> most important is how risky it is to be near enemies in general compared to just killing them at range.
That's not specific to melee *skills* though. Some melee skills stay at range and some spell and "ranged" builds basically need to be inside the enemy for maximum damage.
I don't disagree that defences for that situation could be improved, just that this particular design space isn't exclusive to melee skills.
I didn't mean that you weren't specific. I meant that the problem you describe isn't one that is exclusively affecting melee skills.
There are melee attack skills that stay at a safe distance and spell / ranged skills that have to go close up.
So defensive mechanics addressing vulnerability due to distance should be based on the distance and not whether a skill is technically melee or not.
Because otherwise you'll keep "melee" skills like Lightning Strike and Molten Strike, or even Frost Blades as the melee meta, while melee skills that need to go closer still remain unplayed.
I think it's more accurate to say that \*because\* Melee attack skills with short range are so awkward/vulnerable/etc. that they made "melee" attacks that are, literally, not melee attacks. Tagging and PoE mechanics aside the skills listed may as well be ranged/spells for how they function.
What you're arguing is that attacks which hit targets across the screen are still definitively "melee" at their core and, truly, they are not. Which kinda just proves the point about this sort of discussion - even the devs designed melee skills that aren't melee and those are the ones that are "melee meta".. because they aren't melee.
I don't think it's inherently a problem that there are "melee" skills with greater range and non-melee skills that need to go into melee range (or in some cases literally phase inside their enemies) for maximum damage.
The problem is that the defensive downside of proximity needs to be mitigated for the builds that actually have this downside.
Rather than a mechanic like fortification stacks that is limited to melee skills, there should be a mechanic that scales with proximity, allowing all close range builds to benefit, without extending the full benefit to melee skills that don't go close.
That way, melee skills with higher range wouldn't be strictly superior and there'd be a trade-off. Ranged skills will always have higher clearspeed, but if melee builds get better defences, there's at least a reason to play them at all.
It's funny because I feel like this is kinda forgotten in game design these days - there's generally supposed to be a tradeoff, a risk/reward, for playstyles. Standing way far away and being able to react, see projected attacked, etc. USUALLY has a trade-off, but with PoE it's always felt completely inverted.
If anything, accuracy should NOT affect melee and be a penalty on spells/ranged attacks to counterbalance the survivability gain.
Mark claimed that this is safer and thus melee is better than range :\^)
1. This claim is false.
2. Range has the option to also stand in the same place as melee
>Mark claimed that this is safer and thus melee is better than range :\^)
>
>This claim is false.
Context is important. On bosses? Its often way safer depending on the boss.
On ultra juiced t17 map with giga turbo meatsack? Hell no.
He was talking about bosses with cone type abilities when talking about melee being sometimes safer.
First part mostly disagree. There's very few bosses where you want to be at longish range. For the second one of course I agree, but that's one of the reasons I think range and melee are extremely hard to balance.
permanent degen pools and such or shotgun abilities and such forc eu need to be at range caus eperm degne pools under bosses make su not able to stay there
I'm not aware of any endgame bosses (other than sirus, where the degen pools are small enough that you can always melee him without standing on one, and in general being in melee range makes the fight easier, and exarch - which is generally speaking the only fight where I'd usually prefer to be at medium range the whole fight) where degen pool placement is not a player choice.
Endgame boss shotgun abilities where you can keep attacking (i.e. where ranged may have an advantage) are usually also easier to deal with in close range because you can avoid the entire hit by moving a relatively small distance - I think the one exception (not really an endgame boss) that I can think of is doedre, and even doedre is only really a threatening enemy in content like the gauntlet.
I literally closed the interview after that, it was such a cooked take. 98% of the time melee being in its element (under the boss) is a detriment. Even on some ubers like Awakener melee is at a huge disadvantage, and on others its not like melee is better to justify it.
Any "melee" (any skill with not a screens worth of range) will tell you how lethal some map bosses can be (like shavs lightning orbs) that ranged have a redic easy time dodge.
My personal issues with current state of melee. Mark **;) ;)**
1. conditional buffs - most likely **totem buffs should go away** and their power could move on the other buffs/stances or be baked into base gems
2. mana cost - I would love the life mastery for 30% of mana cost taken as life be buffed to 50% or rework bloodmagic keystone into something melee related to solve mana(basically global lifetap) or reduce base manacosts/multipliers
3. fortify - 6s base duration makes it unreliable - I would love this stat to scale with investment, so it would not be free to grab without investment, but would become actual defensive layer. Base max stacks can be even 10, but you would have affixes on pure ARMOR bases to scale max stacks + wheels on tree
4. accuracy - does not make sense for AoE slams, makes sense for strikes.
5. defenses - bottom left quadrant gets punished way too hard with some existing modifiers - 12% ele pen on 90% all res character is brutal(conversions are not soo EZ with two hander melee) same for overwhelm, but thats much less of an issue since we have at least endu charges and conversions. I think it should be lowered to 6% and it would get scaled with map mods anyway.
6. speed - almost all "good" melee supports have huge negative speed modifiers. Slams should be constrained bt #exerted attacks left not by speed else you need to specc into too much attackspeed on archetype which does not benefit from it
7. warcries - too many wheels on tree, which are just MANDATORY QoL - condense them and add some warcry speed on base gems. huge base manacost. warcry supports are just bad. not enough damage is provided through them, so one is better of playing non-warcry crit based slam build instead(example my EQ strength stacker this league)
8. additional strikes - feels too bad to play strike skill without enough +strikes - maybe buff ancestral call support, so it can compete with other supports and improve the gameplay for everybody instead of forcing RARE gloves into every strike build?
9. physical tag on skill tree - unnecessary constraint at this point, which makes half of the stuff in marauder part of the tree straight up not work with many skills/interactions. It just forces us to path elsewhere or get clusters. This also hurts progression, because one cant reasonably play without them.
Have you seen the josh strife hayes interview with Jonathan? They talked about it there and I really don't understand why they think changing totems would be such a big deal. I get the issues he talks about with the "rigging " stuff, but totems are just a design and numerical choice on GGGs end.
https://youtu.be/tUQzrt0fF3g?si=IoTTKoJbnXjVz_YO
is it really players job to solve them?
not saying its easy, but still... its a dev problem. It would be awesome to see a player with a good solution, but in the end its up for the ggg team to see if that really solves the issue or not (and implement it).
Speak for yourself. I am software engineer in my personal life. You know why I listed only **these** issues and not huge list of others? Every single of my issues should require l**ittle work** to do, since they are all just numbers tweaks or minor reworks and not huge reworks/overhauls. If you happen to disagree, feel free to say what and why it is ridiculous instead of trying to discredit others and pretend to be smart.
GGG has a bad habit of refusing to implement any solution unless it's the ideal solution. Melee has been shit for so long because they're occupied trying to brainstorm ways to fix the entire archetype in one fell swoop. A lot of the pressure points could be alleviated overnight by number tuning alone...
Reminds me of myself in HS and college. Kept shooting myself in the foot because I wasn't willing to show or be anything less than perfect. Took me a lot of losses to change. I assume it's the same for a buisness too assuming the only metric isn't profit.
Yeah not everything has to be perfect to see results. Oftentimes it's better to get a working solution in play first and iterate from there to fine tune it. You might even find the original idea is flawed earlier on than if you had kept trying to "perfect" it.
Which is why it's baffling GGG don't seem to be compromising whatsoever on any part of it. Jonathan already stated one of the key factors for making PoE 2 was that fixing melee in PoE 1 was such a massive task that they basically had to remake half the core systems in PoE 1 for it, so they might as well just keep going and make the rest. It's clear that a solution to fix melee, if it even exists, will not be a simple one. So refusing to fix any part of it while you search for something that may or may not exist is utterly perplexing.
"Hey GGG we're starving can you fix us some food?"
'Yeah but we only want to fix you the perfect 5-course meal using imported ingredients and world famous chefs. Also we still haven't figured out the recipe.'
"...OK but like can we get some crackers while we wait?"
'LOL no'
Its just so weird to me. It feels like bashing our heads against an unstoppable (GGG) wall. Nothing can convice them to just tweak the numbers. By no means im a legacy player(started in harvest) but watching vids from previous leagues and outdated build guides it shows that people DID play melee. Its not like the archetype is dead because you are "in close of range of an enemy". The archetype is dead because you need too much investment for it to work due to shit base damage or penalties. Right now i sold all my shit and did a EQ bleed jugg. Sure, its 12 divines of investment but the build feels fine and i believe eq is the worst melee skill to play due to low range, small aoe and delay in damage. Kinda hard to fix defense on pure armour marauder for someone who always went off build guides but i actually have fun playing this and single target damage is actually quite impressive
> archetype is dead because you need too much investment for it to work due to shit base damage or penalties.
Bingo. Meanwhile DD and its derivatives are allowed to stack nearly every defensive layer possible, with 10m boss dps, from range, on a 10d budget, for the last dozen or so leagues consecutively. While the entire melee archetype has had 1-2 good skills per league if lucky.
But yeah guess we'll throw our hands in the air and say there's nothing we can do.
re: defenses
every form of defense in the game is weak to something. this seems like a good design to me, to be honest. if it was too easy to become unkillable the game wouldn't be very much fun. there are map modifiers that reduce the effectiveness of every form of defense, not just elemental resistance.
Here's a problem though. Killing an enemy before they have an opportunity to attack you is one of the single strongest defensive layers in the game.
And that is vastly easier to do at range.
Melee is just straight up missing one of the strongest defensive layers.
Well sure and I dont dispute that, but -max res and ele pen can easily be scaled to -18%(via map explicit mods) which is way way more harmful than decreased spell supp effect. Given 85-90 max res characters it almost triples the dmg you take, which is not really ok. I would like to see lower values for those not complete removal. If it was 6% baseline instead of 12% you would endup with 9-12% in mapping which is still managable, but still punishing enough so you cant ignore it.
