Melee Thread #97865
" Stat-stacking is crazy expensive in comparison to the spell stuff, and that's why melee is kind of fine on a high budget, but still feels kind of shit to play without having an actually good build farming currency for it first. That's in sharp comparison to spells, where the damage progression is both smooth and natural to the build. Also, spells often don§t need to use any complex or external scaling methods - lightning conduit doesn't need anything other than itself, and then doryani's in lategame; reap does more than enough damage by its lone physical self, as do creeping frost, explosive/ice trap, and many other spells. And projectile attacks (not sure how to call them - they have an attack tag, but are spells in every mechanical aspect), like poisonous concoction, toxic rain, caustic arrow, and explosive arrow, which scale exactly the same as normal spells, and happen to be meta as hell for the exact same reason. Last edited by Xyel#0284 on Oct 2, 2022, 8:54:41 AM
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" Yes and the same is true for most spells. Except about 1/3 of the spells which happen to be mechanically really strong. Another 1/3 is ok but already significantly weaker. And about 1/3 is so bad that nobody is seriously going to play those without farming a huge amount of currency first. " Again, only true for the best spells available. Those happen to be mechanically strong as mentioned. Proxy, burst or dot is the way to go early on. If you have currency, add trigger to the mix. Might be CwdT or CoC, doesnt matter but both options require a good chunk of investment. " Once more: Yes. Its not just the lvl scaling tho. All of those skills also enable high mobility playstyle (aka running circles) because its either proxy or dot. Which is why you can get away with low investment into defenses and even low dmg. Its still fine. You just have to run a few more circles around the enemies until they drop dead than you would have to, if you were dealing more dmg and simply not get hit while running circles. Thats what makes those skills so powerful early on. We are both stating the exact same thing. Melee simply doesnt have access to any of that. No proxy, no burst and no good DoT resulting in shitty mobility which leads to terrible dps uptime and thus more incoming dmg. Overcoming this requires significantly higher investment. You cant run circles, ergo you either have to delete mobs on sight or stack enough defense to ignore everything while slowly chipping away at enemies hp bars. Any skill, regardless whether its a spell or bow or melee or whatever archetype, that cant simply delete stuff on sight or enables running circles is going to be more expensive and way harder to play without farming currency first. This true for all sorts of skills and thus not a melee only issue. So you either have to have the inate dmg or if you cant have that, you need the inate avoidance provided for by high mobility or you will suffer. Its been like that for years. |
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They should broaden some of the strike skill weapon restrictions too, if I want to pestilent strike with a 2h that should be OK there are thematics at play but some of the flavour conflicts with good gameplay and choice.
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" I actually disagree here. I think they need to double down on the differences between weapons types. I think wielding axes should feel and play different from wielding swords. Sure, there are some minor differences now, but they are purely numerical - and do not translate to gameplay at all - other than a few skill restrictions. And as there are no real differences, I see no reason why anyone would want to use an axe over a sword. That said - if it was actually possible to find upgrades on the ground, it could feel bad to drop a very good axe while using a claw/dagger skill, but I can't really remember that happening to me in years, outside of early acts. Now, I understand that this is probably asking too much, when the game is as fast and crowded as it is. Still... Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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I'm up for them making the differences more pronounced but not on skill choice, anything that can only be used with claws and daggers is extremely meh already and most of the restrictions already got relaxed to a point they are arbitrary anyway.
Some of them make sense but I think strikes should be usable with just about everything, if somebody wants to heavy strike with a dagger go for it. I like flavour, but they've made flavour have too much of a cost so they should go for freedom instead. It isn't like bows or spells require specific weapon types lmao but maybe they should. Better not give them ideas. Last edited by Draegnarrr#2823 on Oct 2, 2022, 12:43:34 PM
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There will never be any positive progress (or "buffs") and consistency in development to a product when the one that creating and developing it vehemently refuse to put their own shoes into their costumer shoes. Only when GGG employee play the game the ways their players do, they will understand it or at least have insight about why their players scream about buffs / nerfs.
