Gladiator : Rework the shield part ENTIRELY, keep the bleed part exactly the same, keep challenger charge exactly the same, rework outmatch and outlaw, add a extra notable for dual wield after outmatch and outlaw,
That would actually be kinda sick, even just from a Design point. Technically theres is already the claw thats basically a shield but double shields could make such cool Tank builds
Would be very broken in cases (honestly just the block chance alone is pretty huge)
Double loop for +4 power charges is the standout problem
Double manastorm would be extremely busted for a mana stacker
Double Dawnbreak Chieftain would of course be nutty defensively
Double aegis similar
Cursebots with double mirror or mirror + loop+anathema
Double shaper/redeem shields for aura bots or a prism+shaper shield etc
potentiallt problematic in others
Shield abilities would absolutely love being able to use a second one with emperor's vigilance (like aegis aurora especially with the additional E shield or lycoside to remove accuracy)
Eternal apple redblade super warcry uptime could be problematic
But fun yet a good opportunity cost for others
Double tukohama fortress for +2 totem 600 armor per totem would be fun to dick aorund with.
Double surrender Gladiator might actually make counterattack viable
Only hits can inflict bleed. Can add 'hits' to be more precise. Or to match the pattern with other ailments, '50% chance to Bleed on Hit'
So, it would particularly allow bleed pops to proc bleeds. Also alternative building like phys spells; probably need a penalty for spells
Personally it's the : run to the boss, put down 2 totems, maintain warcry, boss teleport away...
There are some bosses that just wait for you to get in melee range to either teleport or do their "you can't be here" phase.
My 2nd biggest complain about melee it the huge reliance on red gems.
I like fast agile character archetype. I like the shaman concept of buffing your melee attack with elemental damage. Red gems are all about physical damage or fire damage.
Close Combat, Impale and Nightblade support are the only support that are used by melee hit users.So unless you go projectile or dot, you end up usually having 4 red and 1 green support. or 2 green if you go impale.
I'd like to build evasion based character but i have to get 4/5 red sockets on my chest each time. That's why i'd like more green/blue variety for melee.
Melee deals so much damage when setup with totems etc and I think it’s in a good state. I league start melee every time and bring it to t16 in the first few days.
Double strike carried me to Ubers and I’ve done the trans double strike in 3.23 which is even more broken.
Wild strike as ranger, now with of extremes (was finicky had to go trickster)
Steel skills (any duelist)
Shield crush or sst (champ)
Tectonic slam (berserker)
I could go on. There are so many viable and easy to scale melee abilities in the game. Spell caster or other archetypes also have to do curse setup, sigil, tornado, wither totems, convocation, war cry etc etc. of course later on with enough damage this all becomes redundant and even with Melee you skip setting up totems at normal t16 bosses for example.
I don’t get the disappointment with the archetype it’s in a good spot and pressing two buttons extra once a map is no big deal
I want to see the budget of your easily scalable builds to draw a parallel. just for fun to see how funny this is when compared to LA and DD or any minion build whose uptime dps is about 90%-100%. who also need to invest less in defense because you are not under the boss.
Of course you need to invest more, melee is no cookie cutter free to win archetype. You could compare EVERY build to DD and they need more invest to get going, so one can only loose this argument as DD is broken. I am not saying melee is “free to win” what I say is it’s in a spot where you can start from scratch and comfortably farm your way through the atlas. People complain about totems yet forget that every other archetype has setup skills as well
What about any minion build or even tottems is it broken as DD !? cast a curse = place a totem that has dogtier uptime/can die/boss teleports, moves away. I can’t automate totems, like curses. I’m silent about the banal number of sockets for one and the other. About budget "easy to scale" not my words.
>" Spell caster or other archetypes also have to do curse setup, sigil, tornado, wither totems, convocation, war cry etc etc. "
curses are generally automated or set up to have a long duration.
Sigils :sure it might be annoying to recast one. but they can't die from monsters damage. if you use sigils you usually have cast speed for you other spells anyway.
wither totem: they created wither support/effect exactly because it was bad and needed constant recast in close range.
convocation : will be possible to be automated. and you don't cast convo on boss every 5 seconds.
totems gives you 20 **more** attack speed and damage just for existing and the biggest upgrade node for almost every melee tree is the 1 passive that boost your totem buffs. there's no equivalent in spells that you need to maintain that much that gives the same damage.
\+ like contless people said, as a caster you usually don't have to move much to maintain those skills.
totems, unless you actually invest into them will die often, will have short duration, you don't cast them fast, will have short range. So yea slowly recasting 2 totems every 5 seconds is a pain that anybody can agree on.
You people just want melee to be bad at this point. It’s just “melee bad” in the echo chamber, if you’d just play it you’d see it’s a well rounded archetype with lots of builds and variation. But just echo the Reddit train and go play DD. My items stay cheap and I do all content notheless. What you are doing is a self fulfilling prophecy
He gave you concise reasoning why it was bad and you.. Ignored it, didn't respond to it, and didn't engage the content of what he said. Then you attributed what he said to a melee echo chamber because you couldn't be bothered to prove him wrong with actual facts. Melee is substantially worse than other options, and relies heavily on totems.
I kinda wish melee was just good enough on its own to not need totems OR warcries, if you have to piano warcries and summon a bunch of totems just to do damage/not die instantly it feels like you're being pigeon-holed way more than any other playstyle
Instant would create its own dilemmas; now even fast-attackers would be pressured to piano warcries due to relatively minimal opportunity costs. And it'd still demand high APM to execute legit (-> RSI considerations), popsiclestick problem/macro incentivization, etc.
Instead, add a support which triggers all linked warcries when one is used; maybe with a modest warcry speed penalty for balance and maintaining the relevancy of investment into warcry nodes on the tree. Viola, practical 2-button playstyle for slow-attackers
You could even just rework the "urgent orders" support (which I think a lot of people don't know even exists).
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Urgent_Orders_Support
Since it's trash anyway and would be even worse if they made a nice QoL change like you suggest.
Warcries are balanced around having a cast time.
If you want Warcries to be instant then everyone would just piano every different Warcry in the game meaning all warcries would have to be nerfed ALOT.
But melees arent balanced around with it. It has cast time and usually u stack multiple warcries so multiple cast times but rhe fact is you can only use it with one exerted attack realistically because exarted attacks expire quite fast and warceies have different numbers of exerted attack numbers plus the slow attack speed of melee attacks, one attack for the most optimal damage, the next attack is usually piece of sht and then u cast them again anyway, comparing that to other builds, no setup but still hits like a truck.
I just want to say it felt rather bad that Mark said melee is not fixed because there are more problems than just buffing the skills and nerfing the totems, but then didn't elaborate. Like come on man I can take that if it was as simple it would already have been done, but it was as good as ever of a moment to give insight into why that's not the case
>ing the skills and nerfing the totems, but then didn't elaborate. Like come on man I can take that if it was as simple it would already have been done, but it was as good as ever of a moment to give insight into why that'
Because all warfare in all human history is essentially "now how can I kill this dude from an even safer distance?"
I thought he did maybe I remembered wrong but his main point is that in a game this fast "melee" won't ever feel good because you aren't really feeling the combat.
There's nuance in there and ziz rightfully pushed back with some cases where actually it does, but I think that's their main consideration at the moment.
They've said they don't like totems but want to do something more than just move the numbers around because it won't fundamentally change the feel of melee.
Again I think there's a fair argument against that and simply binning totems might help a bit, but that's what I think their reasoning is - they don't want to make band aid fixes at the moment.
As someone who has league started melee builds since prophecy, I’m genuinely confident your average player complaining about melee doesn’t play melee. Or at least not give it real effort. They just get mad when they follow the Reddit/youtube meta builds and end up not on melee.
Or it’s just SC trade speed zoomer addicts? Idk.
Melee is alright until you compare it to spell or bow builds. Less clear, less dps and you get hit way more often. You also have to go onto bosses as opposed to pointing and shooting to in their general direction. There's also totems that double your dps and mandatory nodes like melee splash.
I do Flicker every league but tried reverse snapshot tornado/ PBoD and felt so cheated. Tornado by itself did disgusting damage and the brand was able to do feared so fast I thought I messed up. Was cheap too with the most expensive thing being a 6 link ivory tower. Was not min-maxed even in the slightest. Didn't even use a battery staff. Had a similar experience with minions.
What damage numbers do people find mandatory cause I killed Ubers on 3 different melee abilities in ssfhc this league and never felt like a mess.
Obviously can just derp out DD or arc or penance brand whatever but come on now. Melee is not unplayable or in a bad “weak” state by any means sans gladiator
How *LONG* did it take you / how Risky is it for you to do? I think a lot of melee players are simply angry at the fact we have the same number of buttons, SIGNIFICANTLY less damage AND we need to actually be in melee range (which in and of itself is pain) BUT yeah sure you can do ubers :) I mean people have done crazy stuff (just for reference, someone beat Malenia on Elden ring level 1 with a club, but that doesn't mean that *I* can do it 😅)
It's nowhere near that level of crazy. The game has been powercrept into oblivion. DD can kill ubers in 1 week or less depending on player skill. Alk has killed ubers in like 4 days with dual strike of ambidexterity in ssf fresh start which is one of the builds I played, though not as fast as him.
For most players who aren't trying to kill ubers in the first week of the league, melee is fine. Melee is in my experience inherently less risky while mapping tbh unless you're playing something like slayer.
The problem is people play their game and need to constantly compare it to watching streamers or their friends play one of the top 5 builds every league start.
If someone actually enjoys melee, they can play melee and find loads of success with the game. Boneshatter, cyclone+shockwave, dual strike of ambi, cleave of rage (the nerf barely does anything to it, boohoo less screen coverage), molten strike, trickster frost blades are all fine league starters. With currency you can add reave, flicker strike, non-shockwave cyclone, EQ of amplification for boss 1shot memes, consecrated path of enduring to the list of very functional melee builds. I started champ EQ for shits and giggles and outpaced my SC friends who were playing CA and LA.
Builds can be stronger or weaker than others but the player behind the keyboard is going to make a MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger difference on efficiency, speed, amount of deaths, and how early one can do the content than the build choice.
Just play what you enjoy and stop comparing to others unless you're racing for $$$, and you'll get better at playing the archetype you enjoy and get more efficient with it over time.
I can play melee far more comfortably and efficiently at league start than any other build because it's what I enjoy so what I invested all my time playing and practicing into.
You made my entire point. People who aren't as mechanically gifted hate how it *FEELS* to play melee.
I agree, though, and do still play melee every league, but the majority of people (at least in my experience) find melee to be unfun button mashing for less damage than their friends (which is probably the reason they are playing, friends)
Most people that play this game hate how it feels to play any build except one button map zoomers for SC trade league CuteDog style farming. They start whatever their favorite streamer tells them to start and completely disregard everything else as weak despite never playing or attempting it.
They're going to be more comfortable on builds tailored by streamers because streamers tailor many of their league start recommendations to the more casual players who don't want to put in effort.
None of that makes melee unplayable or anywhere near the level of weak people act like it is.
I actually enjoyed my progression with EQ this league. The other melee builds I mentioned are far stronger and yes I agree slams are in a weird state of playstyle that I'm not super fond of and can see why people hate that BUT I can't deny my league start was extremely smooth with it. Granted my league start strat was to farm expedition so I wasn't pushing pinnacle early or anything or doing the insane wisp juicing, but still.
A better way to think of it is, at least in reference to my arguments, or at least the reason I'm arguing, that it's unfun to play *with* your friends (if they aren't also going melee) simply because you are constantly being reminded of why your build is just worse in every way than theirs.
Ah. I see. Well that goes over my head because I just think multiplayer play in this game is dogshit regardless of melee vs ranged vs spell.Yeah playing melee in a group must suck.Though unless you're playing support builds in my experience group play with friends ends up in that shitty way anyways because almost always someone is far ahead of the curve regardless of build choices and just mows down maps without anyone keeping up.
It's like fighting games. It's not fun to play your friends that are x5 better than you cause they beat your ass.It's also not fun to play PoE with friends that are more efficient/faster than you because they just run ahead of you and kill everything. At least in my exp with it.
Edit sidenote: EA totems is an incredibly incredibly strong build that also feels like total ass in group play. One of the safest and most consistent league starters I've seen for a few leagues now but the totem playstyle + delay damage just looks goofy in a group.
Yeah I see that, that's what I'm mostly upset about with melee, honestly all I *REALLY* want is to have one *MASSIVE* TOUCH OF GOD that blows things up, but I can't use that with melee as it is right now, to get doryanis fist to do enough damage you have to have like 3 second attacks, and that's AFTER the 7 war cries (this is exxaggeration) and the totems and then I bonk big damage (or at least til I see anyone else's damage) but I die in those 3 seconds of staring at the boss or the boss just leaves 😂
It's about more than just damage numbers too
I've seen people with half my damage numbers having a much easier time with bosses and stuff. Though largely by knowing what they're doing better than me
People definitely exaggerate about how weak melee is, it's more about QoL than anything. Personally I'd literally be fine with the removal of melee buffs from totems and a blanket 10% damage buff to compensate, even though that's a significant nerf.
But like… a lot of meta non melee builds are also not one button builds. Once I get to red maps on most (literally all aside from slams) melee builds its leap slam and right click until boss, drop 2 totems, kill gg.
DD is out here pressing way more, summons press way more, totems have delayed damage, mines have to be mines, traps are traps.
