Brainstorming about Balancing Melee in PoE

I have been playing PoE for a long time and something that has been bothering me ever since is the balance around melee vs non-melee. I know that this topic has been brought up before, so to justify I would like to focus the discussion onto bouncing idea's about how to improve the position of melee relative to non-melee builds/characters. In my opinion there are currently two major concerns with melee; survivability and clear speed.

The Issue:
Lets talk about survivability and clear speed first. PoE is build around grinding and thus killing legions of monsters is part of the job. This is rewarded with both loot and experience, which in turn enhances your character allowing it to do "The Job" even faster and better. This can be defined as progress. Logically, players aim to have fast clear speed. Furthermore, survivability is also essential because of the experience penalty and the extensive HC player base.

Compared to melee, casters have a wide variety of skills, most of which have good to excellent range and AoE. Bow skills have innate range and are easily build to cover a large AoE (GMP, pierce, chain). Most successful applied melee skills are actually melee-ranged hybrid skills (Reave, Spectral Throw, Lightning Strike, Ground Slam, Ice Crash). Another successful melee skills is Cyclone. It combines movement with AoE, improving both clear speed and survivability. However, most of the remaining melee skills are left behind. Fortunately, the recent improvements to Melee Splash have improved upon the clear speed part. Although its still nowhere near that of bow users and many casters.

Survivability for "true" melee skills is in my opinion a greater concern. Endgame, monster damage can easily reach insane numbers and the best way to deal with it is to simply not get hit. Staying at range and pets/totems are the best way of preventing damage. The risk vs reward is not answered, thus no incentive to go this route. Well other than For Funz, but with the nagging feeling that skill X would do the job 5x as efficiently. This is a bad thing for the actually quite popular Melee Archtype.

Addressing the Problem:
In other ARPG's the balance between Melee and Ranged is addressed by giving melee classes more access to damage reduction, healing, movement skills, build-in AoE melee attacks or abilities that pull enemies towards them. However, due to the high degree of freedom and options for any class/build this is more complicated in PoE, because potentially any build can pick those up. A good example of such an attempt is Fortify, where it has become clear that many casters also took benefit from the support. So, how can selectively improve clear speed and survivability for melee in a complicated game such as PoE?

A way is to address the issue by improving features exclusive for melee skill users. This boils down to the Melee Skill Gems, the Melee Oriented Nodes and maybe Melee Weapon Implicit properties. Some options that come to mind:

1#: Life Leech Efficiency for Attack Gems: This would work similar as Damage Efficiency, but apply to leech. It could help balance ranged vs melee and close range melee vs ranged melee. It also feels kind of intuitive that melee attacks would be better at leeching than ranged.
2#: Introduce more small defensive bonuses onto melee attack nodes: +2% maximum life, +6% armour/evasion. A few of these already exist such as "By the Blade", "Blunt Instrument" or "Splitting Strikes", but the game could use a lot more.

Another Approach: Things Die too Fast
In general, enemies die very quickly in PoE, its quite common for ranged attacks to clear a screen in one attack. Even blue packs and rares fall within a few attacks. In my opinion monster HP (non-bosses) should be significantly increased, rares and blues even more so than whites. This way ranged attacks have the benefit of covering a large area, but take a few more attacks to clear it. While melee would deal more damage, clearing packs slightly slower, but clearing rares/blues/bosses a bit faster. If this would be implemented, experience and loot should be adjusted accordingly for the decrease in clear speed.

Any thoughts?

Things both die too fast and deal too much damage.

I think there's just too much stuff going on now to make any sense out of it anymore, too much "freedom", so to say.

For a perspective, we could look back at games like D2 where all playstyles were viable because the mechanics were simplier (this doesn't mean worse, just better defined) and the game wasn't loaded with oneshots yet it was challenging.

Long ago I posted a potential solution to this in the following topic:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/359477

Here's the suggestion:

"

Nurvus wrote:

This has been discussed in various threads, more or less, but here I try to go more specific into it.

Currently, Melee has the following issues:
- Faces more potential damage than ranged due to its higher likelyhood to be hit by more than 1 projectile from a multiple projectile attack
- Inevitably tanks melee damage
- Often has to choose between stopping dealing damage or standing on top of AoE to continue dealing damage
- Despite the range disadvantage, doesn't really have a meaningful damage advantage
- Is also inferior in terms of AoE
- ES almost never recharges due to frequent incoming hits.

