Melee builds are complete trash

They have several options to make those "true melee" worthy, not to mention RT with 1 handed weapons.

One could be tuning RT to reduce the goddamn gap between Crit damage output, that used to be kept in check by a cool mechanic - Accuracy - until it's scaling became way easier than it should have been, combined with ways to scale Crit chance easier than ever and you got a severe disparity regarding damage potential, even without accounting for broken double dip mechanics.

Another one would be to boost the damage output of the single target skills severely, either by just buffing them or with additional "melee" supports, to decrease the fight time versus dangerous encounters and give them the meaning of "single target destroyers".

They could give them further defensive/offensive bonuses while relying on the "if you recently hit an enemy, you gain x for y amount of time" without necessarily adding that via threshold jewels.

And lastly, I got the crazy idea that GGG could facilitate more bonuses for skill interaction, and by that I do mean using different action skills in a build without relying on "Cast when/while xxxx" mechanics.

Why couldn't Ice Crash gain 10 or 20% Cold penetration if an enemy was hit by Glacial Hammer recently? Why couldn't Glacial Hammer gain a fixed amount of cold damage and apply chill to an enemy hit by Ice Crash recently? Why couldn't Lightning Strike deal 2 times the projectile damage to enemies recently hit by Static Strike? Why couldn't Static Strike have Reverse Knockback on enemies recently hit by Lightning Strike?

Not to mention that changing a bit the way certain immunities on bosses work, by using if "it was frozen/ignited/shocked/poisoned/stuned recently it can't be frozen/ignited/shocked/poisoned/stuned for 10 seconds", while also separating the Crit chance to 100% apply ailments?

These last 2 points open so many possibilities that diversity might re-enter the game, and GGG could do wonders if they think about those...

To improve skills' interacton, you should add more sockets and links, first. ATM, there are too many utility and auto-trigger skills in PoE, and too little sockets/links for them. Also, most builds can use only 1 6-link, and obviously, it encourages 1 button spam.
I think, that 1-2 new item slots should be added (pants, cloak, etc), and all should have 6-link option. Then, a character will be able to hold several well-supported skills, and use synergy between them, or use different skills in different situations.

Also, GGG should revise the power of short-range and single-target skills. In most cases, long-range skills with large AoE deal almost the same damage (maybe 20% less, or something). Considering that large enemy packs are 95% of PoE's content, no wonder that AoE long-range skills domnate the game. Furthermore, even if you happen to have a boss fight, you can do it with your AoE lang-range skill anyway, just because it isnt so much worse (maybe, change 1 suport gem, that's all). In PoE's environment, AoE skills should have ~2 times less DPS that single-target ones, and long-range skills should have ~2 times less damage than close-range ones. So, skill like Heavy Strike should deal 4 times more DPS than skill like Sunder. As long as Sunder deals just ~15-20% less damage than Heavy Strike, there is no place for latter in PoE.


There is a short-range skill that deals very high damage - Blade Vortex. Guess what? It's actually viable!

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sidtherat wrote:

so tell me, with examples maybe (gear if possible) how a Cleave player handles following situation (happened to me yesterday while i was slogging that piece of turd into 90)

- -regen
- beyond (map)
- beyond (stone)
- breach
- 30%+ pack size + magic mob pack size
- chilled ground

a dream map (shaped shore) so first first seconds of the map spawned 5 bosses (2 haasts, Epij, Bameth + one i couldnt even tell from the mess happening on the screen)

you know what is wrong with this picture?

Cleave player has to go deep. kiting produces even more of these suckers. and my AR/EV defence you like to talk about so much is IRRELEVANT in this case. IRRELEVANT. from what i see the only damage it can prevent is Bameth arrow. ONE SINGLE ATTACK. everything else is a spell

before you show me how you effortlessly facetank stuff like that with Aurora - i know that spell block solves this issue

how should i build my character 'right' to not face this kind of issues? (note: fortify 100% up with fortify effect from the Jugg and tree + ele reduction from the Jugg)

i expect two answers: build crit and out-dps this situation with vaal pact OR spell block

any other hints? typical 'solution' list you post (coil, ToH, AR/EV) DOES NOT APPLY to stuff like this. and as a melee I HAVE to have a solution. what are yours? dance around for 15 minutes chipping these bastards away until they luck out and you trip on a pebble?

is the solution 'switch character to ghetto caster and offscreen this crap'?
or 'some mod combos are not for everybody, just re-roll and take that difficult leaguestones out'?