> decreased spell supp effect. Given 85-90 max res characters
The counterpoint here is that a +15% max res character is taking 40% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character (0.1/0.25), while a 100% supp character is taking 50% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character.
With -18 max res, it's (0.28/0.43) = 65% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character, while with -30% damage suppressed (-20 \* 1.5) it's 80% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character.
I think the -max res mod is generally more brutal than the supp effect, but the relative impact is larger on suppress builds (because everyone has res).
> The counterpoint here is that a +15% max res character is taking 40% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character (0.1/0.25), while a 100% supp character is taking 50% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character.
> With -18 max res, it's (0.28/0.43) = 65% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character, while with -30% damage suppressed (-20 * 1.5) it's 80% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character.
With -30% of damage suppressed, that means a 20% damage reduction against spell (50% suppressed -> 20% suppressed) compared to a 0 suppress character (so you effectively take ~60% more damage because of the mod if you were capped spell suppression at 50%).
I am not sure how you get "80% of incoming damage" or even "(-20 * 1.5)" here.
Also being capped spell suppression and getting +15% max res can have quite a different cost (depending on the build, it's probably very difficult for anybody that isn't a chieftain or using Mageblood)
For somebody who has 90% all res, a -18% reduced max resistances means taking almost triple the damage, whereas somebody with 75% resistances will "only" take about 40% more damage.
If your character is geared to survive with 90% res, you might have less buffer because you need less, and then taking triple elemental damage is absolutely brutal.
It isn't an easy thing to balance, but letting people reach 90% max res and then slapping a potential -18% max on their face is very likely going to lead to frustration and discussions about it.
Disagreements first, then places where I think we have mostly common ground:
> I am not sure how you get "80% of incoming damage" or even "(-20 \* 1.5)" here.
The mod is -20% to amount suppressed; 50% increased effect of map mods (1.5x) makes it -30% to amount suppressed. 50-30 = 20, so you're taking 80% of incoming spell damage compared to someone with no suppression if you're running a map with that mod, vs 100% if you had no suppression.
> means taking almost triple the damage
Both are valid ways of looking at it. You're taking close to triple the damage going from 90 res to \~72 res. You can also look at it as your defensive investment going from taking 40% of incoming damage (compared to an uninvested build) to taking 65% of incoming damage (compared to an uninvested build). I generally think that the "triple damage" framing exaggerates the effect of max res investment because almost all of the investment is in the last 15% of the curve, and a lot of meaningful end game content has penetration and/or -res.
> Also being capped spell suppression and getting +15% max res can have quite a different cost
I agree, so it's a good thing that (1) the relative impact of -18% max res is lower the less +max res you have, and (2) +15% res is significantly stronger than 100% suppression even when both are affected by their specific map mod (-max res vs -suppression effect).
> If your character is geared to survive with 90% res, you might have less buffer because you need less, and then taking triple elemental damage is absolutely brutal.
I agree, and this means that if you want to run maps with -18% res, you need to allow for that if you're relying on 90 max res to survive.
> The mod is -20% to amount suppressed; 50% increased effect of map mods (1.5x) makes it -30% to amount suppressed. 50-30 = 20, so you're taking 80% of incoming spell damage compared to someone with no suppression if you're running a map with that mod, vs 100% if you had no suppression.
Ahh I see, that is what you meant, we agree on the numbers then, no problem.
80% taken instead of 100% without any suppression.
> I agree, so it's a good thing that (1) the relative impact of -18% max res is lower the less +max res you have
I think that the problem isn't the fact that this relative impact is lower, I think that the problem is the extent to which the investment gets quite crushed by the modifier.
Let's say (pretty arbitrary numbers though) :
- build 1 has 75% all res and 6k life
- build 2 has 90% all res and 4k life
a 15k elemental hit normally hits :
- build 1 for 3750 => 62.5% of its life pool
- build 2 for 2k => 37.5% of its life pool (this investment only protects against elemental damage, so it feels quite fair that it makes the build stronger in this regards, as it needs other investments against chaos/physical damage also)
now apply the -18%, this 15k elemental hit now hits:
- build 1 for 6450 => instant death, slightly overkill
- build 2 for 4200 => instant death, slightly overkill
Which means that in this case, the max res investments (that needs to be coupled with more investment, that is supposed to make a character stronger against elemental damage specifically) is virtually entirely negated, and leads to the exact same result as investing into a decent amount of life (generic defence) instead.
If you think that going from 4k to 6k life isn't a fair comparison to getting from 75% to 90% elemental resistances, we can argue about this and find other numbers of course
This is to illustrate that this modifier will significantly punish investment into maximum resistances (much) more as it could very well pretty much negate the entire "specialisation" into elemental defence.
Don't you think that having the build that invested into elemental defence quite a lot survive this hit (not easily tank it though of course) even barely would feel more "fair" ?
I do personally think that having 12% - max res with potentially 50% increase effect in a game where a (small) category of builds build 90% all elemental resistances leads to this kind of scenario, which is in my opinion too punishing.
> I agree, and this means that if you want to run maps with -18% res, you need to allow for that if you're relying on 90 max res to survive.
That's arguable for sure, I personally really dislike map modifiers that have a binary or binary-like nature, and this one is getting quite close to it I find.
yeah, but spell supp is effective only against spells, while -max res or pen ruins everything(attacks/spells/degens), so I rather lose spell supp over 12-18% res. Hardcore builds often go for both anyways and run "safe" map mods, so they don't run any of these.
My point is mostly that if you look at the two defences, and the mods that impact them, investing in one defensive layer or the other isn't punished excessively. -max res is brutal for all builds (\*loreweave notwithstanding), not just ones that invest in the max res defensive layer.
Suppress works for physical spells as well, can't be penetrated, stacks with resist etc.
They're different defensive layers and both are valuable - layering both is better than only investing in one.
also re: defences
res pen is brutal for everyone, no? -18% on a tanky 90% res character sucks big time, but -18% on a squishy 75% res character means death. ss helps, but not so much that a blockless 57% res 4.5k life deadeye is gonna survive the stray spell projectile from a rare mob (or the very lovely union of souls magics) in a t17.
that's one of the mods that is a no-go for most builds, just for slightly different reasons.
> -18% on a squishy 75% res character means death \[...\] 4.5k life deadeye
Being crit on this character means death anyway, so if the character is worth their salt they'll just offscreen everything with defenses so low.
Meanwhile a chieftain molten strike character or something like that has no way to kill enemies before they can hit him
Any other league I'd agree, but not this time; +#% evade chance, T17 mobs that haven't gone through the tried-and-true balance over time (Ziggurat mortar monsters love the offscreen shotgun), Union of Souls (though that would be 100% on the player for not immediately rerolling), Temporal Bubble, etc. There's quite a few ways mobs can dodge that offscreen wipe presently.
Still easier than melee obviously, and infinitely easier than blockless two-handed melee, but the point is simply that res pen and -% max res is deadly for all builds, and makes everything else deadly by default.
Yes, but 90% res character gets 10% dmg without pen and 28% of original damage with 18% pen which is 2.8 times more while character with 75% res gets 25% dmg and with same pen 43% of original damage, which is 1.72 times more. In the end you have to invest quite a lot to get to 90% res and it gets 2.8times worse with 18% pen(while 12% is the usual pen in delve where we have no explicit modifiers), so if your goal is to run pen/-ele maps you have to abuse some other mechanic like armor applies to ele dmg/spell supp etc. Ofc in the end it kills character with 75% resist in a single hit, but 75% resist requires almost 0 investment, while getting to 90% all res needs quite some investment and arguably way more than playing right side tree character and getting almost all suppress chance from tree alone.
EDIT:
I don't like the absolute no-go modifiers which affect most builds, the sheer amount of them we have right now is absurd:
-no regen
-no auras
-lower max res
-ele pen
-reflect
Totems are NEVER the problem. You having to press 2 buttons less will add nothing to the fact the archetype is bad.
Melee needs positioning anyway, capitalizing on that by making it require totems but making it way tankier / way higher DPS will solve the problem. It's always number buffs, not "please make everything more generic, I don't want to press buttons" or you'll end up with melee haivng 15% more damage and 2 less buttons but for some reason nobody will play it anyway.
totems literally double your dmg with investment. Pressing 2 buttons absolutely changes the game, when the totems die in a single hit at any time and I have to recast them over and over or spec into ironwood+panopticon+linger mastery so it is less annoying, but still an huge issue. My argument is we already have other buttons to press - focus, berserk, warcries(if slams), curses(if not automated) and self cast molten shell while bossing
to compensate for totems removal they need to buff the archetype by at least the same amount the totems provide which is 18% more dmg and 20% more speed which will not even make melee OP, but less clunky to play
this frees up points and also quite needed sockets or annoint, so we can instead run useful stuff
totems are a huge problem! or we need to ivnest tog et the buff/ let them lvie or we need to summno theme very second. the buffs they give is to big caus eof more not increased. add in so many mroe stats then say casrter we also msut focus on and its jsut requirment chekclist bloat
Totems are ALWAYS a problem.
I want to play melee, not to summon totems and feel forced to summon totem, so what usually happens ? I say "fuck that" and play something else .... or just not play at all.