This means in order to try and have the same chances to stay alive in melee, than ranged do from afar, you must invest alot more into survivability.

Here is what I believe, a reasonable sollution (all suggested values are placeholders):
#1 - Create a new base mechanic (does not require Passive). Call it Instinct, Uncanny, Furor, whatever you want - let's call it Balls of Steel.
#2 - Balls of Steel Stacks up to 3 times, increases movement speed and reduces all damage taken by 5% (including Chaos Damage).
#3 - Balls of Steel loses 1 Stack every 5 seconds
#4 - Your melee hits grant 1 Stack and reset the countdown to 5 sec - this would be a Baseline Mechanic, not a Keystone.
#5 - Your melee crits increase the Stack cap to 4 for 10 sec, grant 2 Stacks and reset the countdown to 5 sec - this could be a Keystone.
#6 - Your melee hits also reduce your Energy Shield Cooldown by an amount of seconds equal to your weapon attack delay (inverse of weapon speed).
Note: 1.5 speed means 0,6(6) delay. 0.8 speed means 1.25 delay.

Example:
Let's imagine I have #5 - keystone or otherwise.

0 sec
I hit my enemy with a melee attack
Now I have 1 Balls of Steel for 5 sec
I move 5% faster and take 5% less damage.

3 sec
2 seconds for Balls of Steel to lose 1 stack
I crit my enemy with a melee attack
The Balls of Steel cap is increased to 4 for 10 sec
Now I have 3 Balls of Steel for 5 sec
I move 15% faster and take 15% less damage.

6 sec
I move away to dodge incoming attacks and/or use ranged Skills

8 sec
I lose 1 Stack of Balls of Steel
Now I have 2 Balls of Steel for 5 sec
5 seconds until the Balls of Steel cap to return to 3
I move 10% faster and take 10% less damage.

10 sec
3 seconds until the Balls of Steel cap to return to 3
3 sec for Balls of Steel to lose 1 stack
I hit my enemy with a melee attack
Now I have 3 Balls of Steel for 5 sec
I move 15% faster and take 15% less damage.

11 sec
2 seconds until the Balls of Steel cap to return to 3
4 sec for Balls of Steel to lose 1 stack
I crit my enemy with a melee attack
Balls of Steel cap remains at 4 for 10 sec
Now I have 4 Balls of Steel for 5 sec
I move 20% faster and take 20% less damage.
---

I hope this was clear enough.

I started playing around about nemesis... I think this was my favourite point of the game, simply because I had less understanding about crafting and skill gem requirements.

My builds have always been very well designed - because I understood the tree and mistakenly thought the game was about the tree... But I didn't have much in the way of end-game success because I wasn't aware of the complete list of item affix, how to attain such items, and I didn't appreciate what characteristics for skills were essential.

To be clear, I think maybe invasion and beyond in hindsight were more fun than nemesis, but the freshness added difficulty to the game that is no longer there now that I understand what the most important things in the game are and how they work.

--

Recently I was watching some videos of Path of Exile before I was playing.

It seemed to me that in the long-ago past that there was significantly less chance of
1) Single skill builds (especially auto-target skills)
2) Whole screens of enemies dying in one or two clicks

This in general, I felt created more build diversity in the past than exists today. For certain, more builds exist today, but the meta game is now restricted to a select few builds, in my experience. For nemesis/invasion era, looking back, it was probably around crit multi and prolif.

I think that generally increasing the time it takes to kill trash mobs (all enemies in fact) and the damage they deal would do this game a great service, and increase the level of skill required (as it would reduce the instance of insta-rips).

It would also have the side effect of having the road to 100 take longer, but whatever.

"

Baelrog wrote:

The Issue:
Lets talk about survivability and clear speed first. PoE is build around grinding and thus killing legions of monsters is part of the job. This is rewarded with both loot and experience, which in turn enhances your character allowing it to do "The Job" even faster and better. This can be defined as progress. Logically, players aim to have fast clear speed. Furthermore, survivability is also essential because of the experience penalty and the extensive HC player base.

