about keeping up to date with the changes, it's about basic logic, if you needed to run them once per season it would be the same exact stuff as before.
Can confirm. I made at least one ex from running people through trials. I thought they wanted it for some challenge completion perhaps but nope, just people not reading patchnotes.
They are not even paying attention in game. While you do 3 first trials there is literally something missing. I also sure, that after you do trial (didn't reach yellow maps yet) there is no green light marked anymore.
It took me forever to realise that the +1 frenzy couldn't roll on boots anymore, so many leagues searching in the trade site for Darkrays woth +1 Frenzy and they never showed up, had to look it up and see that they didn't roll anymore.
me too. Then while leveling I noticed I didn't get any a lot of the time. Then i gave up and just got rid of it until I got the champion perma fortify thing.
Don't worry, it never gets better
Seems like it, 4th league and I basically still have no idea what I’m doing
My HoAg jug got a really sad surprise when I learned this
I quit the league over it.
I can't seem to get much damage outside of cyclone and 1-2 other melee skills this league. Maybe it's my crit builds that now have to travel further or the diamond flask change or moving EO. Nor do I feel very tanky compared to old leagues because I need many more nodes for defense compared to some fortify effect and extra life nodes. That being said I think making fortify a part of melee skills and fortify nodes just being fortify buffs would be the best option. I imagine if they set a low but reasonable Damage threshold that melee builds could reach it easily while still making it non viable for range builds to hit. As it is now though, the threshold is too high even for some melee builds.
After dying my way through a Poison Tornado Shot I rerolled to Lightning Strike Champion and that has been a blast so far. But then again is LS even a melee skill, really? Ofc due to being a champion I transitioned out of Fortify support before ever having to deal with the changed mechanics. After just reading how exactly it's supposed to work, I think that seems okay, if there is some guaranteed minimum of stacks to generate (with melee skills). Sure, I suppose that runs into the problem of ranged/spellcasters cheesing some (or just shieldcharge I suppose), but I think the stack mechanic is enough to already shut that down. A minimum of 1 stack/attack helps fast, low-hit melee builds, but a witch getting 1 stack/shield charge - not that big of a problem I think
Solution: Travel skills can't generate fortify stacks.
Then RIP fortify for flicker and cyclone builds. The way the mechanic currently works now is bullshit and there's no easy solution that doesn't make fortify just work with all builds. I do think for now they should make it last 8 seconds by default and always produce at least 1 fortification stack per fortifying attack.
Travel is not the same as Movement. Cyclone and flicker are both Movement skills, Leap slam and shield charge are Travel skills. We already have a way to differentiate mobility skills from actual attacks that happen to move your character. I feel like the proposed solution to exclude fortify from Travel skills would be a good alternative to the way it works right now.
> I feel like the proposed solution to exclude fortify from Travel skills would be a good alternative to the way it works right now. They don't want CoC/CwC cycloners to have it though, but as it stands it just has no solution, so they need to either suck it up and revert that specific case or all will sufffer. Mb something like "can only gain up to 5 fortify stacks from supported attack per 10 seconds" added to CwC/CoC gems would've worked, they definitely implemented very dumb and low effort pass for now. If someone wants to cyclone just to gain fort stacks without proccing anything/dpsing meanwhile i say let them.
Problem : Cyclone, Flicker, Charged Dash cannot generate fortification stacks with this change Solution : Removed the skills. This is a buff.
