Melee builds are complete trash
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Nice discussion guys, very interesting points.
As I feel (with my experience), the main thing is that with melee you need: - far better gear (more currency) - far more extensive knowledge of the game - some proverbial "skill in hands" - will (experience) to make compromises for efficiency (generaly to chose one of more "working" melee/quasimelee skills and build options) This things more o less compensate each other, but to extent. So, when veteran player with solid amounts of currency builds melee char - this generaly works (as far as melee works in PoE). BUT! Here we come to main disparity - when relativly new and not so rich player tries to do something with melee like he understands it, experiment with crappy (or even mediocre) equipment - he is 99% doomed to bite the dust in most horrible ways when he gets to serious content. Ranged chars (ecpecialy ES ones) far more forgetable for poor, new and less skilled. Even with relativly unfancy builds and mediocre gear they can beat most of the game whith far lesser risk of "unfair" deletion from monsters. Last edited by le_souriceau on Apr 22, 2017, 4:39:25 PM
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" Come on, didn't anyone ever got the memo that "melee" equals HARD MODE in PoE, in a mirrored way from all other ARPGs, and "true melee = single target skills" equal going HARDCORE into the HARD MODE??? Of course you get to say that heavy investments into a character should make you feel close to invincible, but not outright invulnerable - except in the rare case when putting a Vaal Immortal Call to use - and while all is fine and dandy at the upper echelon when comparing melee vs ranged/caster builds or ES vs Life as they all could actually finish end game content although by abusing broken skills/mechanics/items or interactions mostly due to efficiency conundrum, having caster builds rule by a lesser investment versus the moderate one from a ranged character or the one more steep for a melee is at least counterintuitive if not just imbalanced... They need to double up on getting better balance by addressing in a timely manner fixes for all those broken skills/mechanics/interactions or items, and give the players more diversity as this is the greatest thing about PoE, it's almost unlimited potential regarding the journey from 1-100, and each one should feel different and have that feeling that you acomplished something truly epic each time. Right now, with all the broken stuff that gets players to that point in less than a 3 month league, I would just want to see more accent placed on skillplay and a higher increase in difficulty, while making every encounter fair, so if you %*^& up you're punished, but you don't have to experience only one shot deaths, just deaths via players fault due to bad piloting and not paying sufficient attention, or not having enough dedication to invest some time in gaining that valuable knowledge that would have made the difference between failure and success... With each subsequent try to get those "meta no lifers" toned down, they unfortunately made it worse for those that would have liked to get to those same levels in a larger time frame - years of daily playing for a 100 character - and they didn't even offer more incentive to explore at post 95 only the end game content - all this only discussing one aspect where their efforts had an opposite effect instead of the one sought... I love PoE, but GGG should seriously consider all those points above and offer serious improvements in the time frame post 3.0, as PoE still remains an unpolished diamond after all this time... PSS: Our almighty TencentGGG overlords are very scrupulous regarding criticizing their abilities to take proper decisions and consider everything "needlessly harsh and condescending"... Good to know "free speech" doesn't apply in any form or manner on the forums these days... Last edited by sofocle10000 on Apr 22, 2017, 6:34:23 PM
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" One more time, you are talking from things that you are trying to guess, not from pure experience. Snorkle definitely has more experience than you. You are following the hype trend without knowing well what's actually what. And you obviously haven't been reading his post ( or just conveniently ignoring some parts ) judging by what you are saying, so that makes this "discussion" pretty pointless .... " Not being able to evade is a big drawback ..... unless you are a blockbot, and then wants to block as much as you can. I didn't notice the new mod where one cannot be slowed below base movespeed tbh, that's a nice addition to compensate for the lack of MS on it. " Don't think that they ever tried such a thing ... SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading. Last edited by Fruz on Apr 22, 2017, 8:18:59 PM
