Chris Wilson: "Many spells are too weak for players to want to use"

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Fruz wrote:

An unless you are using impulsa, it's pretty bad at clearing, and quite bad at bossing.
I see that you're going all in "OMAGAD LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS" huh

If you factor impulsa (or other "monsters go boom" based mechanics from gear), then sure .... it's more than correct (apart from bossing I guess ? Depending on the boss' hitbox).
With dual strike, you have some AOE built in (obviously using one jewel socket for it, but since that jewel also gives pretty much 10% more damage ...) and you can destroy bosses with the right gear (not needing very expensive gear, but for all I know you might not even playing the game anymore and are not aware of all the new crafting available).

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sidtherat wrote:

it also has full benefit of triple dip (light->cold->fire-->chaos) so the damage ceiling is OUTRAGEOUS

Dual strike has potentially the benefit of "quadruple dip" LOLOLOL

.........


There is no mandatory AC for dual strike obviously, but oh well.

So your saying spells are less balanced and have less variety and late game viability than melee, correct? Or what exactly is your point? Your highlighted point was interesting

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Relationship wrote:

So your saying spells are less balanced and have less variety and late game viability than melee, correct? Or what exactly is your point? Your highlighted point was interesting

Not, it's not even remotely close to what I said.

I was simply pointing out that there are also "bad" spells.
But ridiculous items can make bad skill gems become correct, because power creep.

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sidtherat wrote:

i do not know if you are simply bad making builds or something but Shock Nowa BLOWS most true-melee skills out of the water. simple as that.

it also has full benefit of triple dip (light->cold->fire-->chaos) so the damage ceiling is OUTRAGEOUS. free to get gem has 600damage per hit, around 900dps pre anything. buying a comparable weapon for attack build costs a pretty penny

then ofc you can use it with traps where it truly shines but self cast is perfectly ok


arc is ofc better because arc is from POE2. but one has to gimp his caster on purpose to make Shock Nova worse than dual strike.. skill you HAVE to augment with a threshold jewel (dps loss) and mandatory AC support (less choices)

tried both of them to 91+. dual strike is 100% garbage

i hope you are aware of the simple fact that dual stirke or any other melee attack can scale even 1 step further?

phy (includig all sources of phy added as x dmg) -> light -> cold -> fire -> chaos

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Relationship wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

An unless you are using impulsa, it's pretty bad at clearing, and quite bad at bossing.
I see that you're going all in "OMAGAD LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS" huh

If you factor impulsa (or other "monsters go boom" based mechanics from gear), then sure .... it's more than correct (apart from bossing I guess ? Depending on the boss' hitbox).
With dual strike, you have some AOE built in (obviously using one jewel socket for it, but since that jewel also gives pretty much 10% more damage ...) and you can destroy bosses with the right gear (not needing very expensive gear, but for all I know you might not even playing the game anymore and are not aware of all the new crafting available).

"

sidtherat wrote:

it also has full benefit of triple dip (light->cold->fire-->chaos) so the damage ceiling is OUTRAGEOUS

Dual strike has potentially the benefit of "quadruple dip" LOLOLOL

.........


There is no mandatory AC for dual strike obviously, but oh well.

So your saying spells are less balanced and have less variety and late game viability than melee, correct? Or what exactly is your point? Your highlighted point was interesting

noone is denying that some of the melee skils are weak.
what some ppl are condemning is the comparison of some hadpicked bad melee skills to the absolute best spells.
they use these exampels to "proof" that the "fact" that melee is always worse than any spell.

that claim is simply wrong
if you compare the best melee skills to the worst spells,the meleeskills are vastly superior

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Fruz wrote:

If you are going to use words, at least please understand their meaning properly before you do that.

FACT : shock nova is not better than ... let's go with dual strike.

-> FACT : "skills listed there ARE FAR LESS BALANCED than any spell" : This is not true, as I just quoted one spell that is not as "balanced"(shock nova is farther away from "balanced" skills than dual strike).

So your "fact" is not a fact, it's just you getting excited for some reason and ending up throwing a fallacious claim.

I disagree

The two skills are both pretty bad

The key difference is:

You can use a shield with shock nova which makes it objectively better in hc

As well you do not need to be on top of monsters to hit them with shock nova, or still has some inherent aoe

You can also 6 link shock nova whereas dual strike is enforced 5 link maximum thanks to melee splash

I don't see how someone can think shock nova ISN'T objectively better, and really just proves HOW BAD dual strike really is when you use shock nova as your goal post

It would be an interesting test, so I will grant you that it isn't a fact that one is better than the other, you've got me on that for shock nova, but I'm not convinced it still isn't strictly better than dual strike

EDIT: they changed shock nova from the last time I used it so I can't really comment on it, looks to be like it would be fucking bonkers good now though

To quote Bex:

"

We try to focus on one area of balance with each major expansion to address that area as thoroughly as we can. Around the time that we started scoping 3.6.0, handcasting and lack of powerful spell variety were big topics both in the community and in our design discussions. We feel that the changes in 3.6.0 greatly improve the spellcasting situation and are very much looking forward to your feedback on these when you get to play the expansion.

