Not enough skill gems to scale single target phys.

I use increased critical damage with my dagger builds as another link. I try to use melee gems with the AOE tag so I can cram in a concentrated effect. Currenly using lacerate+multistrike+melee physical+melee physical on full life+added fire+concetrated effect to act as a generic boost. That way I can try to scale my physical, fire, and chaos damage with the same gem. You could also stick a life leech on there or melee splash even if it feels kind of redundant.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Related to this but probably worthy of a different discussion, I've been dwelling lately on what the fuck exactly 'chaos' damage in this game is meant to represent.

To be honest, I just take it as a weaponized form of corruption.

Like, what if someone used a Vaal Orb on your CNS? Probably a good chance of searing agony to be honest...

It would also explain all the different variations on it, given corruption is so unstable that it gives things a bunch of random properties...

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I like how OP rags on Bloodlust because it doesn't fit into the clearspeed meta.

Using Might and Influence jewel gives the character AoE.

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maLcious wrote:

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I like how OP rags on Bloodlust because it doesn't fit into the clearspeed meta.

Using Might and Influence jewel gives the character AoE.

Yeah, but it's still a melee namelock skill. Not to mention that MaI also only does half your damage as splash and even builds using Melee Splash that deal 74% damage as splash are not meta.

Due to Namelock and Melee both being garbage relative to actual meta skills which are all ranged, all inherently dealing 100% AoE damage and with many also murdering things off screen.

Indeed, there is a lack of physical gems to scale damage. It's a well-known feature. Use crit build if you need more gems to scale, as one of options.

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鬼殺し wrote:

I fucking hate the current elemental meta with a passion. Raw physical just can't compete.

Honestly the game needs a major overhaul. It needs to be slowed down like many people have been saying. All AoE skills and whatever that can hit the entire screen needs a huge damage nerf. This would definitely make single-target skills viable.

Honestly, the biggest issue with single-target is that *actual* single-target skills get shafted hard by conc effect existing.

Seriously, pretty much any single-target skill < cyclone/ice crash/lacerate/etc with conc effect, because single-target skills don't have any exclusive option of their own to match it.


Even multistrike generally doesn't count as a single-target boost for those types of skills either, as the forced target-changing means your attack will try to attack something besides that single target if there's any others in range (or swing at air if the intended target walks out of range). And if even one of each trio of attacks misses the intended target either by the enemy walking out of range or by the forced target changing, multistrike actually HURTS your dps against that intended target... swapping it out for nothing would result in better single-target dps (which is why i never use it on viperstrikers).


That all being said, there are still options. Bloodlust isn't at all hard to use, it's extremely useful for bosskilling, it's just not meant to be a clearing tool. Poison/added fire are good options too, though with GGG's planned new system the former is going to be completely worthless for physical attackers.

Hopefully GGG will add more options in the future, especially options that help out those true single-target melee skills that *should* be better but actually aren't.

I mentioned the possibility of adding a small AOE to single target melee skills in my thread https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1892690. Melee splash would make the impact much bigger. I tried viper strike and unholy might was pretty awesome, but without an AOE it's just not that useful honestly.

Thats the one thing about damage scaling in POE ive always kinda disliked.. Even if you run a physical based weapon the best possible damage you can pull is by converting the phys to elemental and scaling both phys and elemental. If you do run a pure physical build you basically end up gimping your damage potential because you can only scale the physical so much. Once you basically have all the %phys and on an attack build Flat Phys on jewelry you can possibly get the only way from there to gain more damage is to start converting all or at least some of that phys into Elemental. And most especially Converting to Physical as Extra Elemental and then WED of course.

The only Pure Physical build in the game pretty much is Facebreaker. And only reason you cant really convert and then scale the elemental from phys on that build is because WED doesn't work since there's no weapon. But even then things like Hatred and HOA are huge damage boosters to that physical build.
Thats why pure phys weapons tend to have so much base damage that comes along with them because the real way you will end up scaling for those weapons in the end is converting to elemental. Your already limited on the amount of scaling potential on the physical.

But at the same time this drawback to phys comes with a huge advantage that elemental scaled builds suffer a huge disadvantage to... And that advantage is Reflect. A pure Elemental build will always struggle with elemental reflect no matter what you do and especially the more damage you scale with it. But a Physical build has options to handle BOTH reflects. For general Reflect rares you can simply convert half and half phys/ele and be fine for those random rares with some leech and some extra resistances of the elemental you convert to and then when mapping Reflect comes into play you can simply swap gems and certain uniques around and deal with either reflect as you have to. If it's a phys reflect map just convert most if not all your damage to elemental and if its ele reflect just drop all your ele conversion. Elemental Builds do not have these options however. If you roll phys reflect then you're good to go but if you see elemental reflect however it's an automatic reroll. So i guess there is that advantage physical builds have over pure elemental builds. You can work reflect out on maps a lot easier than on pure elemental. But to most people this isnt much of an advantage either because they just reroll any reflect they see because they already hate it so much and cant be bothered to have to deal with it and they dont have to either. They can always just reroll with the exception of corrupted maps.

As far as a single target option for anything Melee ive found Either one of the Attack Totems are huge for single target. Warchief is the most common for it gives you more damage and it hits like a truck but even the Ancestral Totem has its place on builds that scale a lot of its damage through HUGE APS. For example my Brutus build got way more out of the Ancestral Protector Totem than the Warchief. Another option for nice Single Target on most any Melee build is Molten Strike. It has built in Ele conversion, Hits hard, and most importantly hits A LOT. Making it one of the best single target melee skills in the game. And it can be swapped in most Melee setups with no other changes to the supports in most cases anyway.