Melee is the worst bullshit ever in poe

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iamstryker wrote:

Melee isn't broken, it's just inferior to ranged and always has been.

its a fair comment to some extent, if you are of that opinion then you can add "and always will be" because you are taking the fact you are ranged as the advantage. Every melee build is not inferior to every ranged build though, and I know that is not what you are suggesting either. But just saying, theres melee builds in the game that are superior to 95% of ranged builds.

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Ashen_Shugar_IV wrote:

TL;DR

Fix Mara by making him Ranger.

Ever heard of Opportunity Cost? Should one apply themselves to all your suggestions they would leave themselves scare room to achieve any meaningful dps.....

well if you started as a ranger and wanted to do the same thing youd need to go to the marauder for a number of things so you either start as a marauder and fix him by making him a ranger or start as a ranger and fix her by making her a marauder.. or "build a hybrid character" is another way of saying it an applies to the majority of decent builds, thats why we have a joined tree.


Heres a marauder I specced out in 1.3.0

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Legatus1982 wrote:

In fact, the current game state actually favors ranged slightly due to the fact that bow users don't get penalized for taking acrobatics. This is a flat out attack on melee characters and I've been vocal about this in the acrobatics thread for quite some time.

I completely disagree with you on that tbh, but weve had that convo. Nice to know you are still blindly carrying on with that thought train regardless of the flaws in it.

Can ranged chars spec the same shit? To some extent, but most bow users are stuck to the ranger to shadow area which stops them investing all the way past duelist to marauder. No spell witch/shaodw is going to spec all the way down to ranger, get all that shit, then across to duelist, then to marauder and get all the life, armour, endurance, evasion and block while still being a viable caster with lots of spell dps from the top of the tree. That is not what is happening in practice. In practice at best ranged characters are getting most of the defense melee characters are getting and more often than not they have way less defenses.

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sidtherat wrote:

sorry to say but this is just theorycraft noone takes seriously as we've all tried this stuff and it all boils down to 'use ranged, preferably bow as these are pretty much immune to reflect due to evasion/ondars'

the most noteworthy semi-truth is 'there is more life in the southern part' - it is not true.

no it is absolutely true, theres way more life on offer for someone staying in the bottom half than staying in the top half. Its not theorycraft, its the game. It doesnt boil down to use ranged, youve obviously been playing bad melee characters, thats all I can say because I have melee characters who have obliterated every map boss in the game solo without using any form of ranged attack, characters with 75k+ aoe melee dps who are immune to reflect without vaal pact or atziri gloves. I have 15k dps tornado characters who take a lot more damage from reflect, sure most is evaded but when it bites it actually hurts.

Im not the one lost in my own waffle, its you guys and your melee sucks mantra. You are wrong, I know you are wrong, what do you want me to say? Either you are playing bad builds or you are playing good builds badly or your gear sucks... something isnt right, I dunno what it is but its on your end because its not in the game I am playing, that I know to be a fact. GGG know it, thats why the never 'fix' it, there's nothing broken to fix outside of the perceptions of part of the player base who for reasons unknown are just not getting it. Honestly, I dont think some of you want to get it, you just enjoy this moaning all the time. I dont enjoy disagreeing with you lot but right now this thread is just overflowing with misinformation and its not healthy to just let you all keep reenforcing your misconceptions.

i have to say that with gear like yours melee might seem 'ok'...

sadly one with similar level of gear and using a bow will leave you in the dust without letting you kill a single mob. leap slam etc is fine but arrow is faster and leap slam + reave do not go well together anyway

still, nice build, learned something new - most important part is that by investing several nodes/affixes into accuracy one can get the same dps as going straight for RT + templar area for great elemental stats (but that would cut the evasion+ondars part so lets say i understand)

it all boils down to gear. people with 'normal gear' wont reach your numbers, their attacks wont hit and 300+ dps sword beats 230dps sword that is a luxury to majority. there are too many things that have to 'click together' to make a build like yours and not end with a flop.

and if one can afford gear like yours - he is savvy enough to pick what works: bow + crit + 'pick random skill, it doesnt matter'

a note: i prefer melee playstyle, play melee characters, have some good gear (but mostly meh, im self found) and tried most techniques. damage is there. what isnt is simply the comfort of being away and not needing to care about stuff like incoming damage. i can play 2900HP (yes, TWO thousands) self cast sparker on maps that my 5k HP melee guys are afraid to go.