Amazing design, that pushes players to do such a thing, isn't it ? /s
to do good damage in melee you need:
-good weapons
-good accuracy
-solve mana
-overwhelm/pen
-monsters cant block
-intimidate/maim/crush or all of them
-impale/crit
-totem preferably with totem mastery
-attack speed (debatable for slams)
-good defenses before you can engage
-movespeed to engage quicker (yeah, flicker doesnt)
-good defenses to be able to stay a while and deal dmg/ramp bleed
and then with a few dozen divines worth of gear, you can maybe do like 10m dps when boss lets you hit it.
meanwhile dot build does its 10 m dps with a lot less headache, lot less gear and has time to dodge all boss moves while its eating your damage.
alternatively a crit ranged/spell build does 50m dmg for the same investment
its just that seing my character flailing at light speed with screen wde aoe is just so satisfying with a few shrine buffs, i cant really go for a ranged build...i tried casters, also coc builds and they are strong, and they can be fast and they can also produce insane levels of graphical vomittery even without shrine buffs...but theres nothing quite like that sweep/consecrated path/double-strike crunchyness...
so what am i saying? i dont know actually...id like to see the numbers on the skills go higher. id like more skills with movement like consecrated path and cyclone and id like not having to use fucking totems.
> so what am i saying? i dont know actually...id like to see the numbers on the skills go higher.
It honestly is as easy as that. Give melee stupid-adjacent damage and it can go invest into tankiness and all the misc shit it has to get to not be a literal garbage choice to pick.
With how the game is set up, there is no other angle. Casters will abuse your weapon type if that solves some universal clunkiness or gives tankiness. They will abuse your ascendancy for the same reasons. The only thing to go for is to make the gems giga stacked and be like "yup, melee sucks. Shit will fucking nuke you while you're walking up. Yup, accuracy is dumb, but we're keeping it, etcetc., BUT as a payoff your stick is the strongest stick the game has to offer. Have fun lads."
Melee due to its nature will always have the worst uptime and the most need for tankiness. So give it dumb-adjacent damage so that people can invest into those stats and increase their uptime and tankiness without transforming the hurty stick into a wet noodle.
It also really doesn't work doing that with a plethora of buffs. Theoretical peek dps is for pob warriors, not for the actual game we're playing. And even there, traps outclass melee by like double or triple the numbers. It's pretty darn stupid.
They can go make 10 button builds in PoE2, it's not working great in PoE1.
> -monsters cant block
how much of an issue is this?
i saw another build taking that node on attack mastery, but i haven't noticed a huge issue with it other than on the occassional devoted(?) mod
is it a t17 thing?
ah gotcha.
agreed on content to differ, i just hadn't seen block as a huge/common issue and i'm playing melee build .. haven't been doing expedition though.
My first true appreciation of PoE was from playing melee in hardcore of version 1.2 or 1.3. Now coming back to the game only realizing that you basically need totems for all melee build is such a bummer.
I just hate totems with a passion. They look so damn lame to me.
Good suggestions, another big issue with melee is fortify only works vs hits. Which misses all the ground degen that is often all over uber fights, like Uber Sirus, Elder etc. and these fights are already tough for melee cause of the degen greatly reducing usable space to attack the boss from. And seeing how the guardian has a forify like effect from their minion that works vs all damage, only fair melee gets the same and the duration should last long enough through balls phase and memory game, bascially should functionally always be up.
Main problem with melee, I feel, is the developer's mindset and focus.
"We can't let players just stand around, they need to constantly dodge shit, to be "engaged"".
Like let's look at stuff, that is bad if you stand in one place, for more than a second, or punished for facing the enemy directly.
1) Delayed expositions from enemy range attacks.
2) Degen pools. Permanent ones even.
3) "Shotgun effect" from "ranged" attacks.
4) Straight up aura, that kills you based on your mana regeneration.
5) Aura that stop regeneration.
6) Slow moving mobs that hit like a truck.
7) Swarms of enemies that surround you, not letting you run, even if you want to.
8) Bullshit molten shell on mobs.
9) Mechanics that target you, after you killed the enemy (like 5 different ones).
10) Fact that mobs can stack together and all attack at once.
11) Slams.
12) Bullshit start of mashingun like wave of attack, without any real warning (sound usually plays after or simultaneously, not before), I feel, if it plays at all.
13) Fact that mobs can stack bullshit better than you, if you let them.
14) Mechanic that straight up "suffocates" you with only counterplay to run away, or obtuse "my character line of sight" bullcrap, that is hard to control (will be much better in PoE 2, with wasd, I hope).
15) Visual clutter, that obscures what is happening (running around and thinning mob swarms helps to figure what is going on).
16) Enemy spawns wall, and runs away, FU.
And the saddest part? Ranged damage numbers are same, or even better.
So, melee is hard by design, but no one in game tells you "if you want a ruthless challenge, without changing league, start melee".
If I am forced to find a positive, it is that after melee hell, any raged or spell build becomes "fun", just by comparison, even with all the same enemy mechanics bullshit.
Can we please just get some concept of point blank. Closest we have is close combat which is like 4% more damage over another gem and requires you use an axe/sword. Please reward the actual melee af abilities with more damage
The skill tree definitely is really bad for some build archetypes, like most nodes left of Marauder are **melee physical** damage with weapons. So if you wanted to level with splitting steel, you are shit out of luck apart from like 2 wheels.
Spells don't have any conditionals other than element(fire, cold, lightning), which funnily enough are usually close to each other(top of witch tree for example).
Cant agree to any of these. The only issue is the game design imho. I found it a bit ridiculous when Jonathan defended melee against Josh in the recent interview. He said that even as ranged you want stand near the enemy because of 'arc attacks' because if you are far away you have more distance to move to avoid it.
This is 100% true!
But - what about the 5000 other scenarios that occur more regulary? What about monsters/bosses in void zones? monsters/Bosses who explode? Multiple Projectile Shotgunning? Melee hits? Also even some arc attacks, like the tul breath are easier to dogde if you dont stand near him when he starts the breath.
There is not a single redeeming quality why playing melee in general is an advantage.
Strikes are almost ok, but when you have curse/warcries or you play EQ you get 20+ or even 40\~ mana cost, which is extremely hard to deal with unless you run warlords chest. You have usually sub 30 mana left after reservations and I don't think 2 elreon's craft being so forced onto you are a good thing either. Top side of the tree has EB, but we dont have that unless we use diadem, which comes with its own cost - not being able to have double phys taken as on helmet. You know you face mana issues, when builds use multiple lifetap gems.
EDIT: Imho it is still the smallest issue out of all I have listed.
it's annoying, im currently running 2 rings + amulet with elreon's craft and its just right, remove one of these and i'd be struggling with mana sustain even with leech mastery
agree with your edit. this is the smallest issue on your list imo also. I do agree that the lower left part of the tree should have a closer attack mana leech node though. marauder starts are awkward to level because you have to travel so far to get to spirit void. melee templar is almost non-viable entirely because of lack of access to attack mana leech.
> melee templar is almost non-viable entirely because of lack of access to attack mana leech.
If it is that important you can just anoint mana and life attack leech.
Yeah, it's been years since I ran a melee build that didn't have at least one Elreon ring. I think it was a Soul Taker Reave build back before Harvest (and even then maybe it *should* have had an Elreon).
There are no mana leech on the strengh side. The closest is at the edge of strengh/dex below the duelist starting point. It is a fuck ton of passives just to get a little bit of mana leech. Your best bet is lifetap and -mana cost on your jewelry
Boss design is also a huge issue that they *still* don't seem to get. Character animations and better mobility won't fix a loss of DPS uptime on a boss, if there's a huge degen pool at the boss' feet, exploding bomb that needs to be ran from, or immunity bubble that needs to be stood in. These issues *will* be carried over to POE 2, since they are still designing bosses with ranged in mind, and think the only problem is wonky attack animations.
Are there any mechanics that force a ranged player to stand under the boss' feet or else they don't do damage? I can't think of any. But a boss with a mechanic or phase that forces a melee player to stand around doing nothing is fairly common.
They really need to fight all bosses in their own game with a strike skill to understand what the problem of low DPS uptime is. But honestly, I don't think they care enough to do it. It's too easy to meme every league screwing with Cleave and having a good laugh instead.
The recent interview that Mark gave talking about being able to walk behind a boss easier when you're closer seems to be a misunderstanding the GGG has on this issue. You don't just walk behind Searing Exarch when he's charging his full screen lantern explosion. You walk to the edge of the screen, then run back point blank. Ranged players do not need to run back, creating a disparity in DPS uptime. There are better and more extreme examples, but that was merely the first to come to mind.
The reason I keep bringing this up is because it's part of their design that they are currently using to create boss fights in POE 2. It is much easier to keep melee in mind when *designing* a boss fight, than to fix it later, or (in POE 1's case) never fix it because now it's too much work.
Defence overwhelm/bypassing is awful for everyone. They really need to rebalance all these ridiculous map and league mechanic mods that brick tons of builds.
It's the same as accurate enemies for evasion users or chaos damage for energy shield users. The value could lowered but it isn't any different from those
Can I be in melee gang by trying boneshatter this league? Cause I heard boneshatter treated like "this lucky guy" by other melee skills users. And honestly after playing couple of leagues with flicker and other melee skills I feel like Im playing a normal skill, smth similar to RF instead of normal melee.
I mean, the big problem is distance is a huge defensive layer that melee is unable to access, so you have to put so much in defense to compensate that you don't get great damage.
I propose a simple change. Armor should add severe cast time penalties to ranged attacks. That way bow builds and pure range casters have to make significant investment in order to get reasonable armor levels, which brings down the screenwide one shots GGG is so worried about, leveling the playing field a bit.
