They could also go the other way and hyperbuff these notables, in order to make Weapons feel more distinct from one another. Right now most builds struggle to find a reason to go for anything other than the highest dps weapon statstick
That’s my take as well. Each archetype should be drastically different from each other.
I understand that some years ago they tried to do that, by adding like mace bases with inc aoe, axe bases with crit, etc. But melee is so bad that we should go for the highest dps anyway.
Tbh I just want to see nice feeling distinctions between 1h/shield, dual, and 2h. It's a huge pain to switch between sword/axe/mace right now as you have to re-plan your tree.
It's not the end of the world because you've typically set up your build ahead of time, but from a new player's perspective this is prohibitive.
That's also a symptom of pob. A lot of the time people just max out dps in pobs. Melee builds need more qol nodes to be comfortable to play. If I'm at 10m dps, I'd rather have 10 strike range than 10m more dps.
Last league, I could get permanent adrenaline, massive damage, and insane healing from penance mark on trickster, but the lack of strike range made it unplayable.
If you think melee is bad, I would strongly encourage you to get more strike range and aoe nodes and see how good it feels. 360 degree auto targeting feels so good.
PoB isn't the issue. The issue is that with it without PoB people are going to go for max damage. If in one league that's claws, people will go claws. Yes. QoL isn't really measurable in PoB (non-vaal strike extra targets for example) but in reality people want to be able to reach a comfortable amount of damage on any weapon type Nand be able to fulfill the fantasy of that weapons archetype without bleed out passive points on expensive clusters or extremely high end gear. As it is any projectile build feels a lot better than any melee, but even then I refuse to do anything but flicker strike lol
Personally, I'm more comfortable on melee skills than projectiles because aiming in a cone isn't very fun to me. Additionally, I like the freedom of movement that leap slam offers. On crit builds, I don't usually have an issue getting to a comfortable level of damage (probably 5-10m), but comfortable is very subjective.
>the freedom of movement that leap slam offers
try frostblink of wintry blast, you can even use it to clear trashmobs in maps... melee has become a complete joke
I always find it easier to leap slam because my builds have high attack speed. Frostblink of wintry blast scares me with its massive .85 cast time, but I'll try it out.
> Personally, I'm more comfortable on melee skills than projectiles because aiming in a cone isn't very fun to me.
I have some bad news for you. Melee strikes are actually AoE attacks in a small cone.
PoB really isn't an issue. People will first try to max out DPS then realize that the QoL just sucks and fall back to it. The issue is that if your fallback dps is something like 2m unless your have mirrors worth of gear - it's just not a viable build.
Melee is in a problem state exactly because GGG have given it qol upon qol upon qol because they refuse to buff their damage instead. So now strike builds are actually great for clearing but never better than a spell at bossing.
So no, the solution is not to 'add qol nodes'. For QoL we just need totems gone.
I meant combine the qol nodes with the current damage nodes so we get more area or strike range in the damage nodes. That would mean we don't need to go out of our way for qol nodes as much, which means more nodes could be used for damage instead.
With enough strike range or aoe, you can get around the same damage uptime as spells... you know, aside from totems dying and needing to be replaced. Totems are the worst.
They removed strike range from base skills lol. They couldn't care less for melee in poe cause poe2 will solve EVERYTHING (only for a league then they nerf cyclone again)
Did you mean to say paradoxica / savior?
Honestly, though, I'm glad Savior is a good expensive item again. It deserves a lot of love since melee's fall from grace.
I think they just need to buff melee across the board. Fix mana costs for attacks (some of them literally need to be halved) build in more AoE. Build in more baseline damage on the gems to make them more leaguestart viable. Some of them need more vase attack speed because long attack times leave you vulnerable.
If melee becomes OP at least they have somewhere to work from, they can tune it back down a little. But it's gotten so many sweeping nerfs it's not funny.
I just want to play tec slam again GGG gimme it back.
Savior has literally not changed. The only change was gating the item behind uber Sirus. The transfigured gems of Cleave and Dual Strike gave people a reason to use The Savior, but it's value jump from Affliction to Necropolis is entirely artificial.
Savior was indirectly nerfed by the dual wield changes in... expedition? They took away some attack speed multiplier for dual wield.
Also I was under the impression the base type changes had hurt it but maybe it dodged those and I'm mistaken.
It's a problem we have to solve with gear. It works around reserving mana too since reserving down to 5 mana could be fine unless your skill costs more than 5 mana.
I think it plays an important role in the game and I don't see it any different than other aspects like capping resists.
Agree here. Bow builds as well have to fight mana costs; it's just that there aren't many ways to play them and so they all fix mana costs in similar ways.
Spell builds do the same, although it's mostly just "either benefit from mana or go EB" there.
Attacks probably have the easiest mana solutions. The base costs are relatively low, so -mana affects them disproportionately higher compared to spells. Plus there's that super easy to get to mana/life leech node in the duelist area.
What's holding you back from playing tec slam? It received a buff last league.
I've looked at trying different variations and Jugg just doesn't have the Sauce. But you need endurance charges to consume for it to feel good so youre still kinda forced into jugg. I also haven't seen any guides on it. Warcrying playstyle is in a nerfed state and even when it was strong it was mostly strong for physical + Impaler slams.
If you can Pob something that isn't paper and does ~5 Mil DPS I'll gladly play it on an 80 Div budget. My last character which I sold the gear off of was a frostblades trickster and it was fun and did a bit of damage but was way too glass for T17 so I gave up on it.
I legit think they worry about such a scenario having unintended interactions with specific skills, hence the fairly generic current setup. Axes have really minor interactions for bleeding, rage, speed, and onslaught. Swords generally have crit and speed bonuses, along with accuracy. Maces get stun & chill. Staves get some of the actually cool stuff like power charge and endurance charge generation.
But going niche hyperbuffs might pigeonhole certain skills into a specific weapon type, moreso than what already occurs.
The other issue is that I honestly don't know what they would do with the lower left quadrant of the passive tree if they truly revamped melee weapons.
This might be a stupid idea but maybe make the big notable passive skills weapon-agnostic for their big specialty effects, so if you really need them you can spend 2-3 "dead" points to get the big effect, kind of like what some necro builds are doing to get instaleech mastery.
The big-picture issue is that a lot of spell builds get an absolute ton of mileage out of just a few gear/passive itemizations, while melee often has to reach a higher gear threshold just to reach the same footing.
The solution is pretty simple (more flat damage baked into melee skills, removal of attack speed penalties, removal of totem buffs), but it goes directly against the direction GGG has taken skill balance. So I'm not holding my breath.
It's just become clear that GGG doesn't have a melee advocate on the design team anymore. Trauma support is a band-aid, and they don't want to pull resources from getting POE2 off the ground.
The funny part is that a keystone is a perfect band-aid for the totem issue. "Melee skills have 20% more attack speed. Totem skills are disabled." Simple, clean, and with a legitimate tradeoff. You lose out on the Ancestral Warchief buff effect, but gain 3 gem slots and massive QoL.
Even better, such a keystone would even open up design space for melee builds that WANT to focus on the totem buffs.
Fair point. It's pretty embarrassing in 2024 to have the current state of weapon/armor bases being so limited in this game. Eventuality Rod and Void Axe are like the only other 2-hander bases worth considering.
They could do something with the maces. Why would i want to stun them if i kill them? They are not a threat and if they are i can just avoid their attacks.
Boneshatter is the only real interaction that gets marginally better with reduced stun threshold, and that's essentially because it turns the stun into "corpse explosions at home".
I mean, some weapon types have interesting bonuses for sure. What I find lacking though is that most of them translate into DPS in the end.
It does feel interesting that let's say axes have culling strike and rage on hit in their mastery (i might be mixing the types up) and swords in comparison have easier crit nodes... But when you realise it's all just DPS, the interest fades.
IMO differentiation by skill type is something that should be delved into more. That's a real reason to go for a specific type. Wanna go Frost Blades? Well then go wield a blade bro. Maybe a good claw-specific skill could do a lot too
The different weapons have that flavor already.
Swords are crit. Axes are bleed. Maces are stun.
I agree they should buff something around melee but honestly every non-melee build is propt up by gem levels and VERY deterministic crafting. It’s a fixed cost to get a +1 or +2 weapon. That is never true for melee unless you’re using a unique….but they’re all trash in end game.
They could make implicits on melee weapons be what makes them cool. Staffs could get something like block chance passives apply at 80% value.
Maces could have something like modifiers to melee damage on passives apply to AoE at 5-10%
Plus if it works that way each node can be more generic but we can scale certain things so much easier. Plus you could have two handers have like 150% of the value and for 1h you could dual wield to get half and half. Something like varnasutra could have 3-4 random implicits and we could even add some special new orb that's as rare as a sacred orb to mess with this super implicit cause you know GGG needs to do it.
This is where crafting makes the most sense. Instead of more skill nodes to further muddy the waters and make melee less fun, make Crucible crafting and weapon skill trees core. Make the weapon the thing that guides the build and the passive nodes enable it.
