Difference between melee and range builds.

Not a whine thread.

I have came to the realization long ago any builds that allow players to keep a distance from mobs or builds that allow players to deal damage while moving are the best builds you can have in PoE. But that doesn't stop me from playing a melee build (like in your face melee build) so I am not talking about skills like Reave or Frost blades.

I have been a dedicated Shadow player since the first day of my PoE "career" but I almost never play the Shadow class like how it was intended to be. For example, I have been trying to build a tanky shadow character that focuses on life and armor for the past two leagues, and managed to get both to at least lvl 90. I have 10k+ armor + granite + running AA as my core defence. Having that said, I know full well that it won't be a best optimized armor build since I have to waste a lot of travelling points to get to the Marauder area.

I want a build that can handle even more dangerous map mods so I sucked it up and started a Marauder for the very first time, and here's what I realized.

I have some lvling gears saved up from my shadow so I swapped my gears to better accomodate a melee build in act 3. i was leveling with a flame totem + fire storm build, so i thought it would be a lot better with the melee oriented gears.

Wrong.

Turns out a 3 linked firestorm with a crappy blue wand and spirit shield out classed the 5 linked melee skill. It has better dmg overtime and an Asenath's gloves made the build even sweeter and safer. (gloves that grants temp chains on hit)

Then I swapped fire storm out for bladefall and it's done. Probably the safest and fastest lvling build I have ever tried. (it is the skill mechanic and playstyle that metters, regardless on how op bladefall is)


It does say a lot when a marauder (one would think he is one of the best char for melee builds) shines with a physical spell that he is not designed for. And all I did was swapping some gears for dex and adding iron will to the links.

So hopefully GGG can find ways to balance the playstyles out, as in making melee and range builds equally good in terms of lvling because personally, I find range skills rather boring.. Actually let me rephrase that, Not boring, but not engaging enough for my playstyle.

It would be nice to be able to play a reliable melee build from start to endgame maps. Lest face it, there is zero to no benefit playing a melee build at their current state when range skills and spells are so much more superior. Even a well built armor character have no clear advantage over a range char or spell caster in high end maps.

Anyways, I will have to swap out bladefall soon after getting into merciless and continue as melee, will see how that turns out.

WHat melee skill are you planning on using?

"

WHat melee skill are you planning on using?

For this marauder I am gonna try a non discharge Mjolner build with Storm call. Been itching to play a mjolner build but not really into the discharge mechanics.

I was playing an Elemental wildstrike build on my Shadow. I enjoyed it throughly even though it is subpar compare to skills like Reave/ice crash. Not to mention it is really hard to scale.

Got to 31k phys dps not counting the elemental conversions so I can still map and clear maps fine. Just feel like the defense won't cut it in higher maps so I decided to try a tankier marauder build.

@Charan

It is quite unfortunate that melee skills are late bloomers, meaning you need the links and support gems to make them shine. Where as range skills or spells have the "built in" advantage which is range, and they require less to scale.

Not to mention most bosses are designed to be anti melee. sure you can skip map bosses but you can't skip act bosses, which makes range/spells even more appealing and safe.

Melee skills are never-bloomers, not late-bloomers.

Melee characters aren't fit for most parts of the game. Too much danger around every corner -- there's no sane reason to risk it. The only reason to play melee is, well, it's fun. It sucks, but who cares about sucking if you enjoy something.

The only reason this is a problem is that building new characters is also lots of fun, and new characters often require rare and exciting items. Since trading is competitive, opting to play something sub-optimal (at least as a main/first character in a league) is shutting out the possibility of playing some really creative stuff later.

And that's just a damn shame.

Bless you Pneuma, it is indeed "a damn shame".

The brute truth however is that competition is one of the main driving forces behind sales and participation for a lot of people.

Thus we ourselves as a collective community are responsible for the current state of affairs in tandem with GGG as a responsive actor in this story.

Shit goes both ways and as long as people are out to "dominate" others in a fairy tale make believe world it's going to remain how it is.

Peace,

-Boem-

range should be nerfed by an order of magnitude. There is literally no reason not to play things like blade fall, lightning arrow and what not over similar DPS melee skills.

