GGG, give some love to melee characters

I play both melee and ranged characters, so does my friend. From both my personal and my friends experience I can assuredly say that ranged characters are far more superior and much more fun to play than melee characters.

Probably the biggest advantages of ranged characters are:

1) Faster when it comes to killing monsters.
For example: When I play glacial hammer Templar and my friend plays ice spear witch. All the time wasted getting into melee range, often monsters are shot dead even before I get close to them. I just run in circles while my friend does the job.

2) Safer.
Enemies can be shot not only at range but also off screen. I don’t have to risk getting close to dangerous monsters that have auras, spread poison clouds, explode on death, cast ice nova and so on.

You know what is the saddest thing? I built my Templar for max survivability, but still, it dies far more often than my “glass cannon” ranger.


Edit:
Probably melee characters are more vulnerable to desync. I've seen my friend so many times frustrated when his life leech assassin gets killed because of desync (life leech doesnt work while character is in desync). He doesn't want to play his melee characters anymore, instead he prefers spell casters.

Think about it, when you go "balls deep" into a horde of monsters with melee character, lag or desync might be a matter of life or death.

I'll agree that melee should have some reward - to compensate for the risk of being close range, or some survivability to even the odds.

However, I was very successful with the last melee character I played, but that was back in Nemesis, so it's hard to speak of current balance.


After all, I certainly did just off-screen Carnage the other day, and I probably wouldn't have even tried it with a melee.


Still, I'm not sure exactly what suggestions you're offering. Perhaps you want additional movement closers? Because there already are some good ones. What is it you think specifically would help?

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Gregoriel wrote:

I'll agree that melee should have some reward - to compensate for the risk of being close range, or some survivability to even the odds.

However, I was very successful with the last melee character I played, but that was back in Nemesis, so it's hard to speak of current balance.


After all, I certainly did just off-screen Carnage the other day, and I probably wouldn't have even tried it with a melee.


Still, I'm not sure exactly what suggestions you're offering. Perhaps you want additional movement closers? Because there already are some good ones. What is it you think specifically would help?

When I play with melee character it feels sluggish and ineffective, but when I switch to ranged character I am having a blast - I move around quickly take monsters away at range quickly, don’t have to risk face to face with deadly monsters - I bring instant death to enemies at great distance. Probably we should look at problem from this end - how to make melee character equally fun to play as ranged character and equally efficient.

It would need deep research to make a good decision, but generally speaking, ability to get faster from one monster to another would really help. Not every melee character can use whirling blades, I’ve tried using lightning warp with reduced duration support gem, but it doesn’t satisfy enough. Probably because melee characters aren’t good casters.

Here is the skill tree, skill nodes with bright blue circles are "increase movement speed":

As you can see melee characters, marauder and Templar are forgotten.

Probably one of the bigger problems for melee characters is that because of close range combat you have to take many survivability nodes and less damage nodes. Opposite situation is with ranged characters, you don’t have to worry about survivability much and can take as many damage nodes as you can. Which leads to a character who can deal extremely large amounts of damage at long range. Maybe giving stronger survivability nodes to melee characters would help?

Edit:

Here is an example how "glass cannon" ranger does Apex:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tW8myKduSM

Can you imagine melee character doing this face to face with each boss? ofcourse it is doable, but you need much, much more survivability than this ranger has. And using more skill nodes on survivability means less nodes on attack power (Here is the ranger build: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1034503)

At this time I can't do Apex with my templar because of "Trio" casting powerful chaos damage clouds. My friend can't do "Trio" with his life leech assassin, because of physical spell rain instantly killing him (CI, evasion, no spell block). "Trio" - room with 3 bosses. Those bosses have almost no chance landing a single hit at ranged characters.

My +1

I'd say even more: too many minions/totems/etc.