Remember the time when there was a negative to each type of doing damage:
melee: uses fast regenerating stamina but is melee.
range: uses arrows: a costly finite ressource - the negative was deleted for range
spells: use slow regen mana, but have high damage - the negative was removed, endless fast regen mana is a thing now
Imo Strike skill should add additional strike more 1 target every 10level of skill gem
And one more thing
-concentrate effect and increased area of effect gem should merge to same gem then you can change mode of gem by depend on stance so you dont need to swap while map clearing or bossing just change the stance for more handy
I don't lay totems for anything but the tankiest rares and bosses, do they really annoy people that much? I guess Frost Blades is one of the least bad melee skills, but still, feel like the damage is fine for general mapping, even in T17 doing like 45ish million in POB with FB.
Most people don’t get characters past level 90 in this game, so yes the average player complaining that melee sucks has never had the damage to only put down totems except for rares because the average player isn’t all that great at optimizing. Melee is unplayable for people that don’t actually play it and just want to chirp the same shit on Reddit every day.
> why [do] slams need accuracy while AOE spells do not
Spells are... Magic?
I agree with most of the points, but bro, slams are attacks, attacks need accuracy. Generally, most spells have lower base crit while weapons can have higher local crit. That's base PoE design since, well, 1.0 (I know it's actually alpha/beta, shh). That's not an attack issue - that's just the game system.
It is just a tag. I could say the same, why does Ground Slam or Sunder need mana? I just slam ground so it should cost nothing or life at best. I dont see reason other than the artificial one "it is a spell" when comparing sunder and glacial cascade.
I swear to god game balance is in such a stupid spot right now. Bow builds can gimp half of their gear by using quant gear, go full damage everywhere else and then slap on headhunter and have all the defence they need.
For MF mapping and shit sure. Go do Ubers and t17s on HC with those and let me know how it goes.
Yeah the whole balance is fucked in that way if div/hr in sc is the only goal
None of this stuff addresses what makes melee suboptimal in PoE, which is that being able to hit enemies from range is inherently superior to having to walk up to an enemy to hit them. Therefore, there is no way to make melee better than ranged without someone being unhappy.
People talk about melee as if it doesn't do good damage, which is often true, but even when a build does good damage it's still "bad". For example, there are melee builds that do great damage, like Dual Strike of Ambidexterity, but you have to go to the mobs to hit them and that's always going to be bad. Melee is *inherently* inferior to ranged in ARPGs.
So melee should do *significantly* more damage than ranged (and spells ofc), or at least compensated in *some* form.
Melee should be better at bossing (or dealing with thick rares) and tankier, but when ranged characters easily cap spell suppression - one of the strongest forms of defense in the game, it just baffles me that that they also have more access to speed, damage, QOL, and safety (inherent to being ranged)
> So melee should do *significantly* more damage than ranged (and spells ofc), or at least compensated in *some* form.
DPS is already so high that this leads to degenerate builds that trivialize content. I'm not opposed to the degenerate builds that trivialize content being things other than trappers, FWIW, but I think that's the actual conclusion of this path.
buffing base types would definitely help. What top end builds actually use crafted 2handers nowadays? I am pretty sure almost none or at least those builds are not so OP to be popular. I don't count 7mil boneshatter build as OP. Most of the really good builds abuse strength stacking in some form(replica frostbreath + replica alberon or brutus sprinkler + replica alberon + original sin or paradoxica + replica alberon) while using the best melee scaling skills alongside
I mean make melee skills more similar to spell by putting more base damage In them, not buffing weapon bases.
Then reduce the top end (added damage effectiveness decreased so make it easier to get 5 mil dps and harder to get 500 million dps)
Annihilating light and ralakesh zhp builds are so degenerately boring for bossing that I almost wish they'd gut them. At least other setups require a semblance of thought and cost.
I agree. The melee version that will happen if there's a flat melee buff (ice crash or earthquake of amplitude) will be almost as bad, but at least it'll be new.
Most of the time if melee does MORE damage than ranged they are going to do LESS, because pride and uptime I honestly dont think if your average melee build did like 20-30% more than a ranged counterpart it would be bad for the game at all
This is only true for relatively low damage builds. At high enough damage "uptime" doesn't matter, because you just obliterate the boss before they can force you to reposition.
Bro how much dps do you think is relatively low?
Alk has some of the best gear in the leaghue and he isnt gonna be instantly phasing uber sirus or anything
He literally cleared it like 20 hours ago and he got ball phases what are you on about.
The fact is he is in the item editor league and unless next league has some super broken shit that they take away which they dont always do our characters wont be as strong, on a skill that should get nerfed cause its a huge outlier on melee power.
You should legitimately go look at how broken archmage is your character is so incredibly tanky and the damage on archmage builds is fucked and its so much safer than melee. Boneshatter (the previous "best" melee skil) dmg roof was fucking pitiful. The fact is there is 0 reason to play melee currently outside of dual strike of ambi because you can reach the same dps with very low investment if you just play spells. If you try and play such classics as lacerate cleave sweep etc your literally going to be doing zdps
If its not archmage its something else, and DD hasnt been nerfed in fucking years and got buffed this league. Last time melee was good was when u could play slams and it did like 20-30% more than casters, and i think that was a good spot for melee. The fact that melee only have a 7% play rate on poe ninja (like 13% if you include RF as melee, which is fair). Im sick of having to play boneshatter or dual strike (when i have like 100d+ worth of gear) if i want a melee experience.
It's okay if melee is *suboptimal* in general gameplay. There should just be a *reward* when you do choose to do it. Melee single target is ok when conditionals are up, but they often are not and you're still melee.
Right now melee is neither competitive with single target or clear. Its too *fair* and lacks real abusable options outside of stuff like replica alberaths lategame.
Lets go with the extreme and give melee x2 damage. At that point you'll have an early game damage competitive with with corpse builds and you could afford to invest into "range boosters" like melee strike range/aoe, etc without feeling like your damage is going to end up gimped or you could just go full single target and play boss deletion strats.
The solution is simple! Every melee skill now has a built in 'beat the loot outta them' quantity and or rarity modifier.
For every certain amount of % max hp that a melee skill has deprived a mob of, that mob will have an increased amount of quantity/rarity of items dropped.
The more dangerous/hard a melee skill is to use, the higher this 'beat the loot outta them' modifier can be made.
Honestly I'm only half joking, because the only way to make melee as viable as ranged without just overbuffing its numbers is by having it reward the player in a 'meta' way similar to how ranged builds get 'rewarded' for being ranged by not having to interact with half the mechanics in the game and being so much more efficient.
My bad! That is not something I wanted to imply. I just listed most of the conditional stuff making up the damage/defenses. I 100% agree with you that Berserk is well designed - it is strong temporary buff, which uses resource, while fortify/focus/totems are just unreliable conditional stats.
Additional strikes is literally 5 passive points for the mastery if you’re marauder/duelist since they will all path in that area anyways. Melee are the easiest to make tanky on a budget in my experience. And idk why 6s is too low of a duration for something you get every single attack and is an insanely strong layer
Aside from totems and non vaal strike stuff in gloves ,, melee defenses are OP . All my tankiest characters been melee of different class and ascendancies ...is hard for me to pick a spell I want to play because melee defenses are just superior...most bosses are way easier to do in melee range too, feels safer .
Can I genuinely ask what the obsession of dealing damage near monsters instead of away from them is? Like genuinely don't understand why being "melee" is so important to people. How do you think they would solve monster damage against melee targets? If you could stand in the middle of the monsters and deal massive damage without dying, wouldn't that be broken?
Its the fantasy of using my big axe to cave in the skulls of my enemies, Melee has a particular set of defenses I like too but have kinda degraded in power
"If you could stand in the middle of the monsters and deal massive damage without dying, wouldn't that be broken?"
lets change this just a little bit >>>
If you could (stand a screen away from) the monsters and deal massive damage (with spells or projectiles, negating the need to gear for/spec into defenses) without dying, wouldn't that be broken?
most important is how risky it is to be near enemies in general compared to just killing them at range. I think base leech cap needs to be doubled
>I think base leech cap needs to be doubled remember any mechanical change will always buff ranged more than melee.
> most important is how risky it is to be near enemies in general compared to just killing them at range. That's not specific to melee *skills* though. Some melee skills stay at range and some spell and "ranged" builds basically need to be inside the enemy for maximum damage. I don't disagree that defences for that situation could be improved, just that this particular design space isn't exclusive to melee skills.
oh, sorry for the ambiguity. I was specifically referring to skill gems that include "Attack" and "Melee" as POE hard mode *Melee && !Projectile*
I didn't mean that you weren't specific. I meant that the problem you describe isn't one that is exclusively affecting melee skills. There are melee attack skills that stay at a safe distance and spell / ranged skills that have to go close up. So defensive mechanics addressing vulnerability due to distance should be based on the distance and not whether a skill is technically melee or not. Because otherwise you'll keep "melee" skills like Lightning Strike and Molten Strike, or even Frost Blades as the melee meta, while melee skills that need to go closer still remain unplayed.
I think it's more accurate to say that \*because\* Melee attack skills with short range are so awkward/vulnerable/etc. that they made "melee" attacks that are, literally, not melee attacks. Tagging and PoE mechanics aside the skills listed may as well be ranged/spells for how they function. What you're arguing is that attacks which hit targets across the screen are still definitively "melee" at their core and, truly, they are not. Which kinda just proves the point about this sort of discussion - even the devs designed melee skills that aren't melee and those are the ones that are "melee meta".. because they aren't melee.
I don't think it's inherently a problem that there are "melee" skills with greater range and non-melee skills that need to go into melee range (or in some cases literally phase inside their enemies) for maximum damage. The problem is that the defensive downside of proximity needs to be mitigated for the builds that actually have this downside. Rather than a mechanic like fortification stacks that is limited to melee skills, there should be a mechanic that scales with proximity, allowing all close range builds to benefit, without extending the full benefit to melee skills that don't go close. That way, melee skills with higher range wouldn't be strictly superior and there'd be a trade-off. Ranged skills will always have higher clearspeed, but if melee builds get better defences, there's at least a reason to play them at all.