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sidtherat wrote:

it all boils down to gear. people with 'normal gear' wont reach your numbers, their attacks wont hit and 300+ dps sword beats 230dps sword that is a luxury to majority. there are too many things that have to 'click together' to make a build like yours and not end with a flop.

This, pretty much.

Survival in this game comes down to having enough defenses to survive being hit coupled with the ability to leech enough to bounce back after the hit. So with enough hp/ES and DPS, anyone can be viable. The DPS side of things isn't really the problem.

The problem with melee is that they need more defenses to survive those hits. A melee will take a lot more damage than a ranged type will. There's a wide variety of things that make sure of that, from short ranged attacks ranged types entirely avoid, to multiple projectile mobs that will hit you with multiple projectiles if melee, but not if ranged, to things like "poison cloud on death". Currently, the passive nodes do not make up for this gap. And that means they need to invest a lot more into gear.

Not only for hp/resist reasons, but also for other things, like links. My templar is fine running one less link than my Duelist, because he doesn't need Life Leech. And there's armor/evasion. Again, because my templar doesn't get hit that often, he doesn't feel the same crunch to keep his armor up to date either. For my duelist, it is a bigger factor. So that combination of wanting more frequent upgrades and needing those upgrades to be better pieces of gear... both hinder the melee.

And even with all, the melee will still be more vulnerable, because of the resist cap.

Offensively speaking, melees are more dependent on gear than spell casters as well. Getting a weapon with +phys damage; +phys damage %; and accuracy+phys damage %... not super common. Finding upgrades as you go along, well, rougher still. So yet another aspect that fights for your resources.

Anyone that thinks melee is remotely balanced compared to ranged for the typical player is deluding themselves. There's a reason the ratio of high-level melees than non-melees is a lot different than that of low-level melees to ranged.

Mind you, I think some of it could be solved without huge changes. Say if one quarter of your armor value worked to reduce elemental/chaos damage, as a separate multiplier. That means with 50% armor reduction, you'd take 12.5% less elemental and chaos damage. It'd help to take the edge off, in a way that wouldn't take as much work as rebalancing all resist caps and damage to allow room for some +max resist nodes in the melee area.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I dont enjoy disagreeing with you lot but right now this thread is just overflowing with misinformation and its not healthy to just let you all keep reenforcing your misconceptions.

Misconception/misinformation: Melee is fine

Basis:
1. There are existing in the current game state mobs that can one shot you regardless of how your character is geared or specced. Some require rare/blue mods or map mods, some do not.
2. Ranged characters avoid most of these by a) staying away from the source and b) killing it too fast for it to get to them

Melee has neither of these options available. Not only must melee facetank ALL damage in POE just to exist doing what it does, it is also completely vulnerable while traversing that gap between melee and ranged, unable to leech anything at all while taking to the face any damage output of the mobs in question until the gap is closed.

Until you do something about this simple fact, your point of view holds NO weight here. Gear is not even PART of this discussion until this issue is changed.

If common sense wasn't enough to illustrate this point, take a look at the beyond ladder and all the duelists sitting at the top of that ladder. You have to go down to 184 (last time I looked) just to FIND one. If you think melee is fine, maybe you should make a bloodlines duelist and top that ladder to show us all how it's done.

The thing about Melee is there seems to be very little middle ground. Early game, melee owns as defences aren't really needed, and a weapon like Geoffries will let you level from 24 to 60 in a breeze.

Late game, with uber specced gear, Melee are actually really powerful if you have something like dual mirror epic daggers with block 8k+ ES. You will basically kill stuff before enemies can react, and damage rolls on melee gear are much better then ranged gear

The problem is middle ground, where the extra damage from rolls on melee weapons doesn't make up for the insane damage that melees can receive. Hyper optimizing your build so you have epic defense but good enough damage is takes a lot of time.

The only way to buff only melee, and not ranged, is with the rolls on melee specific weapons. 2H in particular, needs an insane amount of love, I would honestly buff 2H so they have ~40% more damage (on average) then they do now.

Since this is the only way to buff melee, probably the only way to fix the issue would be giving fantastic rolls to melee only weapons, and adjusting "melee" ranged skills like ground slam as needed. Melee's would then invest more into defence which is what makes up for the insane damage rolls on melee weapons.