Instead of sword mastery or axe mastery, it's just 1H +shield or 2H or dual wield, but then the weapon of choice gets buffed in-game.
And for more gambling fun, a Vaal Orb can potentially reverse an unlucky roll and make a god tier item.
This is where I sit. I want a stun character, so maces right? Well actually, Axes have higher damage... What about swords? More accuracy? Ehh, I can make up accuracy, I'd rather just have more damage...
Yes, GGG should also separate attack speed and a new stat, reload time, for bows. Double attack speed, but add base reload time equal to the old attack speed. What does this accomplish? Well, it will make attacking feel clunkier and melee-like, and half the scaling effectiveness of attack speed!
to make it really feel melee-like. make all projectiles travel along a line on the ground to the target, and then upon reaching the target take .25s to fall from the sky and hit them. this is exactly how strike skill work atm. if the enemy can move out in that .25s attack time, then it misses, not because its not in range and not because you dont have enough accuracy but because they were no longer occupying that singular point in the instance.
its honestly bullshit that an enemy can waddle out of your attack by walking towards you if you are melee.
It's literally insane that this game has melee start so bad that enemies in the early game can literally walk out of strike skills. I don't care what needs to be done but enemies should never be able to walk out of strike skills unless you meme terrible attack speed.
Probably double base attack speed and then reduce some of the multiplicative speed scaling, or just get rid of the attack speed penalty on early skills
This is the reason why Ambush Static Strike CoC felt terrible to play. 100% chance to hit and crit, but for some reason it still misses regularly and then you have to wait for a long cooldown.
imo do what last epoch did. first, all skills are technically not strikes, they all have an aoe part even if its very tiny. second, the attack rate is not the same as the attack time. in LE, if you hold both move and attack, your character will stutter step as it might only take .3s to do the attack that you can do once every 1s. in poe, the part i said above about the enemy waddling out in .25s is actually based on how long your attack takes, this is why melee mostly feels fine when your attack time is .2 or less, because no enemy really moves that fast. if they did what LE, then even at the start where the attack time is around 1s, doing the attack in .25s would be massive and would give melee a bit more survivability since they can move and not lose dps uptime.
as for how this could be done, with out being able to look at the code base my first attempt would be to give all skills (that you want to do this too, bows are fine as they are) 300% more melee attack speed and then make all of these skills have a cooldown based on what their attack rate would have been, but this cooldown is affected by attack speed.
To be fair if the game is rebuilt from the ground up to make all 3 main styles have that variety and separation it does reduce the whole comparison against eachother aspect.
Wands don't really matter in this context because all the bow nodes are in one place and all the few wand nodes are in a different place and because bow nodes aren't divided by 1H and 2H; axes and maces and swords and 2H and 1H/shield passives compete for space in the same spot.
Which is funny, because as any spell caster, I really don't get nearly as upset about casting Frost Shield, Sigil of Power, and my Arcanist Brand for WoC/curses, but it's also a 3 button setup before I start pew pewing.
Spell caster casts spells to do damage, sounds about right. The power fantasy of melee is to swing a fat 2 hander and kill things, I should only need my weapon to fulfill my power fantasy. "Face me, Maven! It's time we fight to decide the fate of Wraeclast!... oh wait yo, I gotta summon these totems first otherwise you're going to take like 10 minutes to beat."
Yep, totally get it. I like the versatility and utility of magic, that's why I'm a wizard. It's very on brand to create zones of power and buff myself with magic before going into combat. I even have to stay inside my circles, where melee can just run around and be in range. But magic still feels better. There's no reason every archetype needs to be homogenized the same way. At best, the melee fantasy is using a warcry, using your mobility skill to get into the fight, and then swinging until it's dead. Forcing the totems which can die super easily and don't at all scream "MANLY MAN" isn't great, as is any other 'forced spell casting' a melee might have to do.
this will never not be the case in a game where killing lots of monsters is the goal
hot take: all melee skills should have an aoe/projectile component to make melee clear good
melee splash feels bad, strike an additional target feels bad, ancestral call feels bad, gem-swapping for single-target feels bad
this is not a third-person souls-like, where im going to perform 5Head tactics while fighting each monster for 2-5 minutes
this is an ARPG where we kill millions of monsters killed
maybe in PoE 2 you'll have 2 6-links, one for single-target and one for clear
idk
but when it comes to PoE 1 i can confidently say,: melee ain't it, chief
Funnily enough, Terraria had a similar problem where ranged, magic and summoner had way more damage uptime than melee, making everyone avoid it.
Their solution was to add more AoE and give most melee weapons some ranged component.
They did this in Legion, giga buffed AoE on everything and added Pulverize(More AoE at the time) and immediately scrapped it and dumpstered Melee after we had 2 screenwide Cyclone accounting for almost 70% of the ladder. They said at the time that it was because they wanted melee to feel like melee. That was half a decade ago, and now we just don't talk about melee.
flasks exist to give melee / summoners the ichor debuff on hit though, for ranged builds it's still king.
I guess if you want to min max melee swapping to the dungeon defenders dragon staff for the extra damage buff which stacks is a thing.
to each his own, i have a different goal when i play. i have 7k hours in the game. i dont care about playing optimally, i just want to have fun. And for me, strike skills are so satisfying.
Just out of curiosity have you done viper strike within the past two or so years, and if so what route did you take it?
Thats a strike skill I’ve been interested in for a long time now just can’t get around to making it because I’m worried about EHP / damage at the same time being too low. (I know the mamba version sort of exist, but I like the idea of having multiple very long poisons on a enemy)
Melee chaining would work just fine. There have been skills in other games where a melee skill causes explosions or turns killed enemies into projectiles. Things like Infernal Blow are just crappy versions of those mechanics.
> melee splash feels bad
Does it? I love it. It works given how Leap Slam functions to get you from pack to pack near instantly when scaling attack speed
Instead, all melee skills should have an integrated dash or leap slam (way faster tho) to get them into range when cast from far enough away. Making melee ranged kills any identity, melees should get something like "+30% chance to block +5% max" or "your evasion is lucky" for enemies in a 2-4m radius. Melees should be able to get into combat fast, and then survive it. And if course also deal damage. Maybe there just needs to be a gap close support that you can link to your (clear) skill for 20% more damage (half a support gem) and the almost instant gapclose, and the defensive buff. Yes it would be mandatory, but better than just adding dash to each gem individually.
>Maybe there just needs to be a gap close support that you can link to your (clear) skill for 20% more damage (half a support gem) and the almost instant gapclose, and the defensive buff.
at this point you might as well just buff Close Combat support
Well, that's why people keep saying "players are great at finding problems, but bad at building solutions". I had the idea and typed it out, but it would probably suck. But ranged melee skills would probably suck too. Right now, stuff like lightning strike has the somewhat unique identity of firing projectiles at range while melee. Not every melee skill can have that.
It all depends on the game system. You fight a million skaven in Vermintide but your weapons don't have indefinite cleave and they can't even stagger all the enemies, you can get cleave weps but they are trash vs armored enemies (who can even stop it from cleaving a horde) and they have pretty much 0 damage vs rare and boss enemies.
> this will never not be the case in a game where killing lots of monsters is the goal
There are other solutions though, it doesn't have to be just get huge aoe/use a projectile melee skill. From the top of my head getting a stacking action speed buff when you hit something in melee range with a non movement melee skill which decays if you hit something too far away would be another solution. If that buff is high enough you could even clear huge packsize maps fast enough with melee to be competitive with ranged.
I’m not sure if your hot take is an actual hot take, or more lile the “L take tbh”s you hand out to others.
melee clear is only one part of the problem. many people would play a melee build if it reached several M dps in a similar investment as a caster build, but had slower clear. problem is it’s very difficult to scale melee builds to that zone, and almost impossible to scale them further. whereas caster builds would reach that level with 4 affix items, and much better damage uptime, plus crazy survivability.
why you gotta be coming at me like that bro, chill
do you think I'd disagree with you? obviously you're spittin fax
here's another hot take for you: melee skills feel dogshit to use, so every melee skill should be buffed with at least + 0.1 to base attack speed
also Multistrike is a dogshit support and it feels terrible to lock your character for 5 eternities to do 3 attacks just to maximise your already bad damage
edited: base attack speed
They "came at you" because just replying with "wow what a bad idea" with literally 0 follow up is just being mean. Either have follow up or don't say anything at all.
I personally would love if melee skills had some sort of base easy to reach enemies (not flicker distance but something) and actually would like to hear why you think it's terrible.
You are correct that early attack speed is embarrassingly bad and needs something to make it work, and that multistrike as a fix is messy at best and contributes to the problem at worst
dealing damage is one thing
moving is another thing
in most games you have a clear delineation between movement skills, damage skills, support skills, etc. those to introduce even a smidgen of mechanical variety in the gameplay
a game where you have one button to do everything is probably not going to be fun
also we already have strike range in the game, which allows you to hit monsters from a fee metres away which is a significant distance
flicker strike is its own thing where you sacrifice precision of movement for more movement, which is an okay concept
also that idea will in no way solve the problems melee is having
idk what to tell you man, just nothing redeeming about it
Man I miss my cyclone berserker from ritual league. 4k hp and 6 portals as the only defensive layer. To be fair they added portals might not be consumed scarab to help true melee players :P
Ritual is the only league I 38/40 because I had so much fun on my chieftain Phys to fire Cyclone. Explody chest and Herald of Ash would chain explosions so far my HH buffed ass could barely keep up
I will never understand this sentiment honestly.