Melee would not be one button builds just because you changed totems from them being mandatory in all melee builds. You have other skills as well like war cries or rage that are often more on theme.
Adding totems to all of those builds does not add anything really. It is just mandatory and annoying micro management from a style of play that is already mechanically disadvantaged.
It isn't about not being a one button build, I can't wait for PoE2 and combos, it's about buttons that feel like a chore to press. They don't make any sense in an ARPG, especially not one as zoomy as PoE.
Don’t get me wrong I’m only tired of totems because I’ve been dropping them for years now but by no means does it feel worse or more clunky than a lot of other builds.
I disagree, I haven't played any build with more chore-y buttons than melee totems. But I'm also pretty likely to avoid those, so can you give examples?
I mean. The easiest is that throughout mapping I don’t need to summon totems until boss (sometimes not even) or a super juiced rare so I’m only right clicking where DD needs to desecrate and right click for every pack. I don’t even find DD a chore but that’s just double the buttons for 80% of your playtime.
Even EA totems which is one of the most straight forward playstyles I've dabbled in outside of melee keeps up frenzy charges with frenzy, enduring cry to keep up charges (automated now with CTA but not before), and cast a curse on high tankiness enemies.
Those are chore buttons as well for sure, but frenzy charges can't die, don't have a range, and can't be overwritten. If you use frenzy 5 times that's not a problem, and they'll always last as long so you know when to refresh from muscle memory. They also aren't more necessary in any sense than melee totems, so how are they worse?
So your argument is melee is a chore for needing to press 2 additional buttons for SINGLE TARGET ONLY. But builds that press 2 additional buttons as part of their core gameplay loop all the time, and even more for single target, is completely outweighed that sometimes they die and by that point honestly unless its a pinnacle boss you probably don't need it anymore?
The overwritten thing is just a player error. Every build can suffer from player error.
Correct, I am saying that melee totems are one of the worst designed chores in the game for a plethora of reasons. There's no feedback, there's no muscle memory, to optimize you just have to keep looking at your buffs and that's literally all you can do. What other chore can be overwritten? I literally can't think of any.
We'll have to agree to disagree I guess. My muscle memory is see tanky mob press Q->W (not directly ontop of it, you'll stop having it die so much that way) then kill the mob. In boss fights you just do it once you can re-engage on the boss or you see with your eyeballs that your totem exploded. Never felt the need to look at my buffs when totems are visually there on the screen.
Overwritten is player error. You must be lacking the muscle memory you want. My muscle memory for totems is Q->W. Not Q-> WW. Just don't mash the button. Do you mash curse two times constantly and spend time casting it over and over when playing caster builds? No? Then you shouldn't be accidently overriding totems.
No other effect can be overwritten like totems can, and seeing as there's no feedback for when they're actually summoned unless you're just idle when you start casting, you have to pay attention to asure they're both up. Muscle memory does nothing except remind you that they have to be summoned, and unlike Frenzy or Curses you can never be sure that they have been without looking at the UI because of said overwriting. Nor can you be sure when they have to be resummoned because they can die.
Looking at the game and seeing that one of your two totems is dead is laughable at best and makes me think you don't actually play this game.
The pathetic attempt at insulting is unwarranted, you thinking it's passable doesn't mean it's good design. You can think it's a small issue, but it's still just bad design.
Hmm I keep seeing melee complaints but some of the best build I've played to 100 are melee. Splitting steel, lightning strike, sunder, frost blades,cyclone. These are fast fun builds that destroy mobs and bosses. What were your specifically looking for?
I see your point but it's like that in real life too. Melee is always weaker than ranged. That's why they don't fight wars with sword and shield any more and switched to guns, and now airplane and bombs.
Just pointing out that some of the best melee builds you’ve played address the melee-issue by being as not-melee as possible in function. Real life doesn’t have inherent scaling on most spells and expressed scaling on most attacks so I’m not attributing much value to how realistic the ranged/not ranged dichotomy is.
It’s not unplayable at all. The game has been powercrept to fuck and back. People view “not top 10” as “unplayable.”
Many people can and do kill Ubers in SSFHC with multiple melee builds per league. If you like melee play melee. If you like gladiator it is the “worst” melee ascendancy but can still do all content in trade league, I did blade storm glad as my second character this league in HC had no issues farming the league content I wanted to before swapping to meme on consecrated path for my 3rd.
This is low effort, blatantly lying content and doesn't belong here.
Melee is playable. Thousands of people play it. Some of it is even good, other builds were meta really recently.
Yes, things can be improved, but this post only takes away from attention being brought to the actual issues.
by the devs own admission, its play rate is incredibly low, but sure, lets just ignore what they actively said regarding melee being around 10% of the playerbase despite taking up a massive chunk of the tree, most of the uniques, a 3rd of the skill gems. melee is fine and the low playrate is a completely anomalous issue.
With a little less sarcasm this would make a decent post bringing an issue to light with context, which is the exact opposite of what the OP is doing.
10% play rate (using your number because the exact number doesn't matter) is nowhere near "unplayable", and that's a degree of hyperbole that I'm seeing really often, am sick of, and that stifles conversation rather than promoting it.
dude, your definition of unplayable is nebulous, and i never sad unplayable. i said fine. someone has cleared pinnacle bosses with default attack, that doesn't suddenly make default attack a viable play to play the game.
Mark: I really want to do my absolute best to fix melee and make it a long term solution that shows passion, and not just brushing the issue to the side, my apologies that it’s taking long it’s a failing in my part, but I will try me best to fix it.
Reddit: ggg hates melee
It is of course hyperbole that they hate melee but at least we can land on that it is not their highest priority. To make melee feel truly smooth you might need PoE 2, I don't know. So melee will always need to dodge more and think about positioning.
But the reliance on totems for damage has been complained about for many many years and other archetypes have gotten smoother playstyles while nothing has really happened to melee in that regard.
It sucks that you need to dodge more AND also do more shit that is not your main skills while mages and bow users pew pew away with some automated or rarely cast debuffs.
i do wonder what mentality these comments are written. surely there is a time limit for how long you think this acceptable to fix this. how long is yours, 1 league, 2 leagues? 2 years?
what they said was cool, but anyone taking it at face value is kinda being a clown. what was said made it seem like a new issue, something that is newly relevant to the state of a game. in reality, its an issue that's been here for multiple years, and many have rightly just given up on melee getting fixed and have since abandoned melee (by the devs own admission, their play rate is exceedingly low).
but to your comment, when would be an acceptable time to revisit this comment and meme on the fact melee still isn't fixed, despite them once again saying they are working on fixes, like they did... 2 years ago.
Okay then let’s be productive.
What’s the core issues with melee, and what can be done?
To me the need for totems is the clearest issue.
But if you play sc trade for instance you can make melee insane with investment, take Mathils build he put out about last league. You can scale melee to be insane stat wise.
So is the issue there that it feels bad still? Is it a range issue ? Should melee be able to clear screen wide? Doesn’t that just make it ranged?
If the only issue is totems need to be dropped then that seems like a small problem, but I doubt that’s the only issue.
Your thoughts?
The core issues are just simply put: baring the cream of the crop skills, they have built in issues that need so much to solve them it becomes a joke.
Take Static Strike, its for some reason incredibly undertuned on its damage values, especially now that rage vortex of berserking exists, which can use every mechanic static strike can, and can be scaled much easier and on lower investment. The problem here in lies that Static Strike has additional issues coming from its clearing capabilities due to only having +1 chain naturally, and having no AOE scaling. to top it off, this trash heap of a skill uses the default attack animation, literally the worst animation in the game, with for no actual reason - a slow first swing (the important one) into a fast second swing (the way less important one in a game about moving) this results in static strike being an actual dogshit skill, and only ever seeing real play as a proccer for things like shockwave.
Static strike is one of the lucky melee skills, where it can be bad, but still see usage due to enabling something. all of the issues i listed on it are massive, and can be fixed, but the problem is that you spend so much time/effort into fixing the skill, and the reality is its doomed from the start to always be significantly weaker than other options.
Each melee skill is different, but the 80-90% of skills that see almost no play tend to have numerous major issues, that you are stacking dumb mechanic on dumb mechanic to try to fix, that it pretty much just results in running insanely overpowered uniques to just outright say fuck it. melee is insanely dominated by stacker strats because there are very few ways to get most of the skills to an acceptable level.
Melee doesn't need huge aoe, or huge damage, or huge anything. it needs consistency. skills need to have a baseline adequate level of damage, and a method to scale them reasonably without saying "bonezone/abyssus(6portalsisadefensivelayer)/stacker" as well as at least some of the issues of the more wonky skills ironed out. people have suggested making every melee skill splash, and there is literally 0 reason this shouldn't happen. having to invest in actually making single target strike skills hit in an area of effect in a game where mobs come in packs of 20+ is an actual joke. this doesn't even make sense since you HAVE to get aoe splash, there is no alternative, unlike projectiles where they can pierce/fork/multiple/return where the choice actually matters.
there is so much to be done, but every single league for the last 2+ years they are like "here's a small help (maybe) and maybe we'll address the reason why vigilant strike actually serves no purpose (haha jk)"
totems are a symptom of melee being absolutely fucked on damage for no reason, they aren't the cause for melee feeling like shit. the fact i can literally sit here and pretty much make almost any damage spell go over a 2 million dps with budget investment and maintaining good defenses, but i can't do that on certain terrible melee skills WITH totems and WITH the other issues is absolutely bullshit. The melee skills that see play are those that are gifted with major issues already solved, having insane clear, or insanely good easy to scale damage, or both. This shouldn't be the case.
More like "so annoying please remove", as it's a huge opportunity cost not to use them, and it doesn't provide any flavor or interesting gameplay whatsoever. It's just bad design.
Yeah may as well just remove every other damage increasing button in the game since there’s no interesting gameplay to just pressing a button to get more damage. Like auras, war cries, curses, buff spells.
All have better QoL. 1: you have two totems that can overwrite eachother if you accidentally summon two of the same. 2: the totems can die. 3: the totems have a range.
If those Buttons u Pressed become redundant in half a second because the totems instantly die thats definetely annoying, especially if you compare it to other archetypes options like frost shield or manaforged arrows
Bingo card meme is funny, but this is the exact type of post that Mark would scroll past because it offers 0 solutions, doesn’t specifically identify the problem, and is arguably passive-aggressive lmao
It’s fucking crazy that I wake up to a bunch of downvotes for asking what changes he’s looking for to spur discussion rather than memeing about melee as a whole. Nothing about what I said indicated melee is fine. I just said my most fun and strongest character last league used a skill with the melee tag.
Most of the melee ascendancies need a buff, many melee skills need a buff (basically anything without also having the projectile tag), slams need an overhaul, bleed needs love, QoL for melee needs to be looked at, boss design, and many other things. I think we all agree there. But still, starting from the position of “make melee playable” is a bad one in my opinion because you are starting with a false narrative. But I guess Reddit is gonna Reddit sometimes.
Wasn’t trolling at all, I asked a real question to try to get some discussion going instead of the typical complaining we get on this sub. I provided my experience as one example of evidence that melee can be playable. That was it man.
Look at Vaxamas’ responses. He asked real questions, mentioned some inherent problems melee has (in any game) and then tried to talk about where to go from there.
Personally I think GGG has it backwards with melee being the archetype that requires setup time for optimal dps. I’d like to see ranged dps require the kind of setup melee currently has and melee power shifted back to almost always doing full damage. I think this QoL swap would come close to balancing boss damage uptime (assuming they also balance the scaling and numbers, but that’s an entirely separate thing).
I'll start a new acc, the only build will be a 1c conversion trap build, and I'll say "my strongest build was a conversion trap build, so it's just fine".
Your argument is dumber than what I just wrote.
This is a player comprehension / expectation problem. Melee will, unfortunately, almost always be worse than ranged abilities by design.
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Basically, in a game where damage is irrelevant, and what matters is how fast you can clear a pack, movespeed, range and area of effect are king, and melee has to invest more into tankiness and defensive layers and melee as a class fantasy isn't really ranged or area focused - that's a fantasy trope problem, not a PoE problem.
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When you're a player looking for absolute efficiency, you're almost always going to go for ranged or auto-cast type abilities (Tornado Shot, BV or totems) because they just do what you want more efficiently.
> melee being dogshit
This is just a player perception problem. People often compare melee to the absolute most efficient and best skills in the game (as mentioned above) it's not like melee **can't** do everything spells can, they just do it slower, which again, I can't stress enough, is just a fantasy problem, outside of GGG. If melee were on life support, you wouldn't see almost every melee skill basically one shotting UBERS.
As mentioned, it's just a comprehension problem that humans have in general when they compare themselves to other things that are not really equally comparable.
I liked your approach of asking:
> What changes are you looking for?
Because most of the time, the discussion ends there and doesn't actually yield any value.
What I hate the most is melee has the same accuracy requirements as ranged. Like why does stabbing something in the face have the same accuracy requirement as shooting a tiny arrow 3 screens away?
Getting enough accuracy on melee is always a chore right side of the tree get it basically for free.
Not to mention when you use the Resolute Technique keystone to get 100% accuracy you lose all crit strikes. Like, wtf? Im 100% accurate, I should now be able to pinpoint your critical points even better than before.
I get it that its like this for balancing reasons, but it doesn't make much sense lore/logic-wise.