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" Thats true actually, and projectile damage is just that, projectile. Its actually swapped places a bit from where we started 4 years ago when there was no PPAD, very little of the generic projectile scaling, so if you were phys bows what would u do? Added Fire + WeD, maybe Blackgleam, Hatred, Wrath and Anger, your more multiplier was WeD so even as a phys base you were just trying to feed as much elemental into that as possible, going to templar even for catalyst etc. " but you can achieve that every time with such a wide variety of builds and methods. You can go life with armour, evasion, armour and evasion, block, coil, pure life stacking, can go ci, ci with evasion, ci with armour, with aegis, life hybrid with aegis, go 2h axes, 2h swords, staves, 1h swords, claws, daggers, go bows, wands, phys spells, ele spells, chaos spells, burn prolif, you can start a fresh league and within a week or 2 have all the gear to do that with a million and one different setups. And these are tanky setups, setups focused on having absurd layers of defenses. People like foxtactics in my guild who actually push dps with fairly expensive gear hit 300k, then 400k, then 500k, a week later its 600k, "I think I can squeeze another 50k+ if I get proper gear and level all my gems". Meanwhile mathil is there "When we calc the poison Im at 1 million dps... Ive been playing this character for 4 days... but this poison stuff isnt whats rly broken, check out this sprinkler build that does 3x as much damage as that". Im talking tanked out builds who arnt even focused on damage. This isnt a niche thing, you can go make 30 different characters right now off the bat spanning a huge array of skills, damage scaling and defense options and they will all meet that criteria with league gears you can put together in a week or 2. honestly if it were my game Id hit crit multi pretty hard, remove double dipping, sort out this howa/sprinkler mess to bring damage figures down and then I would triple the hp most mobs have. Id probably buff the damage significantly on about 90% of them too. Thats not mirrored gear talking, when u got stupid level 500pdps weapons and you instantly kill all the mobs in a map including rares, and then you come down to a 3 exalt weapon and still instantly kill everything, come down to a 25 chaos weapon same deal, drop down to a 1 chaos weapon and you are still instantly killing everything and you have to result to picking a white weapon off the floor, throwing 2 wetsones and 7 alterations on it just to get your damage down to a point where the game feels like fights actually last long enough to have any kind of meaning its not 200 exalt weapons talking, its the state of the game thats the issue. Esp when the dps you had with your 200 exalt 500pdps weapon is the same sort of dps you can get with a lvl21 spell gem. Foxtactics randomly said to me last league "Ive been trying out freezing pule today", oh ya hows it going? "Ive got 250k dps, with a lvl16 gem in a 4 link".... right... " pretty much. Im not some infallible expert who knows it all, Im here to learn as much as give input, Im not looking to stonewall discussion at all. I offer a point of view and then get flat out told Im wrong by people who are selectively ignoring half of what Ive said, basing their arguments around intentional misinterpretations of the rest... Are we here to actually discuss things? Ill say something, Ill give examples, Ill link the builds, Ill record videos and say heres what Im seeing when Im playing. Its all there on the table, if Im basing an opinion on something because Im doing things wrong then by all means pick it apart, show me, Id love nothing more than for someone to show me a way of doing things I havent tried or seen before thats going to improve my game. I never used to make ci with evasion, and then we got into discussions on it on the forums, some people saying it couldnt be done, some saying ci was shit and evasion was shit and when you put them together its going to suck even more than they do on their own, sid was in there saying you know i think it can be done and it works well, there were some people on the fence. So I went and tried it out, I bought a good triple prefix carnal off Ash, stripped it, crafted it up, I wanted to see for myself. Now Im almost always making ci with evasion, its rare Id make a ci any other way because it turns out its fantastic. Ive tried it many ways, Im not even doing it with carnals most of the time now, Im going regalias with a hybrid shield, hat and gloves. I didnt try it once, Ive made 10+ different full endgame setups with all manner of spells, attacks, degens, crit, non crit, different gear combinations, different ascendancies. I get into it with sid from time to time but he does have some good knowledge in areas and Ive learned things from him, Ive listened to what he has to say, gone away and played with those ideas in game. I am actually here for the serious discussion and I do listen to ppl when theyre being serious. I shouldnt even respond to some of these other guys, i dunno why I let myself get dragged into waste of time nonsense with them tbh. I need to just try harder to ignore dead ends. |
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Just to make sure ( I'm definitely not a dps freak here, quite the opposite actually, I'm on a Gladiator Incenerator on 8k dps before factoring the inc damage on monster from the ascendancy and resistance debuffs, to illustrate a bit, but switch to LL RF is coming so Ill guess that will change soon ), all of those setups you are mentioning ..... are crit based, right ?