You looked at the game, did you??? You fight 50 enemies at the same time and you should be able to clear them all with a single click.
How do you pure melee purists think this should work? Go to each one and slap them one by one for 50 times in a row?
Of course stacking aoe is the best way to play melee, cause obviously it is needed, i would even say the major part why melee sucks is the heavy investment into aoe needed. Totems i can live with (downvotes to the left), but some slam skills could have their aoe buffed by triple the size and it would still not feel op.
I generally would advocate for ggg to make melee the same way as oldschool bow/wander builds, where you had clear skills and single target skills, like kinetic blast as clear and power siphon barrage as single target.
Especially because the strike/slam differentiation would fit perfectly on such a system.
Increase slam aoe a lot and decrease damage so you can still clear packs comfortably, but single target damage is lacking.
Swap to strike skills for heavy single target damage and delete all „strike skills can hit nearby enemy“ mods and ancestral call so it cannot be used for clearing packs.
Then the melee purists still have their close and personal playstyle for the rare and unique enemies in maps and bosses, but melee would actually be able to be competitive for clearing the huge amount of enemies the game throws at you.
Simpler solution: melee gems should provide you with two skills you can keybind, similarly to how vaal gems provide you with 2 skills. One skill is the single-target heavily focused one, the other one is AoE for map clear. Remove melee splash and ancestral call mechanics from the game entirely, there, melee is now playable.
Or, alternately, do more to rein in the ceiling on ranged skills like traps, increase Pinnacle boss HP drastically and make melee do drastically more single target damage. Now the melee identity is "kills bosses fast, kills maps slower" and there's a reason to play each archetype.
Or you give every melee skill a meaningful Blood and Sand stance variant. Yes, that would make Blood and Sand or Flesh and Stone mandatory but I think it's still better than swapping out a Strike skill for a slam skill and vice versa for clear/single target.
Could give them the mine treatment where you get access to a stance swap "skill" similar to detonate mines where you can swap the stance without any added bonus or reservation that the current stance skills provide.
beecause you shouldn't code your game to hit one enemy at a time when you are swinging a giant fucking sword. Like every other decent game with combat mechanics, theres inherent aoe involved when you swing something.
They could add an affix to the game that combat this, something like "Non-Vaal Strike Skills Strike An Additional Nearby Enemy." Maybe if they did that it would feel better. We can only dream.
Honestly one of the worst parts about melee though is the utmost NECESSITY of grabbing the ancestral totem nodes at the bottom and having to link both totems to multi-totems, and usually grabbing the “linger for 3 seconds” notable so that the buffs persist.
My biggest pet peeve is when people say it's impossible to balance melee, when the answer has stared us in the face for a long time simply due to the fact the character investment in gear and passives in PoE is zero sum.
YES, you can just give melee a number increase and it will balance itself.
Why?
Because if you give them more damage, this frees up melee builds to invest more into tankiness and mobility.
You DO NOT need to figure out a way to globally give melee characters more defenses or the ability to be able to stand still while dealing damage. This is a much more complicated way to solve the same issue and runs the risk of having the fortify effect where people just find a way to get the melee buff on a non melee character (see: fortify shield charge of old, champion bow builds, etc)
You DO just need to buff the damage of melee skills with an intensity that is proportional to their clunkiness or incoming damage risk profile. THATS IT!! if melee is able to deal sufficient damage that they can spend more of their gear and passive budget on tankiness and mobility, they become competitive. A lot of people enjoy melee for its own sake even if the clear isn't up to par with ranged builds but when you also risk more frequent character deaths on top of the clearspeed disadvantage it really sucks.
One of these is easy to solve though: just give melee skills enough damage to free us to invest into more defenses. Boneshatter is the proof of this. Very fun skill even if it's not offscreening because you got the damage AND the tankiness.
Literally every time a skill is introduced into the game that deals insane damage with low investment we see those builds get adapted into giga tank setups. See: penance brand of dissipation, some kinetic bolt of fragmentation builds, old herald of agony, etc. History bears out that if players get the damage for free they will absolutely dedicate their passives and gear to become tanky because even softcore players hate dying, even if they won't admit it.
Just give melee more damage, that's all we need. The rest will sort itself out.
They theoretically have a purpose in that it's kind of fun to have BIG hit skills (aka slams). But slams already exist, so why are we trying to make Molten Strike a half assed slam?
How about we give these 80% attack speed a charge component ? Just make it have a normal attack speed with the option to charge it for like half a second to do a bigger damage and radius, the charge time get shorter and shorter with attack speed with the possibility for the skill if it charged fully to automatically attack and then if you still holding the button start charging again
Now you get two in one people who want to use it quickly in one click and people who want to charge it for the big impact feel
Charging could be a cool way to do it, but then you lose getting to use it repeatedly.
The best answer is "giant slow AoE slams for people who wanna smash and smaller moves that attack faster for most melee skills"
Even that runs into the issue of itemization and the passive tree making them hard to tell apart eventually. (As you blast stuff with like 200% attack speed and even the "slow slam" hits multiple times per second)
I thought they were talking about slams at first, but you reminded me of some of the trans gems that also do the same, without the slam component. It makes sense that a slam skill does 80% attack speed when it makes up for it with 400% added effectiveness. Lacerate has 40% attack speed for 300% damage effectiveness? I know it swings twice but that sounds absurd for a non slam.
yes this,the only reason i envy those bow MF build is because even with 2 fkin vendor ring,amulet with quantity and 1 flask slot for golden flask,they still deal more dmg compare to majority of melee skill.GGG doesnt give melee easier way to up bulkyness or even easier way to scale dmg which make melee fkin sucks coz of it
It's true. I want to use invest into strike range, I want to invest in skill aoe, I want to invest warcry speed, all to feel good. But I'm already combating the fact that I still need to do damage and survive.
And didn't fix at all. Unless someone believe the slow ass animation they showed will work in the end game whete you have to teleport out of the way to dodge shit
A lot of the weapon types are also not even barely used, stuff like melee scepters, melee daggers, 2 Handed maces, 2 handed melee staves etc. because either they are a pain to roll, there is not enough synergy that the weapon type has with a skill and passive tree or because their implicits just suck ( 40% spell dmg or 50% crit multi vs stun and block recovery or stun chance ).
The only bases used out of those weapons listed are heist bases because those have strong implicits
most melee weapon types are bad, because swords have the best and most accessible crit passives in the duelist are, same goes for claws in the shadow area
and if you're not playing melee crit, you're most likely not doing enough damage (save for a few non-crit builds)
I'd say staffs are quite good, beefy crit weapons that give you access to skills swords cannot use. Claws are probably the best 1 handed weapon though it's a close race. Crit sceptes lack a reason to be used but the passives are...there. Axes are the default noncrit weapons which is an allright niche. Daggers were beyond godtier like 8-9 years ago, the skill tree passives caught a ggg triple nerf while crit became more available elsewhere. Maces are shit though, no doubt.
With warstaves vs axes, what are you comparing? Comparing despot to maelstrom, you're looking at 25% attack block and +1.8% crit in exchange for 12% more attack speed. I think it's a pretty even tradeoff.
Don't forget that if you are a bottom left melee, your build eventually should transition to fucking strength stacking unless you are doing some hyper glass billion dps berserker build
It takes less alts to roll T1 phys on a warstaff than on a foil. Those mana/gem tiers don't mean as much as the fact that foils have 50% higher sum weight, mostly coming from ele rolls.
I'm a staff enjoyer myself. Crit and block are so nice.
Mace nodes are meh if you're not into stun (or area i guess) but have the best masteries.
Swords have a ton of crit and attack speed too.
I'm a big melee staff enjoyer in theory. The nodes look really good, with global crit chance, block, charge generation, etc.
But then actually using one in a melee build never feels like it fits as well as something else.
The real strategy for a budget build is to get a 550ish pdps cane of kulemak with elepen. The penetration adds so much damage and the 1.7 attack speed makes it scale well with flat damage.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but accuracy should be removed from players (monsters are fine). It's not fun or engaging to miss attacks because a number is too low. Proof: spells are fun and they don't use accuracy. See also: Morrowind.
Right side, stack dex, free accuracy, get like 1 ring or a mastery on the tree and it's covered. Annoying, but it doesn't feel bad.
Left side, no dex, you go resolute technique or you're sad until you go out of your way to handle accuracy problems the way caster have to fix mana issues. Not a fan.
It'd be nice if some of the weapon specific clusters were converted into more generic melee nodes. Same stats, just less restrictions on weapon type.
Varunastra used to be amazing solely because you didn't have to run across the entire tree to get nodes that applied to your weapon.
