GGG on Balancing Melee

Melee can't be fixed without making the other options less viable. That's a fact they have to deal with. So long as you can kill stuff safely from ranged or spell use, there's no reason at all to risk getting in close except for the feels of it. Know that. Fixing melee means removing the effectiveness of the alternatives.

Spells really needed more variety and damage buffs and nerfs even though they've been balancing Spells expansion after expansion. It makes sense if you don't think about it. Melee doesn't need to be used because it's not a spell, that's some 200IQ.


In a nut shell GGG is a doctor that decides to help a guy needing 3 stitches in his ER rather then the guy bleeding out from a gunshot wound. Then explains that it's because he needs stitches too.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Fixing melee means removing the effectiveness of the alternatives.

Not necessarily. They could make melee do five times the damage of range and spells. That leaves the alternatives just as effective as they were, while making melee retarded.

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ExcretusMaximus wrote:

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Fixing melee means removing the effectiveness of the alternatives.

Not necessarily. They could make melee do five times the damage of range and spells. That leaves the alternatives just as effective as they were, while making melee retarded.

That is not GGG's style. More likely 3.6 will heavily nerf the top tier spells and heavily buff the lower tier ones in order to create a more level playing field for 3.7.

The biggest problems is offense versus defense. No matter how much damage you have as a caster or a ranged character, there's not much room for mistakes. Yes, you oneshot almost everything, but if you play like an ass, you die.

Melee IS lacking - especially in the so-called "clear-speed META", but it still has A LOT of sustainability. Leech. Regen. Larger and larger health pools. If GGG should buff melee, we're closing in on GGG's worst nightmare: "cheezing content through defense".

We've seem countless of times that GGG have no problems letting players cheeze content through offense. But we've also seen countless of times that GGG finds the nerf hammer pretty quick, if defense gets too strong. Why? There's room for too many mistakes if your character is too strong defensively. You can play like an ass, and still "win".

It's hard. It's difficult. But melee needs some love. I'm looking forward to 3.7.

I still feel like the ancestral skills that came out were a missed opportunity. They should have been the mirage archer of melee except you control the skill that it uses.

Almost like you take a melee skill and can combine it with a support gem to form a new ancestral support of that attack skill. Causing a mini spirit to surround you when you attack. It will attack nearby enemies with the skill that it absorbed.

The bottom side of the tree needs a good look at. Marauder, Duelist, Ranger as far as melee could use a good touch up. That Marauder defensive area really could see a big change.

Reducing the the base power of Fortify to like 10% but grant addition Fort Effect nodes kind of like the duelist ones but stronger. So if invested in, you could see melee fortify to go up to 25 or 30% while casters up top could still get it but at a reduced power level. May need to buff the essence craft for amulet as well and any other item/craft with fort effect on it. There isn't really much though. Nodes on the tree could also grant chance to gain fortify or fortify duration increases. May need to cap fortify at some value if it gets to much.

With the resurgence of Energy Shield and how much easier it has gotten to roll decent pieces. Maybe a time to look at some of these life nodes. Even 1% buffs could add a sizable life pool increase. Remember that most the melee nodes are in the southern part of the tree so its much more difficult to make melee ES builds. A larger life pool could go a long ways in keeping melee alive.

There are far to many boring namelock skills.. I think it's time to truly decide if it's time to move on from these or perhaps go with my ancestral absorbtion support idea. At the same time though, all attack based skills need some work. Slight number increases aren't the answer for many of these skills.

Two-Handers are actually not that bad.. I think the biggest issue is that they are the only archetype to lose an item slot. That is such a big deal in PoE. If they had the off hand equivalent of a quiver, this alone may solve a ton of issues. People have suggested a scabbard.. in FFXI they added in items called "Grips" to two handed characters, or GGG could make up some magical new item that we get in an upcoming league/expansion. I also think adding in another two handed movement skill to go long side of leap slam could also help.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Honestly, I'd rather they address the fact that physical damage is currently nothing more than something for elemental damage multipliers to work with. I think *that* would go a long way to giving good old melee a leg-up.

The best melee builds I've made lately were all super heavy reliant on those elemental multipliers combined with significant AoE. Boring as pissfuck and about as visceral as playing a mage.

And that is exactly why melee will never really be melee in the way most people want it to be, it will just be screen wide aoe (tech slam) with only slightly more defense than casters and bow/wands.

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e1337donkey wrote:

Two-Handers are actually not that bad.. I think the biggest issue is that they are the only archetype to lose an item slot. That is such a big deal in PoE. If they had the off hand equivalent of a quiver, this alone may solve a ton of issues. People have suggested a scabbard.. in FFXI they added in items called "Grips" to two handed characters, or GGG could make up some magical new item that we get in an upcoming league/expansion. I also think adding in another two handed movement skill to go long side of leap slam could also help.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head.

With the exception of starforge, voidforge and some insane crafted rares, 2h is pretty much shit.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Honestly, I'd rather they address the fact that physical damage is currently nothing more than something for elemental damage multipliers to work with. I think *that* would go a long way to giving good old melee a leg-up.

The best melee builds I've made lately were all super heavy reliant on those elemental multipliers combined with significant AoE. Boring as pissfuck and about as visceral as playing a mage.

You can build some mean ass physical builds. You will be investing heavily into pen if you go the elemental way, because otherwise you will suffer a huge penalty. The problem here is that it isnt that hard getting pen these days, and if you stick with 1 element, you can easily push it resists on shaper/elder into the negative effectively giving you another multiplier. Thing is, there arent that many great melee skills which are purely phys. Theres shattering steel...and..ugh...thats it?

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Thing is, there arent that many great melee skills which are purely phys. Theres shattering steel...and..ugh...thats it?

Shattering Steel doesn't have the melee tag.