Melee rework needed badly.

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stalkingjackal wrote:

Melee targeting is obnoxious and needs a major overhaul.

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The_Reporter wrote:

The 'targeting' style melee gems need to scale up better on their own as they level.

Guys, stop taking the piss. These skills suck. They must suck. I mean, you're a developer designing a skill, and you start the design process with...

• worst possible range
• worst possible AoE
• .

How much design space do you honestly believe is there, assuming you're trying to make something viable? Point #3 pretty much needs to be every single good thing you can imagine giving to a skill.

I'm not quite saying such a skill shouldn't exist. But I definitely think three such skills, in an entire game, is too many. Maybe two, maybe not. There isn't enough design space present to call it a system or a category or a style. The most needed overhaul for such gems in PoE isn't optimization, no optimization is possible. What is needed is pruning.

But more than that, ranged needs nerfing. Period. Let's trim that original list by one:

• worst possible range
• .

Oops! It's already completely fucking impossible to make anything which holds a candle to Tornado Shot.

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The_Reporter wrote:

You know as well as anyone that nerfing the AoE in this iteration of PoE is an impossibility at this stage.

The 1%ers will lose their minds.

Just throwing out suggestions that will make non-meta lifers more happy to experiment.

Not everyone cares about the min max clear speed thing

It's always possible. But GGG dont want to do it.
But of course, if you make the game only for players, who like oneshotting enemies an the screen (or further) with one click...

GGG clearly isn't afraid to nerf what they think is bad for the game. It happened to Incinerate, Spark/Vaal Spark, Voltaxic, etc. As well they shouldn't be, good balance is a great way to retain players (and thus keep them paying).

Evidently, they don't think there's a serious balance problem here.

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Melee Splash now only has 35% Less Damage to Other Targets at level 1 (down from 50% Less). It now has 26% less at level 20 (from 31%). This is a buff.

From the patch notes ....
This is a buff.


:3

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Bex_GGG wrote:

With the wide-ranging melee buffs and adjustment to Earthquake, we expect to see a much more balanced use of melee skills.

It's alright guys. Melee is fixed now. They added a few % more damage to completely out of date skills. All our problems are now fixed.

Honestly that line in the patch notes is probably the worst dev comment I have ever read in every game I have ever played.

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The_Reporter wrote:

Solution: Make the one non-melee skill (EQ) as crappy as the rest, call it a day. Yikes!

The downside to melee needs to be slower killing in exchange for higher survivability. It seems that everyone knows this except for the GGG devs. :(

The issue is that this would require new mechanics, the number-tweaking they did is good for melee, since this allows you to shift some stats from offense to defense essentially doing that. If you get 20% more damage from your skill you can afford skilling more defensive.

What they did was a good way to recognize the issues and I doubt those changes will skyrocket the amount of melee players. Exspecially considering that Fireball got a 50% buff, which honestly was necessary but might be a bit... well I guess I know what I will play :P

Most things they can do to survivability would affect other playstyles as well, PoE allows you to very openly pick together parts for your build, which means there are no real melee kits. A cool thing would be a support that gives you a Proximity Shield for a short time on Melee Kill, that would allow melees to better handle some of the melee traps (although I would punish the player as well and not allow him to damage things outside of the Proximity shield and you know that is necessary).

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The_Reporter wrote:

Solution: Make the one non-melee skill (EQ) as crappy as the rest, call it a day. Yikes!

The downside to melee needs to be slower killing in exchange for higher survivability. It seems that everyone knows this except for the GGG devs. :(

EQ is still the best melee skill, and it still out-performs any other melee skill by a mile! Yes, damage was nerfed by ~15%, AoE was nerfed a bit - so what? Skills like Ice Crash or Sweep need "+50% more damage" buff to compete with EQ, and skills like Heavy Strike need +100-150% more damage for that.