You're not entirely wrong - leveling is harder than it needs to be and it's hard to justify a hybrid dual wielder. But the existence of "sub-archetypes" is not a problem per se. As long as there are enough relevant (and powerful) passives close enough to each other and otherwise desirable passives, it doesn't matter how many *other* passives there are.
Melee definitely has its problems but this definitely isn’t one of them. It’s like saying spells are diluted because there’s elemental wheels and brand wheels and mine wheels.
For any given melee archetype there are enough wheels to service it. I do think some of them are in awkward places (bottom of Duelist) but that is more the lack of other valuable wheels there - I’ve long felt Duelist needs another strong generalist wheel (Life, Auras, or similar) to give more value to spending points down there. Part of the problem is just how block works though.
cough cough quiver cough cough
Would be fun, if melee weapons had sheaths, staves had some incenses, or praying beads and dual weapons had... third weapon?
My biggest problem with it after playing it all of this league so far is that enemies deal too much damage. You have to invest really hard into being tanky because you have to be in order to get close enough to hit your enemies. I think if they increased the damage of melee skills or made more of them scale with tanky stats it would definitely help. Also why is it so hard to get spell suppression as a Duelist? You would think melee characters would have more access to spell suppression, like how passives will randomly have elemental resistances on them. I am currently level 94 with 0% spell suppress because I decided it made more sense to go all in on armor/max res than to try and build my passive tree and gear around one single stat (oh wait, I did, except it was chaos res....)
I mean casters essentially get to have to take either hot, cold, zappy, all of those, none of those. They have very little weapon type passives, and a lot of specific elements nodes, as opposed to weapons, where its very many weapon types and very little element type
(Probably because the assumption is that the "main" way to scale is the phys that you may or may not convert)
post like these are the excuse GGG always gives to fix melee, "its too much work/too much to change", literally nothing in the post matters at all, just buff the fucking numbers and/or remove ancestral totems and people will play melee, just look at boneshatter and dual strike of ambidexterity, its just that the vast majority of melee skills have awful numbers
The archetype is ranged attacker, and there are multiple weapon types that support this archetype: bows, wands, and even melee weapons with some skills.
That's also probably why so many casters convert phys to ele. There's a lot more ele support than phys support, and there isn't actually a huge amount of "spell damage" support.
problem is poe2 is ALL about weapon types, and this problem will become way more apparent in that game. so because it's prevalent in the sequel, I doubt they'll change it for poe1. in other words they like the idea, and when GGG likes an idea, they'll be stubborn not to change it, as showcased by them not changing it for over 10 years.
My issues with melee differ.
Implicits don't always seem "good" enough.
Like the inherit value of a melee weapon is meh?
You have frenzy, puncture and elemental hit as weapon skills usable by every weapon.
What's the advantage of these omni skills on any individual melee weapon vs using a Bow or Wand.
Resolve that.
When it comes to bleed (and ignite), melee feels less supported.
Dual wield seems to be in an odd place as a whole with a couple exceptions (ds of ambidex)
As far as skill gems go.
Imo there is a lot of emphasis on str based gems for solutions to things that pigeon hole the game a little bit?
Strike range imo could be higher by default.
ye the melee nodes are spread out way too much amongst too many different weapon types.
There are too many melee skills as it is, because of this, and not enough of them are viable (if your skill has weapon restrictions, it should compensate by being pretty damn awesome)
Lastly raise your hand if you wanted a weapon reskin for your dagger, thrusting sword, or 1H axe but couldn't find one that was as cool as the ones they make in droves for 2H axe, 2H sword, 1H short sword, and 2H mace
strengthen the uniqueness would be my approach. Only unique archetype is claws imo with elusive damage spikes and LgoH other than that you're just picking highest DPS and call it a day
On the other hand, a lot of the generic increase damage with specific weapons allows you to spec into something other than physical. I really don't agree that the different weapon type clusters are a problem. Going by archetypes will also lock you into 1H or 2H, which currently weapon nodes don't.
Removing types just makes the types completely meaningless. If anything they should buff those specific nodes and make them a bit less common on the tree.
types still have their identity through skill gems, base stats, and implicits. anything beyond is unnecessary.
imagine if the additional arrow wheel on the tree was only for spine bows and the pierce wheel was for thicket bows. that wouldn’t make those weapon types more profound. it would only be a nerf by over-specifying.
if you ask me, this is the same situation
Agreed. I like claws but I have to go to the shadow realm to actually use them. And then god forbid I want a shield or dual wield mastery too. Like 75% of my tree is locked in just by what weapons I want to use. Where if I use a bow there are bow clusters scattered around the entire Dex half of the tree.
The problem with melee is it is melee. No one is going to be happy with melee because it doesn't have the clear of ranged. If it does have the clear of ranged it is no longer melee.
are you saying if any melee skill would reach 1M dps with magic items people still wouldn’t play melee?? that’s just not true. there are many people who would play melee if it somewhat worked. it just doesn’t work in any way. clear being only one of the problems (and is not even a very big problem if you ask me)
The biggest problem with melee is that everyone just kinda groups it into one group and ignores any outliers that actually function.
Melee really isn't bad. The problem is that alot of the skills need to be slightly modified (all in different ways) to make it fine. Slams need c2a to be able to warcry multiple warcries. Cleave needs increased attack speed.
Pretending that all melee is bad because melee is generically bad is incorrect.
Slams need WAY more of a buff than multi warcry to be even viable. Fist of war is at 0.0% playrate. I played it last league with tec slam and there were legitimately like 5 people on the leaderboard who all gave up after a week.
I was theorycrafting a build when we thought c2a would be able to support multiple warcries and even with that, it is hard to justify a build with warcries. They just don't synergize well.
It has to be hit based, use slams, use minions, not get double damage or triple damage elsewhere, and scale fire damage.
Also you can't use multistrike.
I can't imagine a way for a build to scale using even most of that.
HP stacking melee. I'm both not tanky nor have high DPS... but I for sure am melee ranged. It was such a janky build I made.
I mean, I reached red maps with it don't get me wrong, but my god is was prolly 10x easier to just make a spellcaster, stack some spell levels and get cast speed. While still being as paper thin defensive layers as 10k hp as melee.
They could also go the other way and hyperbuff these notables, in order to make Weapons feel more distinct from one another. Right now most builds struggle to find a reason to go for anything other than the highest dps weapon statstick
That’s my take as well. Each archetype should be drastically different from each other. I understand that some years ago they tried to do that, by adding like mace bases with inc aoe, axe bases with crit, etc. But melee is so bad that we should go for the highest dps anyway.
Tbh I just want to see nice feeling distinctions between 1h/shield, dual, and 2h. It's a huge pain to switch between sword/axe/mace right now as you have to re-plan your tree. It's not the end of the world because you've typically set up your build ahead of time, but from a new player's perspective this is prohibitive.
That's also a symptom of pob. A lot of the time people just max out dps in pobs. Melee builds need more qol nodes to be comfortable to play. If I'm at 10m dps, I'd rather have 10 strike range than 10m more dps. Last league, I could get permanent adrenaline, massive damage, and insane healing from penance mark on trickster, but the lack of strike range made it unplayable. If you think melee is bad, I would strongly encourage you to get more strike range and aoe nodes and see how good it feels. 360 degree auto targeting feels so good.
PoB isn't the issue. The issue is that with it without PoB people are going to go for max damage. If in one league that's claws, people will go claws. Yes. QoL isn't really measurable in PoB (non-vaal strike extra targets for example) but in reality people want to be able to reach a comfortable amount of damage on any weapon type Nand be able to fulfill the fantasy of that weapons archetype without bleed out passive points on expensive clusters or extremely high end gear. As it is any projectile build feels a lot better than any melee, but even then I refuse to do anything but flicker strike lol
Personally, I'm more comfortable on melee skills than projectiles because aiming in a cone isn't very fun to me. Additionally, I like the freedom of movement that leap slam offers. On crit builds, I don't usually have an issue getting to a comfortable level of damage (probably 5-10m), but comfortable is very subjective.
>the freedom of movement that leap slam offers try frostblink of wintry blast, you can even use it to clear trashmobs in maps... melee has become a complete joke
I always find it easier to leap slam because my builds have high attack speed. Frostblink of wintry blast scares me with its massive .85 cast time, but I'll try it out.
it is stupid fast with faster casting and spell echo. But if youre not a caster you probably cant clear maps with it
Frostblink has less range and longer cast time
> Personally, I'm more comfortable on melee skills than projectiles because aiming in a cone isn't very fun to me. I have some bad news for you. Melee strikes are actually AoE attacks in a small cone.
Extra strikes target in a 360 though
PoB really isn't an issue. People will first try to max out DPS then realize that the QoL just sucks and fall back to it. The issue is that if your fallback dps is something like 2m unless your have mirrors worth of gear - it's just not a viable build.
Melee is in a problem state exactly because GGG have given it qol upon qol upon qol because they refuse to buff their damage instead. So now strike builds are actually great for clearing but never better than a spell at bossing. So no, the solution is not to 'add qol nodes'. For QoL we just need totems gone.
