Difference between melee and range builds.

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tryhardgg wrote:

Melee is always garbage in RPGs , you'll have to learn to deal with it .

again, not true. ranged is usually better, that part is correct. but not ALWAYS

quite few arpgs have better melee than ranged balance.

out of latest ones, van helsing (first game) was heavily melee-favored

melee is also fucking king in grim dawn. a blademaster (soldier [tank class ]+nightblade [offensive melee class]) hybrid is literally the best class to get.

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the true problem of melee in poe is because every class can do anything and there are no designated melee classes like in other arpgs. you cant give something to a duelist or a marauder without making it available for everyone else as well.

the whole concept of a 'melee' player in poe is defined by what exactly ? a melee skill with a melee weapon of choice. and some melee weapons can also be caster weapons. which basically makes it a clusterfuck to balance.

There's no clusterfuck. You can easily buff the base damage for melee skills/gems till they achieve the same clear speed. CoC-discharge build is also a melee build but has no problem competing with range builds like crit-bows. Why? because it does 10 times the damage of cyclone or crit-bows which is reasonable because as melee you have run to each individual mob to do damage.

Worried about melee become too good at killing bosses? I think you should be worried about firestorm trappers one shotting uber atziri images with 5ex gear not melee skills like cyclone. 9 out of 10 boss fights in poe mechanically favors ranged builds. 8 out of 10 fights, there's a one shot smash at melee range which range builds don't even care about. How about for once adding delayed lethal blows if you stand too far from the boss?

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Mephisto_n wrote:

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the true problem of melee in poe is because every class can do anything and there are no designated melee classes like in other arpgs. you cant give something to a duelist or a marauder without making it available for everyone else as well.

the whole concept of a 'melee' player in poe is defined by what exactly ? a melee skill with a melee weapon of choice. and some melee weapons can also be caster weapons. which basically makes it a clusterfuck to balance.

There's no clusterfuck. You can easily buff the base damage for melee skills/gems till they achieve the same clear speed. CoC-discharge build is also a melee build but has no problem competing with range builds like crit-bows. Why? because it does 10 times the damage of cyclone or crit-bows which is reasonable because as melee you have run to each individual mob to do damage.

coc-discharge isnt a melee build, because it's not using your weapon damage. it uses multiple spells at the same time. all that requires of your weapon is fast attack speed, large base crit and not missing (vagan daggers says 'pssst sup bruh u buyin ?'). coc in general is too different a concept from everything. the spells themselves crit a fuckton and they never miss as well.

[I fucking hate CoC and I wish it was never in the game btw]

the problem with melee, stated many times btw, isnt the damage. you can clear screens easy nowadays with melee as well. sure, it can be higher- but thats not the real reason.

no one will say reave cant clear fast. because- it can.
lightning strike and frostblades are actually quite good at clearspeed nowadays too. theyre not 'true' melee but their damage with good weapons is sufficient.

'true' melee's problem is being required to be in proximity without any real benefit. adding more damage wont do much if you can already one shot things. vaal lightning strike with 3 charges make any boss croak super fast. clearing packs is trivial.

and with current pace of game

@grepman

I feel what you're talking about isn't so much about balancing melee skills with ranged skills, so much as balancing melee characters with ranged characters. The melee skills are still basically inferior, it's just that players are forced to pick either an inferior "chasis" to have access to superior skills, or a superior chasis and be limited to inferior skills.

Those designs eventually run into trouble assuming any form of intercharacter item transfer, such as an account-wide stash or interplayer trade. Assuming that monsters can be killed with 1 hit of the ranged skill, superior skills means a superior kill rate, and thus superior monster drops per unit time. Although it can be possible to balance the absolute highest content such that ranged simply cannot OHKO enemies, while melee can, the same cannot be said for lower-level content, in which overleveled ranged characters will be able to OHKO enemies. This, in turn, leads to "MF characters" as a first/primary character, perhaps supporting melee characters with loot found, but ultimately reinforcing a "MF char first, fun build after" meta.

This puts designers in a difficult position, because in order to realistically face content, players should have access to appropriate gear prior to that content; if they ignore this, you have what I call the "D3 v1.0 A2 Inferno" problem, where players feel like they hit an impasse with content. Or they can make ranged weaker still, at which point you've got an imbalance in the other direction (which is kinda fun in a karmic sense, but ultimately no better).

