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

Dear Bish OP,

I read your initial post, and have this to say in return,

If you haven't played molten strike, give it a try and stop your whining about melee.

If you want to walk up to a mob and whack it with a stick and only have that one mob affected by that whack, then by all means.

But there are supports for melee... You should look into support gems for melee skills.

If it isn't obvious to you that Frenzy is a utility skill, then you're probably trying to play the wrong game.

If it isn't obvious to you that Vigilant Strike is a utility skill, same thing goes.

Play MS, be happy!

I play 85-90% of the time as a summoner. This league I wanted to do a melee character so I played Molten Strike. It was such a roaring success, and I was so nearly-immortal, that I got bored with it and went back to summoning minions.

What does that tell you?

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Mlvado wrote:

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brushmonkey wrote:

So the main complaint seems to be that true melee range melee skills aren't as good as spells... the only way to improve them mechanically is to give them range/aoe and make them not 'melee' so they won't even be the same skill.

I'm sure there are ways of improving the quality of life for namelock melee, but a 'stand toe to toe with dangerous baddies' skill will always be mechanically inferior when measuring clearing power, that is just unavoidable, even if you can one shot everything you encounter.

There seems to be some unrealistic desires being voiced here, If you want to play melee that plays like spells..just play spells?

its even worst than that, People dont like Molten strike, double strike, bladeflurry, tectonic slan and all other melee skills anyone says its good, they dont like voidforge Two handed game play, and 1 handed multimod is too expensive, mind you, spend currency on a currency based game, nonsense. They want to play with a full yellow 1c gear and kill uber elder, because someone did that with storm brand, so now, every melee need be on that level too.

If you're not trolling, wow.

People are upset because to be viable on melee you need over powered gear which takes a long time to acquire and it still won't be as god tier as the same investment on a spell caster plus spell casters have the advantage with no gear as well which doesn't make sense that they would be stronger at every stage. If your god tier early game they better fall off end game but that's not the case. In every aspect, in every phase spells are superior that's why people are raising hell. It's not balanced.

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Relationship wrote:

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Mlvado wrote:

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brushmonkey wrote:

So the main complaint seems to be that true melee range melee skills aren't as good as spells... the only way to improve them mechanically is to give them range/aoe and make them not 'melee' so they won't even be the same skill.

I'm sure there are ways of improving the quality of life for namelock melee, but a 'stand toe to toe with dangerous baddies' skill will always be mechanically inferior when measuring clearing power, that is just unavoidable, even if you can one shot everything you encounter.

There seems to be some unrealistic desires being voiced here, If you want to play melee that plays like spells..just play spells?

its even worst than that, People dont like Molten strike, double strike, bladeflurry, tectonic slan and all other melee skills anyone says its good, they dont like voidforge Two handed game play, and 1 handed multimod is too expensive, mind you, spend currency on a currency based game, nonsense. They want to play with a full yellow 1c gear and kill uber elder, because someone did that with storm brand, so now, every melee need be on that level too.

If you're not trolling, wow.

People are upset because to be viable on melee you need over powered gear which takes a long time to acquire and it still won't be as god tier as the same investment on a spell caster plus spell casters have the advantage with no gear as well which doesn't make sense that they would be stronger at every stage. If your god tier early game they better fall off end game but that's not the case. In every aspect, in every phase spells are superior that's why people are raising hell. It's not balanced.

Bruh...

really? have you never heard of the "thicc jugg" meme? Have you never heard of slayer reave? What planet do people live on where melee is at a disadvantage to spellcasting?

Oh, let's nerf all the bow skills too because yeah that solves everything.

Want some cheese to go with that wine?

"

Relationship wrote:

If you're not trolling, wow.

People are upset because to be viable on melee you need over powered gear which takes a long time to acquire and it still won't be as god tier as the same investment on a spell caster plus spell casters have the advantage with no gear as well which doesn't make sense that they would be stronger at every stage. If your god tier early game they better fall off end game but that's not the case. In every aspect, in every phase spells are superior that's why people are raising hell. It's not balanced.

do you know who is really trolling? Quinn69 and his scuffed challenge.

did you ever played molten strike, double strike or blade flurry, on the right ascendancy, knowing what you are doing? i mean, using the right auras and the right gem setups and the cheap uniques? have you tryed herald of agony while cycloning/molten striking? do you know you can make the tankiest jugg ever with 2 life on hit claws, and the crawler will do all the damage you need while you experience all the melee gameplay you want? or are you following the "TOS"?

do you know how many "hand cast" spell are capable of doing those "no gear early game"? i can answer you, armageddon/storm brand, blade vortex and vortex/coldsnap. ANYTHING else you try to "handcast" will have the same result as the other attacks not mentioned on my post

it is a fact that storm brand are waaaay above everything else if you are participating in a race, othewise, you can play melee if you want, you can make currency and progress the same way everyone else, every boss is killable with melee, every piece of content in this game is reachable with melee

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Mlvado wrote:

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Relationship wrote:

If you're not trolling, wow.

