Melee Thread #97865

Just saw the latest Mathil video. He's usually one of the most positive streamers, and can adapt (or cope) with pretty much everything. If that will comes from playing PoE for a living, or that he can actually find fun in every iteration of the game, I don't know.

Anyway, I just found one specific quote very fascinating, talking about his Cleave build:

"

...Still a melee build, and my God is that just not that much fun for 'Ubering'

Now, there will come people in here, claiming "melee is fine", and they will of course be very wrong. Sure, there are some melee skills that are "fine", but they usually take advantage of stuff/mechanics most melee builds/skills can't take advantage of.

There will also probably be people reading this thread, thinking "well, melee is impossible to balance and will always be shit, mechanically". They are, of course, also wrong. Just a few minutes of thinking outside the box, will give you 3756 ideas that will make melee better.

I urge everyone to count the amount of melee skills/supports we've gotten the last 10 leagues, and compare it to the amount of spell skills/supports we've gotten, and we will instantly see where GGG's 'creativity' and effort are placed.

At this point, it isn't about balance. It isn't about mechanics. It's just about will and priorities, and sadly - melee just ain't it.

Now... Don't come at me with "PoE 2 will fix everything". They cannot just forget about a complete archetype for several years, just because "it may be OK in 2034".

Sorry for the rant. Back to my beers.

Yeah he never likes melee for Ubers because fights have to be very carefully designed to even allow melee opportunity and i don't think the Ubers were really designed, more just turned up to 11 and shipped as is.

It is hard for them to design a boss that is melee friendly that isn't just easy though but much of that is caused by melee not being tankier than non-melee providing no real differentiation between the two.

Sirus and Maven are both pretty toxic for melee builds in their own way its just the base versions are easy enough fights that it doesn't matter too much.

I think its good to rant about Phrazz as it needs keeping front and centre, melee needs addressing and they need to be cognizant that bosses need to be doable as melee without extreme tank or dps.

Well, Chris said he would take a look at melee for 3.20. I hope he does because the meta is kinda stale.

Just give every name lock melee skill a 50% damage reduction to all types across the board and buff the damage by 300%.

Agree with Phrazz, its less about one specific solution ( I could come up with 12 in 2 minutes), and more about making an attempt to make them fun and competitive.

I would love to see a build-in splash for every strike. Can be a small one.

I'd like to see using a weapon (Ax, sword, dagger) over time (measured by killing monsters or leveling) get bonuses while using that weapon. The idea is that the more one uses the same weapon, the better you get at using it effectively. These would be on top of any other bonuses and they would only apply while that weapon was in use. I think it would be helpful for SSF players as well as impact others. Certainly killing monster's would have greater impact over time.

Different weapon classes could get different bonuses or let players choose 2 to focus on:

Accuracy
DPS
Blocking
Crit %
Attack speed

Stop and think, its not that they cant make melee good, they dont WANT it to be good, think about the only melee strike that had melee splash.. dual strike, they removed that entirely from the jewel..
Dual strike was not and has never been over powered, but they nerfed it anyway..
Any time melee starts to see some play ggg nerfs it, at this point it HAS to be by design.
Melee has gems that add no damage like melee splash that end up being mandatory, no spell has this issue.
No ranged attack has this issue.
Add in the fact that spells scale better damage wise than melee and are much cheaper to gear, whats the point in playing melee beside it being my favourite play style?
Look at the most recently viable melee builds, bleed and poison, both nerfed.
Both were barely meta.
What spell gets nerfed when 2% of players use it?

Fun fact: the original Gauntlet had melee as well. If you let the horde get too close to you, you would forego whatever weapon you were throwing and swing it. It was a neat feature given you were almost certainly dead soon after.

And PoE has always shared a lot more DNA woth Gauntlet than it does Golden Axe. Except those screen-clearing potion supers. A typical PoE build spams those. Heh.

Most of the suggestions here exist in other games. Melee attacks with built in AoE for example. Wolcen does that elegantly with each weapon combo getting unique areas of damage per attack. Perfectly executed. But you want something similar in your game because Wolcen is so shitty on other levels, and thats understandable.

But...plaguefear is right in this case. GGG dont want to make melee good. This was evident when they started to fuck with the definition of the word itself, at least as far as game terms go. The range of melee attacks in PoE far exceeds what most games would deem "melee".

But here is a fun irony for you: a dictionary definition of melee emphasises the clutter and chaos of close quarters combat in a battle. PoE is definitely cluttered and chaotic. So from the perspective of, say, a 4X game, ALL of PoE is melee!

Otoh relatively speaking even the melee in Mech5 is more intimate than PoE's and I use a sword twice the size of Kitava...

Melee is fine. As long as you don't play it.

They don't want to fix melee. They keep feeding players that PR fluff: "Wait for POE 2"

Gonna be funny when POE 2 comes and melee is still in the same place.

Don't worry the eagles are coming...the eagles!!!

THEY WILL NEVER SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF MELEE!!!!