A subtle way that melee is screwed over (the melee/projectile/AoE attacks)

Lightning Strike
Lightning, Projectile, Attack, Melee
You hit an enemy (or air), and shoot out projectiles. The initial strike is treated as melee damage, and the projectiles are treated as projectile damage.

If you increase your melee damage, you don't increase the secondary projectile damage. If you increase your projectile damage, you don't increase your melee damage.

Molten Strike
Fire, Projectile, Attack, AoE, Melee
You hit an enemy (or air), and shoot out projectiles. The initial strike is treated as melee damage, and the projectiles are treated as projectile damage and AoE.

If you increase your melee damage, you don't increase the secondary projectile damage. If you increase your projectile damage, you don't increase your melee damage.

Static Strike
Lightning, Attack, Melee, AoE, Duration
You hit an enemy (or air), and shoot out projectiles. The initial strike is treated as melee damage, and the explosion is treated as AoE.

If you increase your melee damage, you don't increase the secondary AoE damage. If you increase your projectile damage, you don't increase your melee damage.

Why is it reasonable that the Melee skills have any component of their damage not treated as 'melee' damage? Every aspect of Kinetic Blast is treated as 'projectile' damage, so a player can just stack projectile damage and it will increase the damage of the initial hit, as well as all the secondary explosions. Nearly all the ranged skills treat the WHOLE attack/spell as a single entity. A Fireball's explosion doesn't ignore 'projectile' damage increases. Ice Shot doesn't treat it's AoE cone totally separate from its projectile hit - 'projectile' damage increases both equally. Projectile damage increases the damage of Tornado shot shots, and the secondary projectiles, and the other secondary projectiles, and the other, other, secondary projectiles. The only ranged skill I can see that doesn't work like this (i.e., functions like a melee skill) is Poison Arrow, and it's a bit of a special case, for obvious reasons.

Why are melee skills punished by significantly reducing the effectiveness of their passive skill/support gem interactions by forcing players to choose between increasing the damage of the initial impact OR the secondary mechanic, when ranged skills can just stack and stack and stack?

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RickyDMMontoya wrote:

Why are melee skills punished by significantly reducing the effectiveness of their passive skill/support gem interactions by forcing players to choose between increasing the damage of the initial impact OR the secondary mechanic, when ranged skills can just stack and stack and stack?

A valid complaint, just a few comments on it. Melee skills have higher damage effectiveness AND typically better secondary effects from the skills.

Lightning strike doesn't really shotgun so can comment on that, but attacks like molten strike each and every little aoe blob hit an enemy, while you don't scale this off of projectile nodes, the damage DOES scale off of the initial physical damage.

Not sure where you got the information that stacking physical doesn't increase the secondary effects...

TL;DR stacking physical still scales the secondary affect of these attacks.

There is very little in the way of support gems or passive skills to increase "physical."

It's substantially 'melee' or 'projectile.'

Why do players using Tornado Shot and Kinetic Blast, and Freezing Pulse, and, and, and, and, every other ranged ability that shotguns get to just stack projectile damage, and have it increase the whole thing?

To be completely honest with you: I don't think melees lacks damage. We fare pretty well damage-wise, there is a discrepancy between older melee skills and newer melee skills where for example static strike outshines almost if not all of the other melee skills in the game right now simply because it deals a huge melee hit and later on also deals a pretty decent amount of AoE DMG all around you, no other melee skills have that 360° AoE in addition to the single hit.

The other problems are: We are much more prone to desync and there is a lot more danger for us because of the need for proximity to the enemies we need to kill. Additionally there is the need of travel from pack to pack, which we usually do by running or leaping/whirling. The travel time adds to the time to kill for us.

Imo there should be more defensive measures for melees like better benefits from strength and dexterity for X seconds after you've used a melee ability, but make it short and non-scaleable, maybe even depending on weapon speed, maybe something like attack time times X. Maybe something like dodge for dex while str would provide parry and both would need to work for melee, ranged AND spell abilities, nothing huge. Numbers could look like this. You're using Heavy Strike and have an attack time of 0,30 sec, you would get a scaling of attack time times 3. In this case you would have X (maybe 1% for every 35 strength)% chance to parry spells, projectiles and melee attacks which would lead to 0,9 seconds of 12% chance to parry after every heavy strike you make.

a) It would tell players that str and dex are actually worth more than just the gem requirements you need and it could make the tree more interesting whre you would just add high stat clusters to further improve and increase the skill tree.
b) you would be inclined to play more aggressively to have your parry/dodge up at all times, which would increase your dps at the same time because you would not be too scared of every damage ability
c) new skill gems/unique items could be designed in the wake of the new parry/dodge mechanic.
d) more people would play melee, no more path of casters

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RickyDMMontoya wrote:

Static Strike
Lightning, Attack, Melee, AoE, Duration
You hit an enemy (or air), and shoot out projectiles. The initial strike is treated as melee damage, and the explosion is treated as AoE.

