Melee play vs other playstyles

On a serious note. I'm currently lvl 93 on ESC. Two friends and I were racing to 95. Once I hit 93 I gave up. I was ahead but what it took be ahead was taking a toll (plus school hadn't restarted yet). My competitors were explosive arrow (EA) and Summoner (flame sentinnels). When I was doing like 4hrs of sleep rinse repeat I had a slight edge. Once they woke up and started easy moding the content the gap would close.

They effectively had about 3x my clear speed. Now ill admit I've always felt safest as melee. As a juggernaut , with the new brass dome, 5 endurance charges, fortify on leap slam physical damage is a non issue save for the obvious Vaal/malachai slams. However, I'm playing cleave (lmao yea ik, lost from the get go).

The bulk of my 93 levels was with earthquake (EQ) with hege's staff but to be honest I felt like a meta slave so I did a bit of respecting to cleave. It's weird 200k tooltip cleave seems to be noticeably less damage than 80k EQ. Combine that with when all 3 of us group play..I can hardly say I killed more than 20 mobs per map lol. In fact when I went HAM keeping quicksilver up etc I typically get wrecked because I can't see or I am too focused on getting to the next pack that I get killed by bearers.

The only time I shine is when there is a tanky boss epecially a warband boss(like overgrown ruin/beacon) and we can duke it out while they try to stay at the periphery,for safety.

Disparity within melee

We all know EQ is king, but ancestral warchief is a joke.

My 4L until recently 5L warchief does more damage than me. There is literally no place for heavy strike as a single target while warchief exists, unless it's base damage gets changed to 300% or something.

Shaper kill

I've seen videos of melee shaper kills.. they had some interesting gear choices (Acuities, not really). As you can see I have 34/40 I wouldn't mind getting the rest. I've done all 4 guardians so far. My only issue is that the chimera python phase is a bit overtuned. I have 40 +ve chaos res and I had to use 3 portals just for that phase. That out the way I feel like I'll have to go ancestral bond and use 2 warchiefs or re-roll to snooze vortex if I hope to get the shaper kill. I don't see cleaving that fight with "normal gear" (only 440 dps exquisite blade) ending too well.

melee in a nutshell



problem is buffing melee to be on par with ranged is nearly imposible. they could give single target melee skills like heavy strike 300% more damage, and it would still be a subpar option becouse it cant wipe the entire screen and it will still have to go and face tank all the monsters with crazy high spike damage.

best buff melee can get is a reduction to monsters damage and a large nerf to aoe and ranged attacks / spells so they cant clear the whole screen in a blink of an eye.

now if nerfing FOTM things like coc or Voltaxic Rift brought a lot of hate imagin what would happend if they nerf all ranged / aoe enought to make them on par with melee and single target skills / spells clear speed?.

Yeah it won't matter what ggg decides to make melee's numbers as long as ranged has such a large mechanical advantage.

They should just make melee easily accessible immortal in exchange for their other deficiencies cuz there is no way in hell they're going to do what's needed to bring ranged in check.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Yeah it won't matter what ggg decides to make melee's numbers as long as ranged has such a large mechanical advantage.

They should just make melee easily accessible immortal in exchange for their other deficiencies cuz there is no way in hell they're going to do what's needed to bring ranged in check.

But then bots. Immortal builds destroy online economies.

And even if no economy, immortal builds aren't really good gameplay. Basically Cookie Clicker with more explosions and gore (so admittedly slightly better than Cookie Clicker).

I firmly believe the correct GGG response is to realize the enormity of their melee vs ranged balance failure, begin development on PoE2, and resolve not to repeat their mistakes.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I firmly believe the correct GGG response is to realize the enormity of their melee vs ranged balance failure, begin development on PoE2, and resolve not to repeat their mistakes.

I agree but if they've already made those mistakes whats to stop them from making them again?

They've exhibited a fundamental inability to produce reasonable parity when it comes to making skills relatively mechanically balanced.

They've tried to make PoE MTG complex but quite frankly they don't have the personnel to achieve that lofty goal so I'm not so sure starting from scratch would increase their chances of success unless they made PoE2 much less complex which would probably be a non-starter if it were to be a direct successor.

Your statement is more likely subtly pointing to the fact they need not PoE 2.0 to fix the problem but balance team 2.0.

Maybe in a very real sense the complexity of PoE has exceeded the abilities of these particular peoples to balance.

Where the fundamentals of gameplay balance are lacking is in the PoE core combat engine. GGG started with the model Blizzard used in Diablo II, but made a concious decision to avoid stepped attribute thresholds and fixed limits on things like maximum attack speed, damage multipliers, and run speed. While D2's internal math was thoroughly 8-bit, it used diminishing returns formulas to soft-cap calculated results safely below its hardware limits. For example, in D2 you could stack increased attack speed mods as high as you liked, but past certain weapon-specific points, additional IAS would have little perceptible effect. These global safety rails kept combat within relatively sane limits, allowing designers to max out mods on specific items and skills without fear of destabilizing overall balance or ratcheting into power creep.

In addition to blowing the lid off D2's soft-capped combat model, GGG double-downed with a volatile conflagration of additive and multiplicative ("increased" vs "more") attribute mods. With no practical limits on maximum damage or attack speed, this resulted in unanticipated OP item and skill combos and unrestrained power creep. GGG then typically overreacted with drastic nerfs to core gameplay mechanisms, restraining the worst exploits to idiosyncratic limits which demolished any related builds that weren't OP to begin with.

What makes PoE character design an exercise in excess is the absence of trade-offs. Not only are there precious few drawbacks to maximizing attack speed, DPS, and run speed, there's little to deter you from maxing all three at the same time. GGG seems to think passive-aggressive booby traps like reflect, corrupted blood, and boss immunities are adequate counter-balances to grossly OP builds, but for most players they're nothing more than annoying obstacles to avoid. When all else fails, GGG then resorts to devastating nerfs that utterly ruin the most popular meta-builds, merely to make room for the next FOTM to emerge.

For those who don't immediately recognize the profound impact of well-tuned diminishing returns formulas, consider one of its few examples in PoE: armour. When is the last time you heard of a cheesy OP armour exploit, as in never? That's because no matter how many armour mods you stack, there's an internal soft-cap on its effectiveness. As a result, you can have things like +3000 armour flasks without destablizing gameplay balance in any way that might require a drastic overreaction on GGG's part.

Imagine if such principles were applied throughout the core combat engine. You might even be able to rebalance the game without creating Legacy items...

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RogueMage wrote:

For those who don't immediately recognize the profound impact of well-tuned diminishing returns formulas, consider one of its few examples in PoE: armour. When is the last time you heard of a cheesy OP armour exploit, as in never? That's because no matter how many armour mods you stack, there's an internal soft-cap on its effectiveness. As a result, you can have things like +3000 armour flasks without destablizing gameplay balance in any way that might require a drastic overreaction on GGG's part.

Imagine if such principles were applied throughout the core combat engine. You might even be able to rebalance the game without creating Legacy items...

i think that has more to do with hard counters than diminishing returns, you can have all the armor in the world it wont matter if you get hit by chaos or elemental damage, i mean the day someone creates a unique that make armor olso reduce elemental/chaos damage you will see builds with 70k armor tanking everything.