Melee Thread #97865

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Orbaal wrote:

There, you did it again.
The melee spells turns into pseudo melee because it doesnt fit your narrative while all trigger based spells still qualify as caster although those builds dont ever cast.

Okay, ignore the word pseudo, and both the argument and the point of what I said, even numbers and everything else, remain exactly the same.

I've got no idea why you're nitpicking on a word that has no impact on the meaning of the post.

Then again, it's not like you're bringing any argument to begin with, or do you want to argue that melee is in a good place, because lightning strike is good, and because it can be used as a trigger for spells, so there's no reason to make any changes to anything melee related?

He is simply asking you not to use double standards with your definitions, that's all. And i whole heartily agree with that. You can make any archetype look like shit by just warping the definition of what belongs to that archtype to suit your narrative. There is an argument to make that casters, by definition, have to chant/cast their spells before hand and chanting powerful spells usually takes some time. Therefore only Channeling spells are "true" casters. Here, now i can start pointing out that "true" casters in this game are way worse than melee and arguably the most shitty archetype in the game. Would i be right about that? Yes. Does it make sense to do it? No. Yet every single melee discussion i've seen here over the last years went that way to some extent.
Plus if everyone in a discussion uses his own definition of terms that differ from those set by the game, the discussion can't get anywhere because everyone is talking about different things. I do agree that POE's given defintion of "melee" is rather wide and doesn't fit with the general understanding of the term. But you've got to realize that the general understanding of the term is not suitable for this game or most games for that matter. With all the scaling options for weapon range and AOE you can argue on for years to just find a common ground as to how much of those things are allowed to still be melee, it's ridiculous honestly.

I don't think anyone here thinks melee is perfectly fine. Even i don't and i am probably the most hardcore melee addict here in the forum. But it's very much playable if you just gear accordingly, doesn't even have to be expensive. Is it always on the backfoot when leveling? Certainly, like any attack build. It's part of the identity, it was the same in D2. Like it or hate it but it is by design. Maybe the difference is bigger than it needs to be but this is GGG we are talking about.
They have literally made it their point to NOT balance their game. Skill balance isn't even on their agenda. They release balance manifestos and make changes simply to "turn the meta upside down" and to "keep things fresh". You will never have skill balance with a mindset like that even assuming it would be possible to achieve balance in POE if you tried. Balance is a state of equilibrium you are trying to reach. The moment it is reached you wouldn't have to change anything anymore and things would stay the same. That goes completely against GGGs principles. You can go and ask them for balance, you can complain about it's absence but all you really do with that is wasting your breath and time.

I won't tell you to like that or to stop complaining, i don't like it either afterall. All i will say is that you should try to adapt. Melee can work very well if done right. If you just give up before even trying because everyone here and on reddit is whining about it you just hurt yourself in the end. It's nowhere near as impossible and problematic as people make it out to be. At least not if you have some competence as a build creator.
It's certainly not a build choice for new players with low frustration tolerance. But then again, that kind of player probably won't last long in this game no matter what they pick.

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Orbaal wrote:

The reason why Im pointing this out and trying to drive this home is because I think this is the difference between players stating melee was fine and others stating melee is in shambles.
If you simply look at everything using a melee weapon to deal damage (and yes the does include steel skills, helix and for all I care even shield crush) then melee isnt that bad. But if you narrow it down to some skills you like or prefer for whatever reason and this selection of skills happens to be bad, well then melee is in the gutter.

Problem with this is its dealing in absolutes and it isn't, yes spells normally get listed as successful despite nobody on ninja actually casting them themselves however if you actually play them almost any spell performs substantially better at all levels than a majority of melee skills whether you are being very specific or very broad with definition.

Nobody really thinks melee is fine because the definition of fine is what ends up being the disagreement, not the actual state of melee. To some the fact you can clear everything with melee on SC means its Ok~ish but if you dig down into real cases with those players you'll find they agree on all the same drawbacks that the melee is dead players do. It is only things like acceptable death count, investment cost, speed/build tolerance that change their definition of OK not said mechanics.

The point is splitting hairs serves no purpose because the real meat of peoples arguments remain the same, yes its disingenuous to label casters as beacons of success based on poeninja but spells perform better than melee regardless. They are easier to build, easier to play, easier to scale and they get better defences due to those facts.

if you compare spells X to melee Y spells keeps coming out ontop until you get the worst limitation spells, like would I rather play incinerate or most melee? Tbh i'd rather play most melee and I think they perform better but most of the fire and forget non-channeling spells its not even a question. I should note I personally think bow attacks are nearly as bad, they have the advantage of range over melee but aside from that I think bow attacks are numerically very weak also.

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Xyel wrote:

I've got no idea why you're nitpicking on a word that has no impact on the meaning of the post.