Then there is shit like desync which doesn't help the problem

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sidtherat wrote:

i have to say that with gear like yours melee might seem 'ok'...

sadly one with similar level of gear and using a bow will leave you in the dust without letting you kill a single mob. leap slam etc is fine but arrow is faster and leap slam + reave do not go well together anyway

still, nice build, learned something new - most important part is that by investing several nodes/affixes into accuracy one can get the same dps as going straight for RT + templar area for great elemental stats (but that would cut the evasion+ondars part so lets say i understand)

it all boils down to gear. people with 'normal gear' wont reach your numbers, their attacks wont hit and 300+ dps sword beats 230dps sword that is a luxury to majority. there are too many things that have to 'click together' to make a build like yours and not end with a flop.

and if one can afford gear like yours - he is savvy enough to pick what works: bow + crit + 'pick random skill, it doesnt matter'

a note: i prefer melee playstyle, play melee characters, have some good gear (but mostly meh, im self found) and tried most techniques. damage is there. what isnt is simply the comfort of being away and not needing to care about stuff like incoming damage. i can play 2900HP (yes, TWO thousands) self cast sparker on maps that my 5k HP melee guys are afraid to go.

all fair comments, I agree with pretty much everything you said.

That gear, its far from really optimized but obviously its not like you turn up in maps day 1 and find shit like that, even remotely like that. I found that sword, the amulet I know I bought fairly recently cause I needed something with mana leech for a diff char but the majority of that stuff is just random crap I dragged out of my softcore stash which means a fair amount is probably self found but were talking self found in 1000s upon 1000s of hours play all built up in 1 stash.

I play purely self found in hc and I have melee chars there, their gear is nowhere near that gear for most of it. This is what Im dealing with over there



that character has less than half the armour of the other thing I posted from softcore. It works but I wouldnt be sticking in content as hard as Id throw that marauder until I find some major upgrades. I would literally vendor most of that gear if I found it tomorrow on a softcore league.

Even the marauder is pretty mishmash though, thats not a tuned full on melee character. This is an aegis ci witch that would happily go up against maps I wouldnt even humor on that marauder



that witch has 10,600 energy shield with an aegis aurora and up to about 85k aoe dps while using chayula depending on what skills/gem setups you use. Even this gear, theres people reading this who are looking at the gear thinking well thats cute but my melee character has better gear in literally every single slot, I_NO is probably laughing at how scrubby it is having cast speed on a melee ring. That character can do everything my 6 link harbinger + coil crit bow ranger does, more even, trust me melee witches are brutal. Theres better melees than this, its not as good as it gets, but your point comes in here again where that gear probably costs twice as much as my harbinger ranger in order to be roughly as effective.

So why do I do it? Because its fun, I have the bow character too, i do both, and more. honestly when youve got a 6 link coil the bow isnt even always the best way to go, cast on crit is insane and actually cheaper.

Melee is certainly more gear dependent and more reliant on you actually playing the character with some thought, micromanaging combat more. I wont argue with that at all. Maybe that is where a lot of disagreement is found because you go below a certain budget line or rng loot drop threshold and suddenly melee isnt what it is when you are above it. Theres a line you can cross where the whole map system becomes complete faceroll, and many melee builds exist beyond that line. Casters are way cheaper and bows can be more effective at the same budget, I cant argue with that at all and by that criteria then ya, fair play, melee is inferior if thats how youre looking at it. Im looking at melee and thinking endgame with crazy gear melee absolutely obliterates content and solo self found its endgame viable = melee works.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Melee is certainly more gear dependent and more reliant on you actually playing the character with some thought, micromanaging combat more. I wont argue with that at all. Maybe that is where a lot of disagreement is found because you go below a certain budget line or rng loot drop threshold and suddenly melee isnt what it is when you are above it. Theres a line you can cross where the whole map system becomes complete faceroll, and many melee builds exist beyond that line. Casters are way cheaper and bows can be more effective at the same budget, I cant argue with that at all and by that criteria then ya, fair play, melee is inferior if thats how youre looking at it. Im looking at melee and thinking endgame with crazy gear melee absolutely obliterates content and solo self found its endgame viable = melee works.

This is the essence of the problem.

There's no incentive to play on "hard mode", to deal with point-blank multi-projectile spells and volatile enemies, to deal with desync and stun. If GGG intended melee to be an unofficial hard mode, then they succeeded.

Past that, at the hardest difficulty areas of the game, hard mode becomes just too damn hard. It requires too much gear to overcome -- gear that is farmed fastest by ranged classes with better clear speeds due to being able to move less and dps more from safety.

Hmmm two top dudes in my clan both rape uber with melee (flicker and a rever) when I look at UBER capable thread about half are melee. Yeah desync is problem and why I don't fuck with it but still seems powerful in right hands (connection)

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To be fair, reave and spectral throw are not melee

Nor is CoC