Ingame buffs such as affixes (like gems and certain amulet perks) are applied in an inconsistent and in transparent manner. Affixes are allowed to exceed fortify/ABS caps arbitrarily for no reason while limiting the amount of fortify that can be applied.
This is not resolved by moving most fortify buffs to an armor buff like on PTR.
Many abilities, such as defensive formation, remain in this weird state where affixes such as gems are allowed to increase caps if they exceed them, while otherwise their sum is capped together with fortify.
This can be represented with this formula
MIN(MAX(AF+SE,MIN(AF,-0.3)),MAX(AF,0.5)) + ABSVitalsfor the damage reduction provided by affixes(items), status effects such as buffs and absvitals perks such as mob wards.
Affixes do not deserve special treatment. This special treatment makes it hard to reason about the game and serves no useful design purpose.
This design also leads to exploits where damage mitigation becomes 100% because they are allowed to ignore caps due the way those caps are applied.
This is probably not well written, but it should get the point across. We should not need tables like this to understand and reason about buffs in the game. Credit to X-R for collecting this information.
