Make Melee Great Again: Siege Axe Or Jewelled Foil? Time to Re-balance Weapon Bases!

Literally every advantageous function in the game becomes better with speed. I shouldn't need to convince any experienced player that attack speed in POE is the almost always the premium choice, but briefly if you're new: everything good scales off base attack speed and everying good is significantly penalized if you don't have a top speed base to scale it off. This is why 99% of all attack builds use the top 1.5+ attack speed bases like Siege Axes and Jeweled foils to the point where basically no one EVER uses maces (except to be a hipster of course). Which then scale harder with that copious attack speed investment..

Its not just the best way to get DPS from a melee skill; Leech, charges, life on hit, various support gem procs, animation feel (smoothness of gameplay) are ALL MULTIPLIED BY SPEED. As a consequence they feel really bad and work poorly mathematically speaking without that speed. Part of the reason for this is that unlike other games POE didn't seperate the speed of your swing animation and the interval between swings like most games do to avoid making "bigger and slower" builds always objectively worse than fast builds.

Now Instead of advocating that attack speed be rebalanced which I would 100% get behind if it wasn't a pipe dream (I know GGG will not do this in 3.7 there's no chance IMO). or that at least Attack interval and swing speed be separated into two things to allow "slow+Big" to be an actual thing in the game and not feel like shit because of the SLOW MOTION SWING. (which maybe they might hopefully do in 4.0 when the new animations are put in); I feel the best move (with compromises in mind) is to rebalance the weapon bases with the current ludicrous speeds in mind IMO the following suggestions are what would need to happen before a Gavel or Royal Axe base became competitive. (Note Numbers are aproximate due to generalizing the changes over multiple bases, the magnitude of the numbers aren't the important part, the basic suggestion is my focus)

1.
Take all the slowest bases and ad .5 or .10 to their speed until there's no weapon slower than 1.25 this somewhat reduces the massive gap in viability of slow swinging builds.

2.
Give slow Maces, Swords and Axes a sharp flat damage boost. Perhaps something like 30 flat top end damage and a 30-40 flat bottom end damage. So an approximate 50-90 mace that now has 1.25 APS becomes 90-120 flat range. Give axes the lesser bottom end buff and Maces (because they are so seldom used) the higher bottom end.

Royal Axe becomes something like: 80-120 with 1.25APS

A Gavel (probably the least used melee weapon in the game) for example goes from 1.15 to 1.25 APS and 94-131

Whatever numbers a deemed the best for the slowest bases (again my numbers are illustrative not mathematically derived): Graduate these up through the intermediate bases tapering off fast so that 1.35 and higher APS bases have only a moderate damage buff, and 1.4 a small buff. 1.5 and higher get nothing.

Implcits:

Maces: new Implicit, "your melee physical damage is Lucky"

Slashing Swords: Accuracy gives 0.0xx% crit multiplier (where x is a suitably balanced number)

Will probably post my thoughts on changes to Melee with respect to "low attack speed big hits" design space in a future post. Not that anyone gives a shit, but I feel like throwing my 2c out there.

+1

I can agree with that, playing glacial hammer in SSF at the moment, I had a hard time finding better than , because .... well, high attack speed.
( 298 dps )
I found
( 334 dps )
eventually, but it does not feel good, knowing that this does not benefit from abyss jewels as much as the previous weapon, and that it gives me actually quite a minor increase overall ( the implicit is also helping with more than the main attack, which is a plus for it ).
But it isn't an actual 10% dps increase, even though the implicit is a global 32% increased damage ( my glacial hammer has 100% phys to cold )


There are couple of things that I can think of that benefit more from slower weapons though :
- triggered attacks, they hit harder with slow weapons, but this is pretty insignificant
- lab enchantements scaling off weapon's damage, but those are not very significant either
- Earthquake, to some extent .... but even then, attack speed could give more mobility making it more desirable even though the skill benefits more from slow weapons.

So ... I completely agree, there is no good 'choice', picking a higher attack speed weapon is just better in almost every way ... and that's a bit .... well, sad.

have to agree that attack speed is a must have and anything that dosent go well with it tends to suck in comparison

would like to add a third solution "weapon efectivness", same effect as spells "Damage Effectiveness", this way slow weapons can get better efectivness to compensate the lack of speed, it could be olso used to add new mods like "increased efectiveness, less attack speed"