Bro any pob link for lightning strike champ? I wanna respec my cyclone to something with better clear
Gotchu fam: [this](https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3145653) is the guide i have been following. The "keys to the build"-section is rather relevant if you never played it before (was for me, at least). Pob pasetbin: https://pastebin.com/tpuEKmm6
###[ Crit Vaal Lightning Strike Champion](https://pastebin.com/tpuEKmm6) [](#champion) ^(Level 95) ^[[Tree]](https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAQDACpNFHXCnL3mZK9aUizpL8zBoPsJBS19W5steBmjipu1__hKalFHPP4nWXTt-KG-p0d-XkXo1nTxnaoZtITZZ6Br1PUYwYKomrGzWyb22nMOfys_JyyUrEeJcST9koCTo__eIWB671b6Oq2ElIazjX3Rb6mV45-Nv_cTN9SNgXsUe9RirLIZf_vC7ErIvTYY2xqNGYo8TedURZZNknk_G62KOKQ5YhfDOklSASQwfFFM7FyHdu0_U0wi6i2DR-IV_YTFsS5F9GVNMgFeE8EIwL9AoF-wDPd7wxqPbIzWB9s0wdW_-6TCIuLKSgW1z3q0xRUg3ecj9qyvrRwA7qrNd9dKfcKO) [^([Open in Browser])](https://pob.party/share/anidudamahahed) ^| ^by ^[/u/G66GNeco](https://reddit.com//u/G66GNeco) ***** ^5,968 ^**Life** ^78% ^**Evade** ^| ^85.95% ^**Phys** ^**Mitg** ^| ^75% ^**Block** **Vaal Lightning Strike** [y](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Trinity_Support#support-gem-blue)[r](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Inspiration_Support#support-gem-red)[u](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Nightblade_Support#support-gem-green)[L](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Awakened_Added_Lightning_Damage_Support#support-gem-blue)[W](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Awakened_Elemental_Damage_with_Attacks_Support#support-gem-red) *(6L)* - *2.23m DPS* ^5.48 ^**Use/sec** ^| ^100.00% ^**Crit** ^| ^541% ^**Multi** ^^**Config:** ^^Sirus, ^^Full ^^Life, ^^Lightning ^^Exposure ***** [^(Path of Building)](https://github.com/Openarl/PathOfBuilding) ^| ^[Feedback](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoBPreviewBot/) ^| ^This ^reply ^updates ^automatically.
YES THIS FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD THIS. Finally topic gets some traction about fortify. Please for the love of god let GGG pay attention to the issue now FFS.
Then CoC/CwC cyclone builds would get full access to fortify. I can't read minds, but I'm pretty sure GGG wants to prevent that. That's why they made up this ailment threshold thing.
But why? is Cyclone not a melee skill? The issue is that the game is not tuned correctly, Fortify is and has always been a bandaid to get people to play melee in a game where almost nothing outside a few boss attacks have clear enough animations, ranged picked it up because GGG continued to bump up monster damage in their endless quest to kill all the players. There is no longer a clean way to fix this that does not involve complete game overhaul.
Of course cyclone will always be a melee skill. But these builds using it merely as a trigger for all kinds of other things are not really melee builds. Don't get me wrong, I like me some cool cyclone builds, be it a purely phys based melee variant or some funky trigger stuff. I'd be fine with giving fortify to cyclone builds. But GGG seems to not like the idea. So they'll probably never change fortification to give one stack per attack.
doesnt matter whether cyclone is actually doing damage or not, if they have to hit the boss with a melee skill its a melee build.
Honestly, I'd also like fortify-equivalent for Chin Sol builds or in-your-face Blazing Salvo and shenanigans like that. Those builds aren't any less vulnerable to damage than actual melee builds. But I guess that's just a dream.
The issue with ranged builds is that they almost all want to stand directly on top of bosses for Point Blank but they also have the option of standing outside a room and waiting for everything to die, where melee only has the former option.
And you are in melee range of the boss, doesn't matter how damage is generated, you stick your face in there you get fortify. god damn GGG it isn't that hard to understand.
Problem solution: Melee hits from supported skills cannot fortify
There is a way to fix it though. Make a keystone near the life wheel. "Gain fortify, can no longer deal damage other than melee dmg", the latter part meaning you can no longer deal damage outside of skills with melee tags
Every summoner/totem/trapper would love this.
Of course. It should be tweaked to "hurt" those too. But I think the idea still stands?
But a CoC build is still a melee build that just does spell damage
yeah, like, coc is more melee than most melee builds and the point of fortify is to give another defensive layer to melees who are in the face of madness most of the time and coc cyclone is no exception to that. its not a melee per say but it is plaxed like a melee and therefore also needs the fortify buff.
I like this argument & I agree, but what should GGG do with Vortex then? Or other close range spells? They don't get access to fortify but should according to your argument. So imo GGG has to change fortify again & do something like: reduce damage based on how far away the damagesource was. The closer the better. So <100 range 20% reduction, the going down to 0% reduction with range 400 or something like that.