Melee like reave, flicker, etc get really good endgame but leveling is a nightmare.

most arpg games at least try to somehow close the gap between ranged and melee - be it more survivability to melee or less damage to ranged. there are ways better or worse but there are ways

poe does not try. at all.

in a game where clear speed is promoted and rewarded it is damn shame that it is better in the long run to die from time to time (non HC ofc) and clear way faster than to slowly slog yourself as a melee

in HC it is even more important: you slog yourself anyway but ranged just kills faster and is inherently safe from some of the most BS stuff in the game (volatile, obelisks, conduit, most difficult bosses)

if i was to ever recommend this game to anyone id start with 'forget about melee, play cheeze'. diversity is an illusion exile. if you do not want to loose on the character selection screen - select FoTM build (that is 'stack %design mistakes multiplier') and shamelessly exploit. be warned tho - if after you try one of the standard builds, like.. melee? you wont play if for more than few hours remembering how much more powerful the FoTM (that somehow was always ranged with lots of %design mistake multipliers) build is

Melee physical non crit (RT) is really clunky and frustrating, unfortunately. Harder to gear up (special weapon) and taken more effort and time. Always more risky and not viable in some situation.

There are so many things in this game that are only moderately dangerous if you keep your distance, but will give you a beating if you dare come closer. People can say you should have dodged it etc but how if you melee range?

Why is ranged casters so much easier to play and gear than melee. Melee skills that don't have general aoe inbuilt is severely gimped. Okay screw itemization. Just gameplay itself is so much harder for melee than casters. On top of that caster dps is retarded. Bladefall/firestorm/spark-vaalspark/discharge(Mjolner)/CoC and probably more caster skills just outclass melee. Reave is like the only melee skill thats really viable and that too it becomes a caster playstyle where you attack with your stacks and high range dps targets by kiting.

Melee RT has no scale but melee physical damage! Crits or GTFO for melee, but then why we have RT node if there no gems that scale DPS? Blood Magic Casters has Clear Mind, Rangers has Lioneye's Fall, Crits has Mantra of Flames and Static Electricity, Totems has Rain of Splinters, and more. Where non crit (RT) melee?

At starting melee has worst gear up problem. And after each Act, Difficulty and Map it's only worse as you need a lot more HP, more Res, more armour, better and better weapons as soon as possible to be half good as any caster or ranger.

The problem with melee is that you will get a lot more hit and much more often than ranged and because of that melee build will always be worse than ANY ranged build

Another problem with melee is that with a bad ranged build you will still be able to play (because you can kite and take it slowly) with a bad melee build you are screwed.

Some more reason that melee is harder to play is because everything that can hurt ranged characters can hurt melee characters and some things can hurt melee characters and can't hurt ranged characters:
-Ranged enemies can hurt ranged characters.
-Ranged and melee enemies can hurt melee characters.

Another reason is that, despite being a far safer way to play, GGG decided that Ranged characters should also do 5 to 100 times more damage than similarly geared melee characters. And the Ranged attacks and spells should cover more enemies.

Finally, since you can stand still and clear all enemies within a couple screens with Ranged characters, while a melee character has to go wandering around punching stuff or whatever, the Ranged character has less time spent moving which makes it more efficient to play even if everything else were equal.

Melee never will be equal with ranged characters with GGG devs, it is impossible for them.

Basically, it is all about being able to scale your skills.

Ranged characters have Increased AOE, IAOE nodes in the tree, LMP, GMP and chain to easily scale their skill how they choose.
Melee gets.... Melee splash... (I just place Spell echo and Multistrike under the same cat. here)..

Why can Melee not get a support that repeats their skill in a 180º arc, or a support that created an Air effect of the skill above the character, etc..etc..

Maybe Melee skills are hard to scale technically, but GGG should make a bit more effort in my eyes to see that Melee is AT LEAST on par with ranged.

Monster wise, you have those Bubble duded and Far shot as "anti ranged" mods, but those are nothing compared to the horrors melee characters have to face when going up to melee distance in a fight.