How We're Approaching the Melee Rebalance in 3.7.0

Please allow stat sticks to be used with melee skills again.

Then if you could go "balance"/"improve" = "ruin" something else that would be great.

Looking forward to play some melee next league!

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Chris wrote:

In Synthesis, we performed an extensive rebalance of Spellcasting throughout Path of Exile. A lot of this work focused on a numerical rebalance of most skills.
We have indicated that the June 3.7.0 expansion contains a similar rebalance of Melee skills, and while we certainly do intend to numerically adjust them to make sure they're viable, the actual scope of Melee changes planned is a lot larger than we have indicated so far.
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One league more like Sclerosis League - full of rebalances, improvements and new retarded ideas, plus some old and new bugs on the top of that, and GGG will see the players pool comparable not to 2016 like now, but to 2014 level!

Make cyclone work like Barb D3 WW

The combat has been clunky since the day I started playing. Diablo 3 got this right all those years ago (gotta get something right huh?)

I'm sure you can optimize animations but the combat flow to me is mostly lacking in one level up, the meta flow. Vaal skills are sort of what I'm talking about but I'm missing a lot more cooldown skills. Right now the flow of combat is monotone, we need powerful defensive and offensive skills with long, medium and short cooldowns.

Diablo 3 had SPECTACULAR skills. Like zombies climbing on top of eachother and falling over your enemies like a falling tower. How on earth they could make such a skill and not be clunky, I'll never know. But those who did that were genius.

I think you should consider nerfing damage of skills across the board and making us a bit more squishy. Then adding these longer cooldown skills with the goal of maintaining average damage and survivability but making it more dynamic.

Melee/2h Melee pre 3.7




GGG seconds before 3.7

Close enough to eagles...

"

whrsmycoffee wrote:

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I'm sure you can optimize animations but the combat flow to me is mostly lacking in one level up, the meta flow. Vaal skills are sort of what I'm talking about but I'm missing a lot more cooldown skills. Right now the flow of combat is monotone, we need powerful defensive and offensive skills with long, medium and short cooldowns.
(...)
I think you should consider nerfing damage of skills across the board and making us a bit more squishy. Then adding these longer cooldown skills with the goal of maintaining average damage and survivability but making it more dynamic.

This sounds slightly like Lineage2 skills, which are very interesting, but PoE players base will not be happy with such mechanics, as it requires far more from the player than just spamming one skill button and eventually spamming flasks. I would be happy to see such mechanics.
Nerfing the damage and slowing down the entire meta is good idea in my opinion, as arcade shooters games is not exactly something what people would expect from a game seeing description: "online Action RPG". I was playing Diablo1 and Diablo2 for hundreds of hours and a fun was obtained not because I have exploded all content in seconds, but because hacking and slashing was challenging and sometimes rewarding (maybe some of you remember 32 players mod for D2).

Dream come true? No more attack speed meta?

I'll love melee then if I see melee skills on cooldown, melee skills hyper damage, wider melee skill hitbox next league. Besides who would like to his character attack with melee skills like he is doing the same skill at 1000x speed?....ugh...that's not how melee feels like...ugh!

A big part of the problem has been that ranged combat is just so darned good. It USED to be that melee was balanced because melee skills were simply that much stronger, and hence you could afford to take some more tanky passives to make up for having to be in harm's way so much.

Power creep has thrown that all out the window. Back in 2014, few, if any, spells or ranged abilities had a viable set of 5 "more DPS" gems you could socket in them. (but melee often did!) Now? They ALL to. And power has crept into other things, such as spell DPS generally climbing up, while things like the damage malus on GMP going down. (going from "50% less damage" to "25% less damage" is a de-facto "50% more damage" bonus! Of course, then we have the huge list of sources of extra arrows and projectiles...)

And yeah, the skills feel clunky. I've built around quite a few different skills, but while some of them got pretty fun... They weren't terribly fast for clearing. None of them could hold up to simply going with high range.