Im nitpicking on this word because it highlights your mindset, your approach to the overarching issue.

You are arbitrarily ruling out skills or at the very least try to do that so you can narrow the definition of melee down to whatever you like best.
Those skills happen to be bad, therefore the entire archetype has to be bad.

Thats your point in a nutshell.

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Xyel wrote:

Then again, it's not like you're bringing any argument to begin with, or do you want to argue that melee is in a good place...

Whether melee is in a good place or not doesnt depend on PoE-Ninja numbers nor your preferences. Ninja doesnt show whats good, but whats popular. Clearly not the same thing.

Melee is overall in a rough spot. Im not denying it.
It always has been tho. The gap wasnt as big back in the days but it always existed. Back when I started in 2014 the exact same discussion was going on, except bow skills got the blame and not spells.

Around that time GGG started to introduce more and more melee skill designs with inate range and AoE to tackle the issue.
This should tell you all you need to know. This was GGGs melee fix.
Give it range and AoE - done.

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Xyel wrote:

... and because it can be used as a trigger for spells, so there's no reason to make any changes to anything melee related?

No thats not my point, never has been.
My point is that CoC builds are abusing broken mechanics. By definition those builds are going for crit dmg scaling. Also CDR to trigger CoC as often as possible and combine it with a fast hitting melee skill allowing movement while also hitting to deal dmg while on the move and avoid dmg because they are on the move.
I could mention other mechanics or synergies but that besides the point.
Its not about the spell being used at all, its everything else enabling this combo.

A perfect example for this behavior would be aura stackers. Are the active skill those setups are using to deal dmg broken or is it the aura stacking mechanic?
You know the answer just like I do.


My point is that if you do build around strong mechanics and back those up with strong synergies, you end up with a strong build. Doesnt have to be expensive, doenst have to be popular or meta. As long as you know what you are doing, it will work.
However if you start out with a mechanically weak skill like Heavy Strike or Lightning Tendrils, proceed to add weak mechanics like RT or MoM and use terrible itemization like 2H for both examples - well you do end up with a pissweak build and you will have a bad time.

Thats partially the games fault for sure but every player going down that path has to take some blame as well. Its not like this was new and you didnt know the result beforehand.

This is also why I pointed out (multiple times) that melee cant hold a candle to strong mechanics spells can abuse and melee cant. Like proxy, burst, dot, trigger and mobility.
Its no coincidence that most of the spells you listed do fall into those categories. Take those mechanics away and the narrative of spells being so much stronger than melee falls apart.

TL;DR: The powergap between melee and spells does exist. Its real.
But its mostly due to strong mechanics spells have available and melee does not.


@Baharot: Thanks for having my back

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Orbaal wrote:

TL;DR: The powergap between melee and spells does exist. Its real.
But its mostly due to strong mechanics spells have available and melee does not.

See i'm mostly in agreement with you Orbaal but right here this isn't the case, mechanics define what skills are meta and busted due to the way GGG rarely accommodate for area overlap, projectile stacking etc but base spells were superior to melee ignoring that already, then they got an across the board 50% buff to try and make it more desirable than casting via proxy.

The difference now is huge, even spells with undesirable mechanics like firestorm are a doddle to play vs most melee. Spells with no mechanics at all perform better the only ones worse are ones with mechanical failings.

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Orbaal wrote:

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Xyel wrote:

I've got no idea why you're nitpicking on a word that has no impact on the meaning of the post.

Im nitpicking on this word because it highlights your mindset, your approach to the overarching issue.

You are arbitrarily ruling out skills or at the very least try to do that so you can narrow the definition of melee down to whatever you like best.
Those skills happen to be bad, therefore the entire archetype has to be bad.

Thats your point in a nutshell.

You can always suggest a better approach. I've tried both - go by what's actually melee, and go by the mechanical tag. Both arrived at the same result, and you didn't like either approach.

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Orbaal wrote:

Whether melee is in a good place or not doesnt depend on PoE-Ninja numbers nor your preferences. Ninja doesnt show whats good, but whats popular. Clearly not the same thing.

Not really, because PoE Ninja is a pretty good sample (even if it wouldn't be the only available sample), as it shows character to which the player truly stuck to and played it enough to make it to the ladder.

So far, it has extremely well mirrored the general power levels of skills, and there's little reason to argue that this league is any different from all the previous ones.

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Orbaal wrote:

Melee is overall in a rough spot. Im not denying it.
It always has been tho. The gap wasnt as big back in the days but it always existed. Back when I started in 2014 the exact same discussion was going on, except bow skills got the blame and not spells.

IIRC in Legion, 3.9, cyclone was THE meta skill, and probably the most dominating skill ever in history of PoE.

