Melee builds are complete trash

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

You cant even have fun as melee anymore, you just really cant.

that's odd, i wonder why i'm having so much fun as melee then

i guess sucking at the game has its benefits!

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adghar wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

You cant even have fun as melee anymore, you just really cant.

that's odd, i wonder why i'm having so much fun as melee then

i guess sucking at the game has its benefits!

You can only play melee soo many years and invest soo much into your gear and still die to things you cant control before it gets unfun. Balancing has been done soo poorly its pretty clear they arent thinking of anything other than a specific genre of builds when they make changes.

Just look at some of the new content weve already gotten sneak peaks of like the Brine King. Screams anti-melee boss mechanics. Im not very optimistic about 3.0 already just based on that segment of video.

Of course, 3.0 is based on defense and utility, thats what god alignment is all about, but none are soo significant that they fix the current issues with the game for melee characters. Weve also seen exactly what kind of "melee balance" they think of with prior patches. None have been significant and only introduce more problems, for example, the problem of specific threshold jewels being soo retardedly good for a skill they become mandatory.

Im trying to stay optimistic but when you lay the facts out on the table its very hard to.

Only reason you think melee is trash, is because you go for max dps all the time. GGG saw that and designed all the end game content to have absured amounts of hp.

The damage is survivable, but then the damage output suffers, that's why ranged playstyle is preferred. Kill before getting killed.

Some things to note:
-Flasks are way too strong. Like Morrowind levels of strong. Apply a limit to unique damage and defence flasks or unique flasks in general (like with jewels). i.e. You can only have 1 unique damage flask and 1 unique defence flask equipped.
-Too much dmg + leech = too much leech (add vaal pact and ci to that equation and you have a problem). Since damage levels only seem to be increasing on purpose (nice design guys /s), it's time for Vaal pact to go.
-It's really hard to make a Ci melee char because of colour sockets (too many offcolor melee dmg + melee dmg on full + multistrike + possibly red melee gem i.e. cleave + faster attacks = 5 offcolour)


tldr
Melee is da.

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Pyrokar wrote:

Only reason you think melee is trash, is because you go for max dps all the time. GGG saw that and designed all the end game content to have absured amounts of hp.

The damage is survivable, but then the damage output suffers, that's why ranged playstyle is preferred. Kill before getting killed.

Some things to note:
-Flasks are way too strong. Like Morrowind levels of strong. Apply a limit to unique damage and defence flasks or unique flasks in general (like with jewels). i.e. You can only have 1 unique damage flask and 1 unique defence flask equipped.
-Too much dmg + leech = too much leech (add vaal pact and ci to that equation and you have a problem). Since damage levels only seem to be increasing on purpose (nice design guys /s), it's time for Vaal pact to go.
-It's really hard to make a Ci melee char because of colour sockets (too many offcolor melee dmg + melee dmg on full + multistrike + possibly red melee gem i.e. cleave + faster attacks = 5 offcolour)


tldr
Melee is da.

This is just factually wrong and this is coming from someone who usually doesnt break more than 100k on their most defensive characters and still dies on them. I dont know who youre talking to but it seems youre talking to the OP in this but im gonna respond to it anyways.

My Gladiator last league had 6.5k life, 78/78 block, Formless and Perfect Form (Phase Acrobatics and 8% physical taken as fire), 12k armour and 8k evasion, dual curse defenses and still died (Enfeeble, Temporal Chains), Chill (both from Soul Taker and Enchant), CWDT setup (IC), Surrender. Barely over 100k, I_No saw my character, saw me play it, it was slow as shit but it did content but there are things in the game you cannot deal with without a high Effective Life Pool and thats what the game is balanced around. That Gladiator was extremely min maxed too, my planning on it was perfect and with all that, the uniques, etc i full capped 169% res for everything. There was very few things i could do to make that build better other than getting Mirrored gear.

Theoretical Effective life with things like Evasion, Block only mean soo much, they arent guaranteed defenses. Guaranteed Effective life is direct pool or passive reductions, etc. If an (x)k damage hit, hits you and goes through, youre dead. It doesnt matter what kind of trivial RNG defense you add in, eventually a hit like that will go through and kill you.

Forcing players to play something they dont enjoy isnt a good thing, thats exactly what is going on with the game currently. Theres no reason that people shouldnt be able to do content with good enough gear and a well made build.

It breaks down to simple math and probability at the end of the day. Math factually proves that unless you meet certain Effective Life thresholds, you are at risk to dying eventually within certain content regardless of how skilled, well geared or how good your melee build may be.

To elaborate on end game content:

Shaper fight, minotaur fight, phoenix fight. If you don't deal an excessive amount of damage then the arena fills with vortexes, firebirds and falling rocks and lightning beams. It can be done if you have invested in survivablity and have less damage but you need way more skill to do so as you need to avoid stuff for way more time than the build that got more dmg and less survivability.

The difference between a character that has more survivability and one that has more damage should be that the one with more invested in survivability would survive more and have an easier time. That isn't the case here. Especially since the damage of things in end game is just absurd. Doesn't matter if you die in 0,5 seconds or 0,6, but it matters a lot if you have 100k dps vs 250k dps.

And that's the issue. You get way more out of damage that you could ever get out of survivability in this game, point for point. As an example my 10k life 100k dps build had a hard time in those bosses. Respecing out of life and into more dmg (losing like 3k life) made everything so much easier. From shaper to xp gaining to currency dropping. Everything was easier. Dmg > everything.

Rip melee.

