instead of 3.9 bow rework we should get a 3.9 melee rework 2.0

Holy dog balls, this thread is still going even in the Bin of Forgotten Souls? Wow. Legit impressed.

Melee is fine. Targeting in this game is never going to be smooth and easy because if they did what was required to make it smooth and easy (i.e. target creature nearest to your click and direct the attack towards it, even if the character has to turn a bit or take a step), the forum grognaks would explode with molten, irreconcilable fury over the "loss of control". Either you have perfect control over your shit and you need to click precisely on what you want to hit, you can click "close enough" and the character will compensate at the expense of occasionally placing a feetie wrong or losing assballs strategies like Ancestral Call stacking, or you pick skills that affect an area and sidestep the issue completely.

Frankly, given the number of "I only use Multistrike for the autotargeting" posts in this thread, I think people'd get used to built-in autotargeting for strikes sooner rather than later. Obviously directly clicking on a critterbox would override close-enough targeting, since the click'd critter would be the closest thing to your target point, but yeah. Until y'all are willing to admit that targeting can only really get better than it currently is if you let the game do most of it for you a'la Multistrike or Ancestral Call, it's not going to improve.

As for the "tanky melee vs. squishy caster" thing? Yeah. Melee has more access to defensive nodes and abilities as a rule. Melee-focused classes like Duelist, Marauder, and Templar have a wider diversity of nodes, they can freely use Fortify Support without jank or having to weapon-swap to a melee skill (and if you think that's a valid way to generate Fortify defensively/reactively, you can kindly stop commenting about how jagged and un-smooth melee feels to play, please), they get the easiest access to leech, and furthermore melee weapon skill clusters tend to be more potent by far than spell clusters, bow clusters, or anything-else clusters. You need less of them to get to a point where you can squash everything in front of you, and if you invest in more of them anyways you get significantly more damage.

Super high end builds can overcome this through ruthlessly efficient tree planning and utilization of ridiculously expensive gear to get enough DPS to make up the difference, but it takes effort and currency. Up until Blight league showered me in riches and let me build this ridiculous Ice Shot thing, the strongest build I'd ever assembled was a pre-3.7 Molten Strike non-crit Inquisitor. Dealt great damage, but more than that it had 7k life, strong leech AND strong regeneration, easy Fortify, and easy Blind. All of which was reasonably easily achieved just by building sensibly in the west/southwest quadrant of the tree, obtaining a Belly of the Beast and snagging some Blind-on-hit Abyss jewels.

My current Ice Shot character deals more damage, and deals it "safely" from a distance, but I've only got about 4.5k life even after grabbing every life cluster within reasonable reach, sufficient leech (after a 1.x-exalt jewel) but ass regen, no Fortify whatsoever, and less reliable Blind. Even with stronger flasks and significantly more damage than the Inquisitor, that character is noticeably more fragile and I have to be a lot more careful with it, a lot more awake and on point. That's fine by me, I enjoy the nimble avoid-the-Owch playstyle, but it is much easier to build strong defenses into a melee left-side build.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is making excuses.

"

kompaniet wrote:

I'm playing a melee charachter this league. I don't have any issues.

Yeah i dont get it either...

Some of the very best clearing as well as bossing builds ive made were all Melee builds before and after the rework but, ok.. Somehow it's ALWAYS sucked balls. Fine by me joke is on everyone else putting together these Bow Builds at well over 100ex and i'm still putting together UE boss smashers cheaper than ever.. I dont even need good weapons anymore these days to make good damage to clear and boss now. Unique Weapons can cover damage on melee these days. Even the unique's that can also do so on Bow Characters is pretty hard as well as expensive to put together and see the results you want. (Doomfletch, Ripper, Tempest) Legion League was the only league it was expensive to do Melee..

