Can someone confirm melee getting buffed?

Right now going melee is very discouraging and you'll always get carried by some tanky ranged character. So are we getting buffs anytime soon? And before someone says "build more defensively" go melee Vaal on merciless difficulty...

Melees have a number of problems, first of we need to define what we mean by melee

In my opinion, a melee character is one that happens to engange in melee ranged combat. Being a templar or a marauder does not make you melee (especially with Templars just running around with lightning strike all day)

In this sense, there are viable melee builds, they are just ridiculously limited. You have to stack HP/Endurance (armor is basically worthless). Specifically speaking if you are doing templar, you need to stack elemental damage (the catalyst node does wonders), and just put the rest into health and elemental resist.

Thats the only real effective way to play melee right now, any other kind of melee build is just not effective. Ranged definitely have a +1 compared to melee right now

tldr: Melee are viable, but there are only like one or two viable builds for them (as opposed to ranged, who have as many viable builds as under the sun, and will all generally work)

Many top-tier characters in HC are melee. This seems to contradict the notion that "melee is broken" -- but I agree, many KINDS of melee characters have horrible troubles. And the result of this I think is skill diversity in combination with the weaknesses of certain mechanics (LS is only dagger/claw aoe, 1h+shield has horrible dps problems in many instances, face-tanking the increased pack sizes is very rough for melee, stuns are a big problem when using slow melee weapons or melee-range spells, etc.).

Buffing these mechanics... is tricky. We don't want to make non-melee too strong, and we don't want to over-tip the already good melee builds that seem to be doing so well in HC. Fine-tuning melee issues is a tricky task.

GGG has already confirmed that it will be "looking at melee" or at least Chris has suggested they are considering buffing melee in some respect. The question is - how? This is not an easy thing to fix, mind you. We just can't buff life on items, because non-melee can use those... and we can't just buff damage passives... because that could send things spiraling out of control... we need specific keystones and passives added which are melee-only and really give melee characters ways to deal with certain challenges in the game that ranged characters trivialize.

We also need to introduce more anti-ranged-friendly monsters :P

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anubite wrote:

Many top-tier characters in HC are melee. This seems to contradict the notion that "melee is broken"

Not at all. It just shows that the pure tank build that all melee are forced to use anyway is good for hardcore mode.

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anubite wrote:

We also need to introduce more anti-ranged-friendly monsters :P

That's what shock nova is supposed to do, but it ends up hitting me anyway.

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anubite wrote:

Many top-tier characters in HC are melee.

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mozart116 wrote:

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anubite wrote:

Many top-tier characters in HC are melee.

Hey, it's not just my words. GGG has recently said the same thing. Ground Slam Marauder wins races. It also does well in long-term leagues. Qarl or Chris (I forget who) said that melee builds are popular for many top-tier players. In the past, when CI was ridiculous... I mean, look at Invalesco's old CI melee build. 10k ES, tons of life leech and damage. Hardly underpowered.

Now, are ranged characters better at facerolling screens of monsters? Uhh yeah, but posting a reaction image doesn't change the fact melee characters are abundant in HC, even if we might consider them underpowered. Posting a reaction image isn't a solution. Straight-up buffing melee characters in an inelegant way is just going to result in nerfs in the very next patch.

I used to play a lot of League of Legends. The amateur game balancers over there just love to do this kind of thing. Pantheon was buffed/nerfed easily 10 or so times in a span of 2 years. People could faceroll with him even in his weakest state and even in his most broken overpowered state, he wasn't viable for any serious match-up. Sometimes there are fundamental design issues that need to be addressed and players whining for buffs is usually just a detriment to finding that elegant solution.

If the solution were just, "Give melee characters more life." They would do it, but that has hugely toxic implications (especially in conjunction with life regen passives), as many melee characters already stack the fuck out of life. And then all we need is one righteous fire build or one 'perma stun build' to show up and things are nerfed back down again.

Look no one is denying that melees are popular in HC, but its not 'melees' in general, its one or two specific builds on melee type heroes.

If its marauder, it is a stacking up ground slam

If its templar, its pimping up elemental damage

In both cases, life and resist nodes are spammed, and only minimal amount of nodes required to pump up DPS is used (so in the case of templar, its the elemental weapon damage nodes, such as catalyst, in the case of marauder it would be physical damage for ground slam)

In any case, the point is, that both builds are actually abusing mechanics are broken. There is already another thread on this, but the scaling on elemental damage is retarded, which is what allows templars to do really high damage with minimal investment into the passive tree (and hence the rest of the nodes go into defense). For marauder, its how strong ground slam is pimped (AoE stun damage, what isn't there to like?)

Any other type of melee build in general "sucks", and doing what melee tanks are designed to do (tank mobs face up in melee combat) doesn't really happen. Ground slam is used because its long ranged and AoE (i.e. not really melee) and templares have their lightning strike which is really a ranged nuke more than a melee one

Ranged may not be as strong in the really really really high level, but they have so many more viable builds, to the point where they are just more fun to play

There are not a lot of successful melee hardcore players. There are a lot of successful groundslam hardcore players. Kripp was saying the other day that his ground slam will hit off-screen targets by the time he's gotten back to the high ranks of HC.

Melee is not a class. It is a character from any class that closes the distance to the mobs and engages at melee range. Buffing specific classes is not the right thing here. We need to think at length about what qualifies a specific character for "melee," and enact some balancing around that specifically.

I'm not going to recommend a specific idea, because it needs a lot of though. But the category of thing I am thinking of is: suppose melee skills, when activated, put a temporary DR buff on the skill user, and any use of a ranged skill removed that buff. That's an out-of-the-box way of thinking about it, although as I said: I don't want to recommend anything specifically at all (not even this).

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anubite wrote:

Ground Slam

Ground slam isn't melee.