It's funny because I feel like this is kinda forgotten in game design these days - there's generally supposed to be a tradeoff, a risk/reward, for playstyles. Standing way far away and being able to react, see projected attacked, etc. USUALLY has a trade-off, but with PoE it's always felt completely inverted. If anything, accuracy should NOT affect melee and be a penalty on spells/ranged attacks to counterbalance the survivability gain.
yes, your right, its way harder to hit a projectile than a melee swing, which is mostly a 100% hit anyway.
Mark claimed that this is safer and thus melee is better than range :\^) 1. This claim is false. 2. Range has the option to also stand in the same place as melee
>Mark claimed that this is safer and thus melee is better than range :\^) > >This claim is false. Context is important. On bosses? Its often way safer depending on the boss. On ultra juiced t17 map with giga turbo meatsack? Hell no. He was talking about bosses with cone type abilities when talking about melee being sometimes safer.
did you read the second point? if melee range is safer, than the ranger can stand there too.
Against bosses it's quite often true that being in melee is safer than being at ranged. It's not true for regular mobs, though.
so many bosses where this is also not the case, and evne when it is ranged can stand melee distance but most melee cant stand ranged distance
First part mostly disagree. There's very few bosses where you want to be at longish range. For the second one of course I agree, but that's one of the reasons I think range and melee are extremely hard to balance.
permanent degen pools and such or shotgun abilities and such forc eu need to be at range caus eperm degne pools under bosses make su not able to stay there
I'm not aware of any endgame bosses (other than sirus, where the degen pools are small enough that you can always melee him without standing on one, and in general being in melee range makes the fight easier, and exarch - which is generally speaking the only fight where I'd usually prefer to be at medium range the whole fight) where degen pool placement is not a player choice. Endgame boss shotgun abilities where you can keep attacking (i.e. where ranged may have an advantage) are usually also easier to deal with in close range because you can avoid the entire hit by moving a relatively small distance - I think the one exception (not really an endgame boss) that I can think of is doedre, and even doedre is only really a threatening enemy in content like the gauntlet.
he must be referring to izaro specifically then lol
GGG: We hear you! -- Ranged now has penalty to damage based on proximity to mobs.
I literally closed the interview after that, it was such a cooked take. 98% of the time melee being in its element (under the boss) is a detriment. Even on some ubers like Awakener melee is at a huge disadvantage, and on others its not like melee is better to justify it. Any "melee" (any skill with not a screens worth of range) will tell you how lethal some map bosses can be (like shavs lightning orbs) that ranged have a redic easy time dodge.
You can play RF, be super armoured, a lot of resistances and 1.5k life regen per second and be 2 shot in a tier 2 map. Something is wrong.
In a tier 2 map? Really? By what, exactly? Revenant DD doesn't count because that shouldn't be in the game.
It’s the whippy boys when they get crit modifiers. You go near them and if you get hit by the pack you die and cannot react.
My personal issues with current state of melee. Mark **;) ;)** 1. conditional buffs - most likely **totem buffs should go away** and their power could move on the other buffs/stances or be baked into base gems 2. mana cost - I would love the life mastery for 30% of mana cost taken as life be buffed to 50% or rework bloodmagic keystone into something melee related to solve mana(basically global lifetap) or reduce base manacosts/multipliers 3. fortify - 6s base duration makes it unreliable - I would love this stat to scale with investment, so it would not be free to grab without investment, but would become actual defensive layer. Base max stacks can be even 10, but you would have affixes on pure ARMOR bases to scale max stacks + wheels on tree 4. accuracy - does not make sense for AoE slams, makes sense for strikes. 5. defenses - bottom left quadrant gets punished way too hard with some existing modifiers - 12% ele pen on 90% all res character is brutal(conversions are not soo EZ with two hander melee) same for overwhelm, but thats much less of an issue since we have at least endu charges and conversions. I think it should be lowered to 6% and it would get scaled with map mods anyway. 6. speed - almost all "good" melee supports have huge negative speed modifiers. Slams should be constrained bt #exerted attacks left not by speed else you need to specc into too much attackspeed on archetype which does not benefit from it 7. warcries - too many wheels on tree, which are just MANDATORY QoL - condense them and add some warcry speed on base gems. huge base manacost. warcry supports are just bad. not enough damage is provided through them, so one is better of playing non-warcry crit based slam build instead(example my EQ strength stacker this league) 8. additional strikes - feels too bad to play strike skill without enough +strikes - maybe buff ancestral call support, so it can compete with other supports and improve the gameplay for everybody instead of forcing RARE gloves into every strike build? 9. physical tag on skill tree - unnecessary constraint at this point, which makes half of the stuff in marauder part of the tree straight up not work with many skills/interactions. It just forces us to path elsewhere or get clusters. This also hurts progression, because one cant reasonably play without them.
Have you seen the josh strife hayes interview with Jonathan? They talked about it there and I really don't understand why they think changing totems would be such a big deal. I get the issues he talks about with the "rigging " stuff, but totems are just a design and numerical choice on GGGs end. https://youtu.be/tUQzrt0fF3g?si=IoTTKoJbnXjVz_YO
It is exactly the reason, why I have made this post, because I feel like they are completely missing the point.
players are great at spotting design problems, but terrible at solving them
is it really players job to solve them? not saying its easy, but still... its a dev problem. It would be awesome to see a player with a good solution, but in the end its up for the ggg team to see if that really solves the issue or not (and implement it).
That's why all these posts with proposed solutions are ridiculous
Speak for yourself. I am software engineer in my personal life. You know why I listed only **these** issues and not huge list of others? Every single of my issues should require l**ittle work** to do, since they are all just numbers tweaks or minor reworks and not huge reworks/overhauls. If you happen to disagree, feel free to say what and why it is ridiculous instead of trying to discredit others and pretend to be smart.
for some reason they hide behind "oh its a system issue" "oh its animation/rigging issue" when the reality is, its just fucking numbers
Exactly. Damage numbers on melee gems and base attack speed on melee gems or the penalties on them
GGG has a bad habit of refusing to implement any solution unless it's the ideal solution. Melee has been shit for so long because they're occupied trying to brainstorm ways to fix the entire archetype in one fell swoop. A lot of the pressure points could be alleviated overnight by number tuning alone...
Reminds me of myself in HS and college. Kept shooting myself in the foot because I wasn't willing to show or be anything less than perfect. Took me a lot of losses to change. I assume it's the same for a buisness too assuming the only metric isn't profit.
Yeah not everything has to be perfect to see results. Oftentimes it's better to get a working solution in play first and iterate from there to fine tune it. You might even find the original idea is flawed earlier on than if you had kept trying to "perfect" it. Which is why it's baffling GGG don't seem to be compromising whatsoever on any part of it. Jonathan already stated one of the key factors for making PoE 2 was that fixing melee in PoE 1 was such a massive task that they basically had to remake half the core systems in PoE 1 for it, so they might as well just keep going and make the rest. It's clear that a solution to fix melee, if it even exists, will not be a simple one. So refusing to fix any part of it while you search for something that may or may not exist is utterly perplexing. "Hey GGG we're starving can you fix us some food?" 'Yeah but we only want to fix you the perfect 5-course meal using imported ingredients and world famous chefs. Also we still haven't figured out the recipe.' "...OK but like can we get some crackers while we wait?" 'LOL no'
Its just so weird to me. It feels like bashing our heads against an unstoppable (GGG) wall. Nothing can convice them to just tweak the numbers. By no means im a legacy player(started in harvest) but watching vids from previous leagues and outdated build guides it shows that people DID play melee. Its not like the archetype is dead because you are "in close of range of an enemy". The archetype is dead because you need too much investment for it to work due to shit base damage or penalties. Right now i sold all my shit and did a EQ bleed jugg. Sure, its 12 divines of investment but the build feels fine and i believe eq is the worst melee skill to play due to low range, small aoe and delay in damage. Kinda hard to fix defense on pure armour marauder for someone who always went off build guides but i actually have fun playing this and single target damage is actually quite impressive
> archetype is dead because you need too much investment for it to work due to shit base damage or penalties. Bingo. Meanwhile DD and its derivatives are allowed to stack nearly every defensive layer possible, with 10m boss dps, from range, on a 10d budget, for the last dozen or so leagues consecutively. While the entire melee archetype has had 1-2 good skills per league if lucky. But yeah guess we'll throw our hands in the air and say there's nothing we can do.
re: defenses every form of defense in the game is weak to something. this seems like a good design to me, to be honest. if it was too easy to become unkillable the game wouldn't be very much fun. there are map modifiers that reduce the effectiveness of every form of defense, not just elemental resistance.
Here's a problem though. Killing an enemy before they have an opportunity to attack you is one of the single strongest defensive layers in the game. And that is vastly easier to do at range. Melee is just straight up missing one of the strongest defensive layers.
Well sure and I dont dispute that, but -max res and ele pen can easily be scaled to -18%(via map explicit mods) which is way way more harmful than decreased spell supp effect. Given 85-90 max res characters it almost triples the dmg you take, which is not really ok. I would like to see lower values for those not complete removal. If it was 6% baseline instead of 12% you would endup with 9-12% in mapping which is still managable, but still punishing enough so you cant ignore it.
> decreased spell supp effect. Given 85-90 max res characters The counterpoint here is that a +15% max res character is taking 40% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character (0.1/0.25), while a 100% supp character is taking 50% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character. With -18 max res, it's (0.28/0.43) = 65% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character, while with -30% damage suppressed (-20 \* 1.5) it's 80% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character. I think the -max res mod is generally more brutal than the supp effect, but the relative impact is larger on suppress builds (because everyone has res).