And i would rather take a beating then ever play a bow build again. Not for nearly half the investment or More i can make a melee build way more powerful. (Again Before and After rework) Leveling makes me want to kill myself because Bow builds are by far some of the weakest builds UNTIL you start investing LUDICROUS amounts of currency into the build in order to see that "Ranged/Bow OP" shit.. and even then have fun doing shit like leveling past 90... Not when you randomly get one shot every 15-20 maps because Evasion is just fun like that.. Evasion is OP as fuck till entropy rolls around.. Melee and Caster (Both of which people claim suck these days somehow..) both can make competent bossing and clearing builds fresh in the league with little more than the trash off the ground. Melee you just need to work on getting a weapon and your set. Caster leveling your gems.

if you need to gimp yourself to the 4.5k hp levels to get enough damage on bow build then something went HORRIBLY wrong with your build. and i mean HORRIBLY WRONG


i have a 6k hp pure phys impale tornado shot slayer that deals damage in shapers per second, has 8 endurance charges (via the 'useless' slayer notable that makes frenzy==endurance..) and the cost of all that is the bow that i happen to find in my standard stash (Lioneyes is a good replacement if in a pinch) + misc 10-100c items with life and all that jazz


my squishy as f.. MF windripper archers have more than 5k hp, 4end, arctic armour and dodge on top of that. difficult to die when everything is dead around you

and i never bruteforce builds with currency so there is plenty of room to spare so please - spare me that 'archers need to be squishy to have enough damage' because it is all hot air

"Need to", no.

But there's only about 170% or so life in the Ranger-accessible areas of the tree unless you want to wander your happy self over hip-deep in the Marauder area. Assuming you're staying mostly in the southeast quad of the tree however, life is not simple to find, nor does it explode from your ears the way it does over in the Marauder quad.

The other thing is that for many, many, many players, spending a hundred chaos on a single piece of gear is something they do maybe once a league. You say "misc. 10-100c stuff" like a hundred chaos thrown down on a random set of boots you kinda like the cut of is an everyday no-big-deal thing. That holding out for 130+ life and 80+ total res on every piece of gear is EZPZ and no issue, and finding the points to socket six +7% life jewels in the tree is no sweat.

When you're building on the five-chaos market though, and compensating for that with a build that uses the tree for damage instead of gear and thus can barely manage three jewel sockets? Those numbers don't fly. For those folks, melee builds in the west-southwest of the tree are where they can find the durability they need to actually progress through the game. I'm willing to accept lower life totals than just about anyone else in the forums these days because I'm used to the five-chaos market and the limitations inherent in knowing that filling every item slot I've got with 150+c of top-end shit just isn't going to happen.

The top one percent of one percent of players don't like melee because when they invest hella currency in it, it doesn't scale as well as bows or spells can. For everybody else? The silent bulk majority of the playerbase, for whom trading in general is a rare luxury rather than an accepted thing? Left-side melee is absolutely hardier than most distance builds.

well 100c because i do not expect to do endgame with starter 5c gear..

on the other hand previous league fixed bottom-right part of the tree survivability issue albeit clumsy - with Legion Jewels

the 'gain ES equal to part of life' and 'chaos res applies to elemental damage' keystones are both abso-f-lutely amazing for survivability and Point Blank can be used for these without much tree butchering. it is ofc 50% damage loss but oh well. couple that with amazing Crystal Skin notable and i find bottom right part of the tree better than ever

on the other hand - marauder 'quad' has around 20% inc life more than ranger one. it is the strength that makes the difference, not these few extra life nodes.

not to mention that recently life gear (and i mean insane life gear) is pretty much flooding the market if you dont aim for the 'best'.

stuff like this:

seems 'crazy' yet it is all in the 'affordable end-game gear' category - changes to life rolls and abundance of %life rolls on items helped bottom-right part of the tree the most (low base effect)

as for the 5c gamers - ive been one of them, despite having mountains of money accumulated trough many years of playing. 5c melee is most likely too low on the dps to kill dangers before they become problems. 300pdps weapons are really not enough nowadays (unless you go crit heavy that has its costs - life/accuracy/res/damage rings are not cheap)
then there is the jewels case - melee is built on attack speed. where you get most of your attack speed from? jewels. 5c builds wont have double+ attack speed rolls with good accompanying affixes. you end up with SLOW, weak character - and as such it needs to spend even more on defenses as it is going to need them

ranged - with 'added elemental' supports adding ~200+ flat - and fast base bows like Tempest and the incredible Mirage Archer can pull some sick stuff on a 5c budget. melee? maybe, but there is a reason pretty much noone does that - maybe, just maybe, it really sucks

One points missed there in the thread, when we talk bout "melee", it is not only the max block user or those abusing elemental penetration-projectile skills and slapping the "melee tag on it because it fight at melee distance.

