What makes melee bad

nah sorry..agree to disagree. There are many situations where melee get`s borderline insane endgame-wise. Sure my gear isn`t the best in the world, but far from beeing the worst either. All my end-map melee builds (not LS or GS with lots of inc-aoe) were just a masochistic expierience. Your doing fine till you hit the 70s on maplvl and alch that shit.

That beeing said, you got a point: ranged is pretty much care-free (besides reflect and Flicker). All telegraphed, hard hitting attacks just target melee-range, all "bad" mob-mods like (L/G)MP just hurt when ur close...

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What makes melee bad?

GGG makes melee bad. Because they are still clueless about balancing melee and close combat in a hardcore always-online ARPG.

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Veracocha wrote:

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What makes melee bad?

GGG makes melee bad. Because they are still clueless about balancing melee and close combat in a hardcore always-online ARPG.

Umm excuse me, but if i can get a CI melee to merciless HC and die to desync, i dont think the issue is balance, it is desync..

Armor really sucks. I can face tank Piety easily. I don't need to kill her portals or anything. I just click and hold heavy strike. Now, getting to her is another story. I die at least 5 times getting though those titty bitches and the whip sluts. Ridiculous to try and kill them with an axe and not die. Then you have the blue mobs with multiple projectiles. I keep my xp at zero. No point worrying about that garbage.

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CrunchMcPunch wrote:

Armor really sucks. I can face tank Piety easily. I don't need to kill her portals or anything. I just click and hold heavy strike. Now, getting to her is another story. I die at least 5 times getting though those titty bitches and the whip sluts. Ridiculous to try and kill them with an axe and not die. Then you have the blue mobs with multiple projectiles. I keep my xp at zero. No point worrying about that garbage.

Only piety's fire form hits for physical damage afaik and it won't even be much, you ever tried partying for lunaris ?

Issues with melee:




Melee take more damage, the question is how and why?

It is important to understand the various factors that play a role here. One has to look at the differences between melee and ranges, has to look at the game mechanics and has to look at the in game content.

1. Melee fight in melee range and get hit more often, ranged do not.

2. Melee have to close the distance toward the mobs, giving ranged enemies time to attack, while dealing no damage in return.
2.1 Pretty much all ranged mobs have a kiting mechanic, which increases travel distance for melee characters. Increasing damage output downtime. Not killing the enemy, means the enemy is doing damage to you. Not mentioning annoying bosses such as piety, who just warp away.

3. Melee agro more mobs as they close in on packs. Ranged have the luxury to fight the edge of the screen, this leaves many mobs not agroed. Melee by progressing further into the map, will agro more enemies compared to ranged classes.

4. Melee suffer more from Puncture than ranged classes. Denying them the ability to deal with further threads in mob packs. A ranged character can stand still and hit all mobs still, a ranged character in general will avoid most puncture mobs in the game.

5. Melee suffer from certain mobs that deal more damage when the player is nearby. Mob mechanics in PoE make melee suffer extra, beyond the old ARPG "being in melee range."
5.1 Such as freezing pulse mobs in crematorium.
5.2 Shotgun mechanics. Melee characters that face multiple projectile mobs get hit by all projectiles when facing such mobs, receiving considerable damage. The shotgun effect.
5.3 Spark also has a sort of "shotgun" effect, in that spark enemies get more hits off on melee characters.
5.4 Skeleton totem and minions can easily enclose melee, dealing extra damage, it also makes it hard to get to the intended target (mandatory movement skill).
5.5 Several melee mobs are the hardest hitting enemies within the game.
5.6 Molten shell enemies?
5.7 Vaal melee slam, most deadly Vaal attack? Why when the rocks drop, do they also drop near Vaal. Is there one mechanic just deadly for ranged and not melee? I know of only 1 mob which uses shock nova in this game and it hardly poses a thread for ranged classes.

6. Melee suffer from artcic armour mobs, being slowed down. Luckily arctic armour on enemies sucks just as much as it does on player melee characters, since arctic armour almost never manages to actually chill melee enemies.

7. Only Hailrake has an effect that is dangerous for ranged, but melee are not having benefits from this. Since they still have to close the gap.

8. Melee often have to fight inside AoE effects to clear mobs, where ranged can re-position. This counts for those ground flame, blow-ups. Just play an immolation race ranged and than melee. Also counts for poison arrow and other such effects.

9. Melee deal less damage due to various reasons and kill slower, thus having longer fights and receiving more damage.



Melee tend to deal less damage, the question is how and why?

It is important to note that again various factors play a role here, there is also a link with receiving more damage and getting into this cycle, which causes melee to have lower damage. The cycle is worst as point 9. show that due to low damage and slow clear speeds melee recieve more damage, which means compensation, thus more survival and less damage. It is hard to find the right line of balance, since it is almost non existent in this game.

1. Accuracy, unlike spells on the long term more and more accuracy needs to be invested to not lose the ability of critting. Spell always hit and have their crit.

2. Nerf rolls on mobs vs melee. There are specific mods that can roll for mobs that have 0 effect on casters and all the effect on melee. Such rolls are: more evasion. There are no rolls that do nothing for melee and just effect casters. Mobs with more evasion should have an equivalent mobs that says: recieve % less spell damage.