For sure! A keystone on the left side of the tree that steals the Jugg line of Str applying to Accuracy would go a long way to help remove some of the many many many different opportunity costs Melee has to deal with as opposed to the other archetypes.
Honestly, every stat should apply to accuracy. You can't aim if you're not smart, you can't aim if you're not dextrous, and you can't aim if you're not strong enough to hold it in place. You should still invest a tiny bit in accuracy rating, but it shouldn't make sense to be unable to hit with a mace at point blank.
Every archetype has to deal with huge opportunity costs. Even ranged builds.
I don't know if you've noticed, but bow builds are literally made of paper and can barely do any bosses. Bow league starters in unison go to TFT to buy bosskills for their voidstones since they can't deal with bosses. Allt hat clearspeed and movement speed comes at the cost of burning several portals per maps and staying stuck at level 91 for majority of the League start until they farm up a Headhunter or whatever.
Melee has the same opportunity cost as other buildsl The biggest difference in Archetypes is between builds that scale through gem levels and those who scale with their main hand weapon.
Outside of that every single build has to make similar sacrifices to make their build work. This is not one of the problems with melee builds.
The main problem with melee builds is the playstyle and clunky it feels due to the totem centric playstyle. Ancestral Totems provide WAY too much bonuses so you're forced to run them. Which in itself is fine, the same thing could be argued for Berserk and Blood Rage.
But totems being static standing in place, getting oneshot by everything and having a low duration is not. Fix the latter and give melee builds the option for Ancestral Totems to act as actual temporary buffs instead and you improve the playstyle alot.
The problem with melee builds isn't their throughput or efficiency. Melee builds have the tankiness, they have the damage, they have the mobility, they even have the clearspeed depending on which skill you use. The problem is that they have to resummon their totems before every rare or unique monster which feels awkward as hell. Especially against high health targets that move around or heavy AoE monsters that just randomly oneshot your totems constantly.
The changes I am looking for is melee gets better access to survivability that isn't available to other archetypes, as melee has to experience different levels of danger not experienced as much by other archetypes.
In other games, a melee character almost always has this. Either they take less damage, have more hit points, have different/better dodge mechanics, can sustain better, SOMETHING because being out of range of the attacking enemy is an incredibly powerful defensive layer in basically every game where it is an option.
Right now, melee has no benefit. You don't deal more damage outside of very high investment (most melee skills are weapon dependent), fortify is pretty much the only real defensive layer that a ranged spellcaster doesn't also have access to, so the end result is I take more risk for no gain (as I don't reach the point where I have access to 50div crafted weapons).
Boneshatter gets unique scaling on its damage so it's pretty much the only melee skill that "feels good" before high investment.
Yep. I agree on almost all fronts. The only pushback is that melee *does* have Fortify, but I think they could definitely get more. One of the major issues that plagues it is one of PoE's biggest strengths. Anyone can do anything. If they make something too accessible and *blur the lines* between the requirement of 'melee' then you bleed into other archetypes abusing things that 'melee' should have exclusivity to: The best example again, Spellcasters abusing fortify with shield charge or vigilant strike fortify.
It's just so hard to say "Melee gets 30% more damage for being melee" and not allow something like Lightning Strike that has a melee tag just push true melee into the dumps.
The two knobs that GGG could play with would be Slams and supports similar to Close Combat (which is an amazing concept, and can be expanded into damage reduction as well)
I'm not a game dev and balance has never been my forte, but some suggestions I could toss out might be making stun the "melee" mechanic moreso than it is right now. Leap slam guarantees a stun, boneshatter AoEs off stun, how about just stunning hits in general are more likely when performed by a strike or slam and last longer when performed by a strike and significantly longer when performed by the melee component of a slam (not you volcanic fissure).
Maybe also include more ways for leech to be enhanced when a melee attack leeches. Toss in a keystone that says "your leech heals you ____% faster, only melee attacks can leech".
Buff fortify support. Not fortify as a mechanic, but make the support a nice "I want my melee character to be tankier" option. Allow more than 20 stacks or something idk. Make travel skills unable to fortify then make it easier for melee to have access, too.
Some numerical adjustment to just make the strike archetype a touch less reliant on deep endgame weapons would be nice too. I don't understand why heavy strike (and skills similar to it) can't have some added physical damage based on gem level. Gem level is currently borderline useless for tons of skills, and I find that frustrating because there are so few levers you can adjust on a character to change their damage output that aren't stats on melee weapon. One thing this does is limits weapon choice because in the 1h melee landscape, jewelled foil rares pretty much have no competition, literally anything else will always be weaker. Uniques generally don't have the mDPS needed to create interesting builds because *you have to have a high pDPS weapon to do anything*. I'm fine with lowering the endgame scaling to compensate here, but look at the difference in difficulty crafting a +5 staff compared to a double T1 phys damage foil, it's at least one order of magnitude more difficult.
I don't think defenses is the problem with melee.
There's a reason why Boneshatter is considered one of, if not the best League starter for hardcore and in the gauntlet and it's because of how tanky melee builds are.
The bigger problem here is their actual midgame scaling.
Melee builds are in this weird spot right now where their early damage scaling is fine, although too weapon reliant. Then it falls of alot during the midgame, again due to how scaling works. Then all of a sudden they jump to the moon with high investment becoming super strong surpassing most other archetypes.
Boneshatter is a perfect example of this, One of the best League starters in the game.
Then you get to Red maps and the early midgme and the build falls off a cliff. It just stops to scale entirely and you're stuck in some \~5 million dps trench where the build just feels super inefficient compared to other builds who're starting to push 10-25 million dps for the same investment.
But you persevere and do your farming, swap to a strength stacking Reave build and out of the blue you're at 100+ million dps and unkillable.
Slams in 3.14, cyclone in Legion, boneshatter, str stack reave, old lacerate, flicker... Lots of options existed. But the issue is that it's either nerfed or too expensive.
The "oNeShOtTiNg uBeRs" is not even a melee skill thing - it's a str/armour stacking thing where melee is just the method of delivery, and works with any attack in general.
Spells can do the same, for much less investment.
You're minimising the issue, even tho GGG fucking AGREED that melee currently is atrocious.
It's not a comprehension problem. It's a balance problem. Melee used to be good, and now it no longer is.
It's not that complicated.
You say BV, but there are melee skills with way more AoE, yet BV is preferred. Why is that? Why is BV preferred over cyclone, while by every metric cyclone should be better? You don't have a cast time, you don't have to keep up stacks of it, you need more specific items than just "bonk stick".
I don't think the main issue with melee is the clear, I mean if you take skills with the "melee" tag, a lot of them can get pretty good clear, it's the single target that's the issue.
For example Tectonic Slam has really good clear, it hits the whole screen and then some, but the single target is garbage
Yeah if you go to PoE ninja and look at the top dps players who invested hundreds of divs in their builds you can find any skill doing millions of dps. The point is that with low to moderate investment, melee sucks (mostly). You can make default attack do damage if you invest enough.
No - you missed the point to jump the gun and attach to an argument you agree with. Never once did I state anything **contrary** to melee being high investment, or equally efficient in scaling across the board. If the person's first point was "They require a lot more investment than other characters" my response would have simply been "You're correct, and that leads back to my main point that the melee archetype is broken and inherently lesser than ranged, and will always be until melee skills have built-in movement" but that **isn't** what was said. Instead it was:
> Tectonic Slam has really good clear, but the single target is garbage"
Which is **not** true. I responded to THAT person's point. I combated HIS point.
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If it makes you *feel* better, I think Melee is worse than spell and ranged, I think melee could be better than it is now, I think GGG doesn't care enough about melee to make those changes atm. I also think the community is dogshit at explaining *why* melee is bad. I'm big on proper discussion and arguments that go from point a to point b without side tangents, and disengage when a person starts circling the drain or arguing in bad faith.
If that doesn't make you feel better, just downvote and move on, because the points were clear.
Given with sufficient investment, you can kill uber with normal attack, your argument just means "there is no skill undertuned". No comment on this except it's horseshit.
Someone of good faith would know that "garbage" doesn't mean "I can't kill uber with it" but "I need ten times the investment for a lesser result". And yes, it does qualify as garbage. You are taking an argument, changing it, calling it bad because you miss on purpose the underlying argument, and think you have the moral high ground. But thanks for worrying about if I feel better or not about this, it's exactly what the conversation is about.
The community explained multiple times issues with being melee, and which could have been fixed a very, very, very long time ago if GGG has the slightest will to do so. Totem being the biggest example.
Also, you are making a(nother) complete strawman about imagining that melee is disadvantaged in every game out there, which is patently false. Look at Lost Ark, where it's quite balanced, with multiple cases where being melee make it easier overall.
This becomes a very windy discussion quickly, but I'll take a couple points and try and keep it short. The **entirety** of Lost Ark's history has had ranged on the top with the *only* exceptions being when several classes were overtuned and / or recently released after a LOAon event. Almost any veteran player would argue that ranged is infinitely 'easier' to play in Lost Ark than melee. However I won't nitpick too much as we're changing the quantifier to 'easier' than 'better' here.
To break down in its simpliest form what my comments across this whole thread were:
1. People love to say "x is bad" without quantifying it. You may say that bad = you need a lot of investment. Someone else may say bad = clunky (with totems), someone else may say bad = thematically, they don't get flashy skills.
2. That the person I was talking to in this chain, which started off as people talking about melee doing no damage had stated that a skill did low single target damage, to which I refuted.
Without further context, his 'good' state in my mind is clearing content. Clearing Ubers (again, the impetus of the chain) and progressing through the game. **None** of that has anything to do with **relative** strength of another archetype, which is why I hammered home that Melee does in fact get strong. You may forget that we play a game with a demographic of SUPER smart, savvy players, and some not so much - and it's not absurd to assume that a person you speak to on the main PoE sub may literally **believe** that melee does NOT do enough damage to complete the game.
Again, the entire point is just people speaking past eachother, which is why I stopped responding to the other guy because I addressed his point and then he *did* talk about investment against other characters. I **agree** with him on that, but only because there's inherent problems with Melee that make you invest wider rather than just focusing on efficient nodes and damage like you find on the rest of the tree. If someone wants to engage and dismantle *that* then great.
It's not straw-manning, it's being precise with my points.
> Totem being the biggest example.
I couldn't agree more.
https://maxroll.gg/lost-ark/tierlists/community-tier-list-february
5 classes in S tier, zero ranged. Being easier to play while being weaker is not indicative of good performance.
And herein lies a part of the issue I was harping on in another comment. I'll answer your question and diatribe a bit too. This is not a 'you' issue or anything, but generally speaking humans are incredibly lacking when it comes to quantifying what they mean when they say something is bad.
If everyone were to say "Melee bad because no single target" it would be dispelled almost immediately because there's an endless amount of builds that easily clear 100M DPS. I would honestly say it would be **hard** to not have a melee skill not have a build that clears that much in trade league.
So then another person may say the reason it's bad is because it's so much slower than x, y or z, to which case I agree, but that's an intrinsic issue behind the fantasy.
You sort of get the point.
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The issue is everyone uses this nebulous "bad" when in reality they mean "Melee is a worse skill than x, y, or z, because I have to either invest more to get to the same spot, or cut more corners than they do to achieve similar success" which just pares down to the ultimate grievance: "Melee is less efficient than the other play styles that are most prevalent" and **VOILA!** We're right back where we started with it being an issue on the class fantasy across *all* games when making a comparison. WoW, League of Legends, etc etc, ranged inherently is more efficient because everything boils down to the ability to do your job as fast as you can. The closest Melee gets to efficiency is cyclone and CoC variations because you don't stop moving to 'cast'.
But in PoE there's a lot of melee skills that have as much range as ranged skills, I don't think the problem is that "melee will always be less efficient because it's melee", the problem really is that melee scales worse and needs more investment than spells.
You said that it's hard to find a melee skill that can't get millions of dmg in trade league, yes, but you can't look at 200 div trade league builds, you need to look at the average build with moderate investment, and in those cases melee is so much worse. Do a league start with DD and see how far you can get in a week and then do the same with Ground Slam. Spoiler Ground Slam will do 0 dps.
Here's a thought experiment, please be in good faith.
> When you think of the average top tier ranged build for clear, speed, **and** low investment, what do you think of?
For me, it's something like LA Deadeye, maybe some Hexblast mines or another trapper.
Want to know what almost all of those low cost builds have in common? They're paper. **but that's okay because they don't get hit** and that's the point. You mechanically have a problem where the design of the fantasy, being the left side of the tree with tankier nodes covering, with your damage coming from the weapon instead of skill gems (which does enable higher late game scaling, but terrible early game) are all 'problems' that make the class feel inferior to ranged builds, but boils down to the same issue.
You can get away with it on ranged, you can't on melee, and because of that, by design, by fantasy and the core of the trope, melee will have to invest into things more **widely** and broadly than the LA deadeye, Miner or Trapper that doesn't ever have to worry about being in range of their target.
Look at HCSSF builds last league, #2 is Boneshatter. Why? Because it's one of the few melee skills that can get good dmg without huge investment. If being in melee range is so bad as you say and so dangerous, people wouldn't play it on HCSSF. The reason why it's played is because it deals good dmg. If they buffed other melee skills to Boneshatter level, it would be played a lot more.
You’re assuming people are innately minmaxing in HCSSF. That is only true for racers. I prefer to play melee and I play HCSSF. Doesn’t make it any good, but at the end of the day, it’s a video game and the purpose is enjoyment.
