Melee bad - Feels good and bad to have devs confirm it

Because those "best players" dont build tanks, they build zoom zoom builds. Its totally possible to "facetank" T17 on melee build. Whether that build can do them in decent time for it to be even worth is another story. He never said how long it takes him to finish one T17. Maybe he plays Quin build that is immortal but with ZDPS.

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Aynix wrote:

Because those "best players" dont build tanks, they build zoom zoom builds. Its totally possible to "facetank" T17 on melee build. Whether that build can do them in decent time for it to be even worth is another story. He never said how long it takes him to finish one T17. Maybe he plays Quin build that is immortal but with ZDPS.

The build has 23 mio dps so it's not exactly ZDPS but it's Shield Crush so it's certainly not zoom zoom. Then again, zoom zoom would be useless with my current level of game performance so no real loss there.

Otherwise your pretty much on point. People like Mathil or Ben don't play defensive builds, why would they with that level of mechanical skills? They can just dodge everything. I can't and honestly, i don't want to. Dancing around my opponents dodging their every attack isn't my idea of a melee fighter. Hence i push damage until a level i feel comfortable with (20-30 mio without flasks typically) and then throw the rest on defense. The results differ quite a bit depending on ascendancy/build but that's the general idea.

@valkaneer i've had my profile public for years so you had plenty of chances to look at it. I can post a POB later on if you really wanna know but we both know you don't so..

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What I don't get though, is why Johnathan says melee is bad, but then one of the hardest nerfs to melee since the block Nerf and Vaal Ground Slam nerf was the nerf to Warcries this very league.

Because they are lying. If they really thought melee was a problem they wouldn't have spend the last 5 years nerfing it almost every single patch. They say that now to appease the community, maybe we'll even get some new vaal skills next patch like the last time we got "melee buffs" and that's going to be it. Anyone expecting serious buffs next league is up for a big disappointment and clearly sniffs way too much hopium/copium. Besides, Jonathan is the game director of POE2, he has no say when it comes to POE1 and his knowledge on POE1 matters isn't the best either. Might as well ignore anything he says about it.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

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Izrakhan wrote:

I'll bite.

I've played the game since warrior. So 2013? Something like that.

I play melee almost exclusively every league. Getting immunity to elemental ailments, bleeds, corrupted blood and high phys reduction is necessary. I also play SSFHC a lot.

I have seen some of my characters get destroyed even during campaign runs. This league I lost a jugg in A10. With 6 endurance charges, 80% phys reduction, 80% ele reduction. He was one shot by Avarius's cleave attack.

That's just one example. I've seen the same thing happen to Glads, Melee Chief, Berserker, etc.

The Jugg died because he was a super slow EQ build. That was intentional to max the hit and the aftershock. He was slow enough that the A10 boss had enough time to cleave him on his way out. Dead in one shot.

So you say melee is fine but you set your profile to private. Mine is public. I've no problem with others looking at my builds to back up my statements.

Ok i'll point out the obvious again, this game is NOT balanced around SSFHC.

This is a useless point. SSFHC is a supported game mode.

If anything SSFHC tests the game at every level seeing how critical it is to not die and not lose gear. Players have to go out of their way to know the game mechanically and what stats they need.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

That's not the mode balance decisions are based on, it's an additional "challenge" that players can take if they want to.

The challenge is to not die. You build a character to minimize the potential of that event. People who play SSFHC tend to know the game better than people who play normie PoE. I don't get where this preaching comes from.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

You losing a character in ssfhc is sad and all but it's part of the HC gameplay loop you decided on. It wouldn't even be an issue if you played the main game mode and by no means does it mean or prove that you can't take melee builds to 100 in ssfhc, there are hundreds or thousands of people who have done that already.
With how out of whack monster damage can get in this game from stacking mods and how basically every defense mechanic has at least one counter mechanic that nullifies it you will never be truly immortal in this game, there is always that one mod combination that can kill you. This game just isn't balanced around HC which is why HC players typically play by tiptoeing around anything that might even be remotely dangerous.