Melee issues aren't just about how much dps you can do, how big is your aoe, how fast you can clear. It also includes character progression, item progression, playstyle, which in most cases are arguably harder / takes more time than spell builds. And even when you did take your time and push through your struggles, at some point this thought will cross your mind : "if I play spell build instead, will I have easier time and more enjoyable experience ?" The issues aren't just about melee builds, or spell builds have it easier than melee. But rather the design of the game itself. However, GGG doesn't want to see past than , and be more than, numbers tinkerer. Last edited by bewilder2#0356 on Oct 2, 2022, 4:56:36 PM
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Melee is non existent for all* intent and purposes, even if you see lightning strike being the "top" melee strike skills around. It's just a nerfed up lightning arrow in a guise as melee...which tells us the glaring problem of the state of the game. There are too many punishing mechanics, hard to see degens, unleash on death mechanics that players have pay attention to stay alive.
In the other hand, you can play range or summoner build that have all the positives without dealing the negative traits of a melee build. Last edited by Molochmane#0328 on Oct 3, 2022, 5:25:59 PM
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" I've mentioned this last time, but if we take GGGs definition of melee then melee is plenty fine as it is. Lightning Strike is melee by their definition and it's been reighning supreme for leagues. Cyclone is also melee, and while most cyclone builds nowadays use CoC, it's still a melee skill enabling them and they play pretty much like a regular melee build, just the scaling is different. Then we have Flicker in a high position, Smite, GC Blade Flurry and Shield Crush. Obviously none of them fits the conventional "real melee" description but if you just leave that bullshit aside there are actually quite a few melee skills seeing lots of play. As for my personal experience on this matter, and i'll write this now fully knowing that i'll get flamed and made fun off afterwards but i don't care. Watch out, it's a wall of text. /Rant start
Spoiler
I currently have an EQ Jugg, a Dual Strike Ascendant, a Sweep Slayer, a GC Blade Flurry Berserker, an Earth Shatter Champion and another Ascendant using Molten Strike in terms of melee chars that i play a lot. Way more than my spell caster builds anyway. All of them can do 80% Delirium maps with sextants + scarabs, Simulacrums into 20s, all pinnacle bosses as well as the basic invitations in form of the Formed/Twisted. Regular red maps go without saying.
And they do all that without any crazy gear, the most expensive piece for most of them is probably their influence armor for power charge gen and maybe + crit. Weapons are on the level of 20C Paradoxica/Savior, Void Forge or some mediocre 4 stat are two hander rare in the 600-700 dps range. All of them (well except the Jugg who is a bleed based dot build at his core) do > 10 mio DPS, some of them even go up to 30+ mio DPS on gear that i could replicate in league for like 10 divines (yes, i play standard but the biggest loss my builds would have in league would probably be 10% damage from Lions Roar so there is that). I have yet to find a single off meta caster build that can do all of that on similar budget. So far i've found 2 casters that were superior to my melee builds. First exception was the Archmage Ball Lightning Hiero before it got destroyed. Second exception is my current RF/FT Inquisitor who is crazy tanky and does decent damage for a dot build, well no suprise, it's top of the meta. Same as BL Hiero used to be. The rest of my caster builds doesn't even reach the double digits in terms of DPS. I'd say on average they do half the damage with maybe 30% of the survivability of the melee builds. It's all good as long as i can utilize their range for higher damage uptime and to dodge stuff but in situations where that doesn't work because shit is spawning right on top of you, the builds all fall apart. Everything caster related that's not "top of the meta" is, from my experience, just as "bad" or worse than melee on a low/mid budget. People always say that casters can have the same defences as melee builds but when you make an Assassin/Sabo/Trickster, you are so far away from any decent defense node on the tree that it's just a pain to come up with anything that doesn't end as a 3k life class cannon. Why is Inquisitor the most played caster right now? He has Glancing Blows and lot's of block right in front of him, is close enough to the bottom left max res and armor nodes to feed MS and Melding and has an ascendancy with a massive defensive boon in form of regen for both life and ES. This is NOT a general trait for casters, it's just one ascendancy being strong. Pick another class and see what you get. Yes, you can get like a level 30 spell gem with +1 amu, 2 CIP and Skin of the Lords with Empower, but go and try making a build with some sort of survivability using that stuff. You'll probably have Spell Supression which is good for bosses but the moment you enter a Simulacrum without 50+ mio DPS you are dead meat. I do think there are issues with melee like, the amount of boxes you have to check before it starts feeling good (which is a big reason why melee sucks for a league start scenario)and the problem with finding time to attack despite the cluster fuck against the Feared and some of the uber bosses but if you lack in DPS then you probably just have a fucked up mess of a build on the