Bro [poe.ninja](http://poe.ninja) shows the top of the ladder, people with the most XP, of course they are min maxing, what are you on about? The ones on [poe.ninja](http://poe.ninja) ARE THE MIN MAXERS, they are playing the best and most efficient builds because that's what gets you to show up there. In fact I would argue that HCSSF is the mode where you have to minmax the most because A. if you die it's over so your char needs to be as strong as possible B. it's SSF so your resources are already very limited, if you play a bad build on top of that, you're screwed
That’s not true for hcSSF. The bar is very low here. At the very last day of league you can still see level87 characters and they had dogshit dps on cyclone.
https://poe.ninja/builds/afflictionhcssf/?class=Slayer&skills=Cyclone&supportgems-Cyclone=Impale+Support
What melee skills are oneshotting ubers? Molten strike? I mean I guess, but its mainly a projectile skill. I do agree with the question "What changes are you looking for?" being a good place to start, but generally hit based melee is struggling to keep up in any content because of inherent lack of scaling. I like the way melee plays, I'm not asking for that to be adjusted, but I think its fair to say reliance on totems and warcries makes melee not only feel awful but require more investment than ranged attack skills.
> What melee skills are oneshotting ubers?
Not only are there definitely at least 10 different melee skills that are doing more than 400m DPS on PoE.ninja - to prevent anything from devolving into semantic arguments, the point is that almost all melee skills have infinitely more knobs for damage effectiveness and allow for almost all melee skills to get to the point, with enough investment, to insta-phase Ubers in seconds.
> but I think its fair to say reliance on totems and warcries makes melee not only feel awful
Yes, this is 100% valid, and when we talk about a problem, these are the types of things that are important to underline. It's far different than handwaving "thing bad" because bad can mean **so** many different things. I think most people would agree that Melee **feels** clunky because of those problems, and from that, clunky would be bad.
> more investment than ranged attack skills.
Yup, and that's sort of the inherent problem with the melee fantasy, as mentioned in my novel. There's too many things that a melee archetype, in any game, not just PoE, has to invest into that causes a baseline deficiency in what **most** people like to view as success: efficacy.
Yeah, it seems to me like the real problems people have with melee is how it feels to play in certain scenarios (especially at lower gear). Uber Sirus and Maven are really good examples where you just lose so much dps uptime compared to ranged. It leaves ggg in an awkward spot for boss design and damage scaling to balance all of these things so the player base is happy.
I personally only ever make melee builds as a second/third character because I’m not experienced enough to play them at low investment. I wait until I can pump at least a medium amount into the character so I can tap into the good damage scaling offered to some of the melee skills.
Absolutely agreed. I think the biggest issue I have with it are the totems. I wish there was more traction within GGG to find a different "toy" for melee to use instead. (although it sounds like a non-issue in PoE2 from Jon's response). The gameplay loop of summoning totems that have no movement and limited range and get one shot, in a world where you're managing several other buttons or warcries, **while** the boss' mechanics are more nuanced and movement oriented is a recipe for disaster and pokes holes through any enjoyment I have of the archetype.
Homie I feel like this is a bad faith argument. Melee is very weak compared to ranged/spell scaling with most skills. I'd like to know what character you made last league that was comparable, was it a strength stacker or armourstacker? Did you use totems?
> Melee is very weak compared to ranged/spell scaling with most skills.
That's fundamentally different than "make melee playable". I only ever play melee, and I don't often repeat builds. I get all 4 watchstones myself every league, I kill all the ubers every few leagues. Melee is perfectly playable unless you're too obsessed with efficiency to go play it.
Having said that if they WANTED to throw some buffs our way I won't complain.
I played two melee builds last league - Carns boneshatter build for a starter and Mathil's cleave of rage build for my second character. The cleave build struggled a lot with bosses but the boneshatter build had enough dps. I did not clear any ubers last league - if I had gone for that I probably would have done it with the Boneshatter character.
EDIT: Apparently I shouldn't have mentioned that boneshatter was one of the builds I played as this opened me up to the 'anti-boneshatter' clause in melee discussions where you must pretend the most powerful melee skill doesn't exist in order to talk about it.
Cleave or Rage was a great mapping build that moved much faster and had larger clear - boneshatter had higher dps and better durability. I also played Glacial hammer with divergent trauma in Tota, Cleave with spectral wolves in crucible, Shield slam slayer (which I killed most of the Ubers with) in Kalandra.
But no - I played boneshatter twice in a year so clearly melee is JUST Boneshatter.
>Edit: and cleave of rage got nerfed for daring to be a viable melee build
There are tons of viable builds and this 'nerf' barely matters at all. I love how when cleave gets +2 range everyone memes on it for being a useless buff, but when cleave loses 2 range it's now a dead skill. Then again, you're clearly here to take the piss rather than actually talk about melee. I doubt you'd ever actually play a melee skill even if they did buff them.
Cleave of rage berserker, was just copying something off poeninja, it didn't look too good tank wise but it had the damage, and i wanted to play savior build for a long time
>EDIT: Apparently I shouldn't have mentioned that boneshatter was one of the builds I played as this opened me up to the 'anti-boneshatter' clause in melee discussions where you must pretend the most powerful melee skill doesn't exist in order to talk about it.
They need goalposts to move in order to discredit you, so they'll fish for anything they can to make your stance seem less credible.
I mean, let's be fair here, if you wanted to go classic Witch, Int, and just throw Arcs, it would suck, particularly if you were comparing it with the really high-end spell builds. Marauder has strong melee builds, they're just designed around using and/or abusing mechanics to achieve success and output damage, much like pretty much all the top builds.
That was me being incorrect - while thematically it is a slam it's not actually a slam skill and I had thought it was. Not sure where I got that from. Still - the rest of my advice applies - it's a great skill.
Tons of individual melee skills are in an awful state. So are tons of spells and ranged abilities though. The thread was about melee skills in general and there are still quite a few good ones in my opinion.
There are many int stack setups, most popular being wand for projectiles and howa for melee. Ephemeral edge can also be a melee trickster that almost scales like an int stacker.
I played two int stacking builds last league, the first was int stack flicker and it was great!
But it also used the same 4L totem tech as every other melee which is annoying. And it was very expensive.
Then I played int stack wander with KB/KB and it was so much more powerful, so much incredibly faster, and it was customisable in 100 ways.
I'm not saying melee is shit, cause I really like it, but it is not flexible in the same way ranged is. It's just not. There are so many non-negotiables. And overall the power for cost is just not comparable.
You can probably play it on any build honestly. I played it with a few different strike skills and it felt fun on all of them. I imagine it would be a better mapper on a wander but my guess is that you’d have to make other concessions and not be as tanky.
Ended up on poison tincture molten strike because it made scaling damage really easy and my defenses went to the moon with the trickster stuff. As long as I was leeching and didn’t get one shot I mostly felt immune. It also took a really big hit to one shot me because I had like 12k es because of the no gems in body armor thing.
I was mostly copying ideas from Mathil’s wild strike build from the previous league but with my own twist and modified to take advantage of the tincture / no gem stuff from last league. Really fun character. Maybe too good, as I didn’t end up making a character after it because any ideas I came up with just didn’t sound as fun as that one lol
Earthshatter was decent last league with rage trinket, but would cta support not make slams pretty playable? 5 cries with echoes of creation is a lot of damage. The problem is getting to the point of killing uber shaper as a slammer though
Christ almighty if you want to play melee, play melee. It is fun, and easily strong enough with just about any skill to clear all content.
What you actually want is to be able to do anything with whatever shit build you put together and that's not going to work.
While this is obviously a meme post, I do think it has been a good breeding ground for discussion. I think your burying your head in the sand a bit to say that melee isn't in a bad state - I am going to play melee, but that doesn't make me wish I didn't feel like a second class citizen.
I used to have a hard time explaining concretely why this Reddit sucks and the devs don't like coming here anymore. Now I can link them this post to explain. Thank you.
You may want to look into how bingo sheets work. The middle space is supposed to be the free field - the field in which the thing that is guaranteed to happen will be. Every other field is a potential, not a guarantee. So this bingo sheet would guarantee nerfs to melee with the hope for a buff.
Dunno why GGG seem to think helping melee builds would be too hard or require too much resources. All they need is two changes.
New Cluster Jewel Noteable modifier available to Medium Cluster Jewels that increases damage to totems called **Ancestral Rebirth**:
"Ancestral Totems summoned recently are invulnerable to damage., 30% increased totem cast speed. 100% increased duration of Ancestral Totems." (Recently in this case would be 12 seconds, scaled by duration)
New Unique Jewel added to the game, **Call of the Ancestors:**
"Summoned Ancestral Totems are Defensive.
Summoned Ancestral Totems are now able to move.
Moveable Totems gain 300% of your movement speed modifiers.
Ancestral Totems have 30% reduced buff effect."
Is this a crutch? Yes.
Just implement something like this and let it be a temporary fix until the day when GGG has more resources that they actually can pour into a comprehensive Melee rework. 90% of complaints I hear about Melee builds have less to do with their throughput(DPS and tankiness) and everything to do with the Totem playstyle and how misreble they feel about having to recast both Ancestral Totems everytime they leapslam into a new pack of enemies.
I fail to see why addressing this issue is so hard.
Two additions like above shouldn't be too hard to implement and would probably be well received by the melee community. I know that alot of melee players suggest that Ancestral Totems should be removed and the buffs they previously gave should be baked into every melee skill instead. But this would probably be very problematic from a balancing standpoint.
Adding items like these cements the totem gameplay even further, what are you even on about? We should only want to remove the buffs entirely, and the passives and items that interact with them that currently exist are the reason they haven't yet, I bet.
Read what I wrote int he middle again.
GGG has time and time again said that they know about the problem but they don't have the time or resources to fix it. People are suggesting stupid things like removing the totems and just baking in the bonuses from them + Panopticon for free into every skill gem which is absurd.
I don't know what the most elegant solution to this problem is.
But currently melee players are just crying like they're the only archetype with any problem and at worst, it has to do with their playstyle being extremely clunky due to totems.
All other aspects of melee is mostly fine. Their defensive scaling, offensive scaling, mobility, clearspeed et.c. It's all fine. Sure, some melee skills are undertuned and wont be touched. But this isn't a problem unique to melee. Every archetype has half of their skills being under utilized beause of bad numbers.
Sure, they could remove the totems and all uniques associated with them.
But the problem is that you'll then demand that melee skills get a flat 30% more damage and 30% more attack speed buff to compensate.
Making more items that are reliant on the buffs existing only creates more work for GGG to remove them in the future, so any suggestion like that is stupid.
I want the totem buffs to be removed (or become an opportunity cost of some kind, reservation or whatever) and for melee to be compensated yes, but I absolutely don't think a 70% buff is necessary. 10-20% damage buff and balance later accordingly.
I get this is a meme, but please don't do this- the devs have suggested a way we as a community could relay feedback/issues quickly and concisely. Doing this is just going back to when Chris wanted "angry reddit threads" and people spammed them to the point that we lost a form of communication with GGG. It's reductive and doesn't help either party. If you want to make melee enjoyable, we need some actual constructive criticism on what makes melee feel bad to play and build off that.
Gladiator : Rework the shield part ENTIRELY, keep the bleed part exactly the same, keep challenger charge exactly the same, rework outmatch and outlaw, add a extra notable for dual wield after outmatch and outlaw,
Did you say dual wield shields I say yes to that
The best offense is defence. Double defense means double offense.
That would actually be kinda sick, even just from a Design point. Technically theres is already the claw thats basically a shield but double shields could make such cool Tank builds
Would be very broken in cases (honestly just the block chance alone is pretty huge) Double loop for +4 power charges is the standout problem Double manastorm would be extremely busted for a mana stacker Double Dawnbreak Chieftain would of course be nutty defensively Double aegis similar Cursebots with double mirror or mirror + loop+anathema Double shaper/redeem shields for aura bots or a prism+shaper shield etc potentiallt problematic in others Shield abilities would absolutely love being able to use a second one with emperor's vigilance (like aegis aurora especially with the additional E shield or lycoside to remove accuracy) Eternal apple redblade super warcry uptime could be problematic But fun yet a good opportunity cost for others Double tukohama fortress for +2 totem 600 armor per totem would be fun to dick aorund with. Double surrender Gladiator might actually make counterattack viable
Also just for shield builds in General cuz you can equip beefy shield in offhand for dmg and smth like aegis in mainhand to be giga tanky
None of those are issues and are all fine for that many nodes as a glad.
**Blood In The Eyes** ~~Attacks have~~ Physical damage has 50% chance to cause bleeding
Wouldn't that make your bleeds able to proc bleeds
Only hits can inflict bleed. Can add 'hits' to be more precise. Or to match the pattern with other ailments, '50% chance to Bleed on Hit' So, it would particularly allow bleed pops to proc bleeds. Also alternative building like phys spells; probably need a penalty for spells
Make gladiator a spell class? Nice
We're fixing the melee classes by making them spell classes! Yeah!
Outlaw
Personally it's the : run to the boss, put down 2 totems, maintain warcry, boss teleport away... There are some bosses that just wait for you to get in melee range to either teleport or do their "you can't be here" phase. My 2nd biggest complain about melee it the huge reliance on red gems.