You're not talking about maps here. It's A10 campaign. The Jugg in question had his ascendancy, 3.5k life, had six endurance charges, 81% phys and 81% ele res. I built him to not die seeing his melee attack speed was so slow. That was the entire point. He died in one cleave attack.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

All that being said, there is a large difference between "I get oneshot every 100 maps by some random bullshit combination" and "I need 6 portals everytime there are porcupines in a map". OP belongs to the latter group. Last league he was complaining how porcupines are the bane of melee while playing a viper strike build with like 20k ehp and sub 5 mio dps that used both a mageblood and kalandras touch. 200+ divines in a build and he still died to porcupines and blamed the game for it.

That's fine. The question as always is how melee adapts and covers enough gear slots and passive nodes to be competent at melee. The answer of course is you're never safe. So why play melee? When you can play a caster, never be in melee range and never be unsafe?

That isn't to say ranged can't die. We know they do. But they usually misstep to wind up in melee proximity. That's the truth. That Jugg died coming out of his slow attack speed eating a cleave attack. If you mean to tell me that's avoidable and little different than ranged you're clueless.

It barely can be called "supported". It was added solely because bunch of people cried they want such mode so GGG added it for them and thats it.
Game will NEVER be balanced around it.

unpopular opinion but ranged should always be weaker than melee. because there is more inherent risk for someone to be in melee range than someone at ranged.

that's where POE fails. you have no downside as ranged where with melee you have to be within melee ranged.

"Supported game mode"... they introduced SSF as a batch of honor for players who demanded it. It's literally just SC trade without trade aka massive selfgimping. There is nothing "supported" about it. It's just there. Ruthless get's actual support.

81% phys mitigation for real or 81% phys mitigation according to character sheet? There is a big difference here. I don't know the situation back then and it's mood talking about it but fact is plenty of people make it out of the campaign and all the way to level 100 in ssfhc using melee. If you can't do that then that's on you not on melee.
Besides, i am willing to bet you've ripped dozens of ranged characters during the campaign, heck it even happens to top streamers sometimes. That's just how HC works. Your onetime experience is completely irrelevant to the topic.

No matter what you play in this game you'll never be "100% safe". One misstep with range and you're dead, get hit by off screen projectiles you can't react to and you are dead, overlook a ground degen and you are dead.
Doesn't change the fact that you can do the toughest content in the game deathless on melee like 99% of the time as long as you know what you are doing. That 1% will always be there and it's always there even on ranged meta builds so what's your point?
If you build your defenses properly you don't need distance and mechanics to stay alive regardless of whether the build uses a melee gem or a spell/ranged gem.
The big difference between ranged and melee is that ranged can somewhat get away with making zhp shit builds by kiting and using COD Portal. Melee can't.

I have one 99lvl and one 100. Both are melee. I almost never level caster/ranged characters past 95-96 because you die so many times to some random things in "juiced maps". Being ranged is simillar defense as evasion. You dont get hit... untill you do, and then you just die.

Yeah i feel similar. I actually have a tornado shot build as well as a bunch of "meta" caster builds and honestly i hate most of them. No matter how great the clearspeed might be getting instagibbed constantly just isn't fun and if i push their defenses to a proper level i might as well play melee because their supposed "damage advantage" goes up in smoke at that point.

The only "casters" i've played that i somewhat enjoyed are my RF inquisitor and my DD occultist. Both of which use max res + armor + Aegis to be immortal in maps. One of my criterias for a "good build" is "can i go afk during mapping without dying" and that's just not happening with like 90% of the meta stuff.

@Baharoth You don't appear to be playing this league and your profile and characters are set to private. How long since you last played? Why don't you show us your builds?

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Doesn't really change the fact that 90% of the problems people in this forum are having with melee including you come from bad builds and not whatever problems melee has.

That's not the case at all. GGG has removed a lot of defensive layers over the years and added A LOT more checkboxes. Granted, that they also added new good defensive layers, but it's somewhat pointless when mobs got way more health and damage than they did before, with new buffs/debuffs/ailments, and what they added did not make up for what was lost. They also made several significant mechanical changes which never got remedied. The passive tree used to have sources of % PDR and % reduced Damage taken, you know. Fortify used to be additive and much more effective (though needed proper investment). Just to name a few.

