melee is total garbage

So, re-rolled today. Marauder.

Played heavy strike, then infernal blow.

Both skills SUCK SO BAD

Can't kill white mobs in 5 hits, each. Get swarmed by a pack of blue? yeah, fuck you too

I bet GGG has lost 1000's of dollars due to players trying the game out, getting frustrated and quitting and never buying anything

It just feels SO SHITTY to play melee

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Xaxarius wrote:

So, re-rolled today. Marauder.

Played heavy strike, then infernal blow.

Both skills SUCK SO BAD

Can't kill white mobs in 5 hits, each. Get swarmed by a pack of blue? yeah, fuck you too

I bet GGG has lost 1000's of dollars due to players trying the game out, getting frustrated and quitting and never buying anything

It just feels SO SHITTY to play melee

I agree overall and had much the same experience on my first 2-3 melee characters, melee sucks in poe, it has been left so far behind that it doesn't even have a niche where it contributes. supposedly the next major update has balance changes. But then they changed Blade Flurry from a point blank melee skill to a ranged AOE skill with a melee tag and called that Melee because they said it wasn't going to be able to compete with current skills if it was left as melee so the balance changes are scary likely to be something like:

New: Flameblast is now called Flame Blade Blast, the only change has been the addition of "melee" in the tags.
New Skill: Summon Melee Spirits, SRS with a melee tag.
New name lock skills: all have 50% of screen AOE and target the ground like earthquake
Melee splash support: now gives namelock skills physical damage prolif extending to the rest of the screen.
Melee damage on full life support: changed to More damage if you've been full life recently. (actually not a bad change not sarcastic enough, should probably remove except that it's probably a good change)..

For some reason, GGG is fine with certain skills becoming completely obsolete :P

Infernal Blow is fine in endgame if you scale hard into Fire Damage and Penetration, but it performs rather worse than other skills in beginning of game.

For melee, if you want the game to "feel smooth," you have to level using Ground Slam, transition into Sunder, and then play Earthquake into endgame.

That's Path of Exile in 2016 for ya ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Agree

Was playing Static Strike (granted it has a secondary AoE) all the way to 87, after a few rips I said fuck this and went EQ, name-lock feels dead, especially in breach.

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adghar wrote:

For some reason, GGG is fine with certain skills becoming completely obsolete :P

Infernal Blow is fine in endgame if you scale hard into Fire Damage and Penetration, but it performs rather worse than other skills in beginning of game.

For melee, if you want the game to "feel smooth," you have to level using Ground Slam, transition into Sunder, and then play Earthquake into endgame.

That's Path of Exile in 2016 for ya ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Actually they are not fine with them. However they don't feel this skills are fun to play overall so buffing them damage wise would be very odd. Imagine Heavy Strike would deal 800% weapon damage and scale upwards. You suddenly would feel forced to play Heavy Strike because it simply has such a high numerical damage. The skill however still has a lot of flaws, most of which a centered around melee having a lot of issue.

The current targetting fixes somehow only seem to apply if you target with shift, when I use my left mouse button to attack nothing changed, because when I point the mouse a bit too far I just walk in that direction. Which feels terrible because I essentially have to just tape something to my shift button because why wouldn't I want to attack instead of walk if I clicked a bit too far.

So unless those mechanical fixes are all done (and the new targetting if you hold down shift is really good, it is a lot smarter than the old one and avoids hitting into nothing too often), numerical changes hardly do anything.

That's why I never play melee in ARPGs , unless we're talking about Grim Dawn where melee dominates :P

I don´t think it´s so bad (it depends on build etc) but what are the true melee skills?
I have used to play with 30k dps sunder in endgame without problems (no poison).
Btw Heavy strike or static strike are good singl target dealers (SS is even decent AoE cleaner).
The problem is that some skills (BF, BV, traps..) are great for both singl and multi target (aoe) ...

The problem is also effectiveness compared to other skills (casters ..) and survivability (depends on build etc) but it´s global problem of balance in this game.

Overall it´s a good personal challenge to beat this game while playing melee.

We can just hope smth will change with 3.0

The thing is Heavy Strike is:

a) Worse than Blade Flurry on single target
b) Worse than Lacerate on single target
c) Worse than Ice Crash on single target
d) Worse than Earthquake on single target

As long as there is no support to compensate Concentrated Effect an AoE skill with concentrated Effect will always be better than a single target skill. Concentrated Effect is such a huge multiplier that it is almost impossible to overcome it.

And if you listen to Rory they know that and I am kinda optimistic that they actually do something about. We all know that GGGs changes might not necessarily be right on point and it is often they case they overshoot their goal or undershoot it trying not to do too much. But then again getting a bullseye on such edgy balancing things is rather hard.

Your lvl 16 Marauder?
Played a Infernal Blow Marauder (with melee splash) to lvl 27 (wasn't my main char) two leagues ago and if i remember correctly every group i hit in Act 2 just exploded afair? .. hm.