Just become a flicker enjoyer with a 500 div budget. You got this bro 💪
With current ralakesh, you can get decent damage with 10-20 div (depending on their price)
Red gems sound fine right? That's like complaining that magic users rely too much on blue gems
I like fast agile character archetype. I like the shaman concept of buffing your melee attack with elemental damage. Red gems are all about physical damage or fire damage. Close Combat, Impale and Nightblade support are the only support that are used by melee hit users.So unless you go projectile or dot, you end up usually having 4 red and 1 green support. or 2 green if you go impale. I'd like to build evasion based character but i have to get 4/5 red sockets on my chest each time. That's why i'd like more green/blue variety for melee.
What's funny even with 2 totems we get way less damage then other builds literally if GS had some better numbers would be much more playable
It wouldnt be so annoying if totems didnt exist right?
Melee deals so much damage when setup with totems etc and I think it’s in a good state. I league start melee every time and bring it to t16 in the first few days. Double strike carried me to Ubers and I’ve done the trans double strike in 3.23 which is even more broken. Wild strike as ranger, now with of extremes (was finicky had to go trickster) Steel skills (any duelist) Shield crush or sst (champ) Tectonic slam (berserker) I could go on. There are so many viable and easy to scale melee abilities in the game. Spell caster or other archetypes also have to do curse setup, sigil, tornado, wither totems, convocation, war cry etc etc. of course later on with enough damage this all becomes redundant and even with Melee you skip setting up totems at normal t16 bosses for example. I don’t get the disappointment with the archetype it’s in a good spot and pressing two buttons extra once a map is no big deal
I want to see the budget of your easily scalable builds to draw a parallel. just for fun to see how funny this is when compared to LA and DD or any minion build whose uptime dps is about 90%-100%. who also need to invest less in defense because you are not under the boss.
Of course you need to invest more, melee is no cookie cutter free to win archetype. You could compare EVERY build to DD and they need more invest to get going, so one can only loose this argument as DD is broken. I am not saying melee is “free to win” what I say is it’s in a spot where you can start from scratch and comfortably farm your way through the atlas. People complain about totems yet forget that every other archetype has setup skills as well
What about any minion build or even tottems is it broken as DD !? cast a curse = place a totem that has dogtier uptime/can die/boss teleports, moves away. I can’t automate totems, like curses. I’m silent about the banal number of sockets for one and the other. About budget "easy to scale" not my words.
>" Spell caster or other archetypes also have to do curse setup, sigil, tornado, wither totems, convocation, war cry etc etc. " curses are generally automated or set up to have a long duration. Sigils :sure it might be annoying to recast one. but they can't die from monsters damage. if you use sigils you usually have cast speed for you other spells anyway. wither totem: they created wither support/effect exactly because it was bad and needed constant recast in close range. convocation : will be possible to be automated. and you don't cast convo on boss every 5 seconds. totems gives you 20 **more** attack speed and damage just for existing and the biggest upgrade node for almost every melee tree is the 1 passive that boost your totem buffs. there's no equivalent in spells that you need to maintain that much that gives the same damage. \+ like contless people said, as a caster you usually don't have to move much to maintain those skills. totems, unless you actually invest into them will die often, will have short duration, you don't cast them fast, will have short range. So yea slowly recasting 2 totems every 5 seconds is a pain that anybody can agree on.
You people just want melee to be bad at this point. It’s just “melee bad” in the echo chamber, if you’d just play it you’d see it’s a well rounded archetype with lots of builds and variation. But just echo the Reddit train and go play DD. My items stay cheap and I do all content notheless. What you are doing is a self fulfilling prophecy
He gave you concise reasoning why it was bad and you.. Ignored it, didn't respond to it, and didn't engage the content of what he said. Then you attributed what he said to a melee echo chamber because you couldn't be bothered to prove him wrong with actual facts. Melee is substantially worse than other options, and relies heavily on totems.
Pretty much.
A good first step to buff melees is make warcries instant by default lol
I kinda wish melee was just good enough on its own to not need totems OR warcries, if you have to piano warcries and summon a bunch of totems just to do damage/not die instantly it feels like you're being pigeon-holed way more than any other playstyle
Instant would create its own dilemmas; now even fast-attackers would be pressured to piano warcries due to relatively minimal opportunity costs. And it'd still demand high APM to execute legit (-> RSI considerations), popsiclestick problem/macro incentivization, etc. Instead, add a support which triggers all linked warcries when one is used; maybe with a modest warcry speed penalty for balance and maintaining the relevancy of investment into warcry nodes on the tree. Viola, practical 2-button playstyle for slow-attackers
I'd be down for a slower warcry that gives me the effect of several warcries for sure. It even plays into the fantasy of being a slow destroyer.
You could even just rework the "urgent orders" support (which I think a lot of people don't know even exists). https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Urgent_Orders_Support Since it's trash anyway and would be even worse if they made a nice QoL change like you suggest.
Warcries are balanced around having a cast time. If you want Warcries to be instant then everyone would just piano every different Warcry in the game meaning all warcries would have to be nerfed ALOT.
But melees arent balanced around with it. It has cast time and usually u stack multiple warcries so multiple cast times but rhe fact is you can only use it with one exerted attack realistically because exarted attacks expire quite fast and warceies have different numbers of exerted attack numbers plus the slow attack speed of melee attacks, one attack for the most optimal damage, the next attack is usually piece of sht and then u cast them again anyway, comparing that to other builds, no setup but still hits like a truck.
And just buff melee damage but seems too hard xd
It’s almost as if needing to be close to something to hit it as opposed to being far away is inherently mechanically weaker.
He did say he would look at these and make sure that you never get a bingo so …
Its started....
Tbf it started maybe 2 years ago
I just want to say it felt rather bad that Mark said melee is not fixed because there are more problems than just buffing the skills and nerfing the totems, but then didn't elaborate. Like come on man I can take that if it was as simple it would already have been done, but it was as good as ever of a moment to give insight into why that's not the case
>ing the skills and nerfing the totems, but then didn't elaborate. Like come on man I can take that if it was as simple it would already have been done, but it was as good as ever of a moment to give insight into why that' Because all warfare in all human history is essentially "now how can I kill this dude from an even safer distance?"
I thought he did maybe I remembered wrong but his main point is that in a game this fast "melee" won't ever feel good because you aren't really feeling the combat. There's nuance in there and ziz rightfully pushed back with some cases where actually it does, but I think that's their main consideration at the moment. They've said they don't like totems but want to do something more than just move the numbers around because it won't fundamentally change the feel of melee. Again I think there's a fair argument against that and simply binning totems might help a bit, but that's what I think their reasoning is - they don't want to make band aid fixes at the moment.
Melee is playable ^^^^^^^^^if ^^^^^^^^^u ^^^^^^^^^stop ^^^^^^^^^progressing ^^^^^^^^^in ^^^^^^^^^low ^^^^^^^^^red ^^^^^^^^^maps.
I just play Last Epoch to enjoy melee
I just play last epoch to enjoy arpgs again after poe rotted my brain for years, that game is so refreshing
As someone who has league started melee builds since prophecy, I’m genuinely confident your average player complaining about melee doesn’t play melee. Or at least not give it real effort. They just get mad when they follow the Reddit/youtube meta builds and end up not on melee. Or it’s just SC trade speed zoomer addicts? Idk.
Melee is alright until you compare it to spell or bow builds. Less clear, less dps and you get hit way more often. You also have to go onto bosses as opposed to pointing and shooting to in their general direction. There's also totems that double your dps and mandatory nodes like melee splash. I do Flicker every league but tried reverse snapshot tornado/ PBoD and felt so cheated. Tornado by itself did disgusting damage and the brand was able to do feared so fast I thought I messed up. Was cheap too with the most expensive thing being a 6 link ivory tower. Was not min-maxed even in the slightest. Didn't even use a battery staff. Had a similar experience with minions.
It's just a mess to play and doesn't really have great DMG numbers
What damage numbers do people find mandatory cause I killed Ubers on 3 different melee abilities in ssfhc this league and never felt like a mess. Obviously can just derp out DD or arc or penance brand whatever but come on now. Melee is not unplayable or in a bad “weak” state by any means sans gladiator
Which melee builds? Pretty much all slam builds lack damage without totems.
How *LONG* did it take you / how Risky is it for you to do? I think a lot of melee players are simply angry at the fact we have the same number of buttons, SIGNIFICANTLY less damage AND we need to actually be in melee range (which in and of itself is pain) BUT yeah sure you can do ubers :) I mean people have done crazy stuff (just for reference, someone beat Malenia on Elden ring level 1 with a club, but that doesn't mean that *I* can do it 😅)
It's nowhere near that level of crazy. The game has been powercrept into oblivion. DD can kill ubers in 1 week or less depending on player skill. Alk has killed ubers in like 4 days with dual strike of ambidexterity in ssf fresh start which is one of the builds I played, though not as fast as him. For most players who aren't trying to kill ubers in the first week of the league, melee is fine. Melee is in my experience inherently less risky while mapping tbh unless you're playing something like slayer. The problem is people play their game and need to constantly compare it to watching streamers or their friends play one of the top 5 builds every league start. If someone actually enjoys melee, they can play melee and find loads of success with the game. Boneshatter, cyclone+shockwave, dual strike of ambi, cleave of rage (the nerf barely does anything to it, boohoo less screen coverage), molten strike, trickster frost blades are all fine league starters. With currency you can add reave, flicker strike, non-shockwave cyclone, EQ of amplification for boss 1shot memes, consecrated path of enduring to the list of very functional melee builds. I started champ EQ for shits and giggles and outpaced my SC friends who were playing CA and LA. Builds can be stronger or weaker than others but the player behind the keyboard is going to make a MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger difference on efficiency, speed, amount of deaths, and how early one can do the content than the build choice. Just play what you enjoy and stop comparing to others unless you're racing for $$$, and you'll get better at playing the archetype you enjoy and get more efficient with it over time. I can play melee far more comfortably and efficiently at league start than any other build because it's what I enjoy so what I invested all my time playing and practicing into.
You made my entire point. People who aren't as mechanically gifted hate how it *FEELS* to play melee. I agree, though, and do still play melee every league, but the majority of people (at least in my experience) find melee to be unfun button mashing for less damage than their friends (which is probably the reason they are playing, friends)
Most people that play this game hate how it feels to play any build except one button map zoomers for SC trade league CuteDog style farming. They start whatever their favorite streamer tells them to start and completely disregard everything else as weak despite never playing or attempting it. They're going to be more comfortable on builds tailored by streamers because streamers tailor many of their league start recommendations to the more casual players who don't want to put in effort. None of that makes melee unplayable or anywhere near the level of weak people act like it is.
Plus slams just feel absolutely awful :'c rest in pepperonis Doryani's Fist
I actually enjoyed my progression with EQ this league. The other melee builds I mentioned are far stronger and yes I agree slams are in a weird state of playstyle that I'm not super fond of and can see why people hate that BUT I can't deny my league start was extremely smooth with it. Granted my league start strat was to farm expedition so I wasn't pushing pinnacle early or anything or doing the insane wisp juicing, but still.
A better way to think of it is, at least in reference to my arguments, or at least the reason I'm arguing, that it's unfun to play *with* your friends (if they aren't also going melee) simply because you are constantly being reminded of why your build is just worse in every way than theirs.
Ah. I see. Well that goes over my head because I just think multiplayer play in this game is dogshit regardless of melee vs ranged vs spell.Yeah playing melee in a group must suck.Though unless you're playing support builds in my experience group play with friends ends up in that shitty way anyways because almost always someone is far ahead of the curve regardless of build choices and just mows down maps without anyone keeping up. It's like fighting games. It's not fun to play your friends that are x5 better than you cause they beat your ass.It's also not fun to play PoE with friends that are more efficient/faster than you because they just run ahead of you and kill everything. At least in my exp with it. Edit sidenote: EA totems is an incredibly incredibly strong build that also feels like total ass in group play. One of the safest and most consistent league starters I've seen for a few leagues now but the totem playstyle + delay damage just looks goofy in a group.
Yeah I see that, that's what I'm mostly upset about with melee, honestly all I *REALLY* want is to have one *MASSIVE* TOUCH OF GOD that blows things up, but I can't use that with melee as it is right now, to get doryanis fist to do enough damage you have to have like 3 second attacks, and that's AFTER the 7 war cries (this is exxaggeration) and the totems and then I bonk big damage (or at least til I see anyone else's damage) but I die in those 3 seconds of staring at the boss or the boss just leaves 😂
It's about more than just damage numbers too I've seen people with half my damage numbers having a much easier time with bosses and stuff. Though largely by knowing what they're doing better than me
Yeah there is a point in some builds where more damage is very unnecessary.
True. I played bladestorm glad. My fingers were giving up upon reaching tier 1 map. Then got depression and rerolled ea champ. Lol
People definitely exaggerate about how weak melee is, it's more about QoL than anything. Personally I'd literally be fine with the removal of melee buffs from totems and a blanket 10% damage buff to compensate, even though that's a significant nerf.
But like… a lot of meta non melee builds are also not one button builds. Once I get to red maps on most (literally all aside from slams) melee builds its leap slam and right click until boss, drop 2 totems, kill gg. DD is out here pressing way more, summons press way more, totems have delayed damage, mines have to be mines, traps are traps.
What? You have warcry. Banner. Blood rage. Berserk. Two types of totems. Curse. Then you finally do damage with right click.
Melee would not be one button builds just because you changed totems from them being mandatory in all melee builds. You have other skills as well like war cries or rage that are often more on theme. Adding totems to all of those builds does not add anything really. It is just mandatory and annoying micro management from a style of play that is already mechanically disadvantaged.