Overall, if you want to have ANY hope of Melee being out of the crapper, you gotta accomplish the following:

• Fix the balance of one-handed vs. two-handed. These used to be on par with each other, but one-handers have naturally higher APS, which means they benefit disproportionately from all the flat damage we get from auras and ESPECIALLY abyssal jewels. The removal of fake dual-wielding just meant that real dual-wield or sword-and-board is now the way to go.
  
  
• Rebalance accuracy and crits. It was seen that Resolute Technique was a joke before, but it's kinda gotten worse, especially when some classes (ESPECIALLY for ranged) can trivialize having to build accuracy. this is someplace where you'll have to nerf ranged combat.
  
  
• Nerf ranged. You can't just solve everything with more power creep, especially since ranged is SO good, you can no longer just make melee "just as good;" we can ALREADY insta-nuke everything at range with a mix of MF and survivability. I mean, why would we give up that range? For a bit more survivability when we can do that fine at range? Can't have more clear speed, since we can max that out already; sub-1-minute clears are where player skill to keep control of the character actually starts to matter more than just build strength.
  
  Looking at a lot of other action-type games, I might suggest a good place to start would be to reduce almost all ranged skills' ability to easily hit lots of targets at once. Big AoEs and hitting lots of targets should be something pretty endemic to melee skills.
  
  
• Rein in the speed clear meta. The speed clear meta wasn't just a consequence of power creep; rather, it came because the game has a really bad habit of not balancing the risks vs. rewards. A lot of boss fights (especially phased ones!) can take longer than the rest of the map put together, but yield nothing special that a pack of trash mobs would've given you... But has a FAR higher chance of you randomly getting spiked/one-shot to death. So much of the riskier content just has no compelling reason to touch it, hence the best solution for YEARS now has been to just build a super-speed glass cannon, and repeatedly farm easier stuff that gives better exalts & EXP/hr than anything genuinely hard would.
  
  And through this lens, melee has no real purpose, since ranged lets you maintain better mobility by not having to run up to each and every monster. I mean, if every mob pack DID drop something you wanted to pick up (or anything other than one in a thousand packs...) we might move around a bit, but ranged combat just lets us run and take the shortest path through the map, and we only detour if our loot filter explodes.

To make melee smooth I think we need to choose between a lot of options :

1°) Get rid of accuracy much easier, or make resolute technique not cancelling crits anymore

2°) Have Massive AOE and multistrike keystones (to free sockets on links since they're mandatory for 90% of melee skills)

3°) Have much more defensive and offensive keystones to counterbalanced the much riskier playstyle like : perma fortify (with bonuses on attack), damage reduction on hit taken recently (with a cap), much less crit damage taken, adrenaline availability and bonuses attached to it (duration added on kill/% chance on unique boss hit for example), % chance of getting frenzy/power charges on attack, increase significantly life regen/leech and life on hit. Make "battlecry" and "words of glory" keystones one point needed only (currently with at the very least between 3 or 4 points needed makes them not worth investing at all)

4°) Rework numbers of almost all skills (but you already know that), it will also counterbalance the need of getting really broken weapons to dps as decently as average casters.

5°) Rework some ascendancies (but you already know that)

6°) Enchance block mechanic with bigger block numbers on passives and damage reduction if you blocked recently (to smooth the defense playstyle and prevent getting on shot if the big hit doesn't get blocked with my 75% chance for a typical example). Also make block much more affordable for all melee classes in terms of points, not only an archetype in which you have to fully commit.

To preserve the "spirit" of Melee's feeling, it will ALWAYS have a slower gameplay because of the need to get closer to the target compared to spells and bows, so you have to rewards this fact with what I mentioned above. I don't know what we should choose between to or combine with each others, but as a fan of your game with thousands of hours of playtime (mainly in melee tanky characters) I'm just giving an opinion.