Compared to melee, casters have a wide variety of skills, most of which have good to excellent range and AoE. Bow skills have innate range and are easily build to cover a large AoE (GMP, pierce, chain). Most successful applied melee skills are actually melee-ranged hybrid skills (Reave, Spectral Throw, Lightning Strike, Ground Slam, Ice Crash). Another successful melee skills is Cyclone. It combines movement with AoE, improving both clear speed and survivability. However, most of the remaining melee skills are left behind. Fortunately, the recent improvements to Melee Splash have improved upon the clear speed part. Although its still nowhere near that of bow users and many casters.

Agree strongly up to here.

"

Baelrog wrote:

Survivability for "true" melee skills is in my opinion a greater concern.

While perhaps a more obvious concern, I do not agree it is a larger concern. As you pretty much stated earlier, clear speed is the metric which determines how quickly the game rewards you. Clearspeed uber alles.

This isn't to say I find survivability irrelevant. I consider survivability to be a component of clearspeed, and if you've ever built a very glassy character in this or any ARPG you know what I'm talking about: skimp on defenses too much, and you crawl through content, always paranoid about dying, hampered in your ability to move forward before you fire a volley of projectiles/AoE, sometimes at thin air, because if you don't it could be too late.

What I'm getting at here is: the more survivability you have, the less time you spend on blindfiring and kiting movements, and the more time you spend on aimed fire and pack-to-pack movement. Hence, it's a clearspeed vector.

"

Baelrog wrote:

Addressing the Problem:
In other ARPG's the balance between Melee and Ranged is addressed by giving melee classes more access to damage reduction, healing, movement skills, build-in AoE melee attacks or abilities that pull enemies towards them.

This can address the problem, but in most ARPGs I feel it doesn't. Instead, what it does is offer melee fans an alternative reward by catering to a casual playstyle.

In most ARPGs, a melee character is a facetank. They aren't expected to avoid enemy damage or care about positioning, they're supposed to charge in stupidly, take all the damage, and live anyway. And usually, they do live anyway. Essentially, melee becomes a "forget positioning" option.

However, this doesn't normally translate to better clearspeed. Instead, it facilitates a one-handed, watch Netflix and play ARPG, while holding a beverage playstyle. And in exchange for pretty much removing gameplay skill from Melee entirely, the typical ARPG is designed so ranged can attain higher clearspeed - therefore more rewards - with positioning-conscious play, but ranged dies if they're not careful.

Or they give melee immortality AND superior clearspeed, in which case mmelee is clearly OP. Or they go full casual, make ranged immortal as well, and ranged is OP again.

I think the conventional ARPG melee model is bullshit.

If you ask me, it should be:
* Melee has the best innate clear speed; against a map full of immobile, nonthreatening targets, melee should clear faster. This is done by giving short-ranged skills offensive advantages, such as more damage or better AoE to "group up" kills with, while denying those advantages to long-ranged skills. Long-ranged skills should feel decisively single-target compared to short-ranged skills.
* Everyone should be relatively squishy. This means that, to capitalize on their offensive advantages, short-ranged skill users would have to worry more about positioning (and survivability) while ranged skill users have the advantage of greater positioning flexibility.

Which means I'm not one for buffing melee; I'm one for nerfing ranged. Chain in particular. And pretty much every spell ever.

But also Aegis Aurora. Fuck that shield.

I want melee to be viable, too. Really, I do. But I'm not really willing to cater to casuals (and botters) to do it. Monsters in this game should be trying to kill you, and they should succeed if you're not putting in the correct inputs, regardless of how tanky you are.

So should melee have more survivability? The best response you'll get out of me on that one is "meh."

So I'm not a big fan of your suggestions.

Maybe... just maybe (an idea) reduce monsters (all) damage and increase defense/life in left side tree (where marauder, duelist, templar)?

Just idea to think. And yeah melee sucks.

Here's the thing about melee:

If you're in the top of the tree, there's no reason for you to be stabbing things with a dagger with your ES-based caster. If you want to go "melee" with a top-of-the-tree character, there are two builds that effectively let you enjoy the fantasy of blowing shit up at close range.

They're called cyclone CoC and blade vortex. Both are obscenely good builds, though the blade vortex build can whirl into a massive pack of mobs and get instantly squished, so there's that. (You might want an immortal call setup for that.)