Like, 250k on a lvl 16 4L freezing pulse .... you cannot get that without stacking crit, or am I missing something ? I'll check your builds later to see how you are reaching that much dps I think, might be a bit hard to grasp since there seem to be quite a bit of really expensive gear, but I'm really curious. I mean, I'm happy to play the game on 30k dps for example lol. SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading. Last edited by Fruz on Apr 22, 2017, 10:09:03 PM
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" Neah, I played a long time only on 5K life my main character, and with Unwavering Stance until Juggernaut Ascendancy appeared, so I actually "facetanked" all that was thrown at me with just that much HP, ~15K armour (due to IR), 6 End Charges and not more than 24% permanent block, and always did up to highest difficult map content. Post introduction of even higher tiers, the larger buffer became a must, and I fine tuned that build towards the current version. And I always relied a main 6L with xxxxxx Strike or Ice Crash + Concentrated Effect as "boss killer" skill... The Kaom's Roots are indispensable for any "Sponge" related "single target melee", as then you heavily rely on steady leech, and there is a Berserker Dual Strike build that finished since a long while back all end game content due to those boots (keeping you close to your target no matter what was essential for success), so they always were good... Oh, but the nerf towards EXP gained post level 90 was an artificial way to prolong the "journey" towards 100 for the "meta no lifers", not people like me that wanted to try that by doing dailies for years and playing maps once in a while, we were already doing it the hard way - relying on single target melee + not partying + limited playtime. What was worse was not even the fact that they made leveling post 95 a crawl if you don't abuse the game, or build "facetanking 101" characters, they didn't even consider it necessary to push those players towards the end game content and reroll characters for map sustain, they kept the reliance on medium-high difficulty to do so "safely". I once asked how many reached 100 by playing versus the difficult fights that the game provides, as those encounters hone your skill, your build and account for your playstyle, but when the best way to get to that goal means: use broken skills/mechanics/items or interactions, as many as possible at once, party with others with same view, and play endlessly Shaped Dunes/Strands, Plateaus or Groges not to even mention those Poorjoy's Asylum rotations. We should ask ourselves where is the difficulty in achieving such goal, as I would prefer a feeling of achievement something truly epic instead of the dying from boredom that is currently provided... PSS: Our almighty TencentGGG overlords are very scrupulous regarding criticizing their abilities to take proper decisions and consider everything "needlessly harsh and condescending"... Good to know "free speech" doesn't apply in any form or manner on the forums these days... Last edited by sofocle10000 on Apr 23, 2017, 1:19:06 AM
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You are using base block + 6 endurance charges, which makes a big difference, but would you have tried evasion and real boots ....