Ill be honest, I can remember dying once to a beyond boss in the last year or 2, and i die so infrequently in this ridiculously easy faceroll game now days that I do actually remember the vast majority of deaths on serious characters. It was over a year ago, I was cycloning through a mass of seawitches in a zana map when bameth spawned and vaal DDed the pack I was killing before my cyclone animation had even stopped to let me get out. Wrecked.

I think every other time with every build thats come across them Ive just killed them. They dont seem to have any life any more, I feel like theyve nerfed the shit out of beyond bosses to the point where they spawn and you just nuke them, theyre like exiles, fairly irrelevant. They are mostly spells ya, Na'em is a physical attackish dude, haast uses cascade which is half phys and probably his harshest spell but the rest are elemental spells.

I almost always use crit, I dont think non crit attacking does enough damage in general compared to other options, melee, bows, projectiles, whatever, few exceptions. I have a disfavour cyclone/eq which deals with beyond bosses easily, outside of that its all crit. But I never use vaal pact on a life build, I dont mathil style leech tank it, I just kill them with crit. Youre jugg so chilled ground shouldnt effect you, I hate things that slow me down so I never play chilled ground on any build that isnt a jugg, never play temp chains, more than its dangerous it just feels like total aids.

Basically 1h weapon, current state of the game u should probably be crit imo and you should just pick a window, jump in and obliterate them. I dont play non crit 1h, thats not just melee, whens the last time you tried to play non crit bows or wander etc? Unless its poison arrow/EA just doesnt seem like a good idea. I dont play cleave and I havent played your build. As people have said though alkiezer managed to get to lvl99 self found in hardcore playing cleave before he died to dc, so it would seem its not impossible to make the skill work in some shape or form. Was he crit? I dunno, it wouldnt surprise me.

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sidtherat wrote:

remind me please - beyond bosses/essences. do they deal 'attack' damage at all? if they do, what %of that is physical?

how can 'melee be fine' if the majority of damage dealt to players in end-game comes as ele spells that typical melee defences (AR/EV) do nothing against? Izaro is the last major phys attack mob added into the game. everything else just spams colors everywhere and if you HAVE to get close to deal damage you can only outdps it or spell block. diversity.

essences seem to be about 50% attacks to me, molten strike nova thingys, blue hammer dudes, procish spike novas. All the guardians are attackers with at least 50% phys, the frost bolts in hydra you avoid, the big flamexplosion thing in phoenix you avoid, those are "dont get hit by this", all the other things they do that you actually get hit with are attacks. Daresso, Kaom, Rigwald, half the chaos warband generals are attackers. So vast majority of t15 and all the t16 map bosses are attack based with at least 50% physical. You can actually farm those maps for xp, shaper is just a challenge boss ppl farm for his drops, which are worth less and less, its like early league or theyre whatever. Breaches, the actual realms chayula is the only dangerous one that I can see, I was farming the other 4 endlessly in breach with a 5k life shit tier evasion build using a 1c unique claw and they seemed easy. Fun farming maps strand, shore, highgardens, courtyard, springs, lair, underground river, gorge, theyre all bosses whos only scary things are attacks, if you can even call anything they do scary. Highgardens has his little degen cyclones you avoid. Plateau and volcano have the spell totem bosses.

I dont think the majority of damage is ele spells in endgame, I honestly think very little dangerous damage comes from ele spells, I dont feel at all concerned about them. Thats my honest experience, maybe its not other peoples, which is fair enough. On proper characters I can remember 3 deaths to secondary elemental damage (explody bullshitters) and 1 death to actual legit spell damage (magnus molten shell) in the last 2 years. Since ascendancy I dont think Ive died a single time to ele spells on high level mapping chars, a couple to explody bullshitter secondary ele death on death mobs.