Now, bottom-left tree characters (marauders and duelists going to marauder) with their armor stacking and 2H weapon skills generally seem to be in a decent place. They get lots of life from lots of strength, better access to life nodes, and hard hitting skills.

However, with evasion, here's the thing:

Melee evasion had its defenses deliberately gutted by GGG.

Let me repeat that.

MELEE EVASION HAD ITS DEFENSES DELIBERATELY GUTTED BY GGG.

See, block? You'd have to go to four separate character block clusters to not miss a significant chunk of it. E.G. Duelist, Ranger, shadow's deflection, and marauder, along with tempest shield and gladiator ascendancy. If you're dual wielding, you get around what? Around 17% additional block from tree? It's a joke.

Secondly, as though to spit on your investment, acrobatics guts blocking anyway because "we at GGG want you to layer defenses. Except the evasive kind because we hate total damage mitigation even though that's the only kind that right side characters get access to." And of course, arrow dancing is suicidal now because if you're depending on evasion for defense, well, big lawlz @ you.

Bringer of Rain? Also gutted from 15% -> 6%.

I'm not sure how GGG could send a clearer message that:

THEY DON'T WANT PEOPLE PLAYING BLOCK MELEE.

If GGG *wanted* people playing melee (or at least any melee besides marauders), then they'd make max block feasible. As of now, well, here's a bare minimum (life and block) tree I came up with for 1H block, starting from duelist since I'm thinking along the lines of gladiator (could just as easily start ranger or marauder):

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwQAAF4B3AIRAycFLQW1CC4ISQkzDPcUIBUgFewZjhm0Gj4brSP2JJss6S2DLlMvzDB8MZ41kjfUOq064T3iPfxAoEF0RNJHfkjuTUZNkk3jUEdRR1boWGNfP2KsYuxlTWebbAhsjG87b4R07XYrd-N4DXiueTl5aHrvfXV-4oCKhNmE74azivCMz419jb-dqqOKo-emV6luqZWsr7Gzsty0xbXyuR29Nr6nwBrAv8EEwYLC7MqQ0TbTb9N-1FLYvdrB2-fcc90N4JXiLORR6Ubp1e0_7YPvDu968YryRfZI9qP3Tf4K_o_-uv8c

Here's a level 97 varunastra build. And honestly? Completely unimpressive. No additional charges of any kind, 200% life, max block if you go gladiator, but overall, mehtastic.

Now maybe you can retool that tree for something else, but as you can see--capping out block while getting the necessary life leaves you VERY little with which to scale anything else--damage, armor, evasion, etc.

In other words, if you go max block, you're going to be hitting with the weakest possible weapon type you can -- a 1H no-crit weapon with minimal scaling. Oh, and your intelligence sucks also since you'd need to go out of your way for int nodes. So that added lightning gem you might want to add to lightning strike? Big lawlz.

If GGG wanted any kind of melee besides marauder massive 2H smash to be viable, IMO, they should probably double duelist and ranger block percent chances, give us back Ondar's Guile, or maybe have arrow dancing give 25% more evasion when holding a shield/dual wielding to remove its drawback, and remove the block penalty from acrobatics.

Otherwise, you might as well just go avatar of the slaughter raider, equip your favorite nuke-everything-that-moves bow (Harbinger/Windripper/Volt), charge up 9-10 frenzy charges, and just dodge 2/3rds of attacks and watch out for spells (some spell dodge per frenzy charge gloves would be REALLY nice).

ive leveled ES/EV/life character to 86 recently (despite people proclaiming it is a 'sh.. idea') as both Frost Blades and Wild Strike (just for lols)

issue with melee is two fold:

- soft issue: clear speed meta. no build that clears maps in 15 minutes is good. it is bad build no matter how many fun mechanics are used. poe is about clear speed and no fancy stories, theories or ideas will change that. build that takes 15 minutes to clear Gorge is dumpster-level.

this makes Frost Blades a WAY better skill than Wild Strike and noone caring about their clear speed should select Wild Strike, ever.

