GGG on Balancing Melee

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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.

Long time ago you could use bleed get milions DPS by double diping it with high physical damage.
Now since they nerfed bleed by around 50 times (literally after calculations) the physical damage focused build lost the only edge they had.

The stupidity of POE if it comes to physical damage is :

1)As a player you reduce physical damage with armor, but the bigger the blow you take the less dmg you will mitigate.

2)As a monster you dont use armor versus physical damage, you have flat resistance instead.

So POE create mechanism which they dont use and give no option to mitigate physical resistance on monsters, where all other elements can do it. That create insane gap on dmg especialy on bosses that have 40% all res and monsters that get endurance charge and other mitigation bonuses. Basicaly screwing you dmg output by half easly.

Not gonna mention the x-diping of conversion mechanism with should be totally remaked in order to make it balanced and fair for all elements in game.

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herflik wrote:

The stupidity of POE if it comes to physical damage is :

1)As a player you reduce physical damage with armor, but the bigger the blow you take the less dmg you will mitigate.

This also contributes to the one shot feeling. Because the smaller the hit is the more effective your armour is you tend to take either trivial damage that heals out instantly or you take a proper slapping with little in between.

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herflik wrote:

1)As a player you reduce physical damage with armor, but the bigger the blow you take the less dmg you will mitigate.

This made me stop playing my TS jugg. I got gazilions of armour and resistances, ok damage, but on end game content I'm dead even before I can start killing stuff. What's the point of all that investment for nothing?

And now that's even worse: my summoner has more HP, more defenses and is way tankier than my jugg, wich is supposed to be the tankiest class in the game.

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toyotatundra wrote:

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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 must be talking about Tectonic, since there's like 2 melee skills in the game that have AOE wider than 2 pixels - Tectonic and Vaal Reave.

I played Tec Slam in Betrayal and found it meh. It's "charged slam" mechanic kept eating my endurance charges and that's with using all of the available options to consistently generate charges. Damage was kinda ok, survivability was kinda ok, clear speed was shit and build simply cost waaaaaaaay too much for what it provides.

For 10x less cost, you can play Storm Brand and clear 10x faster and be in zero danger due to how wonderful it is mechanically.

Clear Speed shit on Tectonic Slam? Boi, do we even play the same game? How skill with screen-wide AoE can have shit clearspeed? You used it on 1L or what?

Tech slam is on par or at least semi competitive with the best clear builds in the game but it's basically the only melee skill that does that and likely less cost effecient than spell/ranged/bomber alternatives.

I definitely see where having one League focus on optimizing spells and the next League for melee skills will cause a lot of grief.

Some progress should be made on all fronts each League, so the game does not feel like riding a roflcoaster of buffs and then nerfs, and than going back to buffs again.

Then there's the age-old problem of technology as represented in gameplay.

It's a grim fact that given enough accuracy and reliability, ranged combat supersedes melee combat in every historical and hypothetical setting.

That said, various games over the decades have found some small economies of balance between casters, ranged fighters, and melee fighters.

If you control every aspect of the world building, you can implement any number of minor changes, costs/benefits to give every character a wheelhouse without handing the game to any one build on a silver platter.

Or holding any one class hostage behind a chaos orb paywall.

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Aynix wrote:

Clear Speed shit on Tectonic Slam? Boi, do we even play the same game? How skill with screen-wide AoE can have shit clearspeed? You used it on 1L or what?

Fully optimized, it has about 40% of screen clear per use, if it oneshots everything (doesn't hit behind you, you have to target for that).

Meanwhile, deadeye tornado shot can charge right past three packs, fire off a single volley of tornado shot, and expect to clear everything not just on screen but also an additional screen away in all directions (thanks to chain, herald of ice, tornado shot enchant that makes every primary projectile explode with 5 secondary projectiles, etc).

So yeah... tecslam has good clearspeed for melee but absolute garbage clearspeed compared to the standard ranged attacker build.

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codetaku wrote:

So yeah... tecslam has good clearspeed for melee but absolute garbage clearspeed compared to the standard ranged attacker build.

It also eats all your endurance charges, meaning you're no tankier than a ranged build while also having less clear and less damage. People who point to tecslam as if it's supposed to prove melee isn't garbage have either never played tecslam or they're delusional.

Wasn't the soulthirst jugg as fast or faster than most range builds? Or did they nerf that belt already?

I know it was a pretty niche, but danm was that thing was zooming once you got the charges going.

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Aynix wrote:

Clear Speed shit on Tectonic Slam? Boi, do we even play the same game? How skill with screen-wide AoE can have shit clearspeed? You used it on 1L or what?

Yes, compared to the good clear speed skills - it is slow. 3 other builds I've played recently are Storm Brand, Winter Orb and Arc, all 3 shit on Tec Slam. The usual clear speed builds, Tornado etc, any good clear speed build shits on it. Tornado dudes were running circles around me when I joined a party.

Unrelated to clear speed: One thing that greatly annoyed me is how Tec Slam eats charges. I was never at full charges.

It is one of the best melee clear skills, tho. But that's a very low bar.