How much life and dps do you have on this cleaver? what are we dealing with here? I like armour and evasion but not at the expensive of life and dps, Im looking at about 6,400 life and 120k dps baseline acceptable. I dunno, I just feel like almost the entire game is absurd faceroll, I say 120k dps but only because your other options will outweight if u go much less. I have stupid tier weapons that cost triple figure exalts, and then I replace them with 1-20 chaos weapons, halves my tooltip dps, play a bunch maps, guardians... cant even notice the difference. Even with 200 exalt weapons Im doing like 1/3 of the damage mathils builds are doing and I dont have vaal pact, going down to joke tier weapons anyone can have ive got about 1/6 of his dps with no vaal pact and I just feel like I virtually never die, everything just gets crushed, barely even use my potions. None of it matters, life, ci, attacks, spells, ranged, melee, its all the same, just faceroll virtually everything. Go to a new league, if I put in some effort for 6 days then my entire gear apart from the weapon is just a mirror of what I use in standard and its back to mindless demolition. In my mind a 50k dps non crit 1h melee life build in a temp league is probably where the game feels about right and anything much beyond that just seems like a total farce, the game becomes a joke its so easy, conversation is just splitting hairs over slight differences in the shades of lolcopter mindless faceroll on offer.


check this video, t11 spell based map boss

http://plays.tv/video/58daea55a3329afbc2/just-go-round-the-pillar-init


I wanted to show how you turn off the bosses laser by going around the pillar, so I didnt want to kill it quickly. Took off a 500pdps crit dagger and look at the dagger I put on, a 10% quality blue dagger with 12% attack speed and 1 shit tier ele roll. My entire tree is increased physical damage, I have absolutely no elemental scaling on my tree at all and the dagger Im using has 10% quality, thats its only phys that lifts it beyond a white weapon. I dont feel in any danger in there, the amount of time it takes to kill those mobs and that boss feels about right, thas how the game should feel imo, thats the time shit should take, its still easy it just takes a moment and you have to play the fight. What happens if I put on the 200 exalt dagger? Id just obliterate that boss in about 3 seconds. What if I switch to a 1 chaos binos? It will take twice as long, Ill obliterate the boss in 6 seconds... this is a red tier map, a t11 spell based boss and Im using a skill that people say has bad single target, I could double my damage with a single target wildstrike setup. I could run that boss 50 times in a row with a white weapon and never die, and honestly it would feel about right time wise, it would feel like the level of effort it should take to kill a map boss. I think everything should be reduced to this level, but it needs more balance between options like crit vs non crit.

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sofocle10000 wrote:

One could be tuning RT to reduce the goddamn gap between Crit damage output, that used to be kept in check by a cool mechanic - Accuracy - until it's scaling became way easier than it should have been, combined with ways to scale Crit chance easier than ever and you got a severe disparity regarding damage potential, even without accounting for broken double dip mechanics.

not every non crit attacker is RT though, if you hurt accuracy you destroy a ton of non crit attack builds and force every one of them to go to the far left between marauder and templar. The problem with crit is that it does too much damage and what gives crit its damage is crit multiplier. Forcing RT on every non crit attack build would be so harmful to build potential and basically turn all their trees into the same thing because they all have to go to the same place.

If you dislike melee builds so much , don't play melee builds .

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Dr1MaR wrote:

Actually Melee builds are at the very good spot atm. Look at alkaizer, he managed to get to lvl 99 with fucking cleave on fucking SSF withing fucking 10 days if not less. So are really melee builds at the bad spot or maybe you just got spoiled with stupid double dip broken builds or CI VP vinktars immortal builds? Melee is fine, it s the broken meta that needs a fix.

What maps did he ran?

Alkaizers lvl 99 SSF Cleaver is not a proof for anything here. It would be if we were saying that it's impossible to reach X level as melee.

Also notice that all 3 of his melee guys that hit top levels were Gladiators with spell block. I guess melee is fine as long as you're a Gladiator.

As a fun note, Alkaizer also used Kaoms Roots on his SSF lvl 99 Cleaver that seems to be praised here by mister Snorkle, but somehow my Berserker wearing them is me falling for the noob trap that Kaoms Roots are.

Shows just what we're dealing here. Specifically Snorkle being anti-mainstream to get his daily fuel.
The same guy is seriously analyzing others and criticizes their builds by saying "it's bad", meanwhile he swaps his 100+ exa gear between his characters.

So he's using the most OP "melee skill" (BF) with insane gear that he's using with his other characters.
Of course that he doesn't feel that melee is garbage. In his eyes and from his experience it's all nice and easy.
And I agree, that's exactly how I felt with my CI Cycloner, but I had to pump many exalts in there to make it feel not shitty.

Not sure what's so great and awesome with putting the same gear on every character. Making them pretty much fully geared at lvl ~70 which makes those lvl ~91s real easy and quick to get. "oh I've played much more than you did hurr durr" Pathetic.

It is a lot more of actual playing than I've done, but it's all the same shit pretty much. being completely isolated from the reality.