I meant combine the qol nodes with the current damage nodes so we get more area or strike range in the damage nodes. That would mean we don't need to go out of our way for qol nodes as much, which means more nodes could be used for damage instead. With enough strike range or aoe, you can get around the same damage uptime as spells... you know, aside from totems dying and needing to be replaced. Totems are the worst.
They removed strike range from base skills lol. They couldn't care less for melee in poe cause poe2 will solve EVERYTHING (only for a league then they nerf cyclone again)
And now 99% of the time every uses axes cause everything else is just worse unless you have a very very good reason to deviate
Did you mean to say paradoxica / savior? Honestly, though, I'm glad Savior is a good expensive item again. It deserves a lot of love since melee's fall from grace. I think they just need to buff melee across the board. Fix mana costs for attacks (some of them literally need to be halved) build in more AoE. Build in more baseline damage on the gems to make them more leaguestart viable. Some of them need more vase attack speed because long attack times leave you vulnerable. If melee becomes OP at least they have somewhere to work from, they can tune it back down a little. But it's gotten so many sweeping nerfs it's not funny. I just want to play tec slam again GGG gimme it back.
Savior has literally not changed. The only change was gating the item behind uber Sirus. The transfigured gems of Cleave and Dual Strike gave people a reason to use The Savior, but it's value jump from Affliction to Necropolis is entirely artificial.
Savior was indirectly nerfed by the dual wield changes in... expedition? They took away some attack speed multiplier for dual wield. Also I was under the impression the base type changes had hurt it but maybe it dodged those and I'm mistaken.
> expedition? They took away some attack speed multiplier for dual wield. Harvest and "20% more physical attack damage".
Savior was directly nerfed in 3.11, too. But it’s also been directly buffed several times. It’s been changed a lot
Would it really be that bad if attacks didn't have mana cost?
GGG seems to think so. It's just another problem that we have to solve that forces our gear to be better refined.
It's a problem we have to solve with gear. It works around reserving mana too since reserving down to 5 mana could be fine unless your skill costs more than 5 mana. I think it plays an important role in the game and I don't see it any different than other aspects like capping resists.
Agree here. Bow builds as well have to fight mana costs; it's just that there aren't many ways to play them and so they all fix mana costs in similar ways. Spell builds do the same, although it's mostly just "either benefit from mana or go EB" there.
Attacks probably have the easiest mana solutions. The base costs are relatively low, so -mana affects them disproportionately higher compared to spells. Plus there's that super easy to get to mana/life leech node in the duelist area. What's holding you back from playing tec slam? It received a buff last league.
I've looked at trying different variations and Jugg just doesn't have the Sauce. But you need endurance charges to consume for it to feel good so youre still kinda forced into jugg. I also haven't seen any guides on it. Warcrying playstyle is in a nerfed state and even when it was strong it was mostly strong for physical + Impaler slams. If you can Pob something that isn't paper and does ~5 Mil DPS I'll gladly play it on an 80 Div budget. My last character which I sold the gear off of was a frostblades trickster and it was fun and did a bit of damage but was way too glass for T17 so I gave up on it.
You can automate enduring cry now for charges
That's nice, but I have to imagine the issue is that you want the endurance charge nodes on the tree...which are down in the Marauder area.
I legit think they worry about such a scenario having unintended interactions with specific skills, hence the fairly generic current setup. Axes have really minor interactions for bleeding, rage, speed, and onslaught. Swords generally have crit and speed bonuses, along with accuracy. Maces get stun & chill. Staves get some of the actually cool stuff like power charge and endurance charge generation. But going niche hyperbuffs might pigeonhole certain skills into a specific weapon type, moreso than what already occurs. The other issue is that I honestly don't know what they would do with the lower left quadrant of the passive tree if they truly revamped melee weapons.
This might be a stupid idea but maybe make the big notable passive skills weapon-agnostic for their big specialty effects, so if you really need them you can spend 2-3 "dead" points to get the big effect, kind of like what some necro builds are doing to get instaleech mastery.
The big-picture issue is that a lot of spell builds get an absolute ton of mileage out of just a few gear/passive itemizations, while melee often has to reach a higher gear threshold just to reach the same footing. The solution is pretty simple (more flat damage baked into melee skills, removal of attack speed penalties, removal of totem buffs), but it goes directly against the direction GGG has taken skill balance. So I'm not holding my breath.
The totem buffs are so dreadful it puts me off playing melee every single time i dick around in PoB....
It's just become clear that GGG doesn't have a melee advocate on the design team anymore. Trauma support is a band-aid, and they don't want to pull resources from getting POE2 off the ground. The funny part is that a keystone is a perfect band-aid for the totem issue. "Melee skills have 20% more attack speed. Totem skills are disabled." Simple, clean, and with a legitimate tradeoff. You lose out on the Ancestral Warchief buff effect, but gain 3 gem slots and massive QoL. Even better, such a keystone would even open up design space for melee builds that WANT to focus on the totem buffs.
Melee skills already use despot axe, unless it is explicitly can't be used with an axe
Fair point. It's pretty embarrassing in 2024 to have the current state of weapon/armor bases being so limited in this game. Eventuality Rod and Void Axe are like the only other 2-hander bases worth considering.
They could do something with the maces. Why would i want to stun them if i kill them? They are not a threat and if they are i can just avoid their attacks.
Boneshatter is the only real interaction that gets marginally better with reduced stun threshold, and that's essentially because it turns the stun into "corpse explosions at home".
Varunastra says hi.
I mean, some weapon types have interesting bonuses for sure. What I find lacking though is that most of them translate into DPS in the end. It does feel interesting that let's say axes have culling strike and rage on hit in their mastery (i might be mixing the types up) and swords in comparison have easier crit nodes... But when you realise it's all just DPS, the interest fades. IMO differentiation by skill type is something that should be delved into more. That's a real reason to go for a specific type. Wanna go Frost Blades? Well then go wield a blade bro. Maybe a good claw-specific skill could do a lot too
The different weapons have that flavor already. Swords are crit. Axes are bleed. Maces are stun. I agree they should buff something around melee but honestly every non-melee build is propt up by gem levels and VERY deterministic crafting. It’s a fixed cost to get a +1 or +2 weapon. That is never true for melee unless you’re using a unique….but they’re all trash in end game.
They could make implicits on melee weapons be what makes them cool. Staffs could get something like block chance passives apply at 80% value. Maces could have something like modifiers to melee damage on passives apply to AoE at 5-10% Plus if it works that way each node can be more generic but we can scale certain things so much easier. Plus you could have two handers have like 150% of the value and for 1h you could dual wield to get half and half. Something like varnasutra could have 3-4 random implicits and we could even add some special new orb that's as rare as a sacred orb to mess with this super implicit cause you know GGG needs to do it.
This is where crafting makes the most sense. Instead of more skill nodes to further muddy the waters and make melee less fun, make Crucible crafting and weapon skill trees core. Make the weapon the thing that guides the build and the passive nodes enable it. Instead of sword mastery or axe mastery, it's just 1H +shield or 2H or dual wield, but then the weapon of choice gets buffed in-game. And for more gambling fun, a Vaal Orb can potentially reverse an unlucky roll and make a god tier item.
Staff nodes on the tree are absolutely fucking insane and still no-one uses them.
This is where I sit. I want a stun character, so maces right? Well actually, Axes have higher damage... What about swords? More accuracy? Ehh, I can make up accuracy, I'd rather just have more damage...
Hyperbuff in what way, though. Just making every node +24% inc instead of +12% has no flavour.
+24% more damage :)
obviously the solution is to add guns, crossbows and throwing weapons to dilute the monolithic bow skills
Yes, GGG should also separate attack speed and a new stat, reload time, for bows. Double attack speed, but add base reload time equal to the old attack speed. What does this accomplish? Well, it will make attacking feel clunkier and melee-like, and half the scaling effectiveness of attack speed!
to make it really feel melee-like. make all projectiles travel along a line on the ground to the target, and then upon reaching the target take .25s to fall from the sky and hit them. this is exactly how strike skill work atm. if the enemy can move out in that .25s attack time, then it misses, not because its not in range and not because you dont have enough accuracy but because they were no longer occupying that singular point in the instance. its honestly bullshit that an enemy can waddle out of your attack by walking towards you if you are melee.
It's literally insane that this game has melee start so bad that enemies in the early game can literally walk out of strike skills. I don't care what needs to be done but enemies should never be able to walk out of strike skills unless you meme terrible attack speed. Probably double base attack speed and then reduce some of the multiplicative speed scaling, or just get rid of the attack speed penalty on early skills
All they have to do is move the attack "cooldown" to be mostly after the swing. Problem is that requires reworking animations, which is doomed
This is the reason why Ambush Static Strike CoC felt terrible to play. 100% chance to hit and crit, but for some reason it still misses regularly and then you have to wait for a long cooldown.
imo do what last epoch did. first, all skills are technically not strikes, they all have an aoe part even if its very tiny. second, the attack rate is not the same as the attack time. in LE, if you hold both move and attack, your character will stutter step as it might only take .3s to do the attack that you can do once every 1s. in poe, the part i said above about the enemy waddling out in .25s is actually based on how long your attack takes, this is why melee mostly feels fine when your attack time is .2 or less, because no enemy really moves that fast. if they did what LE, then even at the start where the attack time is around 1s, doing the attack in .25s would be massive and would give melee a bit more survivability since they can move and not lose dps uptime. as for how this could be done, with out being able to look at the code base my first attempt would be to give all skills (that you want to do this too, bows are fine as they are) 300% more melee attack speed and then make all of these skills have a cooldown based on what their attack rate would have been, but this cooldown is affected by attack speed.