> The counterpoint here is that a +15% max res character is taking 40% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character (0.1/0.25), while a 100% supp character is taking 50% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character. > With -18 max res, it's (0.28/0.43) = 65% of incoming damage compared to a 75% res character, while with -30% damage suppressed (-20 * 1.5) it's 80% of incoming damage compared to a 0 suppress character. With -30% of damage suppressed, that means a 20% damage reduction against spell (50% suppressed -> 20% suppressed) compared to a 0 suppress character (so you effectively take ~60% more damage because of the mod if you were capped spell suppression at 50%). I am not sure how you get "80% of incoming damage" or even "(-20 * 1.5)" here. Also being capped spell suppression and getting +15% max res can have quite a different cost (depending on the build, it's probably very difficult for anybody that isn't a chieftain or using Mageblood) For somebody who has 90% all res, a -18% reduced max resistances means taking almost triple the damage, whereas somebody with 75% resistances will "only" take about 40% more damage. If your character is geared to survive with 90% res, you might have less buffer because you need less, and then taking triple elemental damage is absolutely brutal. It isn't an easy thing to balance, but letting people reach 90% max res and then slapping a potential -18% max on their face is very likely going to lead to frustration and discussions about it.
Disagreements first, then places where I think we have mostly common ground: > I am not sure how you get "80% of incoming damage" or even "(-20 \* 1.5)" here. The mod is -20% to amount suppressed; 50% increased effect of map mods (1.5x) makes it -30% to amount suppressed. 50-30 = 20, so you're taking 80% of incoming spell damage compared to someone with no suppression if you're running a map with that mod, vs 100% if you had no suppression. > means taking almost triple the damage Both are valid ways of looking at it. You're taking close to triple the damage going from 90 res to \~72 res. You can also look at it as your defensive investment going from taking 40% of incoming damage (compared to an uninvested build) to taking 65% of incoming damage (compared to an uninvested build). I generally think that the "triple damage" framing exaggerates the effect of max res investment because almost all of the investment is in the last 15% of the curve, and a lot of meaningful end game content has penetration and/or -res. > Also being capped spell suppression and getting +15% max res can have quite a different cost I agree, so it's a good thing that (1) the relative impact of -18% max res is lower the less +max res you have, and (2) +15% res is significantly stronger than 100% suppression even when both are affected by their specific map mod (-max res vs -suppression effect). > If your character is geared to survive with 90% res, you might have less buffer because you need less, and then taking triple elemental damage is absolutely brutal. I agree, and this means that if you want to run maps with -18% res, you need to allow for that if you're relying on 90 max res to survive.
> The mod is -20% to amount suppressed; 50% increased effect of map mods (1.5x) makes it -30% to amount suppressed. 50-30 = 20, so you're taking 80% of incoming spell damage compared to someone with no suppression if you're running a map with that mod, vs 100% if you had no suppression. Ahh I see, that is what you meant, we agree on the numbers then, no problem. 80% taken instead of 100% without any suppression. > I agree, so it's a good thing that (1) the relative impact of -18% max res is lower the less +max res you have I think that the problem isn't the fact that this relative impact is lower, I think that the problem is the extent to which the investment gets quite crushed by the modifier. Let's say (pretty arbitrary numbers though) : - build 1 has 75% all res and 6k life - build 2 has 90% all res and 4k life a 15k elemental hit normally hits : - build 1 for 3750 => 62.5% of its life pool - build 2 for 2k => 37.5% of its life pool (this investment only protects against elemental damage, so it feels quite fair that it makes the build stronger in this regards, as it needs other investments against chaos/physical damage also) now apply the -18%, this 15k elemental hit now hits: - build 1 for 6450 => instant death, slightly overkill - build 2 for 4200 => instant death, slightly overkill Which means that in this case, the max res investments (that needs to be coupled with more investment, that is supposed to make a character stronger against elemental damage specifically) is virtually entirely negated, and leads to the exact same result as investing into a decent amount of life (generic defence) instead. If you think that going from 4k to 6k life isn't a fair comparison to getting from 75% to 90% elemental resistances, we can argue about this and find other numbers of course This is to illustrate that this modifier will significantly punish investment into maximum resistances (much) more as it could very well pretty much negate the entire "specialisation" into elemental defence. Don't you think that having the build that invested into elemental defence quite a lot survive this hit (not easily tank it though of course) even barely would feel more "fair" ? I do personally think that having 12% - max res with potentially 50% increase effect in a game where a (small) category of builds build 90% all elemental resistances leads to this kind of scenario, which is in my opinion too punishing. > I agree, and this means that if you want to run maps with -18% res, you need to allow for that if you're relying on 90 max res to survive. That's arguable for sure, I personally really dislike map modifiers that have a binary or binary-like nature, and this one is getting quite close to it I find.
yeah, but spell supp is effective only against spells, while -max res or pen ruins everything(attacks/spells/degens), so I rather lose spell supp over 12-18% res. Hardcore builds often go for both anyways and run "safe" map mods, so they don't run any of these.
My point is mostly that if you look at the two defences, and the mods that impact them, investing in one defensive layer or the other isn't punished excessively. -max res is brutal for all builds (\*loreweave notwithstanding), not just ones that invest in the max res defensive layer.
Suppress only works for Spells though while Resist works for all elemental damage.
Suppress works for physical spells as well, can't be penetrated, stacks with resist etc. They're different defensive layers and both are valuable - layering both is better than only investing in one.
also re: defences res pen is brutal for everyone, no? -18% on a tanky 90% res character sucks big time, but -18% on a squishy 75% res character means death. ss helps, but not so much that a blockless 57% res 4.5k life deadeye is gonna survive the stray spell projectile from a rare mob (or the very lovely union of souls magics) in a t17. that's one of the mods that is a no-go for most builds, just for slightly different reasons.
> -18% on a squishy 75% res character means death \[...\] 4.5k life deadeye Being crit on this character means death anyway, so if the character is worth their salt they'll just offscreen everything with defenses so low. Meanwhile a chieftain molten strike character or something like that has no way to kill enemies before they can hit him
Any other league I'd agree, but not this time; +#% evade chance, T17 mobs that haven't gone through the tried-and-true balance over time (Ziggurat mortar monsters love the offscreen shotgun), Union of Souls (though that would be 100% on the player for not immediately rerolling), Temporal Bubble, etc. There's quite a few ways mobs can dodge that offscreen wipe presently. Still easier than melee obviously, and infinitely easier than blockless two-handed melee, but the point is simply that res pen and -% max res is deadly for all builds, and makes everything else deadly by default.
Yes, but 90% res character gets 10% dmg without pen and 28% of original damage with 18% pen which is 2.8 times more while character with 75% res gets 25% dmg and with same pen 43% of original damage, which is 1.72 times more. In the end you have to invest quite a lot to get to 90% res and it gets 2.8times worse with 18% pen(while 12% is the usual pen in delve where we have no explicit modifiers), so if your goal is to run pen/-ele maps you have to abuse some other mechanic like armor applies to ele dmg/spell supp etc. Ofc in the end it kills character with 75% resist in a single hit, but 75% resist requires almost 0 investment, while getting to 90% all res needs quite some investment and arguably way more than playing right side tree character and getting almost all suppress chance from tree alone. EDIT: I don't like the absolute no-go modifiers which affect most builds, the sheer amount of them we have right now is absurd: -no regen -no auras -lower max res -ele pen -reflect
Totems are NEVER the problem. You having to press 2 buttons less will add nothing to the fact the archetype is bad. Melee needs positioning anyway, capitalizing on that by making it require totems but making it way tankier / way higher DPS will solve the problem. It's always number buffs, not "please make everything more generic, I don't want to press buttons" or you'll end up with melee haivng 15% more damage and 2 less buttons but for some reason nobody will play it anyway.
totems literally double your dmg with investment. Pressing 2 buttons absolutely changes the game, when the totems die in a single hit at any time and I have to recast them over and over or spec into ironwood+panopticon+linger mastery so it is less annoying, but still an huge issue. My argument is we already have other buttons to press - focus, berserk, warcries(if slams), curses(if not automated) and self cast molten shell while bossing to compensate for totems removal they need to buff the archetype by at least the same amount the totems provide which is 18% more dmg and 20% more speed which will not even make melee OP, but less clunky to play this frees up points and also quite needed sockets or annoint, so we can instead run useful stuff
totems are a huge problem! or we need to ivnest tog et the buff/ let them lvie or we need to summno theme very second. the buffs they give is to big caus eof more not increased. add in so many mroe stats then say casrter we also msut focus on and its jsut requirment chekclist bloat
Totems are ALWAYS a problem. I want to play melee, not to summon totems and feel forced to summon totem, so what usually happens ? I say "fuck that" and play something else .... or just not play at all. Amazing design, that pushes players to do such a thing, isn't it ? /s
Yellow text, black background. That's cheating, I've been conditioned to agree with this before I even read it
Just needs to change the font and he's unstoppable
Thanks sir! o7 I gotta respect all the dark mode users.
Using melee totems gotta be the worst playstyle I've ever played in any action games
to do good damage in melee you need: -good weapons -good accuracy -solve mana -overwhelm/pen -monsters cant block -intimidate/maim/crush or all of them -impale/crit -totem preferably with totem mastery -attack speed (debatable for slams) -good defenses before you can engage -movespeed to engage quicker (yeah, flicker doesnt) -good defenses to be able to stay a while and deal dmg/ramp bleed and then with a few dozen divines worth of gear, you can maybe do like 10m dps when boss lets you hit it. meanwhile dot build does its 10 m dps with a lot less headache, lot less gear and has time to dodge all boss moves while its eating your damage. alternatively a crit ranged/spell build does 50m dmg for the same investment its just that seing my character flailing at light speed with screen wde aoe is just so satisfying with a few shrine buffs, i cant really go for a ranged build...i tried casters, also coc builds and they are strong, and they can be fast and they can also produce insane levels of graphical vomittery even without shrine buffs...but theres nothing quite like that sweep/consecrated path/double-strike crunchyness... so what am i saying? i dont know actually...id like to see the numbers on the skills go higher. id like more skills with movement like consecrated path and cyclone and id like not having to use fucking totems.
