The REAL problem with melee vs. ranged

The REAL problem with melee is that there is absolutely no incentive to play it.


You sacrifice a lot of clearspeed and expose yourself to a lot of extra sources of danger, and have bugger all to show for it. Anything a melee char can do, a ranged char can do better.

If you want to play PoE, play ranged. If you want to play melee, play another game.
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suszterpatt wrote:
The REAL problem with melee is that there is absolutely no incentive to play it.


You sacrifice a lot of clearspeed and expose yourself to a lot of extra sources of danger, and have bugger all to show for it. Anything a melee char can do, a ranged char can do better.

If you want to play PoE, play ranged. If you want to play melee, play another game.



Honestly, the issues with Melee are glaringly obvious just from a simple OVERVIEW of things to anyone with half a brain cell really, its GGG's basic game design.in a game where Everyone can equip everything based on a couple basic stats (whether or not they're ranged) and HP/tankiness is gained via Skill nodes that everyone can Buy, Ranged WILL be just as tanky as Melee.
HOWEVER, melee, by its very nature, has to incur more risk in order to play itself, due to having to maneuver in close to fight-- This is why in RPG's Ranged is always historically made squishier than melee.
The fact that GGG hasn't fixed this is really only due to laziness; The only half assed attempt they've made to fix it is with Fortify. But that's seriously Super half assed, as, due to being from support gems, its easy for Ranged to cheese it if its neccessary, and the Gem's damage output isn't that good either for melee to use.



Its going to take alot more than Fortify to fix this, which means them actually thinking and adding in Anti ranged mechanics (Such as Mobs only using certain skills if the opponent is a certain distance away, with "deadzones" in close to them, like most MMO's use to keep parity), and for them to actually go in, with a fine tooth comb, and Rebalance Melee skills: Either buff the damage of "face range" skills like Heavy strike, cleave, ect, or fold in Actual defensive stats (like how cleave gets Fortify for free from its jewel-- pretty much all face range melee skills should have that FREE at level 15-20). No blanket "this works for all "melee" tag skills!" bullshit, as there's a crapton of Ranged "melee" skills that would just end up becoming Overpowered with a blanket Melee tag buff.





I mean, let me give an example of a situation where Ranged is absurdly better than Melee: Canyon.
I can freaking kite and dodge the Boss's on there all day long. they're easy to outmaneuver. But to kill the rooster, I need to get in CLOSE. So I go in and attack him. Well, fuck, here's a nice Root for you so you can't move anymore, and a cloud of poison for your troubles too!
And if you choose to kill the rooster first and enrage the pitbull? Well, hope you brought some defensive flasks and can remove bleed on demand!


On the other hand, I can outrun and kite the Pitbull and doge Arrows with temporal chains on me from the map mod easily-- half the time I play as if I were RANGED to kill them, chipping away at the pitbull with icecrash to take him down.
Fucking hell, melee having to kite is one of the most disgusting things in the game ever.
Last edited by aleksandor on Apr 28, 2017, 2:34:39 AM
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suszterpatt wrote:
The REAL problem with melee is that there is absolutely no incentive to play it.


You sacrifice a lot of clearspeed and expose yourself to a lot of extra sources of danger, and have bugger all to show for it. Anything a melee char can do, a ranged char can do better.

If you want to play PoE, play ranged. If you want to play melee, play another game.


Amen. Preach sister.
I think hes right, I think monsters should have wayyy wayyyyyyyyyyyyy more hp than they do now. But they need to balance out player dps a lot better first.

Short range skills should do way more damage, the old cyclone was fine, for the range of that skill the amount of damage it did was perfect compared to long range skills. thats the sort of damage all toe to toe skills should do.
Give ppl ability to reach 20k Life and any of this problem won't exist anymore.
In order to get rid of clearspeed meta cap global movement speed at 100% but make all skills instant so everything feels great.
I think that the real problem is that with melee unless you use melee splash, you're essentially stuck fighting ridiculously close to enemies. Spellcasters and projectile users can easily fire spells that cover a lot more area or attack more than one monster at a time without giving up a link. I understand that as melee you should be close to the target, but if you're that close it's easy to get surrounded. There are some skills which automatically fix this problem as melee as previously mentioned, but the single target ones without aoe or projectiles just don't cut it.

The ranged approach simply eliminates enemies before they even have a chance to hit you so I don't know if I'm just not playing correctly, but I really don't see how some of these single target skills are viable.
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Ceryneian wrote:
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suszterpatt wrote:
The REAL problem with melee is that there is absolutely no incentive to play it.


You sacrifice a lot of clearspeed and expose yourself to a lot of extra sources of danger, and have bugger all to show for it. Anything a melee char can do, a ranged char can do better.

If you want to play PoE, play ranged. If you want to play melee, play another game.


Amen. Preach sister.


So basically the issue with melee is that it is melee. Honestly unless you stack stupid buffs on melee chars, which is hard to do in such an open environment melee will always be worse if they have the option to be ranged.

So unless you take away the option for melees to be ranged they cannot be as good as a ranged char. So a Marauder as one example would not be allowed to use bows or spells (technically male karui were not allowed to use bows). But it is really hard to get buffs for melees which are not avaible for other classes. Fortify showed that, all that Fortify did was making Wands terrible.

And whenever melee was good or actually is good, it is the form of melee that allows for the greatest range.

The next issue you would have is that if melee would be locked in melee and get buffs for that, you would have to ensure that ranged chars are never melee, because they don't have the buffs to survive that. So you are again in the same situation, just the other way around.

