Defense Overhaul: Introducing Toughness
In an effort to better equalize effective Health across classes and builds, we’re making several changes to the way effective Health interacts with Damage Reduction and how those individual stats are calculated. Our goal is to properly test you defensively as you climb through difficulty tiers, putting more emphasis on gearing your builds towards survivability.
Armor and Resistances will both become rating systems, with diminishing returns at higher values.
Armor now reduces all damage taken, both Physical and Non-Physical.
We’re introducing a new type of Damage Resistance: Physical Damage.
The Armor and Resistance penalties per Torment Tiers have been removed.
Skills and Paragon Nodes are being reworked with these changes in mind. Paragon Nodes and Skills that provided various form of Damage Reduction now grant a multiplicative bonus to your armor or all resistances.
To help you understand your defenses better, we’re adding a new stat called Toughness that represents the total amount of raw damage of each type you can take after considering all damage mitigation sources.
Toughness is displayed under your character stats beneath Attack Power.
The Toughness value summarizes your average defense against each damage type, hovering over this value will give a detailed view of how effective your defenses are against each specific damage type.
Healing Updates
Potions are changing significantly to make their use more impactful and tactical. These changes go in tandem with the Renown changes next, so keep that in mind when reading these changes.
Base Potion capacity has been reduced to 4 (regardless of previous Renown progress).
Potion healing is now an instant, percentage based heal. Using a Potion heals you for 35% of your total Health immediately on use.
In addition to the Potions you pick up, you’ll also slowly regenerate a Potion every 30 seconds.
Life on Hit has been improved and re-added as a potential affix.
We’ve also increased values for Life Regeneration, Life on Kill, Healing %, and made them more readily available.
Healing Potion upgrades have been removed considering Potions are now a portion of your overall Health.
Fortify Re-design
To work in tandem with the changes to Healing and Potions, Fortify is shifting from a type of Damage Reduction to an additional reservoir of Life that’s drained to heal you over time.
When you now gain Fortify, it will stack up to your Maximum Life. When you have Fortify under Maximum Life, you’ll heal for a percentage of your Maximum Life per second in exchange for an equal amount of Fortify.
You will be considered Fortified as long as you have any amount of Fortify.
Specific changes to Skills, Passives, and items related to Fortify are detailed in the 2.5.0 PTR Patch notes found at the bottom of this blog.