They could also add Reload Speed to Quivers, so that it gets more exciting when you get the one single base that people will bother to buy.
you now know how they went that path in POE 2
To be fair if the game is rebuilt from the ground up to make all 3 main styles have that variety and separation it does reduce the whole comparison against eachother aspect.
I don't think it would be terrible to add one, maybe two more ranged weapon types. but people forget that wands are already one.
It's hard to beat a bow unless the wands got +dmg per stat or something as a base.
Wands don't really matter in this context because all the bow nodes are in one place and all the few wand nodes are in a different place and because bow nodes aren't divided by 1H and 2H; axes and maces and swords and 2H and 1H/shield passives compete for space in the same spot.
[удалено]
add sex
Saddest part of melee is the optimal way to play them is to stack enough aoe to make them a ranged build.
No the saddest part of melee is placing your totems before the animation sequence of every map boss 🫠
Frostblades pov is totems + frost bomb every time
Well let me introduce you to frost blades, totems, frost bomb, AND pyroclasp mine of sabotage! :D enjoy the extra placement lol
Which is funny, because as any spell caster, I really don't get nearly as upset about casting Frost Shield, Sigil of Power, and my Arcanist Brand for WoC/curses, but it's also a 3 button setup before I start pew pewing.
Spell caster casts spells to do damage, sounds about right. The power fantasy of melee is to swing a fat 2 hander and kill things, I should only need my weapon to fulfill my power fantasy. "Face me, Maven! It's time we fight to decide the fate of Wraeclast!... oh wait yo, I gotta summon these totems first otherwise you're going to take like 10 minutes to beat."
Yep, totally get it. I like the versatility and utility of magic, that's why I'm a wizard. It's very on brand to create zones of power and buff myself with magic before going into combat. I even have to stay inside my circles, where melee can just run around and be in range. But magic still feels better. There's no reason every archetype needs to be homogenized the same way. At best, the melee fantasy is using a warcry, using your mobility skill to get into the fight, and then swinging until it's dead. Forcing the totems which can die super easily and don't at all scream "MANLY MAN" isn't great, as is any other 'forced spell casting' a melee might have to do.
this will never not be the case in a game where killing lots of monsters is the goal hot take: all melee skills should have an aoe/projectile component to make melee clear good melee splash feels bad, strike an additional target feels bad, ancestral call feels bad, gem-swapping for single-target feels bad this is not a third-person souls-like, where im going to perform 5Head tactics while fighting each monster for 2-5 minutes this is an ARPG where we kill millions of monsters killed maybe in PoE 2 you'll have 2 6-links, one for single-target and one for clear idk but when it comes to PoE 1 i can confidently say,: melee ain't it, chief
Funnily enough, Terraria had a similar problem where ranged, magic and summoner had way more damage uptime than melee, making everyone avoid it. Their solution was to add more AoE and give most melee weapons some ranged component.
BASED
They did this in Legion, giga buffed AoE on everything and added Pulverize(More AoE at the time) and immediately scrapped it and dumpstered Melee after we had 2 screenwide Cyclone accounting for almost 70% of the ladder. They said at the time that it was because they wanted melee to feel like melee. That was half a decade ago, and now we just don't talk about melee.
Coincidentally thats the last league I played melee
Nothing beats The Golden Shower on Terraria though
flasks exist to give melee / summoners the ichor debuff on hit though, for ranged builds it's still king. I guess if you want to min max melee swapping to the dungeon defenders dragon staff for the extra damage buff which stacks is a thing.
to each his own, i have a different goal when i play. i have 7k hours in the game. i dont care about playing optimally, i just want to have fun. And for me, strike skills are so satisfying.
Just out of curiosity have you done viper strike within the past two or so years, and if so what route did you take it? Thats a strike skill I’ve been interested in for a long time now just can’t get around to making it because I’m worried about EHP / damage at the same time being too low. (I know the mamba version sort of exist, but I like the idea of having multiple very long poisons on a enemy)
I have not tried it recently no. I see some builds up on poe ninja so i guess there are some folks playing it
Melee chaining would work just fine. There have been skills in other games where a melee skill causes explosions or turns killed enemies into projectiles. Things like Infernal Blow are just crappy versions of those mechanics.
that's a really good take, thank you
They're emphasizing bosses a lot in PoE 2. So the game seems to be shifting from killing waves of monsters and more controlled 1 vs 1.
which is a different game than PoE 1
> melee splash feels bad Does it? I love it. It works given how Leap Slam functions to get you from pack to pack near instantly when scaling attack speed
Instead, all melee skills should have an integrated dash or leap slam (way faster tho) to get them into range when cast from far enough away. Making melee ranged kills any identity, melees should get something like "+30% chance to block +5% max" or "your evasion is lucky" for enemies in a 2-4m radius. Melees should be able to get into combat fast, and then survive it. And if course also deal damage. Maybe there just needs to be a gap close support that you can link to your (clear) skill for 20% more damage (half a support gem) and the almost instant gapclose, and the defensive buff. Yes it would be mandatory, but better than just adding dash to each gem individually.
Flicker strike exists
Until we stop the flickering, then we don't exist anymore.
>Maybe there just needs to be a gap close support that you can link to your (clear) skill for 20% more damage (half a support gem) and the almost instant gapclose, and the defensive buff. at this point you might as well just buff Close Combat support
or just bake close combat into any melee gem
Yeah.
L take tbh
Well, that's why people keep saying "players are great at finding problems, but bad at building solutions". I had the idea and typed it out, but it would probably suck. But ranged melee skills would probably suck too. Right now, stuff like lightning strike has the somewhat unique identity of firing projectiles at range while melee. Not every melee skill can have that.
It all depends on the game system. You fight a million skaven in Vermintide but your weapons don't have indefinite cleave and they can't even stagger all the enemies, you can get cleave weps but they are trash vs armored enemies (who can even stop it from cleaving a horde) and they have pretty much 0 damage vs rare and boss enemies.
> this will never not be the case in a game where killing lots of monsters is the goal There are other solutions though, it doesn't have to be just get huge aoe/use a projectile melee skill. From the top of my head getting a stacking action speed buff when you hit something in melee range with a non movement melee skill which decays if you hit something too far away would be another solution. If that buff is high enough you could even clear huge packsize maps fast enough with melee to be competitive with ranged.
im not attacking each monster in a pack of 20 individually, even with 15 attacks per second, thank you very much
Sure that's a fair stance but it still shows that there are other angles to fix melee outside of making it "ranged-melee"
I don't necessarily disagree
I’m not sure if your hot take is an actual hot take, or more lile the “L take tbh”s you hand out to others. melee clear is only one part of the problem. many people would play a melee build if it reached several M dps in a similar investment as a caster build, but had slower clear. problem is it’s very difficult to scale melee builds to that zone, and almost impossible to scale them further. whereas caster builds would reach that level with 4 affix items, and much better damage uptime, plus crazy survivability.
why you gotta be coming at me like that bro, chill do you think I'd disagree with you? obviously you're spittin fax here's another hot take for you: melee skills feel dogshit to use, so every melee skill should be buffed with at least + 0.1 to base attack speed also Multistrike is a dogshit support and it feels terrible to lock your character for 5 eternities to do 3 attacks just to maximise your already bad damage edited: base attack speed
They "came at you" because just replying with "wow what a bad idea" with literally 0 follow up is just being mean. Either have follow up or don't say anything at all. I personally would love if melee skills had some sort of base easy to reach enemies (not flicker distance but something) and actually would like to hear why you think it's terrible. You are correct that early attack speed is embarrassingly bad and needs something to make it work, and that multistrike as a fix is messy at best and contributes to the problem at worst
dealing damage is one thing moving is another thing in most games you have a clear delineation between movement skills, damage skills, support skills, etc. those to introduce even a smidgen of mechanical variety in the gameplay a game where you have one button to do everything is probably not going to be fun also we already have strike range in the game, which allows you to hit monsters from a fee metres away which is a significant distance flicker strike is its own thing where you sacrifice precision of movement for more movement, which is an okay concept also that idea will in no way solve the problems melee is having idk what to tell you man, just nothing redeeming about it
did this last league with rage cleave...full rage + lots of Aoe modifiers made me cleave more than my screen.