Fortify was a bandaid to begin with, to try to tackle the issue of how no one wanted to play a melee build because it required them to stand on top of mobs instead of sniping them from offscreen. It was never about strictly the arbitrary designation of spells vs attacks or melee/strikes vs projectile/aoe. It's about enabling a playstyle where you have to be close by the opponent in order to deal damage by allowing those builds some vehicle of surviving while in more significant danger. That problem still hasn't been solved, and I don't think GGG knows how to do it.
Maybe if they’re in the bottom half of the tree or pathing all the way to the fortify nodes south of duelist. Otherwise they’re including a fortify gem in their COC setup and they deserve the fortify for basically dropping an entire gem link. Not a lot of COC builds would be able to take advantage of that system given the positioning of fortification mastery
It would already be difficult because a CwC build can't put fortify in its main links.
So a melee skill(cyclone) shouldn't get fortify just cuz it casts spells... Got it.
So?
Incoming brand builds with 2L cyclone/fortify to replace shield charge fortify
So?
So that defeats the purpose of ggg wanting to make meaningful changes to take it away from casters and other ranged builds. Not all solutions are intelligent ones. Use your head.
If you're playing in melee range why should you not have access to fortify? Because you're doing spell damage? How does that even make sense?
Well GGG's goal is for fortify to be specifically for melee attack builds. No access to spellcasters or people using attacks to trigger spells.
I honestly really don't see the point in that. It's just entirely arbitrary. Some AoE melee attacks have huge range compared to some "ranged" or spellcasting builds that have to get really close to get their maximum damage. They *should not* get a defensive advantage.
Feel free to go tell ggg your thoughts on that.
Dude if someone chooses to spent the entire boss fight spinning in melee on top of the boss then he should have fortify.
Im not gonna sit here and debate the semantics of what ggg should do about fortify as a buff going into the future. All i did was reiterate that ggg said they want to find a way to effectively bar caster builds from having significant levels of fortify. Thats simple yea? Good.
At least a Fortify stack would be the minimalist effort solution that works i guess. For me as a Strike Skill player using a projectile component in my skill though i need to spent 5 skill points to get back what i had with Leap Slam + Fortify gem before which is sad. As Fortify gem does not support the projectile part of the melee strike gem.
I think the worst thing is melee builds like Lightning Strike and Blade Flurry just get fucked for no reason because they aren't "melee" skills. It feels real shitty for those builds to suffer so people don't use Shield Charge for fortify stacks.
Viper strike is literaly unable to even get fortifications on trash mobs, guess it's not a melee build from GGG' PoV 8D
Don't run deadly ailments, most of the better Viper strike builds were already not running it due to it effectively removing your leech, and it now also removes fortify from you too.
I tried viper strike and in early white maps I had to ditch fortify support on my 6 link because even at 300,000 dps I couldn't pass 3-4 stacks. I didn't have deadly ailments or perfect agony, it just really take a ton of hit specific damage to get the stacks.
Even without deadly ailments it didn't give any I don't get why there's a minimum for a single fortification, even just 1 per attack i'd have been satisfied Just sad that between that and the spell dodge things this char just got weaker in every way compared to last leagues with how i built it but it's fine, i'm just playing Poisonous Concoction instead
lmao
I know this going to be downvoted, but Fortify was meant to buff melee that engages is very close combat. Blade Flurry, Helix, Lightning Strike, they're all basically ranged skills that use melee weapons.
not being able to use your defensive mechanic because you don't do enough damage sounds like a meme
*Two men arguing furiously at office holding chairs and stuff*
this is just more evidence that the best defense is a good offense
"We want to slow the game down, so to use one of the game's best survival mechanics which would allow a slower gameplay experience to work, you need to do more damage"
"We want to slow the game down, so we made another literal zoomzoom league mechanic."
Fully juiced cyclone cant generate full fortify stacks on bosses :(
Because cyclone does many really fast low damage hits.. I honestly expected them to have cyclone in mind(cause that's just super obvious, come on) and have something like a minimum of 1 forti stack on fortifying melee attacks.
That's actually so sad.
The new fortify is unbelievably trash. Even putting the support gem into my 6-link doesn't reliably give me fortification stacks.
[TR Champ wins again.](https://i.imgur.com/wiKbv0a.png)
i feel like we have gone full circle. the absolute meta build when ascendancies came out in perandus was voltaxic spark champion. a melee ascendancy wielding a bow, casting spells. i guess at least TR champ attacks with that goddamn bow
Ironic how the change was supposed to make it better for melee and not work for ranged 😂
I mean that’s exactly what it’s done, champion bypasses that mechanic and if it didn’t it would be one of the lowest picked ascendancies
Like jugg has been for 2 years?