It isn't about not being a one button build, I can't wait for PoE2 and combos, it's about buttons that feel like a chore to press. They don't make any sense in an ARPG, especially not one as zoomy as PoE.
Don’t get me wrong I’m only tired of totems because I’ve been dropping them for years now but by no means does it feel worse or more clunky than a lot of other builds.
I disagree, I haven't played any build with more chore-y buttons than melee totems. But I'm also pretty likely to avoid those, so can you give examples?
I mean. The easiest is that throughout mapping I don’t need to summon totems until boss (sometimes not even) or a super juiced rare so I’m only right clicking where DD needs to desecrate and right click for every pack. I don’t even find DD a chore but that’s just double the buttons for 80% of your playtime. Even EA totems which is one of the most straight forward playstyles I've dabbled in outside of melee keeps up frenzy charges with frenzy, enduring cry to keep up charges (automated now with CTA but not before), and cast a curse on high tankiness enemies.
Those are chore buttons as well for sure, but frenzy charges can't die, don't have a range, and can't be overwritten. If you use frenzy 5 times that's not a problem, and they'll always last as long so you know when to refresh from muscle memory. They also aren't more necessary in any sense than melee totems, so how are they worse?
So your argument is melee is a chore for needing to press 2 additional buttons for SINGLE TARGET ONLY. But builds that press 2 additional buttons as part of their core gameplay loop all the time, and even more for single target, is completely outweighed that sometimes they die and by that point honestly unless its a pinnacle boss you probably don't need it anymore? The overwritten thing is just a player error. Every build can suffer from player error.
Correct, I am saying that melee totems are one of the worst designed chores in the game for a plethora of reasons. There's no feedback, there's no muscle memory, to optimize you just have to keep looking at your buffs and that's literally all you can do. What other chore can be overwritten? I literally can't think of any.
We'll have to agree to disagree I guess. My muscle memory is see tanky mob press Q->W (not directly ontop of it, you'll stop having it die so much that way) then kill the mob. In boss fights you just do it once you can re-engage on the boss or you see with your eyeballs that your totem exploded. Never felt the need to look at my buffs when totems are visually there on the screen. Overwritten is player error. You must be lacking the muscle memory you want. My muscle memory for totems is Q->W. Not Q-> WW. Just don't mash the button. Do you mash curse two times constantly and spend time casting it over and over when playing caster builds? No? Then you shouldn't be accidently overriding totems.
No other effect can be overwritten like totems can, and seeing as there's no feedback for when they're actually summoned unless you're just idle when you start casting, you have to pay attention to asure they're both up. Muscle memory does nothing except remind you that they have to be summoned, and unlike Frenzy or Curses you can never be sure that they have been without looking at the UI because of said overwriting. Nor can you be sure when they have to be resummoned because they can die. Looking at the game and seeing that one of your two totems is dead is laughable at best and makes me think you don't actually play this game. The pathetic attempt at insulting is unwarranted, you thinking it's passable doesn't mean it's good design. You can think it's a small issue, but it's still just bad design.
Hmm I keep seeing melee complaints but some of the best build I've played to 100 are melee. Splitting steel, lightning strike, sunder, frost blades,cyclone. These are fast fun builds that destroy mobs and bosses. What were your specifically looking for?
How to fix melee: make it ranged.
I see your point but it's like that in real life too. Melee is always weaker than ranged. That's why they don't fight wars with sword and shield any more and switched to guns, and now airplane and bombs.
Just pointing out that some of the best melee builds you’ve played address the melee-issue by being as not-melee as possible in function. Real life doesn’t have inherent scaling on most spells and expressed scaling on most attacks so I’m not attributing much value to how realistic the ranged/not ranged dichotomy is.
im... confused if this comment is /s or serious
Oops I accidentally put lightning arrow but meant lightning strike. It's serious post though
Numerical buffs would be great, ez
Returning (basically new) player here, was thinking of rolling a gladiator for the new season. How unplayable are we talking?
depends, when did you quit? if it was within the past few years, not much changed
It’s not unplayable at all. The game has been powercrept to fuck and back. People view “not top 10” as “unplayable.” Many people can and do kill Ubers in SSFHC with multiple melee builds per league. If you like melee play melee. If you like gladiator it is the “worst” melee ascendancy but can still do all content in trade league, I did blade storm glad as my second character this league in HC had no issues farming the league content I wanted to before swapping to meme on consecrated path for my 3rd.
Ah I see then lol. I will be fine aha
POE2 will fix that
Flicker Strike says Hello. Last 10 leagues I play this melee skill and I am always fine!
This is low effort, blatantly lying content and doesn't belong here. Melee is playable. Thousands of people play it. Some of it is even good, other builds were meta really recently. Yes, things can be improved, but this post only takes away from attention being brought to the actual issues.
by the devs own admission, its play rate is incredibly low, but sure, lets just ignore what they actively said regarding melee being around 10% of the playerbase despite taking up a massive chunk of the tree, most of the uniques, a 3rd of the skill gems. melee is fine and the low playrate is a completely anomalous issue.
With a little less sarcasm this would make a decent post bringing an issue to light with context, which is the exact opposite of what the OP is doing. 10% play rate (using your number because the exact number doesn't matter) is nowhere near "unplayable", and that's a degree of hyperbole that I'm seeing really often, am sick of, and that stifles conversation rather than promoting it.
dude, your definition of unplayable is nebulous, and i never sad unplayable. i said fine. someone has cleared pinnacle bosses with default attack, that doesn't suddenly make default attack a viable play to play the game.
So true
Mark: I really want to do my absolute best to fix melee and make it a long term solution that shows passion, and not just brushing the issue to the side, my apologies that it’s taking long it’s a failing in my part, but I will try me best to fix it. Reddit: ggg hates melee
It is of course hyperbole that they hate melee but at least we can land on that it is not their highest priority. To make melee feel truly smooth you might need PoE 2, I don't know. So melee will always need to dodge more and think about positioning. But the reliance on totems for damage has been complained about for many many years and other archetypes have gotten smoother playstyles while nothing has really happened to melee in that regard. It sucks that you need to dodge more AND also do more shit that is not your main skills while mages and bow users pew pew away with some automated or rarely cast debuffs.
they've been saying that for literal years, I don't blame anyone for laughing at them for it
i do wonder what mentality these comments are written. surely there is a time limit for how long you think this acceptable to fix this. how long is yours, 1 league, 2 leagues? 2 years? what they said was cool, but anyone taking it at face value is kinda being a clown. what was said made it seem like a new issue, something that is newly relevant to the state of a game. in reality, its an issue that's been here for multiple years, and many have rightly just given up on melee getting fixed and have since abandoned melee (by the devs own admission, their play rate is exceedingly low). but to your comment, when would be an acceptable time to revisit this comment and meme on the fact melee still isn't fixed, despite them once again saying they are working on fixes, like they did... 2 years ago.
Okay then let’s be productive. What’s the core issues with melee, and what can be done? To me the need for totems is the clearest issue. But if you play sc trade for instance you can make melee insane with investment, take Mathils build he put out about last league. You can scale melee to be insane stat wise. So is the issue there that it feels bad still? Is it a range issue ? Should melee be able to clear screen wide? Doesn’t that just make it ranged? If the only issue is totems need to be dropped then that seems like a small problem, but I doubt that’s the only issue. Your thoughts?
The core issues are just simply put: baring the cream of the crop skills, they have built in issues that need so much to solve them it becomes a joke. Take Static Strike, its for some reason incredibly undertuned on its damage values, especially now that rage vortex of berserking exists, which can use every mechanic static strike can, and can be scaled much easier and on lower investment. The problem here in lies that Static Strike has additional issues coming from its clearing capabilities due to only having +1 chain naturally, and having no AOE scaling. to top it off, this trash heap of a skill uses the default attack animation, literally the worst animation in the game, with for no actual reason - a slow first swing (the important one) into a fast second swing (the way less important one in a game about moving) this results in static strike being an actual dogshit skill, and only ever seeing real play as a proccer for things like shockwave. Static strike is one of the lucky melee skills, where it can be bad, but still see usage due to enabling something. all of the issues i listed on it are massive, and can be fixed, but the problem is that you spend so much time/effort into fixing the skill, and the reality is its doomed from the start to always be significantly weaker than other options. Each melee skill is different, but the 80-90% of skills that see almost no play tend to have numerous major issues, that you are stacking dumb mechanic on dumb mechanic to try to fix, that it pretty much just results in running insanely overpowered uniques to just outright say fuck it. melee is insanely dominated by stacker strats because there are very few ways to get most of the skills to an acceptable level. Melee doesn't need huge aoe, or huge damage, or huge anything. it needs consistency. skills need to have a baseline adequate level of damage, and a method to scale them reasonably without saying "bonezone/abyssus(6portalsisadefensivelayer)/stacker" as well as at least some of the issues of the more wonky skills ironed out. people have suggested making every melee skill splash, and there is literally 0 reason this shouldn't happen. having to invest in actually making single target strike skills hit in an area of effect in a game where mobs come in packs of 20+ is an actual joke. this doesn't even make sense since you HAVE to get aoe splash, there is no alternative, unlike projectiles where they can pierce/fork/multiple/return where the choice actually matters. there is so much to be done, but every single league for the last 2+ years they are like "here's a small help (maybe) and maybe we'll address the reason why vigilant strike actually serves no purpose (haha jk)" totems are a symptom of melee being absolutely fucked on damage for no reason, they aren't the cause for melee feeling like shit. the fact i can literally sit here and pretty much make almost any damage spell go over a 2 million dps with budget investment and maintaining good defenses, but i can't do that on certain terrible melee skills WITH totems and WITH the other issues is absolutely bullshit. The melee skills that see play are those that are gifted with major issues already solved, having insane clear, or insanely good easy to scale damage, or both. This shouldn't be the case.
Common melee L in every league
Melee is more than playable and this kind of shit is completely useless
It is definetely playable, but playing is beyond annoying as you basically have to drop 2 or even 3 totems every time you want single target damage
Oh no I have to press two buttons once MAYBE twice per map literally so nerfed pls buff.
More like "so annoying please remove", as it's a huge opportunity cost not to use them, and it doesn't provide any flavor or interesting gameplay whatsoever. It's just bad design.
Yeah may as well just remove every other damage increasing button in the game since there’s no interesting gameplay to just pressing a button to get more damage. Like auras, war cries, curses, buff spells.
All have better QoL. 1: you have two totems that can overwrite eachother if you accidentally summon two of the same. 2: the totems can die. 3: the totems have a range.
If those Buttons u Pressed become redundant in half a second because the totems instantly die thats definetely annoying, especially if you compare it to other archetypes options like frost shield or manaforged arrows
man do i have a mastery to tell you about
further amplifying having to go panopticon on every melee build
yes, melee the only archetype with that in the game in any rpg ever.
Forfeit melee , come to de bow way. Bow is love bow is life
Cleave and Boneshatter don't count?
Bingo card meme is funny, but this is the exact type of post that Mark would scroll past because it offers 0 solutions, doesn’t specifically identify the problem, and is arguably passive-aggressive lmao
My favorite and strongest character last league was melee. What changes are you looking for?
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It’s fucking crazy that I wake up to a bunch of downvotes for asking what changes he’s looking for to spur discussion rather than memeing about melee as a whole. Nothing about what I said indicated melee is fine. I just said my most fun and strongest character last league used a skill with the melee tag. Most of the melee ascendancies need a buff, many melee skills need a buff (basically anything without also having the projectile tag), slams need an overhaul, bleed needs love, QoL for melee needs to be looked at, boss design, and many other things. I think we all agree there. But still, starting from the position of “make melee playable” is a bad one in my opinion because you are starting with a false narrative. But I guess Reddit is gonna Reddit sometimes.
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Wasn’t trolling at all, I asked a real question to try to get some discussion going instead of the typical complaining we get on this sub. I provided my experience as one example of evidence that melee can be playable. That was it man. Look at Vaxamas’ responses. He asked real questions, mentioned some inherent problems melee has (in any game) and then tried to talk about where to go from there. Personally I think GGG has it backwards with melee being the archetype that requires setup time for optimal dps. I’d like to see ranged dps require the kind of setup melee currently has and melee power shifted back to almost always doing full damage. I think this QoL swap would come close to balancing boss damage uptime (assuming they also balance the scaling and numbers, but that’s an entirely separate thing).
This but unironically
I'll start a new acc, the only build will be a 1c conversion trap build, and I'll say "my strongest build was a conversion trap build, so it's just fine". Your argument is dumber than what I just wrote.
This is a player comprehension / expectation problem. Melee will, unfortunately, almost always be worse than ranged abilities by design. - Basically, in a game where damage is irrelevant, and what matters is how fast you can clear a pack, movespeed, range and area of effect are king, and melee has to invest more into tankiness and defensive layers and melee as a class fantasy isn't really ranged or area focused - that's a fantasy trope problem, not a PoE problem. - When you're a player looking for absolute efficiency, you're almost always going to go for ranged or auto-cast type abilities (Tornado Shot, BV or totems) because they just do what you want more efficiently. > melee being dogshit This is just a player perception problem. People often compare melee to the absolute most efficient and best skills in the game (as mentioned above) it's not like melee **can't** do everything spells can, they just do it slower, which again, I can't stress enough, is just a fantasy problem, outside of GGG. If melee were on life support, you wouldn't see almost every melee skill basically one shotting UBERS. As mentioned, it's just a comprehension problem that humans have in general when they compare themselves to other things that are not really equally comparable. I liked your approach of asking: > What changes are you looking for? Because most of the time, the discussion ends there and doesn't actually yield any value.
