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

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TreeOfDead wrote:

+1 for 3.9 melee rework 2.0!

BUFF melee finally at least somehow

All good and well as long as it is only the real melee skills that get some loving. The automatic multi-strike that melee skills got in patch 3.7 :

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Bex_GGG wrote:

Hit Multiple Enemies: Every attack -- even Glacial Hammer -- can now hit multiple targets by default. Previously, an attack would look at targets in melee range in front of your character and choose one. Now it chooses all of them that the attack physically passes through. Note that this is not "area of effect", "area damage" or "melee splash".

was a good start but didn't go far enough to bring real melee skills up to a level that is in line with most ranged or spell skills. All the other quasi-melee skills (those skills listed as melee but have secondary AoE damage that isn't melee) should be left as they are.

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Nephalim wrote:

They would likely find a different game to play. would GGG really destroy 4.0 hype by removing the remaining competitive builds from the board?

I guess this is a strong indicator to buff melee to be competitive at something and to have its niche.

Buff melee? That's never going to happen. It is my personal opinion that GGG dislikes melee.

Go fig.

They need to rework off-screening damage, decreasing the power of projectiles and chaining. Only then true melee will be more desirable compared to spells and ranged attacks and minions.

'Real' melee skills needs a lot of work, pseudo-melee skills like Cyclone, Tectonic slam, Earthquake are mostly fine, but:

Multistrike support is useless, 3.7 nerfs destroyed the gem, it needs to attack much faster or it will remain useless, what is there to even think about here.

Melee splash and Ancestral Call should be merged into one gem, also reduce damage penalty or even consider removing it.

Heavy Strike is never going to be good.

Heavy Strike is never going to be good.

Heavy Strike is never going to be good.

Heavy Strike is never going to be good.

Heavy Strike is never going to be good.

Need I continue?

Stop. It. Until/unless the skill gets the Elemental Hit treatment and becomes something entirely new, the quintessential Grognak the Hitmanadin skill will never be good.

You would have to cut pack size by a factor of over ninety percent, make a five-critter group of foes a deadly and nigh-insurmountable threat, for Heavy Strike - i.e. the "REAL MELEE" everyone in here is so hot to butthump - to be even remotely a contender. You'd then have to remove every other skill archetype in the game.

No more casters, at all.

No more archers, at all.

No more wandslingers. No more minions. No more Righteous Fire. No more Spectral Throw. No more anything else that isn't Heavy Striking one critter at a time to death before trundling onward with your sweet hotness 12% movespeed boots and applying your axe to the next face in line.

Go play Dark Souls. Just do that thing. Dark Souls has a REAL MELEE system with tons of depth and variance, slow-paced superheavy melee combat superior to any isometric click-to-smack ARPG. Go play that. Please. Play Dark Souls, and then just get the hell out of Path already.

you really don't like heavy strike, also elemental hit isn't good for the same reason unless we are talking about you can use it with a bow lmao

Id argue that increasing range of strike skills and making Ancestral Call hit single targets when in blood stance would be a good start.

Otherwise we can put some counter balance on bows a few suggestions:

- Bow skills become namelock so that if enemy is not directly clicked the skill will just use mana and do nothing.
- Additional Arrows will be removed from quievers and quiever corruptions
- Dex stacking bonuses from gain x dmg for each x amount of dex is halved and the damage type becomes fire instead of ice
- All bow skills get 30% less attack speed modifier and 30% less damage effictiveness.
- Arrows stop traveling beyond the edge of the screen and disappear instead.

There is some inspiration for GGG please take it.

Heavy Strike is just a stand-in for every single shitty namelock mono-target
fist-to-dick skill left over from the early days of Path of Exile when they were still more or less building Diablo 2.5 and hadn't figured out what Path of Exile looked like yet. You want it to be Double Strike or Dual Strike or whatever instead, do you.

My point is that taking a slow-hitting, mono-target melee skill and expecting it to clear better than a fully kitted out, maximum investment thousand-exalt chainmonster offscreen build or MELEE IS BROKEN FOREVER(!!!!1!) is utterly ludicrous and shows a complete, fundamental lack of understanding as to how Path of Exile works.

Sockets are limited. You only ever get one full-power 6L, Shaped/Elder shenanery aside, unless you put together a two-handed build. Even if you do use a two-hander, your remaining 4Ls are going to have to support both skills, or support one better than the other. You also have to give up six sockets' worth of additional support and assistance for the primary body armor link, and this is before we bother acknowledging that the vast majority of this game's players will never see a 6L that isn't a Tabula Rasa.

Even if the game did not have large, dense packs of critters that cannot be effectively dealt with by Heavy Striking each one to death in sequence, it makes more sense to build a skill that can pull multiple roles in a given build. The days of "single target skill kills single targets, Cleave kills mobs, and never the twain shall ever ever ever ever meet" are long, LONG dead. If you're going to use multiple clicks - which I heartily encourage - it's vastly better to use skills which synergize with or enable each other, or which stack up to do more together than they could alone.

The cold degen multi-DoT Occultist remains one of the most fun and engaging builds I've ever played. Managing multiple dissimilar cooldowns and planning the most efficient placements of both my degen fields and myself on the fly was awesome, I miss that build terribly. It used multiple skills, but it used them blended together seamlessly in a way that was super fun and engaging to play. Not this whole "I use this one skill maybe twice per map, when I fight the map boss or when I fight a stubborn rare. I use this other skill all the time but it's specifically designed to be slow and clunky because I want my single-target skill to be the champion and the reason for my existence" bullfroggery.

Melee could be reworked to be effective. I think the main issue is that generally POE wants you to use the same skill to kill a 20M life boss as it does trash mobs with no hp. If you give it aoe, its 5m DPS screen clears instantly with no risk. If it doesn't do millions of DPS, you can't do endgame content.

Both perforate and bladestorm clearly tried to address this. More damage in a small box, or less damage spread out or moving around.

I think GGG could be creative and create more tectonic slam type skills, but have damage be based entirely on proximity. Standing next to shaper, 2M dps. Screenwide, hitting reasonably but not millions of dps.

The other alternative is make melee into range, ala Cobra Lash, which is a reasonably popular skills (probably half due to it being Mathils first league build).