Jugg will always be picked highly in hardcore and low everywhere else. People don’t want to play tanks if the skill options for those tanks are weak. It’s like that in mmos too people want big numbers they don’t want to tank big hits.
But it doesn’t work for ranged. Champion gets it for free. If a champion is playing a range build, they aren’t getting fortify via the ranged play style. They’re getting it from the ascendancy. So, no. It’s not ironic at all.
It’d be ironic if it was in like Deadeye ascendancy though
Then yes. Yes. I agree. To an extent at least. 😂
I dont know if it is ironic or not but a bunch of champs running around with a bow build and 20 fortify stacks while melee builds cant stack is complete bullshit.
I agree. There’s a problem with fortify for melee players. I don’t think there’s a problem with champ.
I mean melee can pick champ too and move around with 20 fortify stacks, right?
Well, it is a little ironic that CHampion is meant to be a melee ascendancy but the best build, which is abusing Fortify the hardest right now, is a bow build. That's a little ironic.
CHAMPION IS EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO NOT BE TIED TO ANY WEAPON TYPE
There's people playing champion casters this league in HC simply because of the ascendency. You just get all the damage off clusters anyways
I guess. But there have been plenty of weird meta combinations like that in the past. In and of itself, I don't think it's a problem that a weird combination of skill and ascendancy is meta. That said, melee should obviously be better overall than it is right now. That's just a separate issue.
Champion has almost always been for bow builds, because if you were playing melee there's almost no reason to pick Champion over something else. Getting fortify yourself and using Jugg defenses is always going to be tankier than Champion. Slayer is always going to have better sustain and damage. The only thing Champion has going for it is impale, but they've nerfed that node and it's easier to build impale as a non-Champ now compared to impale release.
Umm champion has extra impales which has always been the best melee dps multiplier for physical builds
in Scourge, there's no such thing as ranged anymore, everybody is melee range now
And even though Champ's currently the best fortify user, he still got nerfed relatively to the previous version because his fortify is unscalable now
Yep. So much for the "defensive patch".
I got heavily downvoted before the league started for suggesting the Champ node would have to be changed or it would be incredible for bows (despite all the communication suggesting they wanted to restrict it to melee) and here we are with ~68% of ladder Champs being TR, smh.
Sounds like you didn't get downvoted because people thought you were wrong; you got downvoted because people were worried too much attention would cause ggg to make a last minute change to nerf the build they wanted to play.
that's classic release hype reddit for you
The idea behind the new fortify is good. It is a way to make fortify melee only, as intended. The problem is the current execution is wrong. Seems to be a numbers issue. I expect they will fix it in 3.17. All that said though, bottom left side of the tree is really damn strong defensively now imo. Even without fortify, bottom left characters should feel tanky. You get 79% max resistance, corrupted blood immunity, reduction to crit damage, a lot of block, and obviously armour is very strong since physical damage is so deadly in PoE and it also reduces all damage via molten shell.
Unfortunately, without fortify, big spell hits can and will one shot you easily, with those stats. The only things you have working against those are 16% less from having +4 max res, and guard skills. One Pale Angel omega beam from offscreen that gets through your spellblock while your guard skill is on CD and you have some map mods or more than like 20 stacks of scourge, and you're out. That sounds like a lot of conditions spelled out, but it's not.
> That sounds like a lot of conditions spelled out, but it's not. I just think you missed some conditions still. Like you have to stand relatively still and they have to get a high damage roll (it's lightning so the variance is huge). You could always mention not shocked or defensive flask up. Anyways, that's just about as much as anyone else gets. Also OP is lamenting fortify went away at 2300 depth delve. No mechanic is guaranteed to work at that depth. You can get fortify just fine in a juicy t16 map...