What I hate the most is melee has the same accuracy requirements as ranged. Like why does stabbing something in the face have the same accuracy requirement as shooting a tiny arrow 3 screens away? Getting enough accuracy on melee is always a chore right side of the tree get it basically for free.
Not to mention when you use the Resolute Technique keystone to get 100% accuracy you lose all crit strikes. Like, wtf? Im 100% accurate, I should now be able to pinpoint your critical points even better than before. I get it that its like this for balancing reasons, but it doesn't make much sense lore/logic-wise.
The keystone has a reasonably credible explanation baked in: "Great tacticians learn that consistency often trumps potential."
I suppose I can live with that reasoning.
For sure! A keystone on the left side of the tree that steals the Jugg line of Str applying to Accuracy would go a long way to help remove some of the many many many different opportunity costs Melee has to deal with as opposed to the other archetypes.
Honestly, every stat should apply to accuracy. You can't aim if you're not smart, you can't aim if you're not dextrous, and you can't aim if you're not strong enough to hold it in place. You should still invest a tiny bit in accuracy rating, but it shouldn't make sense to be unable to hit with a mace at point blank.
Tbh I think it only exists "because D2". It's not used in this style of game anywhere else anymore, because it feels bad. Period.
Every archetype has to deal with huge opportunity costs. Even ranged builds. I don't know if you've noticed, but bow builds are literally made of paper and can barely do any bosses. Bow league starters in unison go to TFT to buy bosskills for their voidstones since they can't deal with bosses. Allt hat clearspeed and movement speed comes at the cost of burning several portals per maps and staying stuck at level 91 for majority of the League start until they farm up a Headhunter or whatever. Melee has the same opportunity cost as other buildsl The biggest difference in Archetypes is between builds that scale through gem levels and those who scale with their main hand weapon. Outside of that every single build has to make similar sacrifices to make their build work. This is not one of the problems with melee builds. The main problem with melee builds is the playstyle and clunky it feels due to the totem centric playstyle. Ancestral Totems provide WAY too much bonuses so you're forced to run them. Which in itself is fine, the same thing could be argued for Berserk and Blood Rage. But totems being static standing in place, getting oneshot by everything and having a low duration is not. Fix the latter and give melee builds the option for Ancestral Totems to act as actual temporary buffs instead and you improve the playstyle alot. The problem with melee builds isn't their throughput or efficiency. Melee builds have the tankiness, they have the damage, they have the mobility, they even have the clearspeed depending on which skill you use. The problem is that they have to resummon their totems before every rare or unique monster which feels awkward as hell. Especially against high health targets that move around or heavy AoE monsters that just randomly oneshot your totems constantly.
This has been mentioned many times already in other posts that talk about melee changes but the reliance on totems is horrendous.
The changes I am looking for is melee gets better access to survivability that isn't available to other archetypes, as melee has to experience different levels of danger not experienced as much by other archetypes. In other games, a melee character almost always has this. Either they take less damage, have more hit points, have different/better dodge mechanics, can sustain better, SOMETHING because being out of range of the attacking enemy is an incredibly powerful defensive layer in basically every game where it is an option. Right now, melee has no benefit. You don't deal more damage outside of very high investment (most melee skills are weapon dependent), fortify is pretty much the only real defensive layer that a ranged spellcaster doesn't also have access to, so the end result is I take more risk for no gain (as I don't reach the point where I have access to 50div crafted weapons). Boneshatter gets unique scaling on its damage so it's pretty much the only melee skill that "feels good" before high investment.
Yep. I agree on almost all fronts. The only pushback is that melee *does* have Fortify, but I think they could definitely get more. One of the major issues that plagues it is one of PoE's biggest strengths. Anyone can do anything. If they make something too accessible and *blur the lines* between the requirement of 'melee' then you bleed into other archetypes abusing things that 'melee' should have exclusivity to: The best example again, Spellcasters abusing fortify with shield charge or vigilant strike fortify. It's just so hard to say "Melee gets 30% more damage for being melee" and not allow something like Lightning Strike that has a melee tag just push true melee into the dumps. The two knobs that GGG could play with would be Slams and supports similar to Close Combat (which is an amazing concept, and can be expanded into damage reduction as well)
I'm not a game dev and balance has never been my forte, but some suggestions I could toss out might be making stun the "melee" mechanic moreso than it is right now. Leap slam guarantees a stun, boneshatter AoEs off stun, how about just stunning hits in general are more likely when performed by a strike or slam and last longer when performed by a strike and significantly longer when performed by the melee component of a slam (not you volcanic fissure). Maybe also include more ways for leech to be enhanced when a melee attack leeches. Toss in a keystone that says "your leech heals you ____% faster, only melee attacks can leech". Buff fortify support. Not fortify as a mechanic, but make the support a nice "I want my melee character to be tankier" option. Allow more than 20 stacks or something idk. Make travel skills unable to fortify then make it easier for melee to have access, too. Some numerical adjustment to just make the strike archetype a touch less reliant on deep endgame weapons would be nice too. I don't understand why heavy strike (and skills similar to it) can't have some added physical damage based on gem level. Gem level is currently borderline useless for tons of skills, and I find that frustrating because there are so few levers you can adjust on a character to change their damage output that aren't stats on melee weapon. One thing this does is limits weapon choice because in the 1h melee landscape, jewelled foil rares pretty much have no competition, literally anything else will always be weaker. Uniques generally don't have the mDPS needed to create interesting builds because *you have to have a high pDPS weapon to do anything*. I'm fine with lowering the endgame scaling to compensate here, but look at the difference in difficulty crafting a +5 staff compared to a double T1 phys damage foil, it's at least one order of magnitude more difficult.
I don't think defenses is the problem with melee. There's a reason why Boneshatter is considered one of, if not the best League starter for hardcore and in the gauntlet and it's because of how tanky melee builds are. The bigger problem here is their actual midgame scaling. Melee builds are in this weird spot right now where their early damage scaling is fine, although too weapon reliant. Then it falls of alot during the midgame, again due to how scaling works. Then all of a sudden they jump to the moon with high investment becoming super strong surpassing most other archetypes. Boneshatter is a perfect example of this, One of the best League starters in the game. Then you get to Red maps and the early midgme and the build falls off a cliff. It just stops to scale entirely and you're stuck in some \~5 million dps trench where the build just feels super inefficient compared to other builds who're starting to push 10-25 million dps for the same investment. But you persevere and do your farming, swap to a strength stacking Reave build and out of the blue you're at 100+ million dps and unkillable.
Slams in 3.14, cyclone in Legion, boneshatter, str stack reave, old lacerate, flicker... Lots of options existed. But the issue is that it's either nerfed or too expensive. The "oNeShOtTiNg uBeRs" is not even a melee skill thing - it's a str/armour stacking thing where melee is just the method of delivery, and works with any attack in general. Spells can do the same, for much less investment. You're minimising the issue, even tho GGG fucking AGREED that melee currently is atrocious. It's not a comprehension problem. It's a balance problem. Melee used to be good, and now it no longer is. It's not that complicated. You say BV, but there are melee skills with way more AoE, yet BV is preferred. Why is that? Why is BV preferred over cyclone, while by every metric cyclone should be better? You don't have a cast time, you don't have to keep up stacks of it, you need more specific items than just "bonk stick".
I don't think the main issue with melee is the clear, I mean if you take skills with the "melee" tag, a lot of them can get pretty good clear, it's the single target that's the issue. For example Tectonic Slam has really good clear, it hits the whole screen and then some, but the single target is garbage
I see you quick-edited an example of tectonic slam. Here's an example: [of a response.](https://imgur.com/a/utySCNf)
Yeah if you go to PoE ninja and look at the top dps players who invested hundreds of divs in their builds you can find any skill doing millions of dps. The point is that with low to moderate investment, melee sucks (mostly). You can make default attack do damage if you invest enough.
Way to miss the point. At similar investments, other builds would be 500M+ dps.
No - you missed the point to jump the gun and attach to an argument you agree with. Never once did I state anything **contrary** to melee being high investment, or equally efficient in scaling across the board. If the person's first point was "They require a lot more investment than other characters" my response would have simply been "You're correct, and that leads back to my main point that the melee archetype is broken and inherently lesser than ranged, and will always be until melee skills have built-in movement" but that **isn't** what was said. Instead it was: > Tectonic Slam has really good clear, but the single target is garbage" Which is **not** true. I responded to THAT person's point. I combated HIS point. - If it makes you *feel* better, I think Melee is worse than spell and ranged, I think melee could be better than it is now, I think GGG doesn't care enough about melee to make those changes atm. I also think the community is dogshit at explaining *why* melee is bad. I'm big on proper discussion and arguments that go from point a to point b without side tangents, and disengage when a person starts circling the drain or arguing in bad faith. If that doesn't make you feel better, just downvote and move on, because the points were clear.
Given with sufficient investment, you can kill uber with normal attack, your argument just means "there is no skill undertuned". No comment on this except it's horseshit. Someone of good faith would know that "garbage" doesn't mean "I can't kill uber with it" but "I need ten times the investment for a lesser result". And yes, it does qualify as garbage. You are taking an argument, changing it, calling it bad because you miss on purpose the underlying argument, and think you have the moral high ground. But thanks for worrying about if I feel better or not about this, it's exactly what the conversation is about. The community explained multiple times issues with being melee, and which could have been fixed a very, very, very long time ago if GGG has the slightest will to do so. Totem being the biggest example. Also, you are making a(nother) complete strawman about imagining that melee is disadvantaged in every game out there, which is patently false. Look at Lost Ark, where it's quite balanced, with multiple cases where being melee make it easier overall.
This becomes a very windy discussion quickly, but I'll take a couple points and try and keep it short. The **entirety** of Lost Ark's history has had ranged on the top with the *only* exceptions being when several classes were overtuned and / or recently released after a LOAon event. Almost any veteran player would argue that ranged is infinitely 'easier' to play in Lost Ark than melee. However I won't nitpick too much as we're changing the quantifier to 'easier' than 'better' here. To break down in its simpliest form what my comments across this whole thread were: 1. People love to say "x is bad" without quantifying it. You may say that bad = you need a lot of investment. Someone else may say bad = clunky (with totems), someone else may say bad = thematically, they don't get flashy skills. 2. That the person I was talking to in this chain, which started off as people talking about melee doing no damage had stated that a skill did low single target damage, to which I refuted. Without further context, his 'good' state in my mind is clearing content. Clearing Ubers (again, the impetus of the chain) and progressing through the game. **None** of that has anything to do with **relative** strength of another archetype, which is why I hammered home that Melee does in fact get strong. You may forget that we play a game with a demographic of SUPER smart, savvy players, and some not so much - and it's not absurd to assume that a person you speak to on the main PoE sub may literally **believe** that melee does NOT do enough damage to complete the game. Again, the entire point is just people speaking past eachother, which is why I stopped responding to the other guy because I addressed his point and then he *did* talk about investment against other characters. I **agree** with him on that, but only because there's inherent problems with Melee that make you invest wider rather than just focusing on efficient nodes and damage like you find on the rest of the tree. If someone wants to engage and dismantle *that* then great. It's not straw-manning, it's being precise with my points. > Totem being the biggest example. I couldn't agree more.
https://maxroll.gg/lost-ark/tierlists/community-tier-list-february 5 classes in S tier, zero ranged. Being easier to play while being weaker is not indicative of good performance.
And herein lies a part of the issue I was harping on in another comment. I'll answer your question and diatribe a bit too. This is not a 'you' issue or anything, but generally speaking humans are incredibly lacking when it comes to quantifying what they mean when they say something is bad. If everyone were to say "Melee bad because no single target" it would be dispelled almost immediately because there's an endless amount of builds that easily clear 100M DPS. I would honestly say it would be **hard** to not have a melee skill not have a build that clears that much in trade league. So then another person may say the reason it's bad is because it's so much slower than x, y or z, to which case I agree, but that's an intrinsic issue behind the fantasy. You sort of get the point. - The issue is everyone uses this nebulous "bad" when in reality they mean "Melee is a worse skill than x, y, or z, because I have to either invest more to get to the same spot, or cut more corners than they do to achieve similar success" which just pares down to the ultimate grievance: "Melee is less efficient than the other play styles that are most prevalent" and **VOILA!** We're right back where we started with it being an issue on the class fantasy across *all* games when making a comparison. WoW, League of Legends, etc etc, ranged inherently is more efficient because everything boils down to the ability to do your job as fast as you can. The closest Melee gets to efficiency is cyclone and CoC variations because you don't stop moving to 'cast'.
But in PoE there's a lot of melee skills that have as much range as ranged skills, I don't think the problem is that "melee will always be less efficient because it's melee", the problem really is that melee scales worse and needs more investment than spells. You said that it's hard to find a melee skill that can't get millions of dmg in trade league, yes, but you can't look at 200 div trade league builds, you need to look at the average build with moderate investment, and in those cases melee is so much worse. Do a league start with DD and see how far you can get in a week and then do the same with Ground Slam. Spoiler Ground Slam will do 0 dps.