People are upset because to be viable on melee you need over powered gear which takes a long time to acquire and it still won't be as god tier as the same investment on a spell caster plus spell casters have the advantage with no gear as well which doesn't make sense that they would be stronger at every stage. If your god tier early game they better fall off end game but that's not the case. In every aspect, in every phase spells are superior that's why people are raising hell. It's not balanced.

do you know who is really trolling? Quinn69 and his scuffed challenge.

did you ever played molten strike, double strike or blade flurry, on the right ascendancy, knowing what you are doing? i mean, using the right auras and the right gem setups and the cheap uniques? have you tryed herald of agony while cycloning/molten striking? do you know you can make the tankiest jugg ever with 2 life on hit claws, and the crawler will do all the damage you need while you experience all the melee gameplay you want? or are you following the "TOS"?

do you know how many "hand cast" spell are capable of doing those "no gear early game"? i can answer you, armageddon/storm brand, blade vortex and vortex/coldsnap. ANYTHING else you try to "handcast" will have the same result as the other attacks not mentioned on my post

it is a fact that storm brand are waaaay above everything else if you are participating in a race, othewise, you can play melee if you want, you can make currency and progress the same way everyone else, every boss is killable with melee, every piece of content in this game is reachable with melee

Your right melee and and spell casting is completely balanced no matter the budget and level your talking about or no matter what melee gem you choose.

There's nothing I can do to convince anyone otherwise.

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Relationship wrote:

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ciel289 wrote:

show me 1 build with gear worth 10c + tabula that has accepable level of dps and survieability to safely clear red maps,that isnt arc,winter orb,cold snap+vortey,brand,trap or totem based.

to set a baseline of what is a accepable

-over 5k life/ 6.5k es or 4.2k life + mom + reasonable option recover the lost mana (like crafted dmg taken gained as mana on atleast 2 of the 3 possible ring/amu slots or good manaregen that isnt eaten up by your spellusage)
-the ability to recover high enough regen/es recharge leech
-2nd layer of defences (endurance charges,eva,armor or dmg taken as x)
-caped resitences (doesnt mean chaso resitences)
-30% movementspeed on boots
-250k mapboss not shaper dps

you get the tabula for "free",a budget of 10c no other items with more than 1 good resi + 1good es/life mod + a craftable mod that doesnt cost more than 4c (good doesnt mean put 2 tier 1mods on all items!)

-if you are using mom you cant reserve more than 50% of your mana

-similar items have to be listed for trade in any league (they dont have to be the exact same fire could be cold resi instead and the rolls could be better but still in the same tier)

you will never be able to reach these numbers and they are on the very low end of what i would ever even consider running alced red tier maps with.

feel free to prove me wrong.

its your claim "10c + tabula are enough for spells (not top tier spells! even those would have a hard time with these stats) to clear endgame content" , so its on you to proof it.

You just listed a bunch of spells and totems? Why didn't you mention one broken godly melee gem and build too? Oh because there isn't one that stands out on that budget. That was my whole my point....but let's just forget all that and just stick to the statement I made and not the example


You want to make it fair, make spells require the same amount of investment as melee.



So if you need to find a 300+ DPS weapon to have good melee damage then I think balance is needing to have a 300+ Spell damage weapon to do damage.

This would require changes but that would be equality.

you really wanna go down that road?
there are cheap 1 and 2 hand uniq weapons that can easily be turned in melee builds than can farm red tier maps very well and fast.

if you use one of the extremly powerfull melee gems (tectonic slam,blade furry,molten strike) you can kill shaper/red tier elder without any dps trouble

ofc the other gear has to be reasonable,but that is the same for spells no matter how much ppl like you pretend that spells dont need any gear at all.
alone the difference between level 20 and level 21 gems is as big as the difference between good and insane melee weapons.

yes spells have an easier time with weapons and leveling,but they sacrifice fast dmg progression for safe dmg progression. spell users have to invest into the skillgem itself and not in the weapon,some of the more popular level 21 spellgems cost over 1 exalt.

