Melee Thread #97865

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Baharoth15 wrote:

...eye of winter Assassin ...The moment it's clear (DPS is high enough to vaporize pinnacle bosses in seconds so it's not like he is lacking there) with mob quantity it falls apart.

How much pierce/chain are you running?

I've tried both chain and fork support, neither works to a satisfying degree. I guess i could try adding pierce to the gloves and maybe anoint piecing shots but other than that there isn't much in terms of options available.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

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.

So as soon as you do extremely defensive focused content the characters you spend more on defence for do better.

Its cherry picking you are highlighting the tiny amount of content where DPS doesn't automatically carry you then saying defences carry you, it has nothing to do with melee because melee doesn't get defences for free they are only a tiny bit cheaper than they are for casters which is then yielded back due to the mechanical requirements melee requires to function.

Yes Shadow has the hardest time with this but as you delete pinnacle bosses have you considered that you could just drop that 50% damage and become tanky enough?

Sim characters only come in three types, invulnerable to hits below X, delete everything and I don't get hit because I kite none of them have anything for or against being melee or a caster and the content is setup to overpower anything else.

Link me some pobs for some great sim melee they are all going to have a very common theme.

Edit: and my point on the popularity angle, Shockwave is the most popular melee skill after LS and Flickerstrike its even above the best actual "strike" boneshatter. Selfcast spells are still vastly more "popular" even if you cut out the meta shit.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I've tried both chain and fork support, neither works to a satisfying degree. I guess i could try adding pierce to the gloves and maybe anoint piecing shots but other than that there isn't much in terms of options available.

Depending on what you're doing with boots, Voidwalker might be the easiest way to get/test pierce.

And yeah, getting clear from a support gem isn't great because it sacrifices a lot of damage. Pathing around piercing shots might work, but depends on where your tree is at.

This isn't a tiny amount of content as far as i am concerned. Limiting your perspective to alch and go red maps and below is far more cherry picking from my perspective.

And yes it isn't strictly about melee vs caster, it's about defense vs glass cannon. But the thing is, most casters do end up being glass cannons because the defensive options available for them are incredibly limited.
Obviously i can just go the aegis, melding max block route on every single build. But at that point i have to seriously ask myself why to even play ascendancies other than Inquisitor because i am just gimping myself that way.

I currently have 2 caster builds with that set up and yes, the Inquisitor vastly outperforms my melee builds, top notch dot gem scaling along with a culmination of the most broken defense mechanics available. It's meta for a reason. But remove the busted defense mechanics he is abusing and you are left with nothing because there is literally no alternative in terms of items/mechanics.

Melee has a much wider variety of options available. None of them compare to the top meta shit but they are good enough most of the time.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

This isn't a tiny amount of content as far as i am concerned. Limiting your perspective to alch and go red maps and below is far more cherry picking from my perspective.

And yes it isn't strictly about melee vs caster, it's about defense vs glass cannon. But the thing is, most casters do end up being glass cannons because the defensive options available for them are incredibly limited.
Obviously i can just go the aegis, melding max block route on every single build. But at that point i have to seriously ask myself why to even play ascendancies other than Inquisitor because i am just gimping myself that way.

I currently have 2 caster builds with that set up and yes, the Inquisitor vastly outperforms my melee builds, top notch dot gem scaling along with a culmination of the most broken defense mechanics available. It's meta for a reason. But remove the busted defense mechanics he is abusing and you are left with nothing because there is literally no alternative in terms of items/mechanics.

Melee has a much wider variety of options available. None of them compare to the top meta shit but they are good enough most of the time.

Yeah, armor + es + aegis is the strongest defense archetype. Inq is busted as hell.

From the defense chassis a build can run, afaik there's:
1) Armor + es + block + aegis
2) Armor + divine flesh + huge chaos res + phys to elemental conversion for phys
3) evasion + suppression + es + ghost dance + lethe shade (that's the right/top-right hand side of tree defensive chassis, and it's really good, though not at Aegis level)
4) armor + evasion stack

And then subsets of these, where often, having less than a full setup is about as effective as having no defenses at all, which is why quite a few builds go full glasscannon, maybe save for spell suppression because that one is great even by itself at bosses.

No casters go glass cannon because its vastly easier for the 99% of content you aren't cherry picking :p, you should actually lay out the content types available then decide how much defence you need for them to be functional - there is an absolute cavern between almost all content and Sim/Delirium 100, even Uber pinnacles require a fraction of the D if you are playing the most popular game mode.

You love PoE ninja go look, look at all those wonderful glass cannons so many of them doing so much damage because why do anything else?

Melee needs considerable help I don't know why you are arguing against it that doesn't have to be exclusive with more defensive options but my whole point in posting is while I don't agree with Xyel's stance its in the right direction and I care about results not nitpicking.

Can I clear everything on SC as strikes? Yes most likely it probably won't even cost that much, does that mean its ok? No because it could be better, more fun more parity more options. I played melee when it had all those and i've played melee while it lost them all of them too.

