melee.. melee never changes

Bow league so noone cares but still. Few points for consideration

1. Mechanics

Melee 'strike' targeting is garbage. It doesnt work right now. There is NO WAY of playing strike skill without either Multistrike (garbage clear), Ancestral Call (garbage single target) or Tribal Fury (high cost and opportunity cost). Anyone saying 'it works' - try Facebreaker + Infernal Blow. and tell me it 'works'. It doesnt.

While using one gem to gain AOE is common, the problem is - 'strike' skills simply DO NOT WORK without that. Try it, it simply DOESNT WORK. Current situation is not 'balance' related, it is a technical deficiency that for some reason hasnt been fixed yet (while fix IS THERE - just use the same auto-aim Multistrike uses and simply check range. fixed. done. nobody cares about immersion when players are actively encouraged (yes!) to reach stupid movement and attack speeds)


Build in 'weapon splash' is worthless. Strike skills do not work without splash source. Threshold jewel (dual strike, glacial bummer) or mechanic (static strike) or bust. Skills without splash source are worthless. They do not offer 200% damage of skills that do to justify spending one extra support for splash.


Weapon range discrepancy AKA - 'foils or bust'. Strike skills live or die by the weapon range. Guess what is going to happen when fastest one handed weapon type has more range than two handers? Every experienced player (and many new ones) quickly realise that a) you need highest possible base attack speed b) on a base with highest weapon range. Hello foils. I bet there are more foils in use than ALL OTHER weapon types combined. Great design.. Solution: weapon range is an outdated mechanic that might work in Grim Dawn, not here. this game outcreeped such mechanics years ago and with each patch it gets sillier and sillier with each round of +40% more damage. At current time weapon range is an equivalent of limited arrows for bow users. Stupid idea? exactly.

2. Numbers


Attack speed nerfs aka 'adjustments' for skills like Dual Strike. Why? This skill is already garbage (single target with useless 'deal lots of damage to white mobs' gimmick, that also hinders movement skill usage.. just because) and you made it even worse? WHY? noone ever used that skill (for a reason) and someone seriously decided to make it EVEN WORSE? I might miss something but wasnt Tornado Shot, Kinetic Blast, minions, most spells simply MILES BETTER for years and somehow missed all the nerfs?


Strike skills (single target, clunky targeting, no AOE) damage effectiveness (including flat damage and attack speed penalties) is TERRIBLE. Coupled with -1 link (required for them to work at all) they have less damage, less utility than skills like Reave, EQ or Ground Slam. Why? Heavy strike might look 'meaty' with its double damage et all but.. -2 support gems (aka 2 40% multipliers) surely make up for that. AOE skills have better single target than that.. 'slow clap'


3. Short list of skills that require removal or immediate fixing:

Cleave. everything about Cleave is GARBAGE. aoe with that +radius per mob gimmick is still less than basic spell's one. damage, attack speed, makes sense only when dual wielding. Skill that has NOTHING going for it (no, Fortify from threshold jewel doesnt count when you get 'more damage' from Fortify Support..)

Heavy Strike. no source of splash. slow. requires 2 supports to work and then deals low damage. stun is cool but.. seriously, why bother? i know it works but making it work costs more than reaching damage high enough you dont care about stun anymore. whats the point of this skill?

Chain Hook. targeting. targeting kills this skill. it is fun when it works and abhorrent remaining 8 out of 10 times. this skill RELIES on targeting POE doesnt provide.

Static Strike. targeting. this skill does not require AC/MS to work but requires it to even hit something (try playing it without AC/MS). you WASTE one link to make this skill WORK. seriously?

Dominating Blow. single target. doing Shaper with this skill is.. terrible. it needs redesign as currently single target depends on minions you dont have and take ages to get. bad design (and it ofc requires two gems to work at all.. AGAIN)

Dual Strike. joke attack speed, gimmick threshold jewel, requires one support to even hit things. why would anyone play this when blade flurry exists? like seriously - WHY?

Glacial Hammer - same question? i know i know some managed to kill T11 boss, ive heard that. but again - why use this single target skill when you can play Frost Blades that have 1000% the clear speed and similar single target. for that every-third-hit you get microfreeze? I'll pick every-hit-freezes with a bettter skill, thank you

Lightning Strike - cool in theory, doesnt work in practice. this time it is ground-projectile's fault - it doesnt work in any kind of 'busy' tileset and cannot handle elevation changes. again - game mechanic is the limitation, not the 'balance'.