Cyclone was the go-to melee skill for a long time for a reason. Now it's all flat damage scaling skills with built-in or added AoE components because the base damage across the board sucks ass - and Support Gem nerfs added to that - and is only "fixed" with the right skills and/or a ton of currency. Crit is vastly OP to non-crit and we still have Accuracy in the game for some reason; meanwhile, any spell caster can just spam to their heart's content. Trauma is popular and dominating the charts for a reason. Juggernaut, too.

Turns out, if you give people a skill that scales really well with defense and then give a class with an already convenient mechanic designed around it a new mechanical buff to make investing into an OP mechanic even more worthwhile, people will abuse that because there's no proper alternative.

There's also a reason why a Champion will feel much stronger than a Juggernaut early on and then lose on the top-end. Damage scaling is crazy and flat damage reduction is king. That's why full Damage taken as Fire, when properly built, can stand in basically everything. And it's technically not that hard to build; except only the top 0.1% can actually afford it.

Last Epoch players suffer from this same delusion with the Ward mechanic being "not OP at all" while almost every build abuses it to such great extent that pretty much every encounter is trivial. People will just abuse what can be abused. That doesn't make such edge cases the standard for what is good design. They are terrible outliers that just further highlight the problems.

It's not difficult to make a tanky melee character per sé. It's just simply a waste of time. There are better builds that can use the same mechanics. You simply have no mechanical advantage as melee, not even against Proximity Shields, lol.

Melee will never be as good as any spell caster, ranged or proxy build as long as they are on equal footing with no mechanical advantage. Melee is always in the thick of the fight - and most melee skills are stationary - and thus inherently needs more defense or straight up a lot of front-loaded damage to overcome the simplest of obstacles: avoiding "getting hit". Because in PoE, "getting hit" means quite something else than in your typical ARPG. There's no "soft cap" mechanics (or whatever it's called) that prevent you from getting perma-frozen/-stunned, or "proximity" mechanics that scale damage taken based on how close to/far away from the enemy you are. It all requires additional investment.

DoT builds or builds that can deal damage while moving will always have the upper hand due to their innate mechanical advantage. This is especially noticeable when you start fighting tough enemies with high ES/Recovery with high damage spikes that you need to avoid; as melee, you will find yourself to be fighting their Recovery more than the actual enemy itself. DoTs will just keep that pool from topping off.

Phasing on a mobile build is many times more effective than on a standard melee build, due to the advantage of being able to walk through enemies, that you can't really make use of when you need to be stationary and in front of the enemy to deal damage. That's also another thing that makes Cyclone good on a mechanical level; 360° coverage and no body blocking. Turns out, being able to bypass enemy models is a fucking huge advantage. I even notice it on my CWDT spammer; having a Quartz flask adds quite a lot of extra safety. Tentacle Miscreations being a prime example.

They removed multi-mod crafting in patch 3.9, which was the go-to tool for easy "ok" crafting of items, in favor of far more expensive and more randomized crafting to act as timesinks. And don't even start how there's so many new options; that's precisely the point: the mod pool also got vastly dilluted. However, spell builds scale on their own and can hit 100% of the time. Don't get me wrong, I don't want spells to need Accuracy, I want melee to be able to hit without having to scale Accuracy. Last Epoch solves this somewhat well with its "Dodge Rating" mechanic.

What PoE lacks is proper fluid melee combat and a mechanical advantage for characters using melee skills, and overall less insane stacking of defensive and Recovery mods on enemies. Just look at how most melee skills play in general; so generic you might as well relabel them all as "jump to pack, screen go poof, jump to next pack" skills. However, that's a flaw within the game design, being far too unengaging in combat.

However, they pushed themselves into a corner a long time ago; their flexible and complex game design makes this really difficult to "fix" because: just look at old Fortify and why they chose to nerf it. It was abused by non-melee builds. On top of that, their moment-to-moment gameplay design, timed rewards and gated endgame demands a certain playstyle.

PoE is a "go big or go home" game with nothing inbetween. Just look at T17 maps and their design; it tells you everything you need to know.