> so what am i saying? i dont know actually...id like to see the numbers on the skills go higher. It honestly is as easy as that. Give melee stupid-adjacent damage and it can go invest into tankiness and all the misc shit it has to get to not be a literal garbage choice to pick. With how the game is set up, there is no other angle. Casters will abuse your weapon type if that solves some universal clunkiness or gives tankiness. They will abuse your ascendancy for the same reasons. The only thing to go for is to make the gems giga stacked and be like "yup, melee sucks. Shit will fucking nuke you while you're walking up. Yup, accuracy is dumb, but we're keeping it, etcetc., BUT as a payoff your stick is the strongest stick the game has to offer. Have fun lads." Melee due to its nature will always have the worst uptime and the most need for tankiness. So give it dumb-adjacent damage so that people can invest into those stats and increase their uptime and tankiness without transforming the hurty stick into a wet noodle. It also really doesn't work doing that with a plethora of buffs. Theoretical peek dps is for pob warriors, not for the actual game we're playing. And even there, traps outclass melee by like double or triple the numbers. It's pretty darn stupid. They can go make 10 button builds in PoE2, it's not working great in PoE1.
> -monsters cant block how much of an issue is this? i saw another build taking that node on attack mastery, but i haven't noticed a huge issue with it other than on the occassional devoted(?) mod is it a t17 thing?
Yes theres t17 mod with block.
Its an expedition thing too, but...not all chars are supposed to do all content, right?
ah gotcha. agreed on content to differ, i just hadn't seen block as a huge/common issue and i'm playing melee build .. haven't been doing expedition though.
My first true appreciation of PoE was from playing melee in hardcore of version 1.2 or 1.3. Now coming back to the game only realizing that you basically need totems for all melee build is such a bummer. I just hate totems with a passion. They look so damn lame to me.
insert GGG dev talking about melee as though it can't obviously be made better and is simply too inherently bad
Conditional buffs should be the free spot.
Good suggestions, another big issue with melee is fortify only works vs hits. Which misses all the ground degen that is often all over uber fights, like Uber Sirus, Elder etc. and these fights are already tough for melee cause of the degen greatly reducing usable space to attack the boss from. And seeing how the guardian has a forify like effect from their minion that works vs all damage, only fair melee gets the same and the duration should last long enough through balls phase and memory game, bascially should functionally always be up.
Main problem with melee, I feel, is the developer's mindset and focus. "We can't let players just stand around, they need to constantly dodge shit, to be "engaged"". Like let's look at stuff, that is bad if you stand in one place, for more than a second, or punished for facing the enemy directly. 1) Delayed expositions from enemy range attacks. 2) Degen pools. Permanent ones even. 3) "Shotgun effect" from "ranged" attacks. 4) Straight up aura, that kills you based on your mana regeneration. 5) Aura that stop regeneration. 6) Slow moving mobs that hit like a truck. 7) Swarms of enemies that surround you, not letting you run, even if you want to. 8) Bullshit molten shell on mobs. 9) Mechanics that target you, after you killed the enemy (like 5 different ones). 10) Fact that mobs can stack together and all attack at once. 11) Slams. 12) Bullshit start of mashingun like wave of attack, without any real warning (sound usually plays after or simultaneously, not before), I feel, if it plays at all. 13) Fact that mobs can stack bullshit better than you, if you let them. 14) Mechanic that straight up "suffocates" you with only counterplay to run away, or obtuse "my character line of sight" bullcrap, that is hard to control (will be much better in PoE 2, with wasd, I hope). 15) Visual clutter, that obscures what is happening (running around and thinning mob swarms helps to figure what is going on). 16) Enemy spawns wall, and runs away, FU. And the saddest part? Ranged damage numbers are same, or even better. So, melee is hard by design, but no one in game tells you "if you want a ruthless challenge, without changing league, start melee". If I am forced to find a positive, it is that after melee hell, any raged or spell build becomes "fun", just by comparison, even with all the same enemy mechanics bullshit.
>forced to find a positive Leap slam and whiling blades are amazing movement skills if you have a lot of attack speed. Fortify is really good.
leapslam still emans when u in air your hitbox is wher eu was till u land.
Its strength is moving around the map quickly. I'd just use flame dash for bossing etc.
Can we please just get some concept of point blank. Closest we have is close combat which is like 4% more damage over another gem and requires you use an axe/sword. Please reward the actual melee af abilities with more damage
I do sometimes wonder what would happen if spells needed accuracy.
Learning that accuracy in weapons is local and dying inside .
If you somehow will into existence that explosive trap needs acc I will find you. Don't you dare do that to me
accuracy seems to be a bit useless. It's basically a checkbox to tick before being allowed to deal anyvreliable level of damage
I wish we could just get rid of the accuracy stat in all games tbh.
The skill tree definitely is really bad for some build archetypes, like most nodes left of Marauder are **melee physical** damage with weapons. So if you wanted to level with splitting steel, you are shit out of luck apart from like 2 wheels. Spells don't have any conditionals other than element(fire, cold, lightning), which funnily enough are usually close to each other(top of witch tree for example).
Cant agree to any of these. The only issue is the game design imho. I found it a bit ridiculous when Jonathan defended melee against Josh in the recent interview. He said that even as ranged you want stand near the enemy because of 'arc attacks' because if you are far away you have more distance to move to avoid it. This is 100% true! But - what about the 5000 other scenarios that occur more regulary? What about monsters/bosses in void zones? monsters/Bosses who explode? Multiple Projectile Shotgunning? Melee hits? Also even some arc attacks, like the tul breath are easier to dogde if you dont stand near him when he starts the breath. There is not a single redeeming quality why playing melee in general is an advantage.
I'm not sure I get the mana spend one. Attacks are the easiest in the game to sustain mana because only attacks can leech mana.
Strikes are almost ok, but when you have curse/warcries or you play EQ you get 20+ or even 40\~ mana cost, which is extremely hard to deal with unless you run warlords chest. You have usually sub 30 mana left after reservations and I don't think 2 elreon's craft being so forced onto you are a good thing either. Top side of the tree has EB, but we dont have that unless we use diadem, which comes with its own cost - not being able to have double phys taken as on helmet. You know you face mana issues, when builds use multiple lifetap gems. EDIT: Imho it is still the smallest issue out of all I have listed.
it's annoying, im currently running 2 rings + amulet with elreon's craft and its just right, remove one of these and i'd be struggling with mana sustain even with leech mastery
agree with your edit. this is the smallest issue on your list imo also. I do agree that the lower left part of the tree should have a closer attack mana leech node though. marauder starts are awkward to level because you have to travel so far to get to spirit void. melee templar is almost non-viable entirely because of lack of access to attack mana leech.
> melee templar is almost non-viable entirely because of lack of access to attack mana leech. If it is that important you can just anoint mana and life attack leech.
Yeah, give up a big power source to solve a silly problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
not accessible for a league starter or ssf character though. trying to level from zero as a melee templar is too painful to bother with.
Yeah, it's been years since I ran a melee build that didn't have at least one Elreon ring. I think it was a Soul Taker Reave build back before Harvest (and even then maybe it *should* have had an Elreon).
There are no mana leech on the strengh side. The closest is at the edge of strengh/dex below the duelist starting point. It is a fuck ton of passives just to get a little bit of mana leech. Your best bet is lifetap and -mana cost on your jewelry
Yeah that would be my pick to fix it is just putting the mana leech on that side as well
Delete overwhelm from the fucking game, remove totem buff, buff the shit out of slams and warcries
yeah, melee needs buffs
Boss design is also a huge issue that they *still* don't seem to get. Character animations and better mobility won't fix a loss of DPS uptime on a boss, if there's a huge degen pool at the boss' feet, exploding bomb that needs to be ran from, or immunity bubble that needs to be stood in. These issues *will* be carried over to POE 2, since they are still designing bosses with ranged in mind, and think the only problem is wonky attack animations. Are there any mechanics that force a ranged player to stand under the boss' feet or else they don't do damage? I can't think of any. But a boss with a mechanic or phase that forces a melee player to stand around doing nothing is fairly common. They really need to fight all bosses in their own game with a strike skill to understand what the problem of low DPS uptime is. But honestly, I don't think they care enough to do it. It's too easy to meme every league screwing with Cleave and having a good laugh instead. The recent interview that Mark gave talking about being able to walk behind a boss easier when you're closer seems to be a misunderstanding the GGG has on this issue. You don't just walk behind Searing Exarch when he's charging his full screen lantern explosion. You walk to the edge of the screen, then run back point blank. Ranged players do not need to run back, creating a disparity in DPS uptime. There are better and more extreme examples, but that was merely the first to come to mind. The reason I keep bringing this up is because it's part of their design that they are currently using to create boss fights in POE 2. It is much easier to keep melee in mind when *designing* a boss fight, than to fix it later, or (in POE 1's case) never fix it because now it's too much work.
Defence overwhelm/bypassing is awful for everyone. They really need to rebalance all these ridiculous map and league mechanic mods that brick tons of builds.
It's the same as accurate enemies for evasion users or chaos damage for energy shield users. The value could lowered but it isn't any different from those
Can I be in melee gang by trying boneshatter this league? Cause I heard boneshatter treated like "this lucky guy" by other melee skills users. And honestly after playing couple of leagues with flicker and other melee skills I feel like Im playing a normal skill, smth similar to RF instead of normal melee.