But you haven't, have you ? And the damage was lower before ascendancy, several monsters got buffed, comparing the situations makes little sense imho. And with only 5k life, you will get stunned more often, which means that kaom's boots will have more values. But since the base life buff ..... endgame with 5k life without MoM ?? seriously ? That's just low ... But checking your character now, I guess it has significantly more than 5k, so Idk when it was. And you know what you felt that you needed to rely on heavy leech ? Probably partly (Note the partly here) because you could not evade anything, that's not exactly what tankyness is, that's more like what being a leeching glass canon is. So it was probably something in the middle. But eveyrthing isn't supposed to be facetanked imho. I have almost no leech on my current gladiator, yet I can actually "tank" quiiite a bit ( using block again this time, but no Aegis ). That's what I would call tankyness. But arguably, being a sponge leeching build could be called tanking I guess, there is no fixed definition of that maybe. People got better at the game and the clearspeed meta has been taking more and more of the game, making players more efficient and fasters. Maybe GGG just found that it was faster than what they wanted it to be, it could just be that simple. And using broken skills/mechanics/interactions is the best way to do everything, this is exactly why we call it broken .... This is completely unrelated to leveling, it's related to everything that the game has, bokrne OP combination >>>> * for basically everything. And poorjoy's is one of the map where stuff hit the hardest that you can find, so running it is not just the safety way ... it is taking some risks to get more xp. Now, having mobs in there that are less easy to offscreen would be a good thing imho. SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading. Last edited by Fruz on Apr 23, 2017, 2:43:58 AM
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" From personal experience: Gear: You need a weapon. Those can get quite expensive, but you can get away with 1c uniques for quite a while. Bino's, Scaeva, even Jack the Axe will do fine up to t15. And then one day you invest a couple ex to get some serious lategame DpS. Not much more expensive than a lvl 21 spell gem. The rest of the gear can be super-cheap. Life roll + resists, that's what gets you started. And that's like 1c per slot. Then you gradually upgrade into "same, but with +100% armour roll". The only problem is Enchantments, because people only enchant ES gear these days. Knowledge/Skill: Most of the stupid stuff in PoE is dangerous to ranged builds as well (with the exception of Volatiles). Knowledge certainly helps, but I wouldn't say melee needs more than ranged. Compromises: The biggest compromise is that you'll not compete in clearspeed. There's just no way a melee build can clear a strand in 10 seconds, even using "non melee melee". " You have to look at a longer time frame. When I started playing somewhat more seriously, XP gain was very limited: *maps only went up to lvl 78, and those maps cost like 1 Ex *it was crazy hard to sustain this tier, you needed like 6 people to throw their currency in a pool to pay for maps *mob density was lower *clearspeed and damage output were nowhere near what they are today *there was no high density lvl 68 dried lake that you could farm up to lvl 80+ Today, you can blast through maps, clear a 100 times more efficient, and you can reliably craft your own version of "endgame" and sustain it without any real issues. Of course they had to nerf XP gain somehow. 3.5 build: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2299519
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" That was before Ascendancy, and I also had better damage output than now. You felt like going bonkers on damage and making fights shorter was a viable way to play even as a RT 1 handed character (still possible but way more difficult now). Of course a block oriented build with armour and even some evasion will feel great - Gladiator also adds that cool 100% block to spell block conversion, so you're actually feeling every kind of damage reduced by a lot - but playing even life Sponge to tank all attacks/spells except the untankable ones was and still is an option due to leech efficiency in contrast to regen. Those broken stuffs need to be addressed more regularly if balance around the mechanics of the game is desired, if not we have PoE imbalance that just says "this league spells/traps/projectiles/AoE will be op" and after complaining that too few people play a certain playstyle, the developers add some shake up and nerf/buff "accordingly". That is a cool way to revamp content, but why not focus on keeping everything viable and have different strengths and weaknesses? Oh, for Poorjoy's you should give 50% of the packs Proximity Shields just to keep things fair. " But why not change the focus on grinding the goddamn end game content, as post 95 those daisy chaining of lower tier reds grants more incentive EXP wise. All your points are valid, but why not give EXP for a 99 character only on tier 15-16 maps, as that is the place where that character should feel right at home, and if they feel that they should further add more difficult encounters later down the line, just adjust the tier levels accordingly? Sustain, gear and builds due to power creep got so good that they don't have anymore excuses to not give a true sense of progression on the whole journey from 1 to 100. PSS: Our almighty TencentGGG overlords are very scrupulous regarding criticizing their abilities to take proper decisions and consider everything "needlessly harsh and condescending"...
Good to know "free speech" doesn't apply in any form or manner on the forums these days... |
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" Wasn't totems, but I did find your post: " Interesting. Yup, melee seems alright. |