level of Sidtherat. Damage uptime is a very real issue in the encounters i listed above, but against regular pinnacle bosses you can easily have 100% uptime while facetanking everything. It isn't particularly difficult to make melee builds that can eat up everything from Shaper Slam to Sirus "Die" beam. I know because i do that regularly. There is also the fact that melee got nothing but nerfs for two years straight which is fairly depressing and not a great incentive to start playing it. And if doing regular content doesn't satisfy you, you can just do what most spell skills would have to do at this point, invest and make some broken piece of shit that insta phases uber bosses. GC Blade Flurry can have upwards 500 mio DPS with heavy investment despite using a mere Paradoxica as a weapon. Statstacking/Omni can also produce crazy amounts of DPS with the right budget. If you go the armor stacking + transcendence route with some conversion on high budget you can actually face tank ubers while doing 100+ mio dps. Yes, melee doesn't have crazy outliers like poison Seismic Trap which can reach uber bosses viable levels of DPS for a divine, but even with that it still needs a top level streamer with perfect mechanics to do those fights so it's not like anyone here could replicate it even when using this specific outlier. So yeah, melee has it's issues but when done right it's plenty powerful. This isn't about "real melee" though. This is about GGG definition melee i.e has a melee tag. If you are hell bend on playing 2 handed heavy strike with zero strike range, or using maces with stun investment and RT or anything along those meme lines then yes, you're fucked. That stuff is trash and not very viable but there are plenty of non viable spell builds, surprisingly it's way easier to make a shit build compared to a good one in this game but i've heard that some people think this to be a good thing. /rant end Big # to Orbaal, exactly my thoughts. Last edited by Baharoth15#0429 on Oct 3, 2022, 4:28:00 AM
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lmao I dont think anyone actually thinks melee is fine. Unless you're talking about the offical poe discord users but theyre as bad as redditors when it comes to stuff.
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" As several people have mentioned in this thread: All well-built builds in Path of Exile are probably "OK" if you throw enough money at them, even Vigilant Strike. The main problem, as I see it, is the scaling - at least up until you get a very decent main hand weapon. I may be at fault here, but my definition of melee will always be 'to strike an enemy with a melee weapon', hinting towards actual weapon scaling. So in my snowflake mind, gem scaling or shield scaling will never fit my (personal) definition. Maybe I should just rename the thread to "Weapon Scaling Melee", to avoid confusion. But too much of the power, has been thrown at "stacking" builds, be that through attributes, accuracy or armor, which I think put way to much emphasis on your gear. You are playing standard - and have your profile set to private, so I can't really check out your definition of "not crazy gear", but I really hope you're talking about gear with non-legacy mods, 'easily' obtainable in every league, where the center of balance lies - and not gear you have spent months/years acquiring. I certainly hope we're not talking about explode chest, because they did wonders for melee. And I don't know how long it's been since you leveled a melee character from level 1 without leveling gear. So it's hard for me to put myself in your shoes. But I trust you're talking about your gear from a league perspective, and not a standard perspective - unless, of course, you have an alt account. But at the end of the day, you're allowed to think melee is fine. I just completely disagree with you from every perspective possible. Sure, in an endgame mapping scenario, most builds are "fine" as long as you throw some money at it. But is getting there as smooth as other builds? Is fighting the hardest bosses balanced towards other builds? Is crafting/finding/buying your main hand weapon balanced compared to other builds? Is the potential when it comes to speed, smoothness and non-clunkyness as good as other builds? Lastly, I don't know your definition of "lots of play", but a quick glance at PoE Ninja, tells me that there are exactly 3 melee skills above 1%: Lightning Strike (11%) A melee skill that has everything: Full screen coverage, a proxy element that deals damage while you move, a mechanic that lets you hit bosses twice (in addition to the proxy element) and it uses to VERY strong mechanics that LOTS of melee builds can't utilize: Trinity and Nightblade/elusive scaling. Cyclone (7%) Where most builds are CoC - and not scaling their damage based on their weapon. Flicker Strike (1%) I have chronic migraine, so I have never tried this skill, hence I have never sought knowledge about it. Spectral Helix (1%) Fairly strong, but fairly clunky skill. Probably the most recent attack skill, but does not have a melee tag, and can't be scaled as a melee skill. The next melee skill you say? Smite at 0.8%. And a quick glance of those builds, tell you an armor-stacking story, utilizing the FOTM way of reducing your lightning resistance. Or support oriented builds, using Smite to buff others. Statistics like this will always be just a guideline. But it does paint a pretty clear picture, at least for me. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile. Last edited by Phrazz#3529 on Oct 3, 2022, 6:03:22 AM
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