Difference between melee and range builds.

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sidtherat wrote:

id like to see a melee build that clears faster than Tornado Shot or cocs spectral throw (latest mathils creation is a good reference - i bet his gear is 2 vagan, 2 diamonds, rats, mali and a 6 link chest. not 1ex build but not a costly one for sure)

the only skill and setup that has the slightest chance in this contest is uber dagger crit reave and even it has a problem due to cost and leaving stragglers behind

melee builds that are not crit reave are mere watchers in parties and get carried through bosses as their dps is meaningless

and even then stuff like volatile plop kills you out of the blue. fun.

no sane competitive player would ever play melee in this game if he cared about wining (classic ladder or prize contests).


and the job of making melee not an 'auto loose on a character selection screen' is the GGG's job. it can be done. removing some melee-only BS from the game is one step, adding some ranged-only BS to the game is another. cutting the bow damage in half is another good step. harsh? i bet people wouldnt notice. bow damage output is obscene right now

You right, but i have even cheaper build that the same as TS and CoC and it's Voltaxic. With 5-6 links it's clear any map and any reflect in a seconds, even bosses don't slow them.

Melee in Talisman league and talisman patch have no place at all, they ruined if we compare to "balance" new spells and totems, ranged and hybrid.

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sidtherat wrote:

id like to see a melee build that clears faster than Tornado Shot or cocs spectral throw (latest mathils creation is a good reference - i bet his gear is 2 vagan, 2 diamonds, rats, mali and a 6 link chest. not 1ex build but not a costly one for sure)

the only skill and setup that has the slightest chance in this contest is uber dagger crit reave and even it has a problem due to cost and leaving stragglers behind

melee builds that are not crit reave are mere watchers in parties and get carried through bosses as their dps is meaningless

and even then stuff like volatile plop kills you out of the blue. fun.

no sane competitive player would ever play melee in this game if he cared about wining (classic ladder or prize contests).


and the job of making melee not an 'auto loose on a character selection screen' is the GGG's job. it can be done. removing some melee-only BS from the game is one step, adding some ranged-only BS to the game is another. cutting the bow damage in half is another good step. harsh? i bet people wouldnt notice. bow damage output is obscene right now

How do you come up with this "conclusion" of yours because if I had to guess your just mimicking what other people are saying without any experience to backup what you are saying.


As for "competitive" the game really isn't that competitive, except under certain circumstances, funny enough the first malachai kill would have likely been helman had he not stood in melee range at the very start of the fight. But thats OK melee isn't good its shit and everyone knows it, people just play it because its so bad and they enjoy it.

As far as the "melee sucks" from a playstyle perspective, then why are people playing cyclone CoC, it has similar weaknesses to regular cyclone or melee playstyle where you have to move into melee range to proc the spells, clearly the downside of moving pack to pack isn't the largest reason why melee fails otherwise this CoC build wouldn't be "popular".

Is it damage, well idk people seem to follow trends of what streamers did, I remember last patch many people played cyclone, its as if one or multiple of streamers played it.


As for pointing to GGG to fix it, if the community or rather the "masterminds" in this thread that seems to be so knowledgeable about the game cannot comeup with a magic fix, what exactly do you think a dozen or less people at GGG can comeup with?

How ignorant is a suggestion to nerf bow DPS by half. The point of playing the ranged playstyle is to kill them before they ever get in range to kill you, part of the reason why that side of the tree has crit at the cost of lower armor, life and general physical damage mitigation. Its even more ignorant of a suggestion when you look at the fact that GGG removed eternals and the players in temp leagues would basically never play bow builds if it wasn't possible to roll the dps around where it could be now.

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You right, but i have even cheaper build that the same as TS and CoC and it's Voltaxic. With 5-6 links it's clear any map and any reflect in a seconds, even bosses don't slow them.

Armor based Melees aren't really vulnerable to reflect either. Actually TS rangers and CoC is likely the most messed up in terms of reflect. Melees builds usually have enough defense to not care that much about reflect since their Damage to Defense ratio is a bit different to ranged chars. Technically removing reflect basically from the game was a melee nerf.

And Voltaxic is still more expensive and not really all that much better than a chaos trapper. A Chaos Trapper needs an Infernal Mantle, Consuming Dark and either Deerstalker or Rime Gaze or a 5l Mantle. Binos allows him to be basically invulnerable since every abyssal cry plop can give him up to 15k Life Regen per second :P

With poison being completly broken it is very likely that this behavior somehow gets fixed. The double-dipping was fine when it didn't stack like it works with Puncture or Ignite. But a stacking debuff with this effect basically has to be broken. And Voltaxic wouldn't be so awesome if it weren't for poison. It would still be nice, exspecially with Void Manipulation but not that much better than it was before. But with Voltaxic Chaos Damage and Projectile Damage works again on both parts.

Melee would likely have seen a boost if it would have means to double dip poison as well. Concentrated Effect though may be the only double dip (if it actually does, not sure) it has. 100% Physical to Chaos is just not possible with any of the AoE skills so all you can do is increase physical damage. So while Melee was not that terrible in 2.0 and was actually played a lot (although mostly the strong skills... but that is the same for spells) it simply lost in the buff-race in 2.1.