you reach level 90 before you get a level 20 skill gem and than you still have to gamble for the corruption and if you didint start with a q gem you have to spent those 20 gcp or reset it to a level 1 20% gem.
gems are part of the gear and compared to spellskill gems melee gems are a non factor for gear.

some of you "melee is so bad" fanatics mix up so many things trying to proof your opinions.
jumping from "melee gems are bad" over "melee might be ok,but only if you have the gear" to "spells only need 10c and a tabula" while completely igrnoring the downside of spells that arent used with traps or totems.

just because totems are broken and spells are usually used with them,doesnt make spells in general strong.
for selfcast there are only a hand full of spells that are powerfull and werent added/buffed/changed last patch.

tier one spells are balanced with tier one attacks.
low tiers spells are balanced with low tiers attacks.

people are comparing viper strike with storm brand, srly? its the same to compare a randon college basketball player with lebron james, or trying to compare someone that plays on the second division of the the spanish league with Messi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMknixn-ftY

take a look at this, 20k EHP, god knows how much life on hit, leech and regen, and holy crap that damage.

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ciel289 wrote:

ya right.... and how do you get these 1mil dmg numbers from ingame information ?
the game itself is horrible at calculating the dps for you in a reasonable way.
it doesnt factor in enemy resistances or curses applied to them

you are talking about functional dps,but how do you get these numbers without using some kind of calculator for it. the game itself isnt providing these numbers.

when you use a calculator for these numbers you cant factor in the gameplay they need unless you can facetank the stuff you are fighting.

Well, I apparently have to take this slow for you.

As it appears you have not realized, PoE.ninja lets you see all the "top" characters in a league; 20,000 is a hell of a lot. (It's enough to cover everyone in STANDARD Betrayal level 92+; for SSF/HC, it just covers everyone from level 80+ as that number doesn't even approach 20k)

And with this listing, you also get a complete breakdown of their builds: level, class, passives, gem setups, gear...

And to top it all off? This does calculate and let you preview their Shaper DPS. Yes, because you can ALSO just quickly import these characters into PoB, I've confirmed: the numbers it uses are Shaper DPS, which is considered an actually reliable figure.

But here you are spinning your wheels, apparently asserting that "well, stuff that's not your tooltip DPS isn't in-game and hence useless, but tooltip DPS is also useless" as a pathetic means to try to dismiss actual statistics.

Simple put: you've been hilariously wrong. We have an objective means of measuring the offensive capability of REAL builds being made, and it shows that spells are in a FAR better spot than melee.

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Mlvado wrote:

tier one spells are balanced with tier one attacks.
low tiers spells are balanced with low tiers attacks.

It's hilarious that you use two different examples of SKILL LEVEL to justify a segregation and ranked system for BUILD CHOICES.

In any BALANCED game, there should be no hard-and-fast "tier lists" for choice on basic gameplay decisions. A player should not be punished for not automatically knowing "oh yeah, this is the OP choice." A real game is balanced around SKILL, not an arbitrary choice.

The better comparison would be if we had otherwise-identical shoes for each basketball player to try, with no indication that one pair made you so much better, that a high-schooler could out-shoot LeBron James while wearing them.

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ACGIFT wrote:

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Mlvado wrote:

tier one spells are balanced with tier one attacks.
low tiers spells are balanced with low tiers attacks.

It's hilarious that you use two different examples of SKILL LEVEL to justify a segregation and ranked system for BUILD CHOICES.

In any BALANCED game, there should be no hard-and-fast "tier lists" for choice on basic gameplay decisions. A player should not be punished for not automatically knowing "oh yeah, this is the OP choice." A real game is balanced around SKILL, not an arbitrary choice.

The better comparison would be if we had otherwise-identical shoes for each basketball player to try, with no indication that one pair made you so much better, that a high-schooler could out-shoot LeBron James while wearing them.

you would be right, EXCEPT!

not everyone wants to play "gotta go fast" mode, but frankly speaking, "gotta go fast" mode is what wins races.

HOW ARE YOU SURPRISED AT THIS???

the "tier" list of skills is basically how high up they rank on the "gotta go fast" meter.

And GGG tells us they don't want to encourage the clearspeed meta...

YEAH, RIGHT!!!

(but really i only ever play low-medium speed clear characters, because that's what I LIKE... except that time i played a fakener and nearly gave myself a seizure)


Edit to add:

It's been a couple of years since I argued with you on the forums, and you're still grinding the same old axe. I suggest playing the game for a change and having some fun.