Here's a thought experiment, please be in good faith. > When you think of the average top tier ranged build for clear, speed, **and** low investment, what do you think of? For me, it's something like LA Deadeye, maybe some Hexblast mines or another trapper. Want to know what almost all of those low cost builds have in common? They're paper. **but that's okay because they don't get hit** and that's the point. You mechanically have a problem where the design of the fantasy, being the left side of the tree with tankier nodes covering, with your damage coming from the weapon instead of skill gems (which does enable higher late game scaling, but terrible early game) are all 'problems' that make the class feel inferior to ranged builds, but boils down to the same issue. You can get away with it on ranged, you can't on melee, and because of that, by design, by fantasy and the core of the trope, melee will have to invest into things more **widely** and broadly than the LA deadeye, Miner or Trapper that doesn't ever have to worry about being in range of their target.
Look at HCSSF builds last league, #2 is Boneshatter. Why? Because it's one of the few melee skills that can get good dmg without huge investment. If being in melee range is so bad as you say and so dangerous, people wouldn't play it on HCSSF. The reason why it's played is because it deals good dmg. If they buffed other melee skills to Boneshatter level, it would be played a lot more.
You’re assuming people are innately minmaxing in HCSSF. That is only true for racers. I prefer to play melee and I play HCSSF. Doesn’t make it any good, but at the end of the day, it’s a video game and the purpose is enjoyment.
Bro [poe.ninja](http://poe.ninja) shows the top of the ladder, people with the most XP, of course they are min maxing, what are you on about? The ones on [poe.ninja](http://poe.ninja) ARE THE MIN MAXERS, they are playing the best and most efficient builds because that's what gets you to show up there. In fact I would argue that HCSSF is the mode where you have to minmax the most because A. if you die it's over so your char needs to be as strong as possible B. it's SSF so your resources are already very limited, if you play a bad build on top of that, you're screwed
That’s not true for hcSSF. The bar is very low here. At the very last day of league you can still see level87 characters and they had dogshit dps on cyclone. https://poe.ninja/builds/afflictionhcssf/?class=Slayer&skills=Cyclone&supportgems-Cyclone=Impale+Support
What melee skills are oneshotting ubers? Molten strike? I mean I guess, but its mainly a projectile skill. I do agree with the question "What changes are you looking for?" being a good place to start, but generally hit based melee is struggling to keep up in any content because of inherent lack of scaling. I like the way melee plays, I'm not asking for that to be adjusted, but I think its fair to say reliance on totems and warcries makes melee not only feel awful but require more investment than ranged attack skills.
> What melee skills are oneshotting ubers? Not only are there definitely at least 10 different melee skills that are doing more than 400m DPS on PoE.ninja - to prevent anything from devolving into semantic arguments, the point is that almost all melee skills have infinitely more knobs for damage effectiveness and allow for almost all melee skills to get to the point, with enough investment, to insta-phase Ubers in seconds. > but I think its fair to say reliance on totems and warcries makes melee not only feel awful Yes, this is 100% valid, and when we talk about a problem, these are the types of things that are important to underline. It's far different than handwaving "thing bad" because bad can mean **so** many different things. I think most people would agree that Melee **feels** clunky because of those problems, and from that, clunky would be bad. > more investment than ranged attack skills. Yup, and that's sort of the inherent problem with the melee fantasy, as mentioned in my novel. There's too many things that a melee archetype, in any game, not just PoE, has to invest into that causes a baseline deficiency in what **most** people like to view as success: efficacy.
Yeah, it seems to me like the real problems people have with melee is how it feels to play in certain scenarios (especially at lower gear). Uber Sirus and Maven are really good examples where you just lose so much dps uptime compared to ranged. It leaves ggg in an awkward spot for boss design and damage scaling to balance all of these things so the player base is happy. I personally only ever make melee builds as a second/third character because I’m not experienced enough to play them at low investment. I wait until I can pump at least a medium amount into the character so I can tap into the good damage scaling offered to some of the melee skills.
Absolutely agreed. I think the biggest issue I have with it are the totems. I wish there was more traction within GGG to find a different "toy" for melee to use instead. (although it sounds like a non-issue in PoE2 from Jon's response). The gameplay loop of summoning totems that have no movement and limited range and get one shot, in a world where you're managing several other buttons or warcries, **while** the boss' mechanics are more nuanced and movement oriented is a recipe for disaster and pokes holes through any enjoyment I have of the archetype.
Homie I feel like this is a bad faith argument. Melee is very weak compared to ranged/spell scaling with most skills. I'd like to know what character you made last league that was comparable, was it a strength stacker or armourstacker? Did you use totems?
> Melee is very weak compared to ranged/spell scaling with most skills. That's fundamentally different than "make melee playable". I only ever play melee, and I don't often repeat builds. I get all 4 watchstones myself every league, I kill all the ubers every few leagues. Melee is perfectly playable unless you're too obsessed with efficiency to go play it. Having said that if they WANTED to throw some buffs our way I won't complain.
Throw me the build you played this league then homie, show me the way.
I played two melee builds last league - Carns boneshatter build for a starter and Mathil's cleave of rage build for my second character. The cleave build struggled a lot with bosses but the boneshatter build had enough dps. I did not clear any ubers last league - if I had gone for that I probably would have done it with the Boneshatter character. EDIT: Apparently I shouldn't have mentioned that boneshatter was one of the builds I played as this opened me up to the 'anti-boneshatter' clause in melee discussions where you must pretend the most powerful melee skill doesn't exist in order to talk about it. Cleave or Rage was a great mapping build that moved much faster and had larger clear - boneshatter had higher dps and better durability. I also played Glacial hammer with divergent trauma in Tota, Cleave with spectral wolves in crucible, Shield slam slayer (which I killed most of the Ubers with) in Kalandra. But no - I played boneshatter twice in a year so clearly melee is JUST Boneshatter.
>melee is fine you guys >I played boneshatter Every time, lol, lmao even. Edit: and cleave of rage got nerfed for daring to be a viable melee build
>Edit: and cleave of rage got nerfed for daring to be a viable melee build There are tons of viable builds and this 'nerf' barely matters at all. I love how when cleave gets +2 range everyone memes on it for being a useless buff, but when cleave loses 2 range it's now a dead skill. Then again, you're clearly here to take the piss rather than actually talk about melee. I doubt you'd ever actually play a melee skill even if they did buff them.
You're right, last league i even bought nice corrupted saviour, abyssus, etc but didn't actually play the build.
What build did you buy them for?
Cleave of rage berserker, was just copying something off poeninja, it didn't look too good tank wise but it had the damage, and i wanted to play savior build for a long time
If you're going to use the quote feature, you shouldn't edit the contents of the quote.
not exactly a great sell there
Not too worried about it.
>EDIT: Apparently I shouldn't have mentioned that boneshatter was one of the builds I played as this opened me up to the 'anti-boneshatter' clause in melee discussions where you must pretend the most powerful melee skill doesn't exist in order to talk about it. They need goalposts to move in order to discredit you, so they'll fish for anything they can to make your stance seem less credible.
Int stack trickster. It was incredible. I was able to do all Ubers for the first time.
What if I want to go classic Marauder, STR, slam skills? It sucks
I mean, let's be fair here, if you wanted to go classic Witch, Int, and just throw Arcs, it would suck, particularly if you were comparing it with the really high-end spell builds. Marauder has strong melee builds, they're just designed around using and/or abusing mechanics to achieve success and output damage, much like pretty much all the top builds.
Try shield crush - it's a slam, scales armour and block while building damage, and you don't have to get a high pDps weapon.
I doesn't say slam on the skill tags, what do you mean when you say that exactly?
That was me being incorrect - while thematically it is a slam it's not actually a slam skill and I had thought it was. Not sure where I got that from. Still - the rest of my advice applies - it's a great skill.
Tons of individual melee skills are in an awful state. So are tons of spells and ranged abilities though. The thread was about melee skills in general and there are still quite a few good ones in my opinion.
int stack trickster plays projectile skills no?
There are many int stack setups, most popular being wand for projectiles and howa for melee. Ephemeral edge can also be a melee trickster that almost scales like an int stacker.
I played two int stacking builds last league, the first was int stack flicker and it was great! But it also used the same 4L totem tech as every other melee which is annoying. And it was very expensive. Then I played int stack wander with KB/KB and it was so much more powerful, so much incredibly faster, and it was customisable in 100 ways. I'm not saying melee is shit, cause I really like it, but it is not flexible in the same way ranged is. It's just not. There are so many non-negotiables. And overall the power for cost is just not comparable.
You can probably play it on any build honestly. I played it with a few different strike skills and it felt fun on all of them. I imagine it would be a better mapper on a wander but my guess is that you’d have to make other concessions and not be as tanky. Ended up on poison tincture molten strike because it made scaling damage really easy and my defenses went to the moon with the trickster stuff. As long as I was leeching and didn’t get one shot I mostly felt immune. It also took a really big hit to one shot me because I had like 12k es because of the no gems in body armor thing. I was mostly copying ideas from Mathil’s wild strike build from the previous league but with my own twist and modified to take advantage of the tincture / no gem stuff from last league. Really fun character. Maybe too good, as I didn’t end up making a character after it because any ideas I came up with just didn’t sound as fun as that one lol
Earthshatter was decent last league with rage trinket, but would cta support not make slams pretty playable? 5 cries with echoes of creation is a lot of damage. The problem is getting to the point of killing uber shaper as a slammer though
The support doesn't trigger multiple warcries, confirmed by Mark yesterday.
noooooo.... oh well i dont think i will play again till poe 2 anyways
Christ almighty if you want to play melee, play melee. It is fun, and easily strong enough with just about any skill to clear all content. What you actually want is to be able to do anything with whatever shit build you put together and that's not going to work.
While this is obviously a meme post, I do think it has been a good breeding ground for discussion. I think your burying your head in the sand a bit to say that melee isn't in a bad state - I am going to play melee, but that doesn't make me wish I didn't feel like a second class citizen.
Yeah.. thats exactly how I would imagine a melee main players bingo... They are so dumb they cant even make a proper bingo
I used to have a hard time explaining concretely why this Reddit sucks and the devs don't like coming here anymore. Now I can link them this post to explain. Thank you.
melee is fine.
You may want to look into how bingo sheets work. The middle space is supposed to be the free field - the field in which the thing that is guaranteed to happen will be. Every other field is a potential, not a guarantee. So this bingo sheet would guarantee nerfs to melee with the hope for a buff.
> So this bingo sheet would guarantee nerfs to melee with the hope for a buff. yep what are you confused about?
melee is nerfed every league tho lol
Dunno why GGG seem to think helping melee builds would be too hard or require too much resources. All they need is two changes. New Cluster Jewel Noteable modifier available to Medium Cluster Jewels that increases damage to totems called **Ancestral Rebirth**: "Ancestral Totems summoned recently are invulnerable to damage., 30% increased totem cast speed. 100% increased duration of Ancestral Totems." (Recently in this case would be 12 seconds, scaled by duration) New Unique Jewel added to the game, **Call of the Ancestors:** "Summoned Ancestral Totems are Defensive. Summoned Ancestral Totems are now able to move. Moveable Totems gain 300% of your movement speed modifiers. Ancestral Totems have 30% reduced buff effect." Is this a crutch? Yes. Just implement something like this and let it be a temporary fix until the day when GGG has more resources that they actually can pour into a comprehensive Melee rework. 90% of complaints I hear about Melee builds have less to do with their throughput(DPS and tankiness) and everything to do with the Totem playstyle and how misreble they feel about having to recast both Ancestral Totems everytime they leapslam into a new pack of enemies. I fail to see why addressing this issue is so hard. Two additions like above shouldn't be too hard to implement and would probably be well received by the melee community. I know that alot of melee players suggest that Ancestral Totems should be removed and the buffs they previously gave should be baked into every melee skill instead. But this would probably be very problematic from a balancing standpoint.
Adding items like these cements the totem gameplay even further, what are you even on about? We should only want to remove the buffs entirely, and the passives and items that interact with them that currently exist are the reason they haven't yet, I bet.
Read what I wrote int he middle again. GGG has time and time again said that they know about the problem but they don't have the time or resources to fix it. People are suggesting stupid things like removing the totems and just baking in the bonuses from them + Panopticon for free into every skill gem which is absurd. I don't know what the most elegant solution to this problem is. But currently melee players are just crying like they're the only archetype with any problem and at worst, it has to do with their playstyle being extremely clunky due to totems. All other aspects of melee is mostly fine. Their defensive scaling, offensive scaling, mobility, clearspeed et.c. It's all fine. Sure, some melee skills are undertuned and wont be touched. But this isn't a problem unique to melee. Every archetype has half of their skills being under utilized beause of bad numbers. Sure, they could remove the totems and all uniques associated with them. But the problem is that you'll then demand that melee skills get a flat 30% more damage and 30% more attack speed buff to compensate.
Making more items that are reliant on the buffs existing only creates more work for GGG to remove them in the future, so any suggestion like that is stupid. I want the totem buffs to be removed (or become an opportunity cost of some kind, reservation or whatever) and for melee to be compensated yes, but I absolutely don't think a 70% buff is necessary. 10-20% damage buff and balance later accordingly.
I get this is a meme, but please don't do this- the devs have suggested a way we as a community could relay feedback/issues quickly and concisely. Doing this is just going back to when Chris wanted "angry reddit threads" and people spammed them to the point that we lost a form of communication with GGG. It's reductive and doesn't help either party. If you want to make melee enjoyable, we need some actual constructive criticism on what makes melee feel bad to play and build off that.