This seems like a good opportunity to dump some numbers and ask some questions. The goal really is for fortification generation to be pretty straightforward for melee builds, including ailment builds, and we're not opposed to tweaking it more. Let's walk through things.
When testing and tweaking the new fortify system, the goal for myself and others was to strike a balance of making it as easy as possible for melee builds with low hit damage to generate fortification stacks, while making it as hard as possible for non-melee builds to do so. There's obviously a fair bit of potential overlap, so this really came down to looking at specific damage numbers for the builds we cared about, tweaking the formula by educated guess, testing it, and repeating. I didn't put any specific numbers in the patch notes because it's hard to put them in context without writing a wall of text like this one, so here are the hit damage numbers required to get fortify stacks against normal monsters with average life, before fortification generation modifiers, at a variety of levels:
| Area level |
Damage for 1 stack per hit |
Damage for 20 stacks per hit |
| 31 |
140 |
1600 |
| 50 |
290 |
3300 |
| 68 |
1560 |
18000 |
| 78 |
3290 |
37500 |
| 83 |
6200 |
71000 |
Magic monsters and rare monsters have their inbuilt life multipliers more or less cancelled out by the inbuilt multiplier to fortification generation against them, though of course can have more life than that due to mods. There's also a massive bonus to fortification generation against unique monsters, but since unique monster life is extremely variable it can take as much as double the damage listed above to generate stacks against bosses, with 1.3–1.5x the damage being a more common range.
We ended up with the numbers above because they felt right to us for low-damage builds, whether hit or ailment. In testing, the most bare-bones builds we could come up with were able to sustain full fortification stacks against appropriate content, generating 3-5 stacks per skill use at worst. I double checked this as part of preparing this post by borrowing someone's SSFHC level 85 Lacerate Glad, and despite the damage being real low — still on a 5L, white mobs taking 5 seconds to die, bosses taking up to a couple of minutes — I was able to consistently sustain fort stacks on content as hard as shaper guardian maps, which is obviously not content that build is particularly ready for. Once you start introducing map mods that reduce the build's damage it definitely struggles with that, but that's really a worst case scenario of content — there are a lot more reasons why you wouldn't be doing guardian maps with hard mods on this build until you get stronger.
There are a couple of caveats I haven't mentioned though. Firstly, we felt that requiring low-damage builds to invest a few passives in fortification generation wasn't unreasonable. The build I mentioned above takes the Rampart cluster (using the fortification generation path), and the double fortification duration mastery. Generally the builds we tried could spec into Rampart if they found themselves struggling to generate stacks, and aim to spec out of them later when their damage was higher. This is also why Rampart was moved to be easier to path to. Secondly (for ailment builds in particular), wanting to generate fortification stacks basically forces you not to use Deadly Ailments Support, which we didn't really have an issue with.
So that's the info and process dump. With that all out of the way, I have some questions for people. We tried to test as many builds as we could for this, but this is PoE after all. There are always more builds, and we can't promise we didn't miss anything:
- If you have a melee build (of any type) that is struggling to maintain fortification stacks, give me the details! Post or DM me your account and character name so I can take a look. This is honestly the main reason I'm posting this, since it's been very hard to gain context for the negative feedback around the new fortify system without seeing the characters people are struggling with.
- Do you think expecting low damage builds to take the Rampart cluster to have consistent fortify uptime is reasonable?
- Do you have a build that needs Rampart for fortification generation but doesn't path anywhere near it?
To be clear, this is not a promise that anything will change as a result of this feedback, but we'll definitely consider it. Thanks everyone.
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