3. Gear dependency. Damage relies heavily on the weapons and less on the gems used, compared to casters/ spell users. Dual wield melee has to have 2 good weapons and needs to roll on two items: insane. 2 handers get no offhand such as a quiver or other item for the offhand.

4. Taking more damage leads to dealing less damage.

4.1 You have to recover more and thus be out of combat, while regenerating.

4.2 You use more support skills, such as molten shell, enduring cry, curses such as: enfeeble etc. Since you need more, you enjoy more cast time which reduces the amount of time you actually fight.

4.3 Pretty much all melee weapons and/ or rings will have some life leech or perhaps mana leech, which means less health and/ or no damage roll. Furthermore life on hit and life leech are mandatory support gems on the weapon skill. This means 1 less support to up the damage.



Melee suffer from game mechanics, the question is which ones and why?

1. Recently the tree got pimped, but still the caster sections are the must be sections for resource regeneration. Blood magic is too often a must have keynode, due t the lack of proper powerful regeneration nodes. It must be said that melee skills tend to require less resources to use too, but this compensation means it is only harder combinations for melee to use, such as tote,s or minions, since the resource difference between these and melee skills is huge. Ranged classes tend to not suffer from this, or suffer less from this. On the other hand if you manage to get a good resource pool, there is a lack of powerful melee abilities to use up those resources. Generally the mana nodes and mana system of this game is a mess and changing a few nodes in the three doesn't fix this.

2. Cast interruption. I don't know who thought that moltenshell would be a nice if it got effected by cast interruption. Or giving melee trouble to put up a supporting totem for their build. The inability to sometimes cast supportive abilities for your melee character or to lose more time is both dangerous and time consuming.

3. Desync. Melee move around, melee need to be next to the enemy to deal damage. What a perfect class to suffer from desync. Mandatory movement skills for more damage up time and to escape nasty scenerio's only make this issue worse.

4. Clicking frustration, trying to use that single target skill while you are in the middle of a mobpack. You didn't click the mob in front of you, but the one just behind? Enjoy the desync and the total clusterfuck that ensues from this. Time to whirl out and try again.

5. Skills and weapons. Why are there axes in this game, if they hardly combine with skills available in this game? A joke from the developers. It would be nice to see each weapon having as much skills available as casters or rethink, this exclusion system. It also makes gearing yet another level more difficult.





Most of the issues stem from the damage. Face it, diablo 3 did it far better. If you solve the damage mitigation on melee, you solve most issues this class has leaving just minor issues and issues that plague the game, but currently effect melee harder. You can try to solve the list 1 by 1, but I hope a look is fundamentally given at melee, to tackle issues at the root and not at the surface. Melee in 6 man groups is quite the suicide thing, why is this? What happened to "tanks," why does enduring cry create agro, does it allow you to tank for your party?

I am quite sure I have forgotten stuff and this list can be a lot longer. I am also quite sure that GGG is overlooking things when balancing melee out. They overlook how the game actually plays (clicking and hitting). Damage (taken and dealing) is not merely getting into melee range, it is about drawing more agro, closing the travel distance. There are so many facets to melee that picking out 1 or 2 issues won't do it. You have to design it right from the core up. Any "final" solution that doesn't tackle 95% of the issues is bad game development. There should be no: "Just live with that and deal with it, it aint so bad." If that is the mindset I might as well buy Blizzard games again.

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ShadowWalker07 wrote:

I know some people here are big enemies of d3 but just compare how easy it is to aim at monsters as a melee in d3 compared to poe and that should give you an idea whats wrong with melee in poe.

agreed with this and OP. good analysis, I find it very frustrating to miss mobs with my single target attacks. Not that the mob evaded my hit, my dude just literally swung next to the mob.

I find the melee swing at empty air (while not holding shift) and my guy running back and forth up and down a stair case while trying to walk to the edge near a stair case to be the most annoying things in PoE. I absolutely go bonkers when I tell my guy to walk to the edge of a raised area, and he goes and looks for a stair case to run up and down for awhile.

I still say that the TLDR version of this is that there is currently no downside to going ranged or spell casting.

While melee does have it's downsides and should receive some small boosts everyone in here is over-exaggerating everything. Play a level 84 melee marauder and have no problems in ANY map I've ran ( Have gone up to 75's then ran out. 6K HP ( Don't need Kaoms ) and 15K DPS ( Can get much higher )

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Ozgwald wrote:

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dude great post agree with everything but the bloodmagic thing. Never felt that it was mandatory did fine as physical melee mana wise with 2% mana leech and mana flows and I dropped mana flows endgame as the 2% leech was plenty.

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DoctoreO wrote:

While melee does have it's downsides and should receive some small boosts everyone in here is over-exaggerating everything. Play a level 84 melee marauder and have no problems in ANY map I've ran ( Have gone up to 75's then ran out. 6K HP ( Don't need Kaoms ) and 15K DPS ( Can get much higher )

Could we see your gear and spec? its just that most people that say this tend to either never have seen a ranged player clear a map or are running very OP gear and a 6 link.