An example of something that should be reworked and that The patch did not cover are the 2 handers.

The fact that with nowadays 6-7l helms there is no advantages to them at all anymore for example.

The fact that dual wielding or using unarmed deal more damage and have better Survivability than 2handers.

With the attack speed nerf of the "melee patch", 2 handers got hurt bad.
we even have quivers with sockets now... slap in the face to 2 handers.

"

maybe, but there is a reason pretty much noone does that - maybe, just maybe, it really sucks

Or maybe not everyone in this game is obsessed with the speed meta? I bet you would puke blood if you had to play my Chieftain with 0 faster walk and low APS, he is slow and clunky as fuck and his damage doesn't even reach a milion. But he is bulky enough to face tank almost all content in the game making him my go to choice whenever i have a tough boss encounter to deal with. I probably couldn't do half the content i actually do if it wasn't for him.

The thing about melee is that you can make very bulky chars with very little resources which allows casuals like me to do content they would have no business doing otherwise. I certainly can't do it fast but i can do it, i couldn't at all otherwise.

The stuff you are throwing around here i couldn't even dream of getting shit like that. And i dare say 90% of the playerbase don't even know stuff like this exists to dream about it. If you're around reddit or here on the forum you might get the impression the POE is all about speed meta, but a large part of the POE players aren't using either. Melee might suck ass for your way of playing, but your way isn't the only way, and for normal players melee is in a decent spot.

there is no 'my way' or 'your way' - the game dictates what works and what doesnt.

Current League mechanic REQUIRES fast movement speed AND/OR HUGE coverage AND huge damage. you can ofc play anything but if you dont check these boxes - youll fail league content. might not be a big deal to you but.. well.. it kinda is a big deal. it is difficult to upgrade towers when you have to fight all the time..

Legion? high coverage (most melee characters INCLUDING cyclone couldnt open entire legion!), high damage (timeless conflict), movement speed (legion AND timeless conflict). im sure people playing Cleave had 'amazing' experience with that.

timed events - Incursion (+life T15 incursions demand SERIOUS damage to manage the timer), synthesis. no aoe/speed? sad.


so.. it doesnt matter how you or me like to play this game, it is the game that makes the rules and right now these expect certain speed, certain AOE and certain damage (note: game right now doesnt give a f.. about survivability). you dont want to have that? sure, but dont expect a good time. failing league mechanic more often than not is surely fun - esp when you see stuff like archers/summoners who complete them 100/100

The game sets the rules, but the players set their goals. I didn't give a fuck about legion content and neither about blight content. Why? Because i am not even playing league. And i am not playing league because couldn't get jack shit done in 3 months. I am not playing enough/not efficient enough to get anywhere so i don't even bother. Not to mention that leagues are nothing but beta tests for buggy unbalanced content. I rather wait 3 months and deal with the finished product. And i am fairly sure there are thousands of players who play even less than me, who haven't even seen shaper yet. Not everyone is dead set on fully cleaning highest level league content 100/100. You want that, most of the Forum probably want's that. But thousands of others don't give a damn and still manage to have fun. I surely do without all that nonsense.

And on a side note, all my melees can do Tier 15 incursions and clean 60+% of it on average, more than enough to get a decent temple out of it. You don't need to clear the whole thing with 10 seconds left to spare.

here is the point:

you say you play little and cannot 'accomplish' much. fair enough

here is a thought: given the same time spent you could be killing Uber Elder right now if youve played Summoner

the 'meta' and 'non-meta' difference is so huge and it matters MOST to people who play little. people like mathil can make ANY character in 20-30 hours total playtime, i require 4-5days to reach 92 (my soft-cap) so for me.. it doesnt matter much

for people who play little playing non-meta is pretty much not playing at all in comparison.

give summoner a try - youll be in maps in 8 hours without even upgrading your gear from tabula/wanderlust/etc