Molten strike was THE meta for quite a league or two in 3.1X leagues (don't remember which ones).

Both of those are truly melee skills that are melee, play like melee, and I doubt anyone would argue they aren't melee.

So, not really, melee wasn't in nearly a shit spot as it's now a mere two-three years ago.

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Orbaal wrote:

No thats not my point, never has been.
My point is that CoC builds are abusing broken mechanics. By definition those builds are going for crit dmg scaling. Also CDR to trigger CoC as often as possible and combine it with a fast hitting melee skill allowing movement while also hitting to deal dmg while on the move and avoid dmg because they are on the move.
I could mention other mechanics or synergies but that besides the point.
Its not about the spell being used at all, its everything else enabling this combo.

A perfect example for this behavior would be aura stackers. Are the active skill those setups are using to deal dmg broken or is it the aura stacking mechanic?
You know the answer just like I do.


My point is that if you do build around strong mechanics and back those up with strong synergies, you end up with a strong build. Doesnt have to be expensive, doenst have to be popular or meta. As long as you know what you are doing, it will work.
However if you start out with a mechanically weak skill like Heavy Strike or Lightning Tendrils, proceed to add weak mechanics like RT or MoM and use terrible itemization like 2H for both examples - well you do end up with a pissweak build and you will have a bad time.

Thats partially the games fault for sure but every player going down that path has to take some blame as well. Its not like this was new and you didnt know the result beforehand.

This is also why I pointed out (multiple times) that melee cant hold a candle to strong mechanics spells can abuse and melee cant. Like proxy, burst, dot, trigger and mobility.
Its no coincidence that most of the spells you listed do fall into those categories. Take those mechanics away and the narrative of spells being so much stronger than melee falls apart.

TL;DR: The powergap between melee and spells does exist. Its real.
But its mostly due to strong mechanics spells have available and melee does not.


@Baharot: Thanks for having my back

The point I am trying to get across is that's coc is just one small subsample, that changes nothing on the trend.

If you ignore coc, all the other triggers too to remove builds like wardloop, also remove rf because you don't click to cast that and even though fire trap is a spell that plays exactly like a spell would, it has trap tag, so let's remove that, you still get left with a ton of builds, some of which are strongly meta (spark, lightning conduit, for example).

Even if you go all the way down the rabbit hole and pick a really shitty spell like lightning tendrils, it still has about the same amount of similarly viable characters as each of signature melee skills like lacerate, earthquake, dual strike, heavy strike, sweep, cleave, frost blades, and many more I didn't think of to check in the moment.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

The difference now is huge, even spells with undesirable mechanics like firestorm are a doddle to play vs most melee. Spells with no mechanics at all perform better the only ones worse are ones with mechanical failings.

And yet there is a whooping 1 person on POE Ninja playing Firestorm selfcast. That's 1/3 of the number of people playing Earthquake just to give a reference. You can do the same for most spells and reach similar results. Despite the 50% buff selfcast is still non existant and for good reason. As Inquisitor with Aegis and melding you might get away with playing selfcast trash spells but ascendancies with weak defenses will fall apart. Just try do it on an Assassin and then make a video of doing a Simulacrum past wave 15 and then say that again. I'd bet you'll fail hard. Being ranged is a suprisingly bad defensive layer in a lot of situations where shit is spawning right on top of you.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

...then they got an across the board 50% buff to try and make it more desirable than casting via proxy.

Yeah that one was outright silly and never stood a chance to promote selfcast.
No idea why they did that. Didnt make any sense to me back then and doesnt make any sense to me now.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Spells with no mechanics at all perform better the only ones worse are ones with mechanical failings.

Spells do have an easier time to scale dmg yes.

But the downside is that the northern section of the tree barely provides any meaningful form of defense. Hardly any sustain, no leech, no armor/evasion scaling etc.
The only relevant defense would be block or you simply go Inquis for infinite sustain. If you dont want any of those 2 defenses, you have to travel a LOT or watch your RIP counter going up quickly.

Melee or the southern section of the tree generally speaking does have far easier access to defenses. There is no denying this.
But there is also no denying that those defenses wont cut it in endgame.

Thanks to rampant multipliers for mob dmg scaling the most important upside melee has going is far weaker than it should be.
Melee should deal less dmg than spells but should be tankier to make up for the lack of dmg. GGG has not only failed to nail this for years but made it worse progressively by - amongst other things - diverting defensive power from the tree to gear, which is available for everyone.
It does take more effort for casters to utilize the melee defenses (for a lack of a better term) but once they got it, they do outperform melee.

So yeah, thats a massive issue right there.
This isnt the fault of spells tho. Its GGG failing to provide a strong and exclusive defensive identity for melee builds and they boxed themselves into this by gutting caster defenses like MoM while buffing Determination/Grace to the point where even casters have to resort to those defenses.