As for melee, it's certainly on our radar and is likely to be the focus of 3.7.0 balance work. The design team have some good ideas that I'm quite excited about.

They don't necessarily go for the most egregious offenders at the time, but more for the most talked-about stuff both for the community and with their internal chats. And as far as the total number of skills go, spells are a bigger fish to fry anyway.

Give it another few months though. There are a lot more spells than close range attacks so if they get this spell rebalance in the ballpark then the close range attacks you mentioned, and quite possibly attacks in general, will get a rebalance.

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ciel289 wrote:

if you compare the best melee skills to the worst spells,the meleeskills are vastly superior

What's the point - compare best with worse? Let's compare best spells with best melee skills. Spells win, obviously.

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Jackalope_Gaming wrote:

They don't necessarily go for the most egregious offenders at the time, but more for the most talked-about stuff both for the community and with their internal chats. And as far as the total number of skills go, spells are a bigger fish to fry anyway.

Give it another few months though. There are a lot more spells than close range attacks so if they get this spell rebalance in the ballpark then the close range attacks you mentioned, and quite possibly attacks in general, will get a rebalance.

Ummmm... yah when melee has been shit for years of course people are going to talk about spells more, what the hell is there left to say about melee other than "it's shit"

That's a self fulfilling prophecy dude

And if you're going to balance the game egregious offenders ARE THERE PLACE to start, this is why they suck at balancing

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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ciel289 wrote:

if you compare the best melee skills to the worst spells,the meleeskills are vastly superior

What's the point - compare best with worse? Let's compare best spells with best melee skills. Spells win, obviously.

i basiclly described what ppl are doing when they talk about how shit melee skills are.
i never said its smart or right to do it that way.

if you are talking about melee in general ,skills like tectonic slam,molten strike and a few others are as strong as arc,winter orb etc.
they delet screens and bosses in seconds.

i´m not saying that melee doesnt have its problems.
what i´m saying is "there are spells especially selfcasted, that have a lot of problems as well"

there are ppl (like Legatus1982) that use a different definition of melee(close coombat no big aoe only) that poe itself is using (gem tag and its scaling)
their definition is based on "real" life and logic which is fine,but it creats its own unsolvable problem.

if you buff those close combat skills to be able to compet with those stronger aoe/proj/chaining skills,the skill simply drops out of the close combat category.

they than often they "just give the close combat skills better defences or ridiculous high singel target dps than"
both option cant work either atleast i cant come up with a reasonable way to implement them.

there could only be a handfull of results,if such a buff/change would happen

1)close combat skills would have so much dmg and/or tankiness from the skill gem alone that they could trivialize bosses
2) the buff wouldnt make a difference
3)"end"bosses would be balanced to the level of new close combat dps/tankiness, making all area/proj/chain skills completly inferior or even "useless" for them
4)we would just get a new "fortify" that can and will be abused by other builds than close combat ones

close combat skills will always be inferior in a game like poe by nature or we would have 1 of the 4 situations above

poe would have to change drastically to reach a good balance between close combat and aoe and that is actually not something i wish for.
i´m happy about improvements and changes,but i want poe to feel like poe and not some new game

close combat can be improved,but i doubt it will ever be enough to make the "melee/close combat sucks" ppl happy.

to sum it up: be carefull what you wish for,you might not like the result

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bionicg2040 wrote:

melee is fine as long as you do not play it

This about sums it up.

It's little secret that spells, right now, are by FAR the most popular. Between the main skill types, they make up 52% of all major (non-utility) skills used in Betrayal. (Melee is @24.8%, and Ranged 19.6%; the remaining 3.6% is a mixture of minion skills and miscellaneous stuff like RF)

Of course, that doesn't tell the whole story; there ARE popular melee skills. All two of them: Molten Strike and Cyclone. Except, of course, we gotta discount that of 83% (1321/1591) of all Cycloners are... Cast on Crit, and hence scaling on spell damage anyway. That means 54% of all melee builds are Molten Strike. No other style of combat is anywhere near that lopsided; with ranged, there's roughly a tie for #1, with both Ele Hit and Tornado Shot each taking a bit over 23%. (and there's fewer ranged skills to begin with, just 17)

And for spells, there's even more diversity in builds, to be honest: the #1 spell, Winter Orb, might be hyped as broken and OP... But still accounts for under 20% of all spells people are building off of; Arc, Blade Vortex, Ice Nova, and Storm Brand all have >10% usage.

Melee really is the odd man out; we have one really popular skill, and a tiny handful of skills with limited/niche users. And this doesn't even BEGIN to get into other balance issues, such as how two-handers are effectively worthless in the era of abyssal jewels. Sure, fake dual-wielding may be gone, but sword-and-board is still great, and true dual wielding still works like a charm. (Molten strike works A-OK with a pair of Grelwood Shanks!)

I do agree that the rework of spells isn't anywhere near as necessary right now. For starters, I'd like to see an UNDO of the "rework" the Static Strike that made it worse than it was before.