I know there are people who made 1h/shield mace heavy strike build. I know. I also know you can kill Uber Elder wearing tabula and using 4linked skeletons. POE is weird nowadays.

Right now melee playstyle as a whole is devoid of ANY redeeming feature. It doesnt excel at no budget, low budget, mid budget nor unlimited budget. It doesnt excel at single target, tankiness nor clear speed. Its skills clearly are underdeveloped and most 'fixes' in the 'melee rebalance' were nerfs coupled with random +flat damage thrown in as a collateral. League after league after league Cyclone is the most used melee skill with all the remaining COMBINED hovering around 2-5%. Cyclone being used for proccing spells ofc as 4linked triggered spells still outperform 6inked melee skill. what a surprise


And now we get Barrage Support and Nova Support to even further widen the gap between the strongest (bows) and weakest (your guess).. just because what exactly?

Why out of all 'reworks' melee was actually the worst one and turned out to be net nerf after all? Seriously - WHY?

One more "melee so shit" posts... Melee has it's advantages if you know how to exploit them.
And don't even start with Glacial Hammer reeeee talk. Spells have their black sheeps too. Either play "good" skills from the pool or move on.

If you comment i believe you have 1st hand experience with at least one skill from the Garbo List. do you mind sharing PoB/character name we can check to see the 'strengths' youve exploited?


It is unfortunately frequent from non-melee players to have wild beliefs about melee's strength because they simply cannot comprehend that not all styles are made equal. It might be prudent for such players to not comment on issues they havent yet experienced..

I think you hit the nail on the head re: damage effectiveness. Strike skills need to have by far the highest damage effectiveness of any skills in the game, full stop. And as you pointed out, they simply don't have that kind of Max Possible Damage status, which means there's nothing to reward players for choosing what is by definition the highest-risk and slowest-clearing play style.

I played a bit of Infernal Blow last league just for fun, but then I got to endgame and it was really as blatant as saying "I guess I should change to Tectonic Slam now so that I can be good at things." Because without changing ANYTHING in my gear or passive tree, swapping from a "strike" melee skill to an "area" melee skill (and adjusting support gems accordingly) gave me about six times the clear speed while nearly doubling my damage. And I'm sure your example of Glacial Hammer vs Frost Blades reflects a similar experience to anyone who hated themselves enough to play GH recently.

But I don't even know if this is worth complaining about anymore. Because it's so clearly obvious to anyone who actually thinks about game balance that Strike Melee needs to be the highest damage archetype, and it needs to be the highest by a WIDE margin to justify its use, that the fact that it does LESS damage than the much-safer Bow and Spell options tells me that GGG wants it to be worse.

"

sidtherat wrote:

If you comment i believe you have 1st hand experience with at least one skill from the Garbo List. do you mind sharing PoB/character name we can check to see the 'strengths' youve exploited?


It is unfortunately frequent from non-melee players to have wild beliefs about melee's strength because they simply cannot comprehend that not all styles are made equal. It might be prudent for such players to not comment on issues they havent yet experienced..

Here is my Garbo list:

Bladefall
Cremation
Detonate Dead
Ethereal Knives
Arctic Breath
Fireball
Firestorm
Icestorm
Flameblast
Lightning Tendrils
Purifying Flame
Storm Burst
Spark


Melee is my favorite style of play. Can every skill be top tier damage? No, but everyone is doing the same sad violin about Glacial Hammer and shit. They are crap and they will be crap.
Just look what Mathil is doing. Dude is playing almost exclusively non meta skills and crushes the game with op damage. Remove some damage, invest into deff, make more rounded chars and actually learn how to fight as melee. Have you seen his Static Strike and dps?
I would like to see those Deadeyes op multi screen clear crap when they open full Legion on a red map...
For me bows are utter crap for my taste except SA and only with Impale introduced people started making tanky TS builds with very high damage. Other than that, glass cannons.

As usual I totally agree with your post, Sid.

I did want to note, however, that Dominating Blow is a bit underappreciated imho. As a necro it’s quite powerful in a weapon like Chaber Cairn, both for clearing and single target. If you’re stacking minion attack speed along with Spiritual Command, melee splash is the only convenience gem you need - it really doesn’t take long to summon enough minions to decimate most bosses.

Now, DB may suck with mechanical fights like shaper/elder, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t have a strong niche. Maps (including t16) and league mechanics, including delving, are all fine with it.