Also F for earthquake, why did they remove your helm enchant.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

You love PoE ninja go look, look at all those wonderful glass cannons so many of them doing so much damage because why do anything else?

Because getting 100 mio + DPS isn't just about having a + 1 amulet and wand you know? Most of those POE Ninja builds are 3k life glass cannons with Mageblood and ungodly dps. Obviously that works but it's not something most people including me can replicate. So i am looking for options that allow me to go beyond red maps while not having that stuff. And i end up with a melee build every time i try because for some reason, they always work while the off meta caster builds you hold so highly do not. And i wonder where that difference in perspective and experience is coming from.

If you say those builds are only great until alch and go red maps then we can stop arguing here because then we actually agree. If you say they can do more then go and show me an example that doesn't cost 100+ divines and is off meta. I am not even expecting you to beat uber bosses or wave 30 simu like people usually demand from me to prove that melee is viable. Wave 25, 300+ delve, 80% deli or whatever is fine by me.

You say melee needs help. And it does to an extent but 2 of the 3 big issues aren't even melee issues. One is that GGG needs to fix their endgame boss encounters i.e ubers to not make them pure DPS checks which is an issue for all builds with low dps and maybe provide some vendor recipes for easy weapon crafting during the campaign which is a general attack skill issue. If there is an actual melee only issue it would be dependence on Totems and Panopticon for damage.

And as far as cherry picking goes, this whole topic here was started based on Mathil saying Cleave isn't good for Ubers and you had no qualms with that. So arguing melee is bad because it struggles with ubers is fine. But if i point out caster issues with Simulacrum and half a dozen other things you say i am cherry picking. The constant double standards applied by the pro spell faction are honestly pissing me off.

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Phrazz wrote:

I'm not really asking for them to make melee more melee. That ship has sailed, and will probably keep on sailing. What I'm asking, is for them to make their 'definition' of melee viable/competitive/good. Shouldn't it actually be easier for them to balance melee, when they define it as they see fit?

And no, plaguefear is not right. First of all, they didn't remove the splash damage from the Dual Strike threshold jewel - they just made it Maces only, as far as I know. He's also wrong when claiming spells do not need non-damage supports, because there are several spells that 'need' non-damage supports like Multiple Projectiles, Spell Cascade etc.

But he may be right in the fact that they (GGG) do not want melee to be good, for some strange reason. I would use a much more hostile word than "strange" here, but my post would just disappear - with an over-generic message appearing in my inbox.

More or less a friendly reply given my delay has meant others have sort of picked up the thread (all puns intended), but I believe we're heading towards a fairly circular argument here, spinning from 'what is melee in PoE?' to 'melee in PoE is whatever GGG want it to be', then swinging by the driving query 'then why can't they fix it if they get to define it?' through to what I think is the final stop but is probably just the first question revisited: 'because GGG can't figure out what melee should be in PoE; they themselves are asking, "what is melee in PoE?"'

There are, of course, several true answers to that last one if we take GGG's stance. First and foremost, whatever has the 'melee' tag. Okay. Very practical, thank you very much. I'd call that the Mark1 response, because from there we can proceed to give any number of answers in his typically encyclopædic fashion. I feel like that's probably the best place to stop from a player's perspective: accept whatever they call melee and work with that.

Needless to say, what I feel would be best and what I can actually do are two very different things!

But if we dig much deeper, too many inconsistencies and 'strange' (to use your delightful word for it) decisions become apparent. I don't think 'melee' in its current state (or from my perspective, where it was in AN, which was my last experience with the game) is a true carryover from where it was in beta; for better or worse, it has definitely evolved. It has not been neglected or left behind so much as seemingly reluctantly brought along to the party, like an annoying, incessant younger sibling who will DEFINITELY tell your parents if you sneak a beer. It was kind of cute and charming a handful of years ago but now you just sort of wish it would get its shit together and leave you alone. Then again, by this analogy/simile, you [Path of Exile 2022] are a selfish, angsty teenager rampaging through a too-fast, too-slow life on a mix of hormones and liberally-prescribed amphetamines so hey, not like you're in any position to try to understand anything other than your own incredibly complex and yet oddly naïve existence.

Which is all to say, when they've got so much else going on, I just don't think 'defining melee' is much of a priority. It's important to some players, but probably not enough to make it then important to GGG (read: it is not in 'their community's' [read: popular streamers'] best interest to kick that hornet's nest). And for those mere players to whom melee is a priority, there are always (I keep saying it, and you don't like to hear it, but it's the best answer I got) other games by devs who DO care about what 'melee' is and DO make it a priority. Or, at the very least, have figured out how to be nice to it rather than telling it to go eat some cake or take a walk or something I promise we won't be here long I just want to go talk to my friends...

Five hours later, the kid sib's missing, you're wasted, the cops are on the way and the audience are like, 'well shit, DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING' and change the channel to something a little less fucking predictable. Or they're invested enough to stick it out...

Its because you need to stand beside AN mobs and trade hits