The new league Hive Fortress mechanic is awesome for ranged multi target and atrocious for mele

Hello,

I am really enjoying the new patch and the new league mechanic except for Hive Fortress, which is basically a Blighted map where towers are the buffs you gain (those only last few waves, I think 3?)

Its really difficult to overcome one of these as mele. I am using a frost blades champion and even I can go red maps as of now and blast maps with scarabs, I can't finish a Fortress in a tier 1 map sometimes.

This is because depending on the buffs you gain you will be able to balance the overcome (specially healing, barrier, wall, freeze). If you don't get those, either you have an insane amount of non-vaal target extra enemies or I am not sure what you can do as a mele character.

As grafts, I have one lightning ground graft which makes enemies passing by detonate them and a cold graft which fires a projectile each .3s on chilled/frozen enemies. Both level 27+

Please, could you take a look to it? Maybe make it so that for each wave Ailith gets healed 1 or 2 points.

I agree!

I play a Wander with returning projectiles. I'm having a blast. But for melee? I would probably be a little bit pissed. I mean, I "always" play melee, and very often limited range/AoE melee, so I now it would be hard. The same goes for RF, I would think, at least up until the point where you get huge AoE and damage.

Now, someone will probably come into this thread saying "melee fine, melee stronk, Slam AoE screen cover. Bonkbonk". And while they are right that Slams are in a good spot, a lot of other melee sills are not, at least not for the league mechanic.

That said; we more or less knew this before going in. It's Breach 2.0 for God's sake. But I wish it wasn't all or nothing. Would it be so bad that your rewards were based on the amount of waves you cleared? It would reward good clear, but wouldn't make certain skills/builds useless, you would at least achieve something. Anything.

100000000000% AGREE.

FROST BLADE SLAYER here and I've been shredding content so far EXCEPT every single Hive Fortress I encounter is virtually impossible to complete. I get the waves to 22/23 out of 24 and then he dies. I have a decoy totem also trying to help me out on one side to occupy the waves that flood in but the shear speed and quantity of mobs (ranged specifically) that spawn and hit him toward the last 4 waves is just pure panic as a melee trying to keep him alive.

There is the new Hotfix coming up so that should make it much more viable I hope and we will get rewards now even if we don't complete the entire Hive Fortress so that's honestly all I wanted.

The ranged mobs with the fireballs are the biggest issue I've noticed on the mobs spawned. I can usually take care of the rest in time without any real damage on him but those last 4 waves and the ranged mobs in all directions is just complete lucky RNG at that point as melee to win or not. So far I've only beat literally 1 Hive Fortress all the rest have been 22 / 23 waves and I just go in now for the extra exp from killing the surrounding mobs and grab some of the chests that drop loot.

POE has evolved over time.
Once the best diablolique games is now pinky Space Invaders.
The game now boils down to you looking and quickly clicking on a bunch of red dots that are quickly approaching you, like in a legendary game from the eighties of the last century.

Edit: For melee players, I think the Spectral Shield Throw is the best build choice for this.

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Phrazz#3529 wrote:

I agree!

I play a Wander with returning projectiles. I'm having a blast. But for melee? I would probably be a little bit pissed. I mean, I "always" play melee, and very often limited range/AoE melee, so I now it would be hard. The same goes for RF, I would think, at least up until the point where you get huge AoE and damage.

Now, someone will probably come into this thread saying "melee fine, melee stronk, Slam AoE screen cover. Bonkbonk". And while they are right that Slams are in a good spot, a lot of other melee sills are not, at least not for the league mechanic.

That said; we more or less knew this before going in. It's Breach 2.0 for God's sake. But I wish it wasn't all or nothing. Would it be so bad that your rewards were based on the amount of waves you cleared? It would reward good clear, but wouldn't make certain skills/builds useless, you would at least achieve something. Anything.

:D I have only played 3 leagues (crucible, wisp one, settlers) and only started to grasp breach in settlers when somebody told me about the extra mods. Before that every single ring I got from breach was exchanged for wisdom scrolls lol.

Kind of regretting not listening to the meta with slams / kinetic bolt and crying actual tears while remembering that in settlers i played archmage coc. That build would literally obliterate this league mechanic nerf included haha

Tbh I was about to go for a slammer but I am not fan of 2 attack per second gameplay.

I'm RF with some decent aura radius and damage. I failed every one of the hives until level 91 I got lucky. It's pretty rough. I even tried some tricks like decoy totem (doesn't seem to have the range or survivability. I tried a four link ek of the massacre with chain fork and chance to flee. The (non-rare) monsters do flee, but for like .1 of a second, and it didn't seem to stop them retargetting ailey.

i have to agree, playing a RF chief and cant finish a single fortres and fail 7/10 defend missions in maps. never because i die but always because i fail to be at two places at once and she gets swarmed an dies... feels bad

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conirhawk#4765 wrote:

i have to agree, playing a RF chief and cant finish a single fortres and fail 7/10 defend missions in maps. never because i die but always because i fail to be at two places at once and she gets swarmed an dies... feels bad

This is what I do, so far I have only failed the fortress most of the times. Stay on top of Ailith, tank the fireballs and every hit, don't move from her, and try to use the spells you get on higher waves, not early.

Eshgraft of Destroying is really good, each few secs you can plant 24 hands in the ground which deal up to 50k lighting dmg and sap enemies. Once enemies step the hands blow up and deal the dmg. Each time I use that only one or 2 monsters pass.

Hopefuly that will help you a bit, still fortress is a nightmare, I have skipped last 2 of them. Too much time consumed only to fail at 20ish wave like other player mentioned. Feels really bad.

Same here, this is a horribly designed game mechanic for anyone not ranged

GGG please redesign this.

Same thing here... Lacerate build (not even THAT melee to begin with), and on top of Ailith all the time, facetanking every single hit.. she still dies everytime even on Tier 1.

Also of course the failing-gets-nothing system feels super bad man.

In comparison to any Deadeye-Far Shot build, this mechanic absolutely needs some kind of rebalancing for melee... it`s not even close