Difference between melee and range builds.

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Emphasy wrote:

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Andrius319 wrote:

1. Playstyle

Warcries were a nice thought to improve Melee however they have one terrible flaw, they are awful to use. When I imagine a warrior in the heat of battle I guess he is able to shout while swinging his weapon. Yeah he should be cabable of that, they are often not the brightest but if men are cabable of something it is shouting while doing something else and woman are cabable of multitasking anyway. I would even limit this to attacks, since silence hurts casters it is obvious they need their voice for casting and you cannot cast a spell and shout at the same time. This would mean that whenever you press the button for your shout it is cast instant and does not interrupt your movement or attack. That would make Enduring Cry or all the others feel so much better.

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Wiesl_1404 wrote:

True melee is in a diffcult spot at the moment i feel. GGG has to balance around the potential of high end melee damage with good gear only the top 10% of players can achieve. If you would buff melee weapons in midgame, endgame weapons would become even more insane.

TLDR: Melee would need a exclusive mobility buff (movement speed, movement skills range buff) and some mechanical AoE buffs to compete with ranged and not primarily a damage buff - most melee skills have good damage since 2.0.

Spells are easy to balance because there is only the gem itself and its possible supports to consider - so making a spell deal 40% less damage next patch is an easy balancing task, it also can be balanced through levels in every game stage (does more damage in early game, loses scaling in lategame). So i think well balanced spells are completly fine.


Bows are a big balancing nightmare, because there are so many different ways to scale bow damage in the game. Early game bow builds are very slow due to the lack of dps from the weapon but the better the bow gets, the more insane the clear speed becomes. With even more tools to scale bow damage coming with Acendancy i think bow top end damage or crit needs to be lowerd to keep their potential in check.


Melee has one big problem despite the ones already mentioned (less AoE, has to move more to conect damage with the target, less available support gems to scale damage) - the fact that spectral throw exists.
Spectral Throw is the whole reason why phyical melee weapons can't be buffed that much in terms of numbers and aquisition. If you would buff melee weapons damage spectral throw would become OP and the new meta "again", if you would nerf spectral throw further while buffing melee weapons, spectral throw becomes a useless skill which nobody wants.
Another problem is how elemental conversion scaling works in PoE - if you buff the base damage of melee weapons stuff like Hatred and Added fire and WED would become insane multipliers.

Physical damage is, besides direct chaos damage, the best damage type in the game - at high levels it deals basically "true damage" to any mob in the game, even to bosses due to armour works in PoE. So GGG has also consider this fact (you can already see what happens when physical damage gets out of hand - just take a look at SWT, Bladfall etc.



But, as already mentioned, all the damage would not be that relevant in the end - it's mechanics and mob encounters what determine if melee is good or bad. Currently ranged is heavily favored in nearly every endgame szenario over melee.
If GGG could introduce mobs, more mechanics and endgame bosses which shit on ranged characters and don't harm melee that hard in comparison that would be great for the game overall.

Example:
Fast mobs which go close combat immediately with a gap closer and maim/slow the player while attacking. The mob should be highly resistant against projectiles or take less damage the further it is away from the player - another proximity shield like mechanic would also be great to see.
Or GGG could make use out of the new phasing mechanic on mobs (while phasing mobs take %less damage from ranged attacks and spells)


Over all, i personally think that Ascendancy will bring some sort of true melee builds back to the game. Ascendany classes will be a huge deal in building characters. Duelist, Marauder and Ranger look great for melee builds as i can tell even a elemental melee templar looks nice now.

What would also help melee are nerfs to Lightning Coil and Taste of Hate - as physical damage becomes spell casters automatically become weaker in terms of damage because they would have to invest more into physical mitigation - Bows still remain a problem due to easy acess to evasion and acrobatics cluster. Buffing mob elemental damage would be the solution for that but this would shit on melee evasion and armour builds as well... a difficult task indeed.