But since buffs and nerfs come and go it is likely completly meaningless if Melee gets more damage or less, since this does not change anything about the clunky playstyle. My summoner clears so much slower than my other chars, but he still is fun. He has a nice gameplay even though he sucks and his zombies just die in higher maps. Melee doesn't offer a really fun gameplay. As long as you could just leapslam and cyclone around it was some fun, but now you have to do a lot more things to survive and all those things keep you from actually attacking things.

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Emphasy wrote:

Concentrated Effect though may be the only double dip (if it actually does, not sure) it has.

It doesnt double-dip. Only "general", "projectile" and chaos (in case you deal chaos damage) damage modifiers double-dip for poison.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Emphasy wrote:

Concentrated Effect though may be the only double dip (if it actually does, not sure) it has.

It doesnt double-dip. Only "general", "projectile" and chaos (in case you deal chaos damage) damage modifiers double-dip for poison.

Currently, either that information is inaccurate, or Concentrated Effect is bugged and double-dips anyway.
https://m.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/3xsh77/how_is_it_that_projectile_damage_increases/

I'm not anti-doubledip though. I feel it is an interesting way to build high-damage noncrit characters, since you can redirect the crit resources to double-dipping. The only bullshit in my mind is that "Melee Damage" doesn't double-dip.

Changes I'd make:
* Melee now double-dips with DoTs on skills with Melee tag. (Melee Physical Damage is good with Bleeding.)
* The Marauder starting nodes, up to and including Born to Fight, now specify Melee Damage, instead of Melee Physical Damage.

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POE202 wrote:

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.

Buy e.g. Pillar of the caged and good flat phys dmg stuff and you will level way faster as marauder with groundslam/Vaal groundslam than ANY caster or bow user up to end of cruel.
I agree that there is a problem with melee, but definately not in the lvling phase. (except selffound at the start of a league)

The problem lategame melee has is mainly because of the high monster damage in PoE imho.
I dont think every melee build has to clear as fast as all the ranged builds, but it has to be much more safe then them.
Like it was back in D2... An Immortal King whirlwind Barb didnt had the clearspeed of a Javelin, but it was pretty much immortal (well exccept vs souls) and had enough DPS for endgame content.

I mean sure this was GGG's intention when releasing fortify an stuff like that, but the increased monster damage, Cwdt nerf and stuff like that made those things mandatory for all builds again.

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azraelb wrote:

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POE202 wrote:

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.

Buy e.g. Pillar of the caged and good flat phys dmg stuff and you will level way faster as marauder with groundslam/Vaal groundslam than ANY caster or bow user up to end of cruel.
I agree that there is a problem with melee, but definately not in the lvling phase. (except selffound at the start of a league)

The problem lategame melee has is mainly because of the high monster damage in PoE imho.
I dont think every melee build has to clear as fast as all the ranged builds, but it has to be much more safe then them.
Like it was back in D2... An Immortal King whirlwind Barb didnt had the clearspeed of a Javelin, but it was pretty much immortal (well exccept vs souls) and had enough DPS for endgame content.

I mean sure this was GGG's intention when releasing fortify an stuff like that, but the increased monster damage, Cwdt nerf and stuff like that made those things mandatory for all builds again.

But melee NEVER was and will be any soon immortal or even close to what was in D2, GGG think ranged and hybrids should have crazy AOE + insane OP DPS + same defense as melee + clear speed like nuke. All of them together, when melee should have 100-500 extra HP and thats it, nothing more. Like there extra HP helps anyhow melee to not die from 5MM dmg monsters...

Should add something very interested, after playing with supporter even melee could be viable, or better say melee viable ONLY with GG supporter.
I have no idea why GGG done it, but support in PoE now main defense and offense the same time. Just way powerful and needed to any group, for Top 1 or first kill or something else. They are insane powerful and kickballs.

PoE with supporter and without it's like two different game, all hardcore leave the game with supporter in group.

And melee sux without GG aura-curse support, just unplayable.

Balancing melee is not complicated.

There are people at ggg whose full job is to figure out stuff like this.

You either buff the damage, survivability, or cost relative to range and spell builds.

Stop making "cute" things for melee like Reckoning/Riposte etc, wild Strike, frost blades, and give actual useful melee skills. They make new things like blast rain, and op blade skills, bow totem etc. 3 new bow skills every patch. Buffed tornado shot twice??????

Cast on crit still a fking mess. Vaal spark.

Like what the hell man?

Obviously i dont work at ggg and no one knows what their vision for the game is, but let's be real and stop pretending balancing this game is some kind of incredibly complex task like we are building some kind of SpaceX rocket here.

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Ceryneian wrote:

Balancing melee is not complicated.

Anyone that has read this thread would disagree with you likely 100% if it was simple it would have already been "done"


Buff damage, you mean like they did with melee splash not having a single target penalty.

Buff survivability, you mean like adding fortify?


What exactly do you mean "cost" GGG doesn't really dictate what players charge for items, unless you wear a tin foil hat, in which case sure they do.


Even a game which has the ability to separate melee and ranged playstyles by classes, D3 has issues with balance regarding melee\range.


Complaining about the things you mentioned, but not mentioning poison is just failfish. New skills will be adjusted, GGG only has the opportunity to balance the game every 3-4 months when they start a new temp league and make changes that come with it like skill balance, skill tree changes, ect.