Difference between melee and range builds.

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goetzjam wrote:

@Shppy

You are literally comparing apples to some exoitic fruit.


A 430 dps bow in THC cost 25ex (which has shitty crit chance), a 575-600 dps axe that causes bleeding on hit is 15ex, so before you try to homogenize all skills and playstyles to scale evenly you need to understand the difference of why certain things behave the way they do.


Lets address spells first, spells scale well off of levels, this mainly is a following to the way it behaved in D2. Spells can scale off of various things now, at first there wasn't much or as many flat damage options as now, but at the same time there was "shotgunning" in the past. Spell casters have improved in terms of offensive capabilities with the addition of controlled destruction, but lack the IMO good survival options in HC, at least nothing is "cheap" in that regards anymore.

Bows, they have quivers, because what game doesn't. Secondly because they rely on crit and more niche uniques they can use the quiver for life\res\ect. But getting a high DPS bow, especially one with crit and phys is extremely difficult.

2 handed melee, because lets be honest here 1 handed melee is like scratching your eyes out, unless your crit, which is psuedo the same as bows in terms of this discussion. Getting a decent or high 2 handed weapon is actually quite easy. They typically hit harder and slower, but in general provide more DPS then the other counterparts, in addition building around them does provide you with some of the best life\defensive nodes available. lets not forget fortify either.


In terms of leech, casters actually have it the worst, they use the gem to get a decent amount, one of atziri's uniques or craft it on something, but those values are lower.


Melee and ranged both have ways to get it on the tree and various pieces of gear. Theres a good reason why the strongest build of all time "technically" used a melee weapon, which was a 1 handed crit dagger, even though they used an ability that made it "ranged" (spectral throw)


Again this whole topic has been discussed to death, but you can't begin to suggest drastic changes because you simply lack the experience to even know the above, let alone the multiple pages threads like this have netted in the past. Lets also not forget there are playstyles inbetween here, like summoners, (totems, technically i guess you can call them spellcasters if you want its different).

Stuff in PoE doesn't fit into the little boxes you are describing and can't just be changed. I'd love for bloodlust to not have the "cannot cause bleeding with supported attacks" removed and see how fun that would be.

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allbusiness wrote:

A 300+ PDPS 8.5+ crit chance bow will outclear almost any top end 2H weapon in terms of actual real time clear speeds. It only gets worse as you go up, as once you hit like 400+ you clear at absurd speeds. 2H weapons will never match the same clear speeds as bows.


Defenses mean absolute shit in this game towards the end, it's just about not getting hit for the most part. Again, you're on the GGG is always right bandwagon and can do no wrong. Melee pretty much blows dick in this game.

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goetzjam wrote:

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allbusiness wrote:

A 300+ PDPS 8.5+ crit chance bow will outclear almost any top end 2H weapon in terms of actual real time clear speeds. It only gets worse as you go up, as once you hit like 400+ you clear at absurd speeds. 2H weapons will never match the same clear speeds as bows.


Defenses mean absolute shit in this game towards the end, it's just about not getting hit for the most part. Again, you're on the GGG is always right bandwagon and can do no wrong. Melee pretty much blows dick in this game.

Clearspeed at what cost. In terms of defenses I guess your right your going to die sooner then later, still in terms of rolling the dice its better to have the higher roll to kill you then to test that less often but have a lower roll.


Melee has basically had MASSIVE improvements over time in this game, if you don't or haven't seen that then your oblivious and shouldn't be commenting in this thread anyway. Improvements can be made, without taking everything and completely changing the way the game works, considering there are a number of things in place, I guess maybe 3.0 can change various things in a larger scale, but lets be real here that isn't going to happen for a very long time, constantly bitching when you likely haven't played melee in like forever to me just makes me laugh.

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Emphasy wrote:

Not really you mean Incinerate... that was basically it and that was ridicolous broken (even though not as much as the nerf it got might make it look like).

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Emphasy wrote:

There are actually a few very simply things I thought that could be done, because what they did was good, they introduced new defensive means for melees, however they are basically all used for casters now.

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ACGIFT wrote:

An easy solution would be to prohibit the Fortify gem from supporting MOVEMENT melee skills. (barring Cyclone, akin to the Haku mission rule) It would end the silly meta of "all casters focus knives so they can just use Whirling Blades+Fortify now."

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Wiesl_1404 wrote:

True melee is in a diffcult spot at the moment i feel. GGG has to balance around the potential of high end melee damage with good gear only the top 10% of players can achieve. If you would buff melee weapons in midgame, endgame weapons would become even more insane.

TLDR: Melee would need a exclusive mobility buff (movement speed, movement skills range buff) and some mechanical AoE buffs to compete with ranged and not primarily a damage buff - most melee skills have good damage since 2.0.

Spells are easy to balance because there is only the gem itself and its possible supports to consider - so making a spell deal 40% less damage next patch is an easy balancing task, it also can be balanced through levels in every game stage (does more damage in early game, loses scaling in lategame). So i think well balanced spells are completly fine.


Bows are a big balancing nightmare, because there are so many different ways to scale bow damage in the game. Early game bow builds are very slow due to the lack of dps from the weapon but the better the bow gets, the more insane the clear speed becomes. With even more tools to scale bow damage coming with Acendancy i think bow top end damage or crit needs to be lowerd to keep their potential in check.


Melee has one big problem despite the ones already mentioned (less AoE, has to move more to conect damage with the target, less available support gems to scale damage) - the fact that spectral throw exists.
Spectral Throw is the whole reason why phyical melee weapons can't be buffed that much in terms of numbers and aquisition. If you would buff melee weapons damage spectral throw would become OP and the new meta "again", if you would nerf spectral throw further while buffing melee weapons, spectral throw becomes a useless skill which nobody wants.
Another problem is how elemental conversion scaling works in PoE - if you buff the base damage of melee weapons stuff like Hatred and Added fire and WED would become insane multipliers.

Physical damage is, besides direct chaos damage, the best damage type in the game - at high levels it deals basically "true damage" to any mob in the game, even to bosses due to armour works in PoE. So GGG has also consider this fact (you can already see what happens when physical damage gets out of hand - just take a look at SWT, Bladfall etc.



But, as already mentioned, all the damage would not be that relevant in the end - it's mechanics and mob encounters what determine if melee is good or bad. Currently ranged is heavily favored in nearly every endgame szenario over melee.
If GGG could introduce mobs, more mechanics and endgame bosses which shit on ranged characters and don't harm melee that hard in comparison that would be great for the game overall.

Example:
Fast mobs which go close combat immediately with a gap closer and maim/slow the player while attacking. The mob should be highly resistant against projectiles or take less damage the further it is away from the player - another proximity shield like mechanic would also be great to see.
Or GGG could make use out of the new phasing mechanic on mobs (while phasing mobs take %less damage from ranged attacks and spells)




Over all, i personally think that Ascendancy will bring some sort of true melee builds back to the game. Ascendany classes will be a huge deal in building characters. Duelist, Marauder and Ranger look great for melee builds as i can tell even a elemental melee templar looks nice now.

What would also help melee are nerfs to Lightning Coil and Taste of Hate - as physical damage becomes spell casters automatically become weaker in terms of damage because they would have to invest more into physical mitigation - Bows still remain a problem due to easy acess to evasion and acrobatics cluster. Buffing mob elemental damage would be the solution for that but this would shit on melee evasion and armour builds as well... a difficult task indeed.