But everything I’m saying is moot because, of course, we’re not arguing over whether something is viable or a sleeper powerhouse or whatever, we’re just pointing out these skills are simply outclassed by non-melee options and require too many sacrifices to be functional that non-melee skills do not.

In that vein, I’m surprised Infernal Blow didn’t make your list. I’ve never seen anyone use that skill, ever.

Just for my understanding, in all those topics where you made a rant about melee, were you actually talking about those specific melee skills or about melee in general? Because if you've been talking about these specimen i wouldn't have bothered arguing against it.

Yes, those strikeskills are trash and not worth using. Only redeeming argument to make here is that there are just as many bow and spell skills that are just as useless as these melee skills. And maybe the point that not everything has to be competitively viable. Coming from card games it's common occurence to have cards that will never find a way into any serious deck. It's the same with a number of skill here in this game.

@Infernal Blow - it is weak but it DOESNT require melee splash. it helps a lot but you can play it with 'just' -1 link for AC (not MS!). and the splooosh sound it makes is worth it. it is still a weak skill in comparison to other corpse based ones like DD/VD or even Cremation (with enchant and proper gems it is one pop per shaper phase.. it is ultimate single target damage boost out there)


as for the rest. well, these are main points. there are other:

- there is nothing 'melee' does better than bow and casters. 'tanky' doesnt count as nothing in melee makes you inherently tanky. while you HAVE to be tanky to play melee in the first place.

- defensive mechanics are freely available to anyone with very similar cost associated. on the other hand dangers players face are MUCH more dangerous to melee players. stuff you can offscreen hardly poses any realistic challenge

- boss mechanics are 100% tuned to punish nearby targets harder than the 200% ms mirage archer donning archers. reliance on DoTs as area denials, clusterf.. visuals that obscure said danger zones, post-death effects that are lethal to melee while barely noticeable to ranged (delve icicles etc). there is NO UPSIDE there, simply none.

- building for damage pretty much forces gear choices as most of the non-sword / non-claw options are STRICTLY worse, sometimes by a long shot. going non-crit is.. questionable. there is a reason why most melee builds (all 12 of them) use almost identical passive tree pathing.

- diversity is non existant. if you need damage, you go crit. if you go crit you pick ascendancy that solves your crit and/or accuracy - class that doesnt help you with neither is useless. diveristy.. yeah right.

- when was the last time someone used one handed mace (not sceptre)? slow axe? answer is NEVER. all experienced players use fast swords or fast claws. no reason to touch anything else. one ofc can use whatever but these are STRICTLY worse options. diversity..

- 2handers are in a pathetic state, carried by two elder/shaper swords that are going to be 20ex+ next league. 2handers deal laughable damage compared to dual wielding multimoded foils and scale much worse due to junk attack speed

I still would like to see GGG make a demo of melee, with actual gameplay explaining to the audience why playing melee is a good, valid choice. because right now there is no answer to that question. people play it because they like it and suffer the consequences. you cannot complete the sentence 'melee is extraordinary good at .... leaving bow builds in the dust' with a straight face.

This game must not be perfectly symmetrical, otherwise it would be enough to have one single target spell/melee-attack/bow-attack and one aoe of every kind and thats the cake, everything more would be just a stuffed pillow to pretend.

But how it is right now OP is right, things like glacial hammer dont need to be on the top of anything but as with other "niche" skills they could at least be viable for those who dont have intentions of faceraping screen and screen after screen of enemys.

"

sidtherat wrote:

Spoiler

Bow league so noone cares but still. Few points for consideration

1. Mechanics

Melee 'strike' targeting is garbage. It doesnt work right now. There is NO WAY of playing strike skill without either Multistrike (garbage clear), Ancestral Call (garbage single target) or Tribal Fury (high cost and opportunity cost). Anyone saying 'it works' - try Facebreaker + Infernal Blow. and tell me it 'works'. It doesnt.

While using one gem to gain AOE is common, the problem is - 'strike' skills simply DO NOT WORK without that. Try it, it simply DOESNT WORK. Current situation is not 'balance' related, it is a technical deficiency that for some reason hasnt been fixed yet (while fix IS THERE - just use the same auto-aim Multistrike uses and simply check range. fixed. done. nobody cares about immersion when players are actively encouraged (yes!) to reach stupid movement and attack speeds)


Build in 'weapon splash' is worthless. Strike skills do not work without splash source. Threshold jewel (dual strike, glacial bummer) or mechanic (static strike) or bust. Skills without splash source are worthless. They do not offer 200% damage of skills that do to justify spending one extra support for splash.