If you increase your melee damage, you don't increase the secondary AoE damage. If you increase your projectile damage, you don't increase your melee damage.

Huh? This is wrong. Skill states, "Explosion deals 30% less damage." Melee damage and/or AoE damage will affect the AoE portion. By adding melee damage, the explosion (static discharge) will scale 70% from of the initial hit. AoE passives will affect the explosion radius and damage as a bonus.

Only the problems that this occurs for is Lightning Strike and Molten Strike, skills that have been outclassed with things like Reave and Static Strike.

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Islidox wrote:

Huh? This is wrong. Skill states, "Explosion deals 30% less damage." Melee damage and/or AoE damage will affect the AoE portion. By adding melee damage, the explosion (static discharge) will scale 70% from of the initial hit.

You are making that up.

You have no basis whatsoever that it is based on the initial hit.

Rather, it, like every other skill in the game, is based on the initial weapon physical damage, then modified separately.

There's no lexical difference between:
Explosion deals 30% less Damage
and
40% less Projectile Damage

We have melee physical damage and melee phys damage on full life support gems.

As for damage conversion this is strait from the wiki:

"

Damage conversion: Like all converted damage, the fire portion of Molten Strike's damage will be modified by both fire damage and physical damage increases.

So simply taking the physical nodes increases both the physical damage AND the fire damage (because its converted)

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goetzjam wrote:

We have melee physical damage and melee phys damage on full life support gems.

And using either of those gems won't effect the secondary effect of the skills we are talking about. That's pretty much the problem under discussion...

Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me? It sounds like you are making my point for me, but I can't be sure.

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RickyDMMontoya wrote:

"

Islidox wrote:

Huh? This is wrong. Skill states, "Explosion deals 30% less damage." Melee damage and/or AoE damage will affect the AoE portion. By adding melee damage, the explosion (static discharge) will scale 70% from of the initial hit.

You are making that up.

You have no basis whatsoever that it is based on the initial hit.

Rather, it, like every other skill in the game, is based on the initial weapon physical damage, then modified separately.

There's no lexical difference between:
Explosion deals 30% less Damage
and
40% less Projectile Damage

I am not making it up, nor does it require great insight to interpret how the skillgem works.

a) Explosion (aka AoE) damage is not the same as projectile damage. There is a clear difference. Projectiles are not melee attacks, and as such passives labeled "melee physical damage" or the MPD support do not affect the actual projectile damage. The projectiles can scale off of it indirectly as MPD passive/gem affect the initial hit, but do not double dip into the actual projectile damage.

b) Skill states, "builds up static energy and when it expires it damages mobs around you." The blue text then states that the explosion effect does 30% less damage. If this doesn't scale off the initial hit, then what exactly are you doing 30% less damage of...? This isn't rocket science.

But yes, you are correct in the assumption that for the actual AoE damage, the only things that can affect it are AoE-related passives/mods.

"

RickyDMMontoya wrote:

"

goetzjam wrote:

We have melee physical damage and melee phys damage on full life support gems.

And using either of those gems won't effect the secondary effect of the skills we are talking about. That's pretty much the problem under discussion...

Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me? It sounds like you are making my point for me, but I can't be sure.

Read what I said again.

"

As for damage conversion this is strait from the wiki:


"
Damage conversion: Like all converted damage, the fire portion of Molten Strike's damage will be modified by both fire damage and physical damage increases.

So you can get EITHER one, but getting physical will increase BOTH.

And melee physical damage gem WILL increase the damage from the secondary bonus effect.

Just read the wiki skill gem again:

"

Additional damage: Any additional damage gains from gear, auras, weapons or any other source will apply to both the projectile and the melee portion of the attack

Again all of these are for molten strike, I am sure the others behave similarly.