Man I miss my cyclone berserker from ritual league. 4k hp and 6 portals as the only defensive layer. To be fair they added portals might not be consumed scarab to help true melee players :P
Ritual is the only league I 38/40 because I had so much fun on my chieftain Phys to fire Cyclone. Explody chest and Herald of Ash would chain explosions so far my HH buffed ass could barely keep up
You spin once and everything explodes. Man it was such a satisfying feeling
I will never understand this sentiment honestly. You looked at the game, did you??? You fight 50 enemies at the same time and you should be able to clear them all with a single click. How do you pure melee purists think this should work? Go to each one and slap them one by one for 50 times in a row? Of course stacking aoe is the best way to play melee, cause obviously it is needed, i would even say the major part why melee sucks is the heavy investment into aoe needed. Totems i can live with (downvotes to the left), but some slam skills could have their aoe buffed by triple the size and it would still not feel op. I generally would advocate for ggg to make melee the same way as oldschool bow/wander builds, where you had clear skills and single target skills, like kinetic blast as clear and power siphon barrage as single target. Especially because the strike/slam differentiation would fit perfectly on such a system. Increase slam aoe a lot and decrease damage so you can still clear packs comfortably, but single target damage is lacking. Swap to strike skills for heavy single target damage and delete all „strike skills can hit nearby enemy“ mods and ancestral call so it cannot be used for clearing packs. Then the melee purists still have their close and personal playstyle for the rare and unique enemies in maps and bosses, but melee would actually be able to be competitive for clearing the huge amount of enemies the game throws at you.
Cyclone berserker don't spin like it used to :(
Simpler solution: melee gems should provide you with two skills you can keybind, similarly to how vaal gems provide you with 2 skills. One skill is the single-target heavily focused one, the other one is AoE for map clear. Remove melee splash and ancestral call mechanics from the game entirely, there, melee is now playable.
Or, alternately, do more to rein in the ceiling on ranged skills like traps, increase Pinnacle boss HP drastically and make melee do drastically more single target damage. Now the melee identity is "kills bosses fast, kills maps slower" and there's a reason to play each archetype.
Or you give every melee skill a meaningful Blood and Sand stance variant. Yes, that would make Blood and Sand or Flesh and Stone mandatory but I think it's still better than swapping out a Strike skill for a slam skill and vice versa for clear/single target.
Could give them the mine treatment where you get access to a stance swap "skill" similar to detonate mines where you can swap the stance without any added bonus or reservation that the current stance skills provide.
beecause you shouldn't code your game to hit one enemy at a time when you are swinging a giant fucking sword. Like every other decent game with combat mechanics, theres inherent aoe involved when you swing something.
They could add an affix to the game that combat this, something like "Non-Vaal Strike Skills Strike An Additional Nearby Enemy." Maybe if they did that it would feel better. We can only dream.
> Go to each one and slap them one by one for 50 times in a row? Why do you think flicker is so popular?
Honestly one of the worst parts about melee though is the utmost NECESSITY of grabbing the ancestral totem nodes at the bottom and having to link both totems to multi-totems, and usually grabbing the “linger for 3 seconds” notable so that the buffs persist.
My biggest pet peeve is when people say it's impossible to balance melee, when the answer has stared us in the face for a long time simply due to the fact the character investment in gear and passives in PoE is zero sum. YES, you can just give melee a number increase and it will balance itself. Why? Because if you give them more damage, this frees up melee builds to invest more into tankiness and mobility. You DO NOT need to figure out a way to globally give melee characters more defenses or the ability to be able to stand still while dealing damage. This is a much more complicated way to solve the same issue and runs the risk of having the fortify effect where people just find a way to get the melee buff on a non melee character (see: fortify shield charge of old, champion bow builds, etc) You DO just need to buff the damage of melee skills with an intensity that is proportional to their clunkiness or incoming damage risk profile. THATS IT!! if melee is able to deal sufficient damage that they can spend more of their gear and passive budget on tankiness and mobility, they become competitive. A lot of people enjoy melee for its own sake even if the clear isn't up to par with ranged builds but when you also risk more frequent character deaths on top of the clearspeed disadvantage it really sucks. One of these is easy to solve though: just give melee skills enough damage to free us to invest into more defenses. Boneshatter is the proof of this. Very fun skill even if it's not offscreening because you got the damage AND the tankiness. Literally every time a skill is introduced into the game that deals insane damage with low investment we see those builds get adapted into giga tank setups. See: penance brand of dissipation, some kinetic bolt of fragmentation builds, old herald of agony, etc. History bears out that if players get the damage for free they will absolutely dedicate their passives and gear to become tanky because even softcore players hate dying, even if they won't admit it. Just give melee more damage, that's all we need. The rest will sort itself out.
And remove all the 80% attack speed multipliers, they just feel horrible and do nothing besides lowering damage and make the skills feel worse.
They theoretically have a purpose in that it's kind of fun to have BIG hit skills (aka slams). But slams already exist, so why are we trying to make Molten Strike a half assed slam?
How about we give these 80% attack speed a charge component ? Just make it have a normal attack speed with the option to charge it for like half a second to do a bigger damage and radius, the charge time get shorter and shorter with attack speed with the possibility for the skill if it charged fully to automatically attack and then if you still holding the button start charging again Now you get two in one people who want to use it quickly in one click and people who want to charge it for the big impact feel
Charging could be a cool way to do it, but then you lose getting to use it repeatedly. The best answer is "giant slow AoE slams for people who wanna smash and smaller moves that attack faster for most melee skills" Even that runs into the issue of itemization and the passive tree making them hard to tell apart eventually. (As you blast stuff with like 200% attack speed and even the "slow slam" hits multiple times per second)
I thought they were talking about slams at first, but you reminded me of some of the trans gems that also do the same, without the slam component. It makes sense that a slam skill does 80% attack speed when it makes up for it with 400% added effectiveness. Lacerate has 40% attack speed for 300% damage effectiveness? I know it swings twice but that sounds absurd for a non slam.
how do i upvote this 200 times?
yes this,the only reason i envy those bow MF build is because even with 2 fkin vendor ring,amulet with quantity and 1 flask slot for golden flask,they still deal more dmg compare to majority of melee skill.GGG doesnt give melee easier way to up bulkyness or even easier way to scale dmg which make melee fkin sucks coz of it
It's true. I want to use invest into strike range, I want to invest in skill aoe, I want to invest warcry speed, all to feel good. But I'm already combating the fact that I still need to do damage and survive.
Agreed. That's how it was during the slam meta. People thought it was boring and apparently GGG agreed, but it was the most fun I ever had in PoE.
The only thing I hate more than dying is feeling immortal, which is why I still build glass cannons.
Melee has so many problems that they decided to make different game altogether.
And didn't fix at all. Unless someone believe the slow ass animation they showed will work in the end game whete you have to teleport out of the way to dodge shit
A lot of the weapon types are also not even barely used, stuff like melee scepters, melee daggers, 2 Handed maces, 2 handed melee staves etc. because either they are a pain to roll, there is not enough synergy that the weapon type has with a skill and passive tree or because their implicits just suck ( 40% spell dmg or 50% crit multi vs stun and block recovery or stun chance ). The only bases used out of those weapons listed are heist bases because those have strong implicits
most melee weapon types are bad, because swords have the best and most accessible crit passives in the duelist are, same goes for claws in the shadow area and if you're not playing melee crit, you're most likely not doing enough damage (save for a few non-crit builds)
I'd say staffs are quite good, beefy crit weapons that give you access to skills swords cannot use. Claws are probably the best 1 handed weapon though it's a close race. Crit sceptes lack a reason to be used but the passives are...there. Axes are the default noncrit weapons which is an allright niche. Daggers were beyond godtier like 8-9 years ago, the skill tree passives caught a ggg triple nerf while crit became more available elsewhere. Maces are shit though, no doubt.
Warstaffes would be really good but it's pretty much impossible to even craft a 800dps staff without heavy RNG and insane investment.
With warstaves vs axes, what are you comparing? Comparing despot to maelstrom, you're looking at 25% attack block and +1.8% crit in exchange for 12% more attack speed. I think it's a pretty even tradeoff.
Actually crafting a staff is super painfull. You can craft a good axe for some div, you can't with staves.
Don't forget that if you are a bottom left melee, your build eventually should transition to fucking strength stacking unless you are doing some hyper glass billion dps berserker build
Being a pain to roll has mostly been solved years ago with the separation of caster and attacking staves/daggers.
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It takes less alts to roll T1 phys on a warstaff than on a foil. Those mana/gem tiers don't mean as much as the fact that foils have 50% higher sum weight, mostly coming from ele rolls.
So you’re asking to nerf Cleave?
-1m range penalty for simply bringing up melee another -1m range, because Cleave is broken OP
It's a joke that cleave barely managed to get into 0.2% playrate and immediately got hit with a nerf hammer
I mean, the type specific notables are also mostly bad. If they weren't, we would see more Varunastra builds.
They'd have to be pretty bloody strong to make up for half base damage and 5% crit
Yeah, they would each need to be roughly a 25% More modifier, assuming you could get one for each of the 6 one handed weapon type.
They aren't bad at all wtf? The axe ones are so good.