Weapon range discrepancy AKA - 'foils or bust'. Strike skills live or die by the weapon range. Guess what is going to happen when fastest one handed weapon type has more range than two handers? Every experienced player (and many new ones) quickly realise that a) you need highest possible base attack speed b) on a base with highest weapon range. Hello foils. I bet there are more foils in use than ALL OTHER weapon types combined. Great design.. Solution: weapon range is an outdated mechanic that might work in Grim Dawn, not here. this game outcreeped such mechanics years ago and with each patch it gets sillier and sillier with each round of +40% more damage. At current time weapon range is an equivalent of limited arrows for bow users. Stupid idea? exactly.

2. Numbers


Attack speed nerfs aka 'adjustments' for skills like Dual Strike. Why? This skill is already garbage (single target with useless 'deal lots of damage to white mobs' gimmick, that also hinders movement skill usage.. just because) and you made it even worse? WHY? noone ever used that skill (for a reason) and someone seriously decided to make it EVEN WORSE? I might miss something but wasnt Tornado Shot, Kinetic Blast, minions, most spells simply MILES BETTER for years and somehow missed all the nerfs?


Strike skills (single target, clunky targeting, no AOE) damage effectiveness (including flat damage and attack speed penalties) is TERRIBLE. Coupled with -1 link (required for them to work at all) they have less damage, less utility than skills like Reave, EQ or Ground Slam. Why? Heavy strike might look 'meaty' with its double damage et all but.. -2 support gems (aka 2 40% multipliers) surely make up for that. AOE skills have better single target than that.. 'slow clap'


3. Short list of skills that require removal or immediate fixing:

Cleave. everything about Cleave is GARBAGE. aoe with that +radius per mob gimmick is still less than basic spell's one. damage, attack speed, makes sense only when dual wielding. Skill that has NOTHING going for it (no, Fortify from threshold jewel doesnt count when you get 'more damage' from Fortify Support..)

Heavy Strike. no source of splash. slow. requires 2 supports to work and then deals low damage. stun is cool but.. seriously, why bother? i know it works but making it work costs more than reaching damage high enough you dont care about stun anymore. whats the point of this skill?

Chain Hook. targeting. targeting kills this skill. it is fun when it works and abhorrent remaining 8 out of 10 times. this skill RELIES on targeting POE doesnt provide.

Static Strike. targeting. this skill does not require AC/MS to work but requires it to even hit something (try playing it without AC/MS). you WASTE one link to make this skill WORK. seriously?

Dominating Blow. single target. doing Shaper with this skill is.. terrible. it needs redesign as currently single target depends on minions you dont have and take ages to get. bad design (and it ofc requires two gems to work at all.. AGAIN)

Dual Strike. joke attack speed, gimmick threshold jewel, requires one support to even hit things. why would anyone play this when blade flurry exists? like seriously - WHY?

Glacial Hammer - same question? i know i know some managed to kill T11 boss, ive heard that. but again - why use this single target skill when you can play Frost Blades that have 1000% the clear speed and similar single target. for that every-third-hit you get microfreeze? I'll pick every-hit-freezes with a bettter skill, thank you

Lightning Strike - cool in theory, doesnt work in practice. this time it is ground-projectile's fault - it doesnt work in any kind of 'busy' tileset and cannot handle elevation changes. again - game mechanic is the limitation, not the 'balance'.



I know there are people who made 1h/shield mace heavy strike build. I know. I also know you can kill Uber Elder wearing tabula and using 4linked skeletons. POE is weird nowadays.

Right now melee playstyle as a whole is devoid of ANY redeeming feature. It doesnt excel at no budget, low budget, mid budget nor unlimited budget. It doesnt excel at single target, tankiness nor clear speed. Its skills clearly are underdeveloped and most 'fixes' in the 'melee rebalance' were nerfs coupled with random +flat damage thrown in as a collateral. League after league after league Cyclone is the most used melee skill with all the remaining COMBINED hovering around 2-5%. Cyclone being used for proccing spells ofc as 4linked triggered spells still outperform 6inked melee skill. what a surprise


And now we get Barrage Support and Nova Support to even further widen the gap between the strongest (bows) and weakest (your guess).. just because what exactly?