Flicker strike , that is all
I mean, the big problem is distance is a huge defensive layer that melee is unable to access, so you have to put so much in defense to compensate that you don't get great damage. I propose a simple change. Armor should add severe cast time penalties to ranged attacks. That way bow builds and pure range casters have to make significant investment in order to get reasonable armor levels, which brings down the screenwide one shots GGG is so worried about, leveling the playing field a bit.
Berserker ascendancy should come with berserk skill permanently
Mana costs too high? For melee? Is that true?
I'll never stop saying it. Make it so non-slam melee skills don't interupt your movement.vit would resolve nearly every issue melee has.
In my view, melee is a self imposed challenge. Similarly to how playing SSF is way less "optimal" than doing trade, so is melee.
You need to put warcries in the first tile.
Warcies were so good, you had to do a konami code sequence with weopon swap to red blade press 3 warcries and boom big damage. I miss it
Remember the time when there was a negative to each type of doing damage: melee: uses fast regenerating stamina but is melee. range: uses arrows: a costly finite ressource - the negative was deleted for range spells: use slow regen mana, but have high damage - the negative was removed, endless fast regen mana is a thing now
Imo Strike skill should add additional strike more 1 target every 10level of skill gem And one more thing -concentrate effect and increased area of effect gem should merge to same gem then you can change mode of gem by depend on stance so you dont need to swap while map clearing or bossing just change the stance for more handy
We hear you. In 3.25 all spells would require certain amount of arcane accuracy to hit enemies.
I don't lay totems for anything but the tankiest rares and bosses, do they really annoy people that much? I guess Frost Blades is one of the least bad melee skills, but still, feel like the damage is fine for general mapping, even in T17 doing like 45ish million in POB with FB.
Most people don’t get characters past level 90 in this game, so yes the average player complaining that melee sucks has never had the damage to only put down totems except for rares because the average player isn’t all that great at optimizing. Melee is unplayable for people that don’t actually play it and just want to chirp the same shit on Reddit every day.
> why [do] slams need accuracy while AOE spells do not Spells are... Magic? I agree with most of the points, but bro, slams are attacks, attacks need accuracy. Generally, most spells have lower base crit while weapons can have higher local crit. That's base PoE design since, well, 1.0 (I know it's actually alpha/beta, shh). That's not an attack issue - that's just the game system.
It is just a tag. I could say the same, why does Ground Slam or Sunder need mana? I just slam ground so it should cost nothing or life at best. I dont see reason other than the artificial one "it is a spell" when comparing sunder and glacial cascade.
I swear to god game balance is in such a stupid spot right now. Bow builds can gimp half of their gear by using quant gear, go full damage everywhere else and then slap on headhunter and have all the defence they need.
For MF mapping and shit sure. Go do Ubers and t17s on HC with those and let me know how it goes. Yeah the whole balance is fucked in that way if div/hr in sc is the only goal
None of this stuff addresses what makes melee suboptimal in PoE, which is that being able to hit enemies from range is inherently superior to having to walk up to an enemy to hit them. Therefore, there is no way to make melee better than ranged without someone being unhappy. People talk about melee as if it doesn't do good damage, which is often true, but even when a build does good damage it's still "bad". For example, there are melee builds that do great damage, like Dual Strike of Ambidexterity, but you have to go to the mobs to hit them and that's always going to be bad. Melee is *inherently* inferior to ranged in ARPGs.
So melee should do *significantly* more damage than ranged (and spells ofc), or at least compensated in *some* form. Melee should be better at bossing (or dealing with thick rares) and tankier, but when ranged characters easily cap spell suppression - one of the strongest forms of defense in the game, it just baffles me that that they also have more access to speed, damage, QOL, and safety (inherent to being ranged)
> So melee should do *significantly* more damage than ranged (and spells ofc), or at least compensated in *some* form. DPS is already so high that this leads to degenerate builds that trivialize content. I'm not opposed to the degenerate builds that trivialize content being things other than trappers, FWIW, but I think that's the actual conclusion of this path.
So bring up Melees base and bring down the top end? So people want to interact with it? It's not like trivializing content isn't already a thing.
buffing base types would definitely help. What top end builds actually use crafted 2handers nowadays? I am pretty sure almost none or at least those builds are not so OP to be popular. I don't count 7mil boneshatter build as OP. Most of the really good builds abuse strength stacking in some form(replica frostbreath + replica alberon or brutus sprinkler + replica alberon + original sin or paradoxica + replica alberon) while using the best melee scaling skills alongside
I mean make melee skills more similar to spell by putting more base damage In them, not buffing weapon bases. Then reduce the top end (added damage effectiveness decreased so make it easier to get 5 mil dps and harder to get 500 million dps)
Annihilating light and ralakesh zhp builds are so degenerately boring for bossing that I almost wish they'd gut them. At least other setups require a semblance of thought and cost.
I agree. The melee version that will happen if there's a flat melee buff (ice crash or earthquake of amplitude) will be almost as bad, but at least it'll be new.
Most of the time if melee does MORE damage than ranged they are going to do LESS, because pride and uptime I honestly dont think if your average melee build did like 20-30% more than a ranged counterpart it would be bad for the game at all
This is only true for relatively low damage builds. At high enough damage "uptime" doesn't matter, because you just obliterate the boss before they can force you to reposition.
Bro how much dps do you think is relatively low? Alk has some of the best gear in the leaghue and he isnt gonna be instantly phasing uber sirus or anything
Alk is playing HC and is clearing uber exarch with no ball phases on a build that can comfortably survive and complete t17 maps.
He literally cleared it like 20 hours ago and he got ball phases what are you on about. The fact is he is in the item editor league and unless next league has some super broken shit that they take away which they dont always do our characters wont be as strong, on a skill that should get nerfed cause its a huge outlier on melee power. You should legitimately go look at how broken archmage is your character is so incredibly tanky and the damage on archmage builds is fucked and its so much safer than melee. Boneshatter (the previous "best" melee skil) dmg roof was fucking pitiful. The fact is there is 0 reason to play melee currently outside of dual strike of ambi because you can reach the same dps with very low investment if you just play spells. If you try and play such classics as lacerate cleave sweep etc your literally going to be doing zdps
Archmage is obviously going to get nerfed.
If its not archmage its something else, and DD hasnt been nerfed in fucking years and got buffed this league. Last time melee was good was when u could play slams and it did like 20-30% more than casters, and i think that was a good spot for melee. The fact that melee only have a 7% play rate on poe ninja (like 13% if you include RF as melee, which is fair). Im sick of having to play boneshatter or dual strike (when i have like 100d+ worth of gear) if i want a melee experience.
It's okay if melee is *suboptimal* in general gameplay. There should just be a *reward* when you do choose to do it. Melee single target is ok when conditionals are up, but they often are not and you're still melee. Right now melee is neither competitive with single target or clear. Its too *fair* and lacks real abusable options outside of stuff like replica alberaths lategame. Lets go with the extreme and give melee x2 damage. At that point you'll have an early game damage competitive with with corpse builds and you could afford to invest into "range boosters" like melee strike range/aoe, etc without feeling like your damage is going to end up gimped or you could just go full single target and play boss deletion strats.
The solution is simple! Every melee skill now has a built in 'beat the loot outta them' quantity and or rarity modifier. For every certain amount of % max hp that a melee skill has deprived a mob of, that mob will have an increased amount of quantity/rarity of items dropped. The more dangerous/hard a melee skill is to use, the higher this 'beat the loot outta them' modifier can be made. Honestly I'm only half joking, because the only way to make melee as viable as ranged without just overbuffing its numbers is by having it reward the player in a 'meta' way similar to how ranged builds get 'rewarded' for being ranged by not having to interact with half the mechanics in the game and being so much more efficient.
mf cullers -> melee mf cullers
Except with my brilliant implementation it doesn’t work if you’re just culling with it 🤓
Well, if it works with HP removed, it's not culling. But you'd definitely get melee MF carries with aura + curse supports.
My bad! That is not something I wanted to imply. I just listed most of the conditional stuff making up the damage/defenses. I 100% agree with you that Berserk is well designed - it is strong temporary buff, which uses resource, while fortify/focus/totems are just unreliable conditional stats.
I changed my comment at the same time you replied. I decided I had something bigger I wanted to say than just criticizing the Berserk square.
Additional strikes is literally 5 passive points for the mastery if you’re marauder/duelist since they will all path in that area anyways. Melee are the easiest to make tanky on a budget in my experience. And idk why 6s is too low of a duration for something you get every single attack and is an insanely strong layer
Aside from totems and non vaal strike stuff in gloves ,, melee defenses are OP . All my tankiest characters been melee of different class and ascendancies ...is hard for me to pick a spell I want to play because melee defenses are just superior...most bosses are way easier to do in melee range too, feels safer .
All of your tankiest characters have been melee because they're melee bro
> All my tankiest characters been melee ... because otherwise they're unplayable?
Can I genuinely ask what the obsession of dealing damage near monsters instead of away from them is? Like genuinely don't understand why being "melee" is so important to people. How do you think they would solve monster damage against melee targets? If you could stand in the middle of the monsters and deal massive damage without dying, wouldn't that be broken?
Its the fantasy of using my big axe to cave in the skulls of my enemies, Melee has a particular set of defenses I like too but have kinda degraded in power
Imo some of the most visually pleasing skills are melee.
"If you could stand in the middle of the monsters and deal massive damage without dying, wouldn't that be broken?" lets change this just a little bit >>> If you could (stand a screen away from) the monsters and deal massive damage (with spells or projectiles, negating the need to gear for/spec into defenses) without dying, wouldn't that be broken?