Dev Response on Melee Balance....

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Stonegoal wrote:

How often do you see Melee in the real world.... You don't. Melee is a fail ranged is has an advantage and it should.

No knowledge of history i gather.

How often?
Very often.

Without Melee, we would not have the civilization of today.

The Longbow found huge success in the early 1300s, but an armored knight managing to reach the archers with his blade would make mincemeat out of them.

I completely agree... melee sucks... my first character was melee... then I rolled a ranged and the ranged character was so fucking easy to play it was like a whole different game

whoops double post

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ThirstyGhost wrote:

You make it sound so easy. "Just fix melee" is much harder than that.

In a game like this, difficult progression only has so far that it can go without increasing mob damage output. One-shots suck when they happen to you, but I feel like they are a necessary part of difficulty progression in a game like this. Maybe one-shots vs trash mobs shouldn't be a thing, but getting crit by 4 Pyromancer balls with Vulnerability on you really needs to kill you regardless. That's the problem with melee, in order to do damage, you need to be in a situation where you are going to get one-shot in end-game maps and there isn't really anything that can be done about that.

By nature of HC, some builds will just NOT be viable end-game, why should melee builds get some sort of exemption from this? No build that does not take any +Life (or +ES in the case of CI) will ever be viable in HC, why are we not allowed to say the same for any build that focuses on melee? It's just the nature of the beast.

melee shouldnt be viable ?

are you high ?

so now real world history and military technologies have such a influence on this great hystorical combat simulator known as poe lol. i swear some people would argue over everything.

Sorry but have to ask: When can we expect to see those changes?

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PathofExileVideo wrote:

I completely agree... melee sucks... my first character was melee... then I rolled a ranged and the ranged character was so fucking easy to play it was like a whole different game

Well, I haven't played many games like PoE, but my MMO experience is usually similar in this regard. As long as you can keep your foes at a distance, it's fairly easy to take them down without suffering much damage in return.

Before rolling my first character, I took a look at what everyone was saying on the forum, and decided that - for the time being at least - ranged is definitely the way to go.

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DarkZenith wrote:

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PathofExileVideo wrote:

I completely agree... melee sucks... my first character was melee... then I rolled a ranged and the ranged character was so fucking easy to play it was like a whole different game

Well, I haven't played many games like PoE, but my MMO experience is usually similar in this regard. As long as you can keep your foes at a distance, it's fairly easy to take them down without suffering much damage in return.

Before rolling my first character, I took a look at what everyone was saying on the forum, and decided that - for the time being at least - ranged is definitely the way to go.

The main issue is the game seems balanced more to the ranged side. For starters, everyone uses the same gear and tree. Therefore, most ranged are just as tanky as the melee. Ive mentioned before about playing with people who are playing ranged and think that me being melee, I am inherently tankier. This is not true in PoE. Half the time ranged has the same armor and hit points as I do; I may trump solely by endurance charges.

So this is probably one of the main issues; ranged suffer no penalty for being ranged. Any mob you could think of that might be a problem to ranged, hurt melee just as bad. We have the same defenses.

Melee ought to be inherently tankier without simply hanging endurance charges on that(which are one of the most irritating things in the game to keep rolling). Look at dps charges; you get a crit, keep a power charge. You hit with frenzy, keep a frenzy charge. Endurance you have to stop what you are doing every 8-10 seconds and refresh and lose dps.

Also, most melee skills pale in comparison to ranged. Cleave sucks, they have small aoe compared to chain'd/lmp'd craziness that is spells and projectiles. So they almost always hit far less people. Then, they require you to be closer, then they usually do less damage to boot. It sucks having to face tank a pack of mobs with cleave, with the same inherent defenses as a bow/magic user, while doing less damage.

In any other game melee is balanced by being tankier, but usually doing less aoe/dmg. In this game they share the same survivability, and do less damage. So why would you NOT be ranged? I do more dmg, be just as tough, hit more stuff on the screen, and get hit less? WTF would I even want to play melee for?

How to fix? Well, melee needs to be tankier then ranged by far, for starters. Ranged damage needs to be counter-balanced with them being far squishier like they usually are in other games. Do the damage? Take the damage. Or, melee needs to do the same screen-clearing wreckface aoe spam damage that ranged does, or even more so since they are put in a much tougher position face-tanking mobs.

Changed topic title to reflect certain developments in the thread.

Carry on.

What I think should happen:

The loot system should be set up as such that ranged are not given time to get loot as much. This would give melee the distinct advantage of getting first dibs on loot. But that's a loot system debate, so not going there.

The HP growth for each class should be different. (If it isn't already, I don't think it is.)

Same with ES & Mana.