- hard issue: some close-range mechanics. Volatiles, Bearers, Obelisks, certain bosses (Avatar of Thunder). these simply remove some builds. not make them weaker, slower or whatever - they remove them. or you have to skip parts of the content and be the one overpaying for stuff like Atziri items and Vessels of Vinktars - because you cannot farm this content on your own.

soft issue can be easily fixed by introducing 'dangers' into it: reflect, toning down Vaal Pact (and instant leech in general). this nerfs the speed-meta builds (archers mostly, cocs - but it seems they do not have the balls to nerf cocs. too many whiny kids play only with it as they cannot play otherwise..).

hard issue is easier and harder at the same time. it is easy to tell what these unfair mechanics are but some are the entire design of some encounters.


side note: some melee players simply cannot create builds even if their life depends on it. when i see some of these creations or read 'informed' players here and on reddit i have no doubts that it is their own fault for failing, not the inherent imbalance.

i name this issue 'max or bust' fallacy that a mechanic works only when 'maxed'. it is a total false assumption - short explanation why: cost of maxing stuff is so high that you can get two other mitigation sources to 'acceptable' level and end up with tree, instead of one 'maxed' that even does not cover entire damage spectrum.

"

sidtherat wrote:

ive leveled ES/EV/life character to 86 recently (despite people proclaiming it is a 'sh.. idea') as both Frost Blades and Wild Strike (just for lols)

issue with melee is two fold:

- soft issue: clear speed meta. no build that clears maps in 15 minutes is good. it is bad build no matter how many fun mechanics are used. poe is about clear speed and no fancy stories, theories or ideas will change that. build that takes 15 minutes to clear Gorge is dumpster-level.

this makes Frost Blades a WAY better skill than Wild Strike and noone caring about their clear speed should select Wild Strike, ever.

- hard issue: some close-range mechanics. Volatiles, Bearers, Obelisks, certain bosses (Avatar of Thunder). these simply remove some builds. not make them weaker, slower or whatever - they remove them. or you have to skip parts of the content and be the one overpaying for stuff like Atziri items and Vessels of Vinktars - because you cannot farm this content on your own.

soft issue can be easily fixed by introducing 'dangers' into it: reflect, toning down Vaal Pact (and instant leech in general). this nerfs the speed-meta builds (archers mostly, cocs - but it seems they do not have the balls to nerf cocs. too many whiny kids play only with it as they cannot play otherwise..).

hard issue is easier and harder at the same time. it is easy to tell what these unfair mechanics are but some are the entire design of some encounters.


side note: some melee players simply cannot create builds even if their life depends on it. when i see some of these creations or read 'informed' players here and on reddit i have no doubts that it is their own fault for failing, not the inherent imbalance.

i name this issue 'max or bust' fallacy that a mechanic works only when 'maxed'. it is a total false assumption - short explanation why: cost of maxing stuff is so high that you can get two other mitigation sources to 'acceptable' level and end up with tree, instead of one 'maxed' that even does not cover entire damage spectrum.

Here's the thing about maxing vs. not:

Things which you max get exponentially more effective. E.G. if you have 25% block, you get 33% more EHP. 50%? 100% more. 75%? 400% more.

E.G. if you left elemental resists at 25% in merc, you'd be getting one-shot left and right. If you had them at 50, you'd still get one-shot every so often. 75%? Well, you'll still die in a few seconds from some stuff (E.G. Uber Vaal lightning attacks).

As for that tree I made, it was to make a point how obscene of an expectation it was to get max block, even with a character class designed for it. You don't think that's a problem? I'm fairly certain I could look at some reaver builds and cookie-cut that tree, but that defeated the purpose of my point, which is that the one defense that melee can have that ranged can't (namely, block--at least, unless a bow build wants to give up a spike point with crit chance for rearguard), and that actually trying to take advantage of it hamstrings you so much in terms of damage that you might as well just try and play a safer ranged build with a lightning coil or you're going to take 20 minutes to clear gorge.

Edit: just to be certain that yes, certain mods (obelisks) basically make melee unplayable in certain situations. That said, it's not a good idea to fuck ranged over similarly. I mean what's the point of GGG removing "immune to fire/immune to cold/immune to lightning" that Diablo 2 had, but instead replacing it with a bunch of other "LAWLZ FUCK YOUR BUILD" mechanics?

They should just give marauders 30% damage reduction and templar and duelist 20% kinda like d3 does for barb and monk.

Somehow they have to make nodes hard to get to for other class.