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Pyrokar wrote:

To elaborate on end game content:

Shaper fight, minotaur fight, phoenix fight. If you don't deal an excessive amount of damage then the arena fills with vortexes, firebirds and falling rocks and lightning beams. It can be done if you have invested in survivablity and have less damage but you need way more skill to do so as you need to avoid stuff for way more time than the build that got more dmg and less survivability.

The difference between a character that has more survivability and one that has more damage should be that the one with more invested in survivability would survive more and have an easier time. That isn't the case here. Especially since the damage of things in end game is just absurd. Doesn't matter if you die in 0,5 seconds or 0,6, but it matters a lot if you have 100k dps vs 250k dps.

And that's the issue. You get way more out of damage that you could ever get out of survivability in this game, point for point. As an example my 10k life 100k dps build had a hard time in those bosses. Respecing out of life and into more dmg (losing like 3k life) made everything so much easier. From shaper to xp gaining to currency dropping. Everything was easier. Dmg > everything.

Rip melee.

Oh yes, i definitely agree you get way more out of damage these days for sure. Im very interested in seeing how they are changing Vaal Pact and double dipping especially. Vaal Pact is one of the things they said theyre going to change in 3.0 and thats going to be a huge factor affecting the glass cannon leech builds.

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tinko92 wrote:

You pointed shit.


Just because you quote some text doesn't mean it's an argument (you either can't read/understand what's written properly or you got some heavier issues on your hand). We can read what's in the quote box. And there was nothing related to your countless baseless assumption, because apparently that's all you're capable of.


Also cut the crap about fallacies... I mean, look who's talking, the worst possible person lmao


You're like a made-up character from some cartoon.

Nop, you still don't get it, it was simple, but still.
And yeah, I don't really do fallacies (no point to me), neither did Snorkle, that did not keep you for going crazy raging over it in a video-game related forum.

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le_souriceau wrote:

So, gear and clear well done build matter. Even in hands of unskilled casual like me. May I dont kill shaper or uber atziri, but atleast im not bag for beating in 95% of game content.

Block is also very strong, gear is far from being everything.

You should specify what you are considering melee. You can always play bladeflurry CI VP asassin, melee totems or some howa build. According to GG those are melee builds.

I see those problems
1) The insane damage scaling in every aspect of the game (melee or not, monsters etc) which means too many more multipliers around.
Just one example I got in my mind: Melee Damage on Full Life Support works 100% of the time on CI chars without any downside (it´s free 50% more damage and it´s just 1 thing, we got shock, flasks etc.).
It also creates big discrepancy among skills/builds/items (the goal should be reduced such discrepancy)

2) Not properly balancing the skills according to their AoE/range/abilities (I mean you shouldn´t be able to facetank with typical projectile range skill)

3) Life x CI builds x VP (instant leech, flasks, some OP leech mechanics)

4) Crit builds vs no crit

5) Speed without limits everywhere - there should be some breaks/diminishing returns.

I won´t go into details it´s cycling all the time.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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allbusiness wrote:

If you're going to say Snorkle has more experience than people and his experience trump everyone's argument

no, more experience doesnt trump what everyone has to say, at all. Whats being said is that if you have little to no experience of the things you are commenting on then what youre saying doesnt mean a great deal and you cant sit there and insist people with a lot of experience in those areas dont know what theyre talking about.

I dont play summons, am I gonna sit there and tell someone like ghazzy whats what when it comes to the balance between summons and another another archetype then tell him he doesnt know what hes talking about when he disagrees with some of the points Im making and tries to explain why theyre wrong? You see me in summons balance threads all over this forum running my mouth like Im some kind of expert? No, you know why? Because Im not just talking to talk, Im not just mouthing off opinions because it makes me feel important, I care about the truth of the conversation and when its something I havent got much worth while experience of and Im talking to someone with a great deal of experience Im gonna shut my mouth and open my ears, learn something, try and actually understand what the person is saying. Im certainly not gonna twist their words in some pathetic, childish effort to try and win some internet text fight because my main agenda is my ego and venting.

not saying thats what youre doing allbusiness, at all, none of that is directed at you mate.

You argue like you're an authority on this subject though, and then go ahead and say that people/streamers are making bad builds. You literally dismiss almost every argument about how melees are not in a good spot. No one is saying you can't make it work, it's that when your life build fails, you instantly die. Period. There are literally like a handful of things that will kill a good ES build, and those things are far and few in between and can be prepared for (Vaal DD, DD, Shaper Slam, etc). There are much more things that can kill you as a life build, especially if you are unable to play as a block build which mitigates a significant amount of damage.

Even Alkaizer says melee is in a bad spot, and he's top 10 every ladder with melee. If you're talking about straight up wealth acquisition, especially in SC where deaths don't even really matter that much outside of pushing to 100, casters/ranged characters are in a far better spot. Right now you have less survivability as a melee than as Vaal Pact/CI, you do less damage, and you have less utility. There's actually no objective reason to play life unless you are playing Zerker/EA/EQ/Build that requires you to path life for it to be efficient. It used to be hard to go CI, now it's not anymore with Essences/Master Crafting/etc. Objectively CI has been stronger than life since CB in terms of raw EHP, it's just that there used to be things like triple shock, freeze, bleeds, stun immunity that actually mattered (and you HAD to wear Chayula, unlike now where you can use Kiara's Determination as a stop gap), etc.

Also, as a side note, they need to do away with LL being tied to Shavs/Solarica. LL in general is just way too hard to balance, just look at RF Guardians right now. They are literally fucking invincible unless you severely misplay.