Why out of all 'reworks' melee was actually the worst one and turned out to be net nerf after all? Seriously - WHY?

"

sidtherat wrote:

Spoiler

@Infernal Blow - it is weak but it DOESNT require melee splash. it helps a lot but you can play it with 'just' -1 link for AC (not MS!). and the splooosh sound it makes is worth it. it is still a weak skill in comparison to other corpse based ones like DD/VD or even Cremation (with enchant and proper gems it is one pop per shaper phase.. it is ultimate single target damage boost out there)


as for the rest. well, these are main points. there are other:

- there is nothing 'melee' does better than bow and casters. 'tanky' doesnt count as nothing in melee makes you inherently tanky. while you HAVE to be tanky to play melee in the first place.

- defensive mechanics are freely available to anyone with very similar cost associated. on the other hand dangers players face are MUCH more dangerous to melee players. stuff you can offscreen hardly poses any realistic challenge

- boss mechanics are 100% tuned to punish nearby targets harder than the 200% ms mirage archer donning archers. reliance on DoTs as area denials, clusterf.. visuals that obscure said danger zones, post-death effects that are lethal to melee while barely noticeable to ranged (delve icicles etc). there is NO UPSIDE there, simply none.

- building for damage pretty much forces gear choices as most of the non-sword / non-claw options are STRICTLY worse, sometimes by a long shot. going non-crit is.. questionable. there is a reason why most melee builds (all 12 of them) use almost identical passive tree pathing.

- diversity is non existant. if you need damage, you go crit. if you go crit you pick ascendancy that solves your crit and/or accuracy - class that doesnt help you with neither is useless. diveristy.. yeah right.

- when was the last time someone used one handed mace (not sceptre)? slow axe? answer is NEVER. all experienced players use fast swords or fast claws. no reason to touch anything else. one ofc can use whatever but these are STRICTLY worse options. diversity..

- 2handers are in a pathetic state, carried by two elder/shaper swords that are going to be 20ex+ next league. 2handers deal laughable damage compared to dual wielding multimoded foils and scale much worse due to junk attack speed

I still would like to see GGG make a demo of melee, with actual gameplay explaining to the audience why playing melee is a good, valid choice. because right now there is no answer to that question. people play it because they like it and suffer the consequences. you cannot complete the sentence 'melee is extraordinary good at .... leaving bow builds in the dust' with a straight face.

Very well said @sidtherat, very well said.

The only possible completion for the sentence is: "melee is extraordinary good at DYING leaving bow builds in the dust", and I fear that will never change, as they already leave every playstyle in the dust regarding death potential...

Sadly, TencentGGG seems adamant in not improving melee and granting a damn niche to this beloved playstyle.

I was close to quitting PoE due to their incompetence when reworking Static Strike (the disheartening single target damage of Static Strike post rework is so bad compared to the one before, where it actually was a damn satisfying LIGHTNING BASED STRIKE skill, combined with their ineptitude regarding properly reworking the damn enchants to actually be useful - the duration reduction being preserved simply highlights why PoE has [Removed by Support])...

I am one of those unicorns that actually used every damn REAL MELEE SKILL, and most of the AoE based ones as REAL MELEE, yet even I conceded and swapped to Smite. And yes, I do use a damn dual wielding RT build with 1 handed MACE + 1 handed sceptre (no, no mace that I found/can afford yet is more impactful than a damn Doryiani's Catalyst acquired a long time ago, especially as I want to be focused on LIGHTNING ^^)...

I am very sad about the targeting nerf of Multistrike, not to mention the adjustment of canceling (though that doesn't affect me as much as I always stood in place by using the dedicated key for attack in place when dealing with worthy opponents), but another problem is that melee has no skill beside Cyclone to grant movement AND to allow hitting at the same time with a comparable efficiency your enemies - movement skills don't count.

Will probably finish leveling my only REAL MELEE char next year, and then I might give mindless ranged/AoE metas a try, just to see what did I miss during my few K hours played - I know I can manage up to T16 maps with a totally improper character, as long as I keep the distance, almost anything is manageable.

Even my MF with a small HP pool and close to no proper defenses feels almost as tanky as a real melee with at least double it's EHP... That should have never happened...

Regardless, PoE 5.0 might bring some BALANCE regarding REAL MELEE and it's purpose, as I sadly don't feel that our "puny impact" will be addressed during 4.0 in any meaningful way...