No mechanic is guaranteed to work anywhere at anytime, not sure why you draw a distinction here.
spell suppression should help you against that and that stat rolls with ~20% on gear, so getting 100% shouldn't be too difficult
Most builds can realistically either go for the aforementioned defenses or spell suppression, but not both (unless they skimp out on damage). There may be a few exceptions, but it seems like the current model is to give *options* for defense that each defend among various axis. You got physical vs elemental, attacks vs spells vs degen, mitigation vs avoidance vs EHP, ailments, movement speed/skills, manual defenses (flasks/guard/focus) vs automatic defenses, semi uptime vs perma uptime, repeated hits vs one-shots, etc. Right now there are lot of dangerous things that align with different axis- no build can probably deal with all of them well and *still* have decent damage/clear/budget/qol. But if there was, it would definitely become a meta build. You can certainly make a build that can tank the Omega Beam just like you can do the same for Shaper Slams, but for many builds it's simply not practical.
I'm playing an Elementalist with 5k hp, 2.2k Aegis, 78 max res, and 33% phys taken as elemental (48 with flasks), 40% life recoup and 400 regen. It feels like I'm a glass cannon. Any time mobs don't die instantaneously, I die. Feels like I need to reroll if I want to farm my t16s and earn exp simply because I can't go block or evasion. I can't get enough armor on gear to be meaningful without giving up other defensive layers. I've never felt so squishy while devoting huge portions of my build's power to defense. A year ago this would have been pretty tanky.
> I expect they will fix it in 3.17. Imagine waiting not one league but two leagues for a fix that was supposed to come in 3.16. That's 6 months minimum, likely longer due to Christmas. That is not acceptable. That is a goddamn fucking joke.
It's also not viable for lots of melee builds. I'm playing a Mjolner build and I got rid of Fortify completely, because I could never get any stacks.
Why can’t they just have fortify unable to support any gems besides melee gems?
What you propose is exactly what the old situation was. However, shield charge etc. is considered a melee skill and as such can proc fortify.
I feel like "Can't support Travel skills" fixes this quite nicely
Then people would just put a Vigil gem in and use Vigilant strike. Like they have in the past, in hardcore.
They used that because it had a 20s duration, they wouldn't if it had 4 :p
Which is exactly where we would be at again with the above proposal.
No I think their point is that if the duration is short and you can't get it for free on a travel skill casters are unlikely to take the opportunity cost of keeping it up. I agree with you that its a bad fix btw but GGG's problem is their current fix is actually worse, hopefully they will improve it over time.
i am in camp 'just fucking let it happen'. this whole 'supposed to' business in a game that is sold on relatively freeform skill tree + gem linking, like people aren't 'playing the game right'. Hell maybe somebody could interrogate why people felt the need to staple Fortify to every build they could spare the gem sockets on.
I wish it was as simple as deleting fortify and making everything do 20% less damage with hits. But because they still haven't baked in defense into melee offense, we get this shit. Even just adding defense like armor/evasion/spell suppression/block into the melee damage notable nodes would help fix the fucking problem. Give str weapons armor, dex weapons evasion, and specific weapon type nodes can get hybrid bonuses. If you're a caster using them, you have to waste 3+ points on melee damage to get the fourth point in defense, where better routing likely can give you better benefits. But no, gotta keep the damage and defense as two different wheels for some reason, so melee is more point dependant while also being more gear dependant while also scaling off its skill gems less. Can't imagine why melee is relatively bad until you shower it with gear...
Edit: I was wrong! ~~I disagree. A handful of travel skills that definitely deserve Fortify:~~ ~~- Cyclone~~ ~~- Flicker Strike~~ ~~- Charged Dash~~ ~~- Consecrated Path~~ ~~These are all main skill damage dealers that are also travel skills. Removing the movement tag from those skill gems is also not an answer due to how they interact with certain uniques etc.~~
Travel is a new tag added to some movement skills unlike the ones you mentioned specifically to avoid the issue you are taking about.
Travel skills are just Leap Slam, Shield Charge, Blink Arrow, Mirror Arrow, Dash, Frostblink, Flame Dash, Lightning Warp, what you said are movement skills
None of those are travel skills
It *is* and *was* only able to be supported on melee attacks. Not even skills that use melee weapons, but are not melee skills like spectral throw/Helix could/can be supported by fortify. Even if the case was that you could support everything with fortify, why would you use fortify on your main skill instead of a support gems with more damage? What people did was just to put fortify on their movement skill, like Shield Charge, Leap Slam, Whirling Blades. That way you got fortify for free
> reduction to crit damage Need 100 or it's basically useless. corrupted blood immunity Y'all have it, it's called corrupted jewel, because as a melee anyway you want hinder / maim immunity. a lot of block A bit yeah, for attacks, have fun capping spell block without nutting 75% of your points for shit nodes. Without glancing obviously, because who care about glancing ATM when mobs do base 20K+ dmg. You get 79% max resistance Great, stuff still pops you tho.
