Attn GGG: It's Time For A Melee Grappling Skill

Seems to me, melee is typically underpowered in Path of Exile and ARPGs in general.

It's not the fault of the skills - GGG has created some great melee skills & supports - it's just the nature of a spacial combat system. Those that can hit from a distance have the advantage.

Anybody who played Diablo III hopefully at least tinkered with Ancient Harpoon a little. The concept was great, and even though the execution on Blizzard's end wasn't perfect, it was still a neat skill.

**For those that didn't play D3, it was basically a spear on a chain that you threw out in front of you, pierced any enemy it went through (one of the skill runes), and dragged them all back to you, putting them in melee range**

Attn GGG.... A grappling hook style skill such as this would be great for melee players. It would be:
-leveling out the playing field just enough with ranged players
-more interesting than a typical melee skill
-opening up opportunities for many new builds
-fun to drag a helpless Witch out from behind her damn minions and totems after I tire of eating raging spirits and Arcs.

You guys have the infrastructure in this brilliant game to make a way better Ancient Harpoon than Blizzard could, with all the support & trigger gems, not to mention a Vaal version!

(Side note ... my vote is an oversized chain that hooks the first enemy hit, then the player whips it around 360 degrees dealing massive dmg & knockback to all surrounding enemies before sending the pierced one careening as a projectile)

The need for a skill like this is more relevant than ever with the recent renaissance of PvP in Path of Exile.

lol melee

--For the record, I don't think it would devolve into a "must have" skill for melee players, because some melee playstyles wouldn't necessarily benefit from this skill as much as others would, and with some support gems it would take up a lot of real estate in your chest piece or weapon that could have be used differently.

--Also, I'm not sure how you guys could make this work (support gem maybe?) but, wouldn't it be awesome if you could use it on friendlies sometimes? Pull your buddy out of a Flameblast at the last second? Yank him out of a hot spot when he is frozen or stunned?

Getting into Melee Range is not the current "Problem" of Melee at the moment. Surviving Melee Range is.

How do you figure?

"

Trajik wrote:

How do you figure?

Since expanding on that subject would take several hours to compile it to an understandable pool of information, I'd suggest you read up some of the "melee vs ranged" discussions the community had since 1.3.0.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1162109

This is a recent one for the starters and contains most of the pro/cons and why melee damage is not the problem but survival is.

Ever fight Brutus before they added more movesets to him? He had three attacks - punch from close, slam and chain hook. It was extremely desync-prone because of the hook skill, even though you were dealing with only 1 simple enemy.

Just imagine the amount of trolling that'll go on in parties with this type of skill ...

Let me brace you.