Of course there could be some more improvements for melees, but if melees is translated into actually standing next to the enemy it will always be worse than ranged melees, other ranged attackers and ranged spells, just for the reason that it has to run up to each enemy and attack it. Because if melee would have huge AoE like some melee skills have they wouldn't be melee anymore.

So either people accept that melee skills will have fair AoEs and clear wide areas and feel more like weapon based spells or they accept the disadvantage they are in.
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Emphasy wrote:
So basically the issue with melee is that it is melee. Honestly unless you stack stupid buffs on melee chars, which is hard to do in such an open environment melee will always be worse if they have the option to be ranged.

It doesn't have to be that way. Yes, there are inherent disadvantages to being melee, but it is possible to counter those via the design of player skills and monster abilities.

It's hard to give a good example, because when it comes to favouring ranged over melee, PoE in its current state is firing on all cylinders. But consider the following general scenario:

- High-damage ranged skills have no built-in AoE
- AoE skills have damage penalties and/or mana costs that make them inefficient to use on small packs
- AoE skills aren't strong enough to oneshot entire packs
- Encounters are roughly a 50-50 split between large weak packs and fewer, tougher monsters
- Monsters are more dangerous at range (ranged attacks with Far Shot, strong abilities they only use from a distance, etc)

This setup gives pros and cons to melee, single-target ranged and AoE playstyles alike:

Melee
- Pros: safest, because being close to monsters is safer
- Cons: slower, because of extra travel time between packs

Single-target ranged
- Pros: fastest against smaller packs due to long range and high single-target DPS
- Cons: riskier, because monsters are more dangerous at range; can lose clearspeed when engaging large packs due to having to focus on dodging ranged attacks instead of attacking

AoE
- Pros: fastest against larger packs
- Cons: same as above, extra risk due to being at range


You'll notice however that PoE does all of that completely backwards. AoE skills have the highest damage even against single targets, the game is full of giant packs that can be oneshot by an AoE skill, and getting close to monsters is much, much more dangerous than staying away. So AoE skills are the only thing you have a good reason to use, and we arrive at the clearspeed meta we all know and "love".

But alas, Chris Wilson has spoken, and so PoE shall be a game you can play while watching TV.
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Melee
- Pros: safest, because being close to monsters is safer
- Cons: slower, because of extra travel time between packs

Single-target ranged
- Pros: fastest against smaller packs due to long range and high single-target DPS
- Cons: riskier, because monsters are more dangerous at range; can lose clearspeed when engaging large packs due to having to focus on dodging ranged attacks instead of attacking

AoE
- Pros: fastest against larger packs
- Cons: same as above, extra risk due to being at range


Thing is this doesn't work.

In PoE the difference between a 2h weapon melee and a 2h weapon ranged char is basically the range they attack on. Neither on is tankier, because they have the same tools avaible. Bows are a bit of an exception because they cannot use fortify that easily.

After all a ranged character is just a melee character that can also attack from afar. So if being ranged would put him at a disadvantage he would just move close, and on the other side many encounters force ranged characters into melee. And considering that, it is impossible to make a character who has to be close to the enemy as good as a character that doesn't have to be close.

The gab that exists currently lies in certain mechanics, that not just punish melees but are actually not really counterable by them without moving away. Those are shotgunning (Revenants are a good example) and Volatiles. Most other things are avoidable for melees. However many skills aren't really melee and have basically the same coverage ranged skills have, they are often still a bit closer but cover a comfortable enough range to avoid those issues. So if you are using Earthquake, Blade Flurry, Sunder, Lacerate or even Groundslam you are kinda ranged and have most of the advantages ranged chars have.

Overall the issue with melee is very similar to the issue bows have. Unless you somehow have a mechanic you can scale incredible easy (Crit or Poison) you suck as an attacker. Bows have a far easier time scaling crit but if you would make a non-poison RT bow build (without anything like HoWA or Doomfletch) you would run into the same issues melees do. Because good melee skills aren't actually melee, however their scaling keeps them from double dipping poison and many melees are not in the general area to get tons of crit, if you do you are fine.

So if we look at what puts bows slightly over melee attackers the issue isn't really the position on the battlefield it is a better scaling. As a melee you have basically 2 Multiplying supports, Melee Physical and Multistrike and the later is not avaible for all of them. Ranged at least has one more with Ranged Physical Attack Damage, Pierce and Slower Projectiles. But if you look at what you can do with spells and the fact you neither need a good weapon nor have to deal with accuracy the issue is not being melee, the issue is being an attacker and relying on a weapon.

So besides the fact that people often forget that ranged chars are not forced to be ranged, they can close in easily and are not more or less tanky, due to how open PoE is (just compare Spectral Throw to Cleave, the character could be basically the same, just one is ranged the other is melee).

I think having a few more remarkable encounters (iE enemies that don't just explode) would be good and propably help melees (mostly because they don't have to walk up to them so often) but more importantly I feel it would make the game more interesting.
Last edited by Emphasy on Apr 28, 2017, 3:21:54 PM
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suszterpatt wrote:
The REAL problem with melee is that there is absolutely no incentive to play it.


You sacrifice a lot of clearspeed and expose yourself to a lot of extra sources of danger, and have bugger all to show for it. Anything a melee char can do, a ranged char can do better.

If you want to play PoE, play ranged. If you want to play melee, play another game.




You also forgot shit targeting for the melee player.
Still failing to solve "The Riddle of Melee" 4.0 HYPE!!!
SILLY BITCH...THE EAGLES ARE COMING!!!
THE EAGLES!!! (bleeds out from a wound to the gut)
the eagles...are...coming...(coughs)...the eagles...

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