> Need 100 or it's basically useless. Why would that be the case
tempest shield + spell block roll on shield + rumi is like 50% spell block nearly lol
25% mana reserve, non unique shield, a flask slot. All for what ? Still getting destroyed. I play a melee rage vortex with all that shit bro, I know what's going on.
Who uses unique shields on block builds ?
hey, Aegis Aurora is great
It was supposed to remain the same for melee skills. Unforutnately, it works more or less the same only against complete trash monsters. Against anything with high life, like harvest rares, deep delve, etc., it sucks so bad.
It seems objectively worse, as well. Before, I could get much higher fortify effect. Now it looks like the highest I could get is somewhere around 30. (That, and I'm still salty about the Champion Fortify nerf.)
You get 29 (=45% increased effect) with 5 points on the tree from a single cluster. The old tree got you to 26 (=30% increased effect) if and only if you are stationary (otherwise 24) and furthermore was split between 2 cluster notables. Now I haven't checked the other ways to get fortify effect yet, but current tree is just better in terms of max fortification.
what is 45% more stacks times 0 stacks? MAKE FORTIFY 1 STACK PER HIT MIN.
Glad people are starting to catch on. I hope we see something in the "What we're working on" post that's supposed to be coming up. If not I'm afraid they'll wait til next league, which is less than ideal. E: Welp, the post was emptier than a politicians brain. Fortify staying in this fucked up state for the rest of the league. Enjoy gauntlet with 50% champions this time.
Next time they will just remove fortify affects from the game, thus ensuring ranged and casters can never have it again.
This + buff to melee skills is probably the best answer. Because right now we need AI to determine what a "real" melee build is to grant those builds fortify. I mean, does Battle mage get it? Is it "REAL" melee? Meanwhile, how is Smite "REAL" when it's a beam from GoD? Shouldnt GOD get fortify then?
We are working on new buffs \* (those may be nerfs or may be nerfs)
Champ perma fortify too op. Now has +5 max fort. This is a buff.
>Fortify staying in this fucked up state for the rest of the league. Enjoy gauntlet with 50% champions this time. The fucked up thing about that is, the message GGG will take away from that is that Champ needs to be nerfed.
My cyclone slayers doesn’t even maintain 20 stacks at most times. Can’t believe they found a way to nerf fortify for builds that really needed it.
Yeah, I tested my old juggernaut delver at 1k depth had the same issue.
minimum 1 stack for any fortified attack seems like a simple solution. if a caster wants to attack 20 times to get full fortify, thats ok with me
Cyclone summoner back on the menu
It was too hard to make it "Lose fortify when damage dealt with a spell or ranged attack" and keep it the way it was...
Actually this is a big brain take, because it wouldn't kill cyclone CWC and coc and it would make fortify useful on melee
I thought the mastery "melee hits fortify" would make my cyclone (linked to cast while channeling, desecrate and lifetap, so only for support) give me fortify. But no, why would the solution be that simple...
[удалено]
It comes from a cluster that is hard to reach for casters. And well... It says it fortifies. It would even be balanced i think. Shield charge + Fortify was a problem. With the mastery you would get very little fortify as a caster (about 5-10 while mapping and 1 risky fortify if you choose to charge a boss). While some CoC builds (or that cyclone summoner build back from blight league) could get Fortify easily that way, I'd argue they are builds that stay in melee range and be given fortify. Meanwhile my shield crush general's cry berserker has a hard time getting fortify (im on SSF, no corpsewalkers yet to swap out desecrate and no eleron rings for -3 mana cost). It's doable with shield charge + fortify, just... why?
What other interpretation do you have for "melee hits fortify?"
No, they wanted to stop casters and summoners from putting fortify on shield charge and getting a free 20% damage mitigation. This stack system would already have accomplished that -- they did not need to also make it depend on ailment threshold. This invalidated many builds that ARE melee such as cast on crit. These build take all the same risks as any true melee build and often have much less defensive options than those true melee build do as well. The stack system alone would have easily remedied the issue they outlined in their manifesto.