If casters couldnt stack armor/evasion, then Ghost Dancer, Divine Shield and Aegis builds would cease to exist and casters wouldnt outperform melee defensively anymore.
Again, I dont understand why GGG is doing this (other than shaking up the meta) but they keep doing it. I will also not pretend I knew the perfect answer to fix this because I dont.


But I will stand by what I said: Casters do have access to the one thing that should make melee shine - namely melee defenses. Meanwhile melee doesnt have access to all those strong dmg scaling mechanics I mentioned multiple times already.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

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Draegnarrr wrote:

The difference now is huge, even spells with undesirable mechanics like firestorm are a doddle to play vs most melee. Spells with no mechanics at all perform better the only ones worse are ones with mechanical failings.

And yet there is a whooping 1 person on POE Ninja playing Firestorm selfcast. That's 1/3 of the number of people playing Earthquake just to give a reference. You can do the same for most spells and reach similar results. Despite the 50% buff selfcast is still non existant and for good reason. As Inquisitor with Aegis and melding you might get away with playing selfcast trash spells but ascendancies with weak defenses will fall apart. Just try do it on an Assassin and then make a video of doing a Simulacrum past wave 15 and then say that again. I'd bet you'll fail hard. Being ranged is a suprisingly bad defensive layer in a lot of situations where shit is spawning right on top of you.

This is cherry picking, Sim is hard AF as anybody who isn't block + recovery on block or absolute chad defences quite frankly its the hardest content in the game once you get above 20 but its also a very narrow slice of content.

It isn't about what performs well in separate content pieces its about failings overall, melee isn't any better at sim its just as bad as bad selfcast spells as in you can't do it until you absolutely gib the screen.

That's the point, stack up scenarios and melee performs worse everytime you can't cherrypick where melee is better because there aren't any until you get to boneshatter, rage vortex types which like Orbaal is talking about have a mechanical crutch to compensate for the rest.

PoE ninja numbers are irrelevant in this case too because popularity isn't a balance criteria if you want to believe earthquake is a similar level to firestorm go play them because it isn't, EQ was dead the moment they "reworked" it like most of their reworks.

There is no way to prove this without players experiencing it themselves but if GGG cut out all the current overperformers you would get to everyone playing selfcast spells long before you got to everyone playing melee as the meta (again ignoring bonezone and rage vortex).

It isn't cherry picking as far as i am concerned, more like the opposite actually. If you say any selfcast spell build is way better than melee then it's only fair for me to assume this applies to all content, not just specific stuff right? This would include Simulacrum. Frankly, the only situation where i would agree with your assessment is when we limit it to alch and go red maps or even transmute and go and maybe Pinnacle bosses assuming you have good enough mechanics to satisfy the "just don't get hit" condition.

The moment you go heavy on breach/delirium on your atlas passives, do deli juiced maps, Simulacrum, 300+ delve or just heavily juiced red maps with a tons of shit you'll run into situations where your kill speed doesn't keep up anymore, shit gets close to you, it starts hitting you and there, at least from my experience with a dozen different off meta selfcast builds, the all mighty caster stuff is falling apart.

And no this doesn't apply to melee. My melee builds all have heavy mitigation with scaled armor, max res, fortify etc as well as life leech to recover 2-3k life per second from leech alone. Stuff that is much harder or impossible for most caster builds to replicate. Even if they do get swarmed and surrounded 9 times out of 10 they'll make it out alive. That's why they can make it well past wave 20 in Simus or run 80 and even 100% deli maps despite their kill speed not keeping up. If i do that with any sort of self cast build that isn't a melding aegis max block Inquisitor they fall apart.

I can provide an example case for anyone here to participate in if you like. I have an eye of winter Assassin that quite frankly is subpar atm. The build has 9k ES, 2k cloak, leech, Wicked Ward with faster recharge etc the classic HP sponge ES build and it fricking sucks. The moment it's clear (DPS is high enough to vaporize pinnacle bosses in seconds so it's not like he is lacking there) can no longer keep up with mob quantity it falls apart. I have been martering my brain on how to change the build to enable him to survive in situations where he gets swarmed but everytime, no matter how i look at it, it always ends up with max block with ES on block and as much mitigation as possible i.e Melding, which is incredibly awkward to pull of as an Assassin and would probably cost me 50% of my damage at least with all the traveling and block nodes i'd have to take.

If you, or anyone here has a great idea how to get this build even remotely close to my melees in overall performance, please tell me. I do consider the possibility that i am just missing something but in my experience, that whole caster outperform melee sentiment only applies if you go full on meta by utilizing all the broken mechanics Orbaal has mentioned. Get away from that and the scale becomes even or even tips towards melee.