I dont level builds in standard, theyre all about lvl90 when they get there from leagues, which is where I lvl builds.

Ya kaoms roots are pretty shit because they dont let you evade, and like I always say the only time I wouldnt want to evade on a melee build is if im a block based build... and hes playing a gladiator... I havent even looked at his character, I dunno how its built so I certainly havent praised how its built, it doesnt matter really does it because hes doing just fine. If you were doing just fine then you wouldnt be in all these topics crying about how hard the game is for your poor melee characters.

I dont put the same gear on every character. you talk about isolated from reality, you have barely even played the game mate. You talk about melee vs range and the closest thing you have come to actually playing a ranged char in the last 2 years is a lvl65 tendrils assassin. Im not anti mainstream, I just have my own opinions based on my own experience, which is something you dont have, all you have is repeating what you think is mainstream because everything you pretend to know is borrowed from hearsay.

Im going back to ignoring you, you have nothing to say thats of any relevance to these debates, youre just here to vent, you dont give a shit about actual real information and 2 way dialogue, got your head in the sand, talking out of your arse about other people being isolated.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

"

sofocle10000 wrote:

One could be tuning RT to reduce the goddamn gap between Crit damage output, that used to be kept in check by a cool mechanic - Accuracy - until it's scaling became way easier than it should have been, combined with ways to scale Crit chance easier than ever and you got a severe disparity regarding damage potential, even without accounting for broken double dip mechanics.

not every non crit attacker is RT though, if you hurt accuracy you destroy a ton of non crit attack builds and force every one of them to go to the far left between marauder and templar. The problem with crit is that it does too much damage and what gives crit its damage is crit multiplier. Forcing RT on every non crit attack build would be so harmful to build potential and basically turn all their trees into the same thing because they all have to go to the same place.

Neah, most other attackers already got Elemental Overload, and since there are no physical/chaos related auras to scale end game damage, a physical equivalent of the node isn't such a problem if it's absent...

Having great crit chance and multi wasn't such a problem before, because accuracy actually was scarce and kept them in check better than now, making everything have static accuracy rolls might prepare us for a nerf to crit multi and it's decoupling of guaranteed status ailments by crit...

Either way, they have to address those gaps between single target melee skills and the AoE ones, just as they have to balance ES versus life + defensive mechanics or Crit versus non Crit damage, and by actually improving the bases on every existing item regarding the 1 hand weapon buff, and the recent attention for summoners, I have a bit more confidence in GGG's capability to improve the game for all of the playstyles...

PS: Kaom's Roots are best in slot for any build that relies on constant leech due to a magic trio (used to be duo) of epic qualities - can't be stuned, can't be knockback and more recently, can't be slowed below base speed.

A +1 Frenzy corruption, and as long as leech remains a reliable mechanic for constant sustain their lack of enchantment, movement speed or guarantee to be hit is not, and will never be an impediment for life builds...

Honestly Ranged vs. Melee doesn't even make a big difference. You are basically always melee as soon as you have a few mods that add speed to enemies or slow the player. So while some controlled fights give advantages to ranged chars, most of the random shit that happens in maps makes no difference between ranged and melee and also some boss fights have so tiny arenas that it is hard to take advantage of your range.

The difference is mostly how you scale and that is the big issue melee has. If you are RT you basically forfeit any scaling you could have. Even if you go RT as ranged you can scale projectile damage much easier than you can scale melee damage. So while there is no equivalent for Multistrike you have Pierce and Slower Projectiles and if you just accept that you are not ranged most of the time as well you also have Point Blank.

So one of the big question that can first be raised is this, why does a ranged character gets a damage bonus if he goes melee, while a melee character doesn't.

So me not having a ranged 90+ character means that those hundreds of videos are fake (?) and pretty much everybody except the few on this forum agrees that melee is much worse than ranged, with provided evidence (videos, majority of top guys are ranged, etc.).

What a weak argument pal.


I am doing fine with melee, but I'm doing better as ranged and others that are ranged do better than me. Great? (as it should be)

The Berserker is ranged. Sunder is a ranged skill.


You do put the same gear. You had the same claw on other character there. As well as regalia probably. Come on.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

How much life and dps do you have on this cleaver? what are we dealing with here? I like armour and evasion but not at the expensive of life and dps, Im looking at about 6,400 life and 120k dps baseline acceptable.

That's why you think the game is "an absurd faceroll".