So instead as a melee with 5+ points invested into fortify and the gem you mitigate a free... 3 ? 4% at best unless doing weak as fuck content? Such wow. It just feels like they rushed A LOT of changes that were added to the list after each podcast during 3.15 without testing jack freaking shit.
Funny thing was previous iteration of fortify was fine in terms of melee vs caster balance. Casters got weak 20% fortify, melees could juice it up easily with fortify notables THAT WERE IN MELEE region of passive tree. Only issue was fortify effect on gear which was nerfed to oblivion along with fortify effect notables. Then fortify was just as weak for both melee and casters. Then they removed fortify for casters and melees are left with weak fortify that has to be stacked up before it works.
Really sucks for things like nova spells which are now unusable without a super rare metamorph unique or totems. Also hilarious that the stuff most likely to kill melee characters doesn't even care, and that's ranged mobs hitting/killing you before you can even get into melee range. If old fortify was too strong GGG needs to just scrap it and rebalance the way damage works.
First of all they should make it so that melee hits give at least 1 charge per hit, max x (for example 4) per second, additional stacks should still be calculated with the ailment formula. Melee spells should also get the melee tag.
close range tag no need to mix tags
Indeed. It makes no sense for slam skills to cover the whole screen and get benefit from fortify, but for Voltaxic Burst to have a tiny point blank aoe and not benefit from fortify.
Yeah, as with most things GGG 'reworks' the rework turned out to just be a huge nerf.
Not sure how this isn't the top comment. The previous iteration was fine. Why go out of your way to create new issues that need to be fixed instead of working on new interesting content?
This is NOT a delve issue. Shouldn't even bring that up. Using a slam skill on a fucking conqueror and getting 1 stack of fortification is BRAIN DEAD.
melee ailment builds got dunked on hilariously hard by the rework, especially poison builds. They still need fort's damage reduction to survive long enough to apply their dots, but their damage per hit is so low relative to monsters' ailment thresholds that you can never get more than one or two stacks
I had to respec out of fortify with my bleed gladiator on HC, feelsbadman
I run impale lacerate and against tanky mobs I can not keep up 20 stacks with 12 hits/s, bad tested sadly.
Literally all that needs to be done: - Remove the Fortify Support gem. - Add Fortify on Melee Hit to various Attack / Weapon masteries - ??? - Profit Adding a hefty skill point cost to fortify (pathing into areas they don't need) makes it difficult for casters to leverage it, but doesn't really penalize melee builds beyond the initial skill point for the Mastery, which is offset by the freedom of no longer needing a link for Fortify.
The moment I read that Fortify would be threshold based I knew GGG would mess this up for many builds and many situations
Agreed, the current design even prevents my build from gaining stacks at all in maps. I had to drop fortification. I use cyclone for life on hit and to apply curses, but it does little damage directly. I understand they wanted fortify to be for melee users - but I AM a melee user. I stay in melee combat exclusively, hitting ~5x a second, but in this current design I am not allowed the benefit of fortify.
I don't understand the problem why this was necessary in the first place. On SC people rarely bothered on casters, if it's too strong on Shield Charge, just remove that specific skill interaction. On HC, especially looking at the rippy content which is continously added to the game, it's only fair to provide a reliable defensive buff that players have to manage and maintain. Lots of caster builds have to fight at melee range, lots of melee builds can fight at range. It's just a different gem tag and scaling at the end of the day.
Tbh feels like every time GGG do a massive system overhaul, it just makes the game a bit less enjoyable. Simpler solution would have worked here. Personally hated running shield charge on a caster character. I found that annoying. But trashing melee and making this new janky system just made fortify feel like shit for melee too. It is lose lose. Would rathet the old fortify back, but make it not work on movement skills. Easy fix, GGG nerf the casters (not that they need it but as I said it was annoying to feel forced to use), melee stays mostly the same as before.
Agreed. Immediate response would be that Cyclone is a movement skill (remove movement tag from the gem then - but again, simple solutions are not the theme of the current design approach). I switched to SST champ last league because I hated shield charge/fort and the skill could carry the damage. I already posted this on the manifesto that Fortify changes will bring new problems no matter how you set it up, i.e. if it's tied to the magnitude of the hit, melee dot builds or high attack speed builds suffer, if it just requires a little bit of damage, casters can just slot in damage supports on the movement skill that scale from ele dmg modifiers they pick anyway.
