Neon asked for a brief summery of melee's biggest problems w/ simple suggetions

4) stun. ruthless support. after 4 seconds without attacking, next hit you do is ruthless. that way stun becomes a way of opening a dps window. and would match the 4 sec invulnerabilty of bosses. if you cant garantee a ruthless hit, this ruthless stun bonus feels useless.

4 bis) if you dont want people to stun bosses, even though stun is a loss of dps in a game where people routinely phase bosses, remove stun. this is a bait, a complete waste of time, a pure dead end. so chose if you want it or not. and if no, remove. dont waste people's time.

4 ter) very hard to stun right now without really going through all the stun wiki. so this isnt really a mechanic during campaign. making maces a bait. even with the stun supp, you wont stun the boss enough and you ll get one less supp gem. So below last tier of maces, make them do more TOTAL DPS than axes but at the cost of lower attack speed and remove the stun implicits, put damage implicits. then for maps, depending on your stance on stun, i think i would buff reduced stun threshold one way or the other. I felt that you really really have to look for all pob places to be able to stun and not destroy your damage making it a very memey mechanic.


5) this one is less thought solution.
all staff, below the last tier of staves do 0 attack damage. 20% attack block is completely useless in campaign and staff nodes are crit, so useless early on. attack staff in campaign is one stupid bait. so remove entirely.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

What I think melee needs are immutable characteristics baked into weapons and skills exclusively.

Make attack skills grant significant damage reduction, fortify, give buffs that greatly reduce boss slam damage. Give melee some massive tank benefits that can't be obtained by any other archetype.

They have to literally jump into the thick of danger, they should be given the strongest defensive buffs in the game.

^ Bingo.

Melee will never be winning area damage or speed running contests. Their draw should be massive survivability.

Part of this is a long-running design decision/problem/defect - PoE always reaches a point where the game is a 1-shot fest - so melee just lags behind with no upside.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

"

alhazred70 wrote:

7. Fortify: inconsistent defense with lots of passive tree opportunity cost. Terrible for poison, bleed ignite cyclone and many others.

solution: melee skills give 5 fortify per hit up to 20 fortify, active spell skills remove all fortify.

That will mean every movementskill or guardskill activation will remove fortify, you sure that's a good idea?

Just need better tagging, Not really a problem.


Remove generic "spell" tag or ad "Active" or "offensive" spell tag to all actual spells that we care to differentiate. Honestly this should have been done long ago. Its a design space issue to have too many things just generically classified as "spells"

Like why is the spell tag on guard skills? They removed it from warcrys. Gruthkul's Pelt might become semi useful and less of a meme item.

The simple fact that GGG classifies a guard or a Herald as the same thing as Penance Brand is the actual problem here. Better tagging allows more design space. Differentiating between a Movement melee skill and a damaging melee skill would get rid of the dumb Exerted leap slam issue as well.

its a small part of a bigger issue really.

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Sabranic_SilverDeth wrote:

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

What I think melee needs are immutable characteristics baked into weapons and skills exclusively.

Make attack skills grant significant damage reduction, fortify, give buffs that greatly reduce boss slam damage. Give melee some massive tank benefits that can't be obtained by any other archetype.

They have to literally jump into the thick of danger, they should be given the strongest defensive buffs in the game.

^ Bingo.

Melee will never be winning area damage or speed running contests. Their draw should be massive survivability.

Part of this is a long-running design decision/problem/defect - PoE always reaches a point where the game is a 1-shot fest - so melee just lags behind with no upside.

I very much agree. "how do you make melee relivant in a game this fast" well this is how.

When melee (even tanky melee) currently gets bitch slapped instantly just like any 4k life Mathil build does but without the strong DPS it often gets smacked down more often; then there's literally no reason to bother. This is a larger problem of POE having terrible time to Death design of course.

People were playing melee when we had divergent trauma and back when we had lighting strike berserker. they were nerfed. and then they shrugged their shoulders saying they didn't know what was wrong with melee and how to fix it.

give us divergent trauma effect and phantasmal ancestral protector effects back if they're not going to fix totems. its a quick easy supplement until they find out a true fix. The stuff was already in the game, we loved it, we played it. then..

They took it away.....

"

The stuff was already in the game, we loved it, we played it. then..

Here is how it goes now:

GGG: "k we're going to significantly nerf melee ability X"
Melee Players: "the new version of X feels weak and underpowered"
GGG: "k we need a simple suggestion of how to make it feel better"
Melee Players: "can't you just undo the nerfs/changes to X?"
GGG: "nope that's too complicated can't do that sorry, anything else?"
Melee Players: "but there is nothing simpler"
GGG: "nope not happening, how about we remove instant warcries instead? would you like that?"

Don't fall for the BS, melee will be even more dead in necropolis and further beyond into POE2

I mean I'm not on board with the whole cynical "GGG ruins melee out of spite" vibes but I honeslty can';t blame anyone at this point, after 12 years of APPEARING to very much hate melee and doing unimaginably bad choices over and over and over and over...

Like seriously I couldn't imagine 5 years ago that they would "revamp melee" actually make it worse, then immediately on Beaclast say:

"we know melee needs more work and this revamp is not the end"

then then spend like 5 years doing almost nothing except further nerfing it and making its QoL objectively worse OVER AND OVER. Proxy nerfing it by buffing spells and ranged.

Maybe Neon can be the savour of Melee... the guy who could do it where everyone else failed.

I mean he is literally the first GGG dev to ever explicitly ask for problems and solutions without "20,000 word essays"

Sorry Neon if I'm passive aggressive or just aggressive its been over a decade of actions speaking loud in the best ARPG game with the worst melee combat.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

People were playing melee when we had divergent trauma and back when we had lighting strike berserker. they were nerfed. and then they shrugged their shoulders saying they didn't know what was wrong with melee and how to fix it.

give us divergent trauma effect and phantasmal ancestral protector effects back if they're not going to fix totems. its a quick easy supplement until they find out a true fix. The stuff was already in the game, we loved it, we played it. then..

They took it away.....

I mean you and most of the other participants in this topic were complaining about how bad melee is even during lightning strike and divergent trauma era so it's not like giving those back would solve anything now would it?

There is no point buffing a skill or two, unless GGG gives every melee gem 5 times the base damage they currently have people won't shut up and some of them probably won't shut up even then because "meeehhh stacking is still better than weapon scaling melee baaaaaaddd".

Maybe Mark will actually make an effort to improve melee. Though i highly doubt it at this point. It's just going to end in more nerfs if they touch anything. But actually fixing it in the eye of this community is Mission Impossible³

Maybe its perceived as mission impossible because they've just constantly failed in ways that are measurable and pretty easy to point at?

Repeatedly doing the opposite of what would be mechanically sensible over and over has that effect sometimes.

About melee accuaracy, I have an idea that would be help and it's definitely a nerf and even more brutal especially for evasion character that play melee.

Rework evasion against melee a bit like spell suppression that evaded melee attack still hit but deal a lot less damage and damage reduction from evaded hit might be depend on hit chance of that melee attack (for example, 30% hit chance is dealing 30% damage for evaded hit), and evaded melee hit cannot be crit (because it doesn't hit vital organ)

So melee can still hit even with low accuracy but it's also make uber slam always hit you if you don't get away.