I feel the correct method is to balance at the skill level, not with various chasis to build upon. If ranged skills lack a massive AoE component or are time-consuming to use (a la Storm Call), then a skill which is melee AND AoE like Cleave actually stands a chance at competing. If skills are balanced around the idea that every enemy is going to get OHKO'd, then the balance issue with MF characters is avoided.

All it takes is enough skill design forethought to consistently implement a simple trade-off: the more range a skill has, the less AoE it should have, and vice versa. In order to break that trade-off, the skill would need significant drawbacks which are difficult if not impossible to bypass.

Pretty sure it's too late for PoE at this point, though.

Scrotie, good post. yea I was comparing melee vs ranged characters.

but skills-wise, I dont see how melee skills are inferior per se.

the 'fake' melee skills that dont namelock are basically spells that are scaled off your weapon damage. I think that's fair. Sure, you can raise base damage of weapons. dont see what that accomplishes.

the only real solution is raising the AoE. but, heres the problem- the more you raise AoE the more you are helping 'fake' melee skills like reave to be more 'fake melee'; you arent moving anywhere with namelocked skills because it still requires you to hit up close

so really, what is definition of melee right now ?

[0. attack-based (obviously)]

1. using weapon damage
2. using namelocking to actually hit monsters
3. being in close proximity to monsters

things like reave use only #1. frostblades use 1 and 2 and have pretty long range for 3. ground slam uses #1. cyclone uses #1 and #3. 2 and 3 in generally are related because you actually have to come up to monster and hit within range.

in the end, theres no clear melee/range division in PoE imo. and then theres stuff like spectral throw which basically prevents devs from simply making melee weapons into bigger stat sticks.

skills like reave are in a good place- but they arent considered 'true melee'. so which melee actually has problems ? #2 and #3, which are related anyway unless its frost blades with its crazy range.

When I say melee, what I really mean is "short-ranged." Which means #3 exclusively.

I consider Lightning Tendrils to be a melee spell. It's closer to the radius of Cleave than it is to the radius of Sweep. Yeah, it doesn't use weapon damage, but you still need to consider your defenses when using Lightning Tendrils, and even with a lot of AoE you're probably not hitting an entire screen with a single casting. (It also happens to have pretty good damage as far as spells go.)

There isn't anything intrinsically short-ranged about namelocking. I can imagine an alternate-universe PoE where bow skills were a lot more single-target and a lot less AoE spam, and you'd have bow users complaining on the forums about how namelocking doesn't work, so their arrows always miss, and they can't keep up with Sweep builds as a result. It's only due to the strange skill design GGG has chosen that we associate single target, which is a drawback, with skills which have virtually no range, which is yet another drawback.

In the current meta, the only short-ranged skills which have even the faintest glimmer of competing are Blade Vortex, Flicker Strike, Righteous Fire, and Movement skills, because these have some form of simultaneous movement capability (correct me if I forgot any). Generally speaking, short-ranged is an instant death sentence, and the only "melee" skills which are worth anything are the ones which can cover an entire screen.

And if you consider things like Vaal Spark, chaining arrows, etc, sometimes it feels like killing everything on the screen at once is somehow suboptimal; offscreen kills are where the meta seems to be heading.

with current POE mechanics it is pretty much impossible to solve melee vs ranged with 'adding' something to melee

what is left is to 'take away' from ranged. and taking away the damage is the way to go.

then they can pay with 'less damage' for 'less damage taken'. fair deal

most bow skills can deal damage many times to many targets (with chain, fork, pierce or even built in mechanics like LA). this turns a 300 harb bow into an equivalent of 600+ melee stick

the damage delivery methods heavily favors ranged users - adding to movement, kiting ability (so many bosses deal ABSURD close range damage that even the biggest 'melee is fine' defenders use spectral throw to not get killed - clear sign that 'melee is fine' yeah right)


and the underlying reason for all these problems is 'ability to logout and cheeze' forcing difficulty to be delivered with spike damage. in games with 'time to death' longer than .5sec it is way easier to make tanky characters.

ps. it is not helping that released ascendancy classes for melee are.. well.. weak. after seeing pathfinder and assassin i just no longer see any reason to consider melee non crit characters as a part of the competetive game. it is just a filler for new players.

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grepman wrote:

Scrotie, good post. yea I was comparing melee vs ranged characters.

but skills-wise, I dont see how melee skills are inferior per se.

the 'fake' melee skills that dont namelock are basically spells that are scaled off your weapon damage. I think that's fair. Sure, you can raise base damage of weapons. dont see what that accomplishes.

the only real solution is raising the AoE. but, heres the problem- the more you raise AoE the more you are helping 'fake' melee skills like reave to be more 'fake melee'; you arent moving anywhere with namelocked skills because it still requires you to hit up close

so really, what is definition of melee right now ?