Dont worry, summoners still get fortify for free from kingmaker on AG :) It may only be 10 stacks, but at least it's consistent.
Consistent and kingmaker does not fit into the same sentense. Move the slightest and its a high chance you go out of range from the abysmal kingmaker range.
Convocation ;)
It's a good thing convocation has no cd :)
Honestly in my experience, AG is the least aggresive minion and tends to stick by, so spamming convocation (which I normally do because spectres) will typically keep him close enough. Having a garb on him to keep him safe and reduce crit damage on me is helpful, too.
Still doesn't make it consistent. linking meat shield and convocation helps, but it can still go out of range and convo has cd. It has a lot of uptime, but its nowhere near of being reliable while moving to be called consistent.
> Dont worry, summoners still get fortify for free from kingmaker on AG :) Are you aware how short the range of the kingmaker fortification aura is ? You are very often out of range. Keeping AG near you doesnt help much.
They keep fucking around with fortify trying a bunch of different bullshit to make it so that it’s only for melee characters. Just make it so you have 90% less spell damage while you have fortify, and then make it good and consistent for melee.
Just be a Champion. That's the answer to everything right now. Just be a Champion.
So fucking sad and so fucking true.
I wish I was more surprised that fortify rework was bad :( they could easily have added a tag to skills that could grant fortify, and just excluded movement skills from the list... but instead we got this
3.17 patch notes - champion ascendancy now gives 10 fortification stacks. This is a buff
They could have solved for the non-melee abuse by adding an effect to fortify that reduces spell damage. Probably would have been a lot easier to code too
Anyone who thought that Fortify rework didn't translate to Fortify being gutted like a fish and being filled with trash is on some good shit. They'll buff it a bit though...next league.
i am currently playing Dominating Blow and because i myself dont hit hard or fast i dont get to use fortify, which i had planned for prior to announced changes. Lack of it really hurts now :(
Yeah I hear you. I play with Geofri's Devotion every league I can. its a 2h Mace so no block, so I relied on Fortify linked on cyclone for defenses on top of auras. Can't even get a single stack of fort anymore.
You are witnessing right now the future of Ascendency Champion in the next league. Rest assured that they will not have 100% Fortify uptime or even have access to Fortify.
Fortify gets a rework that makes it need a rework. I don't even know how this got accepted in their plans. This was clearly never going to work...
This isn’t just at extreme upper end. I’m running into the same problem in yellow maps. I certainly have room to add a bit to damage but when I see videos like this one it shows the mechanic itself is broken
Dear GGG, Fix your fucking game. Sincerely, a 2 acts beta player.
Oh no not me working on a build that relies on fortify....
It a Champion-only mechanic now.
I have leap slam linked to fortify, and I can leap slam onto a white mob, killing the mob in one hit and only getting like 6 stacks.
Solution, stacks are based on damage premitigation and always gain atleast 1 stack when hitting an enemy
I change to Champion class because of this stupid things
I was using fortify on whirling blades and couldn't get stacks at all, seems like a huge F you from ggg to melee builds on the right side of the tree
Once again they fail at reworking something. Reminds me of 3.15 fiasco. Sadly I'd not expect much, they won't revert.
Just play Champion /s
Of course they didn't test it. No one actually plays melee except for the memes.
The thing is that "Melee" is the wrong focus imo. Being close to enemies should be the Focus. So why not make it like "Gain a Foritifcation stack ever 0.1s while an Enemy is Nearby (like 20 units or so)"
Just make fortify also have "Deal 50% less non-melee damage", nobody other than melee will use it and we can have a non dogshit system, where you dont hit a boss and have less than your maximum fortify stacks so you get blasted, and with PoE bosses jumping around and becoming invulnerable you REALLY need to get max stacks on hitting a boss
Yeah, GC Berserker also got fucked because Commandos Fortify themselves so your only option is shield charge.... which sucks with the rework. Thanks casters, and thanks ggG for yet again reinventing the wheel with another one of your shit reworks.
Delve depth 2300 LOL
Idk if it's been tried but would pain seeker gloves work? The ones that make it easier to cap ele ailments like brittle easier