I took the deep faith merit on a hybrid bleak walker/rogue build.  At first, as I gained the aggressive and cruel reputations, the defenses were going up, from 15 to 21 as I had 3 in both Aggressive and Cruel.  Then, suddenly, it dropped to +15, the base value.  I'm not sure what happened, nor how to fix it.  I can provide save files if necessary.  I hadn't gained any 'negative' reputations, so it is unclear what exactly happened.

Greetings,

 

And thank you for taking the time to notify us of this we'll go ahead and forward it a long to our developers for further investigation.

 

Cheers.

I think the drop in the defense value happened as the game switched to v 1.1.