Fortunately everything has a trade off with something else in PoE. If you feel certain name-locking skill suffers from having bad defense, increase the base damage and let it invest more into life nodes compared to what you would normally get in a reave build. You claim Sweep/Cyclone lack AoE compared to a reave build ? just buff the gem ezpz : increase gem quality effect, buff the base damage so high so that the player run haste instead of hatred, use increased AoE gem/get AoE nodes instead of damage support gems or damage nodes.

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Mephisto_n wrote:

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grepman wrote:

Scrotie, good post. yea I was comparing melee vs ranged characters.

but skills-wise, I dont see how melee skills are inferior per se.

the 'fake' melee skills that dont namelock are basically spells that are scaled off your weapon damage. I think that's fair. Sure, you can raise base damage of weapons. dont see what that accomplishes.

the only real solution is raising the AoE. but, heres the problem- the more you raise AoE the more you are helping 'fake' melee skills like reave to be more 'fake melee'; you arent moving anywhere with namelocked skills because it still requires you to hit up close

so really, what is definition of melee right now ?

Fortunately everything has a trade off with something else in PoE. If you feel certain name-locking skill suffers from having bad defense, increase the base damage and let it invest more into life nodes compared to what you would normally get in a reave build. You claim Sweep/Cyclone lack AoE compared to a reave build ? just buff the gem ezpz : increase gem quality effect, buff the base damage so high so that the player run haste instead of hatred, use increased AoE gem/get AoE nodes instead of damage support gems or damage nodes.

so do you want every melee skill to be like reave ? ie, basically make all skills ranged in terms of distance?

I simply dont think you can solve melee problem by increasing melee damage or coverage in cases when you need to actually hit a mob in short range.

static strike or IB kill the entire fucking screen right now, but that doesnt matter because ranged kills entire screen+some offscreen and moves to the next one, while in that time you just whirling bladed to the pack.

you are trying to solve a spatial problem by just giving more damage, I dont think it works. a 2h melee build overkills things already. a crit 2h build when critting overkills things by a ton.

other arpgs make archetype melee tanks, and those tanks hit less harder than ranged characters, but they are able to take more hits. but in most other arpgs a pack encounter lasts much longer as well.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

When I say melee, what I really mean is "short-ranged." Which means #3 exclusively.

I consider Lightning Tendrils to be a melee spell. It's closer to the radius of Cleave than it is to the radius of Sweep. Yeah, it doesn't use weapon damage, but you still need to consider your defenses when using Lightning Tendrils, and even with a lot of AoE you're probably not hitting an entire screen with a single casting. (It also happens to have pretty good damage as far as spells go.)

There isn't anything intrinsically short-ranged about namelocking. I can imagine an alternate-universe PoE where bow skills were a lot more single-target and a lot less AoE spam, and you'd have bow users complaining on the forums about how namelocking doesn't work, so their arrows always miss, and they can't keep up with Sweep builds as a result. It's only due to the strange skill design GGG has chosen that we associate single target, which is a drawback, with skills which have virtually no range, which is yet another drawback.

In the current meta, the only short-ranged skills which have even the faintest glimmer of competing are Blade Vortex, Flicker Strike, Righteous Fire, and Movement skills, because these have some form of simultaneous movement capability (correct me if I forgot any). Generally speaking, short-ranged is an instant death sentence, and the only "melee" skills which are worth anything are the ones which can cover an entire screen.

well...theres a difference between blade vortex-ing and using infernal blow though, because of namelocking. the distance might be the same but you will end up hitting air way more times even if you use multistrike. but thats what you probably meant any by those drawbacks. and yeah you forgot cyclone (lol) which to me is clearly a melee skill.

if we consider #3 as the only aspect of things being melee, then we can easily infer that the problem is really a spatial and defensive problem first and foremost. no damage boost can make getting hit worth it in PoE. especially not with existing damage usually being enough to one shot shit anyway.

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And if you consider things like Vaal Spark, chaining arrows, etc, sometimes it feels like killing everything on the screen at once is somehow suboptimal; offscreen kills are where the meta seems to be heading.

and thats just fucking sad, man. I wish reflect makes a comeback. I really do.