why do devotions which provide bonuses to retaliation and shield skills also force defensive ability upon you?? this literally makes zero fucking sense. there are plenty of other defensive stats which could be used in place of DA for these devotions. i’m just dumbfounded that this hasn’t been addressed yet. :rolleyes:
what’s wrong with them having DA though? I would think a defensively based devotion would have defensive ability.
There’s not really anything wrong with more DA, unless you really need to be hit and crit all the time.
Too much DA can be bad for a retaliation build, which i believe is the complaint here. I would kinda agree since most retaliation based gear comes with good defensive stats anyways, but it is not really a big enough issue to worry about fixing. Retaliation is so gimmicky right now anyways, needs to be made more consistent and then damage output nerfed (I have had a 195k crit on a pure retaliation build, which sounds great until you try and fight a ranged enemy).
How is retaliation affected by DA ? Are you thinking of reflection ?
Too high of DA is bad because it will lower clear speeds if mobs miss hitting you 
You need to be successfully hit for retaliation to trigger. This is not the case for reflection.
Either way, unless you somehow wind up with ~2400 DA, it won’t make a huge difference in Ultimate, since enemy OA is bloated. Don’t worry about it.
The DA is important and is there to help mostly with tanking. The retaliation % is merely a bonus for your retaliation skills.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to remove DA from a constellation that can help a lot of builds for something that supports a niche build only.
The anvil constellation is what set me off. It’s garbage. The DA needs to be replaced with block % and recovery. A block proc and the constellation doesn’t give a single bonus to anything related to blocking, what a fucking joke.
I still don’t get why we don’t have Physical Resistance % bonuses granted via constellations to begin with…
Physical resistance is already somewhat rare to get with gear bonuses without sacrificing some offensive bonus for it… it’s like the chaos damage resistance on PoE :undecided:
Stacking DA on a retaliation build is counterproductive. Stacking Armor and Phys resist on the other hand is good because it lets you reliably reduce damage you take while getting hit all the time. There’s also block of course.
Not to mention, the stun from the hammers helps prevent more hammers from appearing.