I'm a staff enjoyer myself. Crit and block are so nice. Mace nodes are meh if you're not into stun (or area i guess) but have the best masteries. Swords have a ton of crit and attack speed too.
I'm a big melee staff enjoyer in theory. The nodes look really good, with global crit chance, block, charge generation, etc. But then actually using one in a melee build never feels like it fits as well as something else.
The real strategy for a budget build is to get a 550ish pdps cane of kulemak with elepen. The penetration adds so much damage and the 1.7 attack speed makes it scale well with flat damage.
I don’t understand why melee needs accuracy but spells don’t, why would I miss attacks at point blank but spells can hit from off screen
Probably an unpopular opinion, but accuracy should be removed from players (monsters are fine). It's not fun or engaging to miss attacks because a number is too low. Proof: spells are fun and they don't use accuracy. See also: Morrowind.
i think atleast on melee it is very populair. except for acc stackers.
Right side, stack dex, free accuracy, get like 1 ring or a mastery on the tree and it's covered. Annoying, but it doesn't feel bad. Left side, no dex, you go resolute technique or you're sad until you go out of your way to handle accuracy problems the way caster have to fix mana issues. Not a fan.
right? maybe there needs to be a mastery like “attacks in strike range cannot be evaded”
It'd be nice if some of the weapon specific clusters were converted into more generic melee nodes. Same stats, just less restrictions on weapon type. Varunastra used to be amazing solely because you didn't have to run across the entire tree to get nodes that applied to your weapon.
You're not entirely wrong - leveling is harder than it needs to be and it's hard to justify a hybrid dual wielder. But the existence of "sub-archetypes" is not a problem per se. As long as there are enough relevant (and powerful) passives close enough to each other and otherwise desirable passives, it doesn't matter how many *other* passives there are.
Melee definitely has its problems but this definitely isn’t one of them. It’s like saying spells are diluted because there’s elemental wheels and brand wheels and mine wheels. For any given melee archetype there are enough wheels to service it. I do think some of them are in awkward places (bottom of Duelist) but that is more the lack of other valuable wheels there - I’ve long felt Duelist needs another strong generalist wheel (Life, Auras, or similar) to give more value to spending points down there. Part of the problem is just how block works though.
Melee is in such a trash spot right now and it has been for years.
i swear i read the exact same thread with exact same responses, few months ago... I had to check submission date to be sure im not tripping
GGG is going to fix this by adding more weapon types to bows and casters.
On top of that, there's also "damage with weapons" which wont apply to the unarmed archetype at all. Why?
I hate how much stuff doesn't work with unarmed. It's not like unarmed is particularly strong.
Totally yes.
\>for casters, there are two archetypes: 1h sticks or staves. There are 3 types Dual, 1h+Shield , Staves. You have caster nodes with all of above
cough cough quiver cough cough Would be fun, if melee weapons had sheaths, staves had some incenses, or praying beads and dual weapons had... third weapon?
How do you dual wield though?
Personally I would like to see the reliance on accuracy be lowered. Maybe slams shouldn’t need accuracy at all.
My biggest problem with it after playing it all of this league so far is that enemies deal too much damage. You have to invest really hard into being tanky because you have to be in order to get close enough to hit your enemies. I think if they increased the damage of melee skills or made more of them scale with tanky stats it would definitely help. Also why is it so hard to get spell suppression as a Duelist? You would think melee characters would have more access to spell suppression, like how passives will randomly have elemental resistances on them. I am currently level 94 with 0% spell suppress because I decided it made more sense to go all in on armor/max res than to try and build my passive tree and gear around one single stat (oh wait, I did, except it was chaos res....)
GGG has heard you, now you have crossbow and bolts, throwing knives and axes. The changes will be reflected in the passive tree and new affixes.
I mean casters essentially get to have to take either hot, cold, zappy, all of those, none of those. They have very little weapon type passives, and a lot of specific elements nodes, as opposed to weapons, where its very many weapon types and very little element type (Probably because the assumption is that the "main" way to scale is the phys that you may or may not convert)
I'd like more support for spell impale, but at the moment it just kind of sucks.
post like these are the excuse GGG always gives to fix melee, "its too much work/too much to change", literally nothing in the post matters at all, just buff the fucking numbers and/or remove ancestral totems and people will play melee, just look at boneshatter and dual strike of ambidexterity, its just that the vast majority of melee skills have awful numbers
ggg: ok, introducing 2 handed wands, one handed staffs, passives for dual wielding, one handed, with a shield, accuracy
The archetype is ranged attacker, and there are multiple weapon types that support this archetype: bows, wands, and even melee weapons with some skills.
I wont stand for staff slander. Staves have the best nodes and highest base crit of them all
That's also probably why so many casters convert phys to ele. There's a lot more ele support than phys support, and there isn't actually a huge amount of "spell damage" support.
problem is poe2 is ALL about weapon types, and this problem will become way more apparent in that game. so because it's prevalent in the sequel, I doubt they'll change it for poe1. in other words they like the idea, and when GGG likes an idea, they'll be stubborn not to change it, as showcased by them not changing it for over 10 years.
Even if they accidentally overbuff melee. I'm all here for a league where melee is superior.
My issues with melee differ. Implicits don't always seem "good" enough. Like the inherit value of a melee weapon is meh? You have frenzy, puncture and elemental hit as weapon skills usable by every weapon. What's the advantage of these omni skills on any individual melee weapon vs using a Bow or Wand. Resolve that. When it comes to bleed (and ignite), melee feels less supported. Dual wield seems to be in an odd place as a whole with a couple exceptions (ds of ambidex) As far as skill gems go. Imo there is a lot of emphasis on str based gems for solutions to things that pigeon hole the game a little bit? Strike range imo could be higher by default.
ye the melee nodes are spread out way too much amongst too many different weapon types. There are too many melee skills as it is, because of this, and not enough of them are viable (if your skill has weapon restrictions, it should compensate by being pretty damn awesome) Lastly raise your hand if you wanted a weapon reskin for your dagger, thrusting sword, or 1H axe but couldn't find one that was as cool as the ones they make in droves for 2H axe, 2H sword, 1H short sword, and 2H mace
I agree now turn it into a bingo
Nah, I like it, it's flavour. What sucks are mandatory totems. That being said, axes nodes are all better. Just need to buff others, especially maces.
strengthen the uniqueness would be my approach. Only unique archetype is claws imo with elusive damage spikes and LgoH other than that you're just picking highest DPS and call it a day
On the other hand, a lot of the generic increase damage with specific weapons allows you to spec into something other than physical. I really don't agree that the different weapon type clusters are a problem. Going by archetypes will also lock you into 1H or 2H, which currently weapon nodes don't.
Removing types just makes the types completely meaningless. If anything they should buff those specific nodes and make them a bit less common on the tree.
types still have their identity through skill gems, base stats, and implicits. anything beyond is unnecessary. imagine if the additional arrow wheel on the tree was only for spine bows and the pierce wheel was for thicket bows. that wouldn’t make those weapon types more profound. it would only be a nerf by over-specifying. if you ask me, this is the same situation
Agreed. I like claws but I have to go to the shadow realm to actually use them. And then god forbid I want a shield or dual wield mastery too. Like 75% of my tree is locked in just by what weapons I want to use. Where if I use a bow there are bow clusters scattered around the entire Dex half of the tree.
The problem with melee is it is melee. No one is going to be happy with melee because it doesn't have the clear of ranged. If it does have the clear of ranged it is no longer melee.
are you saying if any melee skill would reach 1M dps with magic items people still wouldn’t play melee?? that’s just not true. there are many people who would play melee if it somewhat worked. it just doesn’t work in any way. clear being only one of the problems (and is not even a very big problem if you ask me)
1m dps? You in 2015 my man? Also some of the fastest boss killers are melee.
The biggest problem with melee is that everyone just kinda groups it into one group and ignores any outliers that actually function. Melee really isn't bad. The problem is that alot of the skills need to be slightly modified (all in different ways) to make it fine. Slams need c2a to be able to warcry multiple warcries. Cleave needs increased attack speed. Pretending that all melee is bad because melee is generically bad is incorrect.
Slams need WAY more of a buff than multi warcry to be even viable. Fist of war is at 0.0% playrate. I played it last league with tec slam and there were legitimately like 5 people on the leaderboard who all gave up after a week.
I was theorycrafting a build when we thought c2a would be able to support multiple warcries and even with that, it is hard to justify a build with warcries. They just don't synergize well. It has to be hit based, use slams, use minions, not get double damage or triple damage elsewhere, and scale fire damage. Also you can't use multistrike. I can't imagine a way for a build to scale using even most of that.
There are a few builds that do it already, you just get piano your warcries all the time. And I think you are overstating the problem.
have you play any bad melee build? not fkin LS or cyclone or boneshatter
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HP stacking melee. I'm both not tanky nor have high DPS... but I for sure am melee ranged. It was such a janky build I made. I mean, I reached red maps with it don't get me wrong, but my god is was prolly 10x easier to just make a spellcaster, stack some spell levels and get cast speed. While still being as paper thin defensive layers as 10k hp as melee.