melee.. melee never changes

"

sidtherat wrote:

"

someone actually goes to the trouble to prove that a strike skill can yield similar results and effectiveness as your favored ranged skills

go check tornado shot/scourge arrow, go check ball lightning mines, go check summoners, go check cwc magma orb... thats 3.8 where 'one pack at a time, point blank' does not cut it anymore

So it's not a matter of ranged vs melee but of GH vs some overpowered ranged skills now? The result between the GH and the FB video you posted is pretty much the same. Both cleared deathless in reasonable time with similar damage to the pump. Both of them aren't exactly meta so that's a reasonable comparison to make. Maybe GH can't compete with those meta skills you mentioned, and we won't really know until we see a similar vid with one of them being involved, but your "ranged is generally better than melee" argument is invalidated at this point as far as I am concerned. Looking at that GH vs FB comparison it's just a matter of playstyle preference, not of effectiveness.

"

sidtherat wrote:

thanks for sharing.

i do not want to shatter your dreams or anything but.. is that it? you claimed that GH is 'OP' so i expected something REALLY good.

what i see is typical pom-pom melee build with all its weaknesses and clunky gameplay


you went with the 'stack attack speed' route (as predicted, you used high AS to cover up the clunkyness). as a berserker your only 'tanky' feature is high hp (Kaom's chest+boots? i see little to no links so that might be it) so it does not support the 'melee is tanky because ascendancies' theory

i hope you realize that for this particular setup (Blighted map) and your character Frost Blades is STRICTLY superior? you cannot cull bosses but you can offscreen thrash mobs that hit your pump before they even enter the screen

There is FastAF's GH showcase. luckily he also did Frost Blades. you can compare and see whats the difference. he has the BEST gear/setup possible as he is RichAF and can afford anything.

some of you think Fireball is bad, maybe check that for benchmark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY36j8Q49Q
this is the same environment but with 'worst' spell. guess what maps faster, is safer and has higher chance to react if portal spawns near the pump.



as for the infernal blow - the same story. targeting sucks. you either gimp your damage with AC or have worse clear with MS. without either of those youll hit nothing most of the time. targeting is THIS BAD

sure IB clears nicely with AC but everything clears nicely. vs bosses you either gem swap (sucks) or accept 40% damage loss (sucks). because total damage output of IB is nothing special (ramp up evens out the damage to 'standard' level). flat added fire is more of an insult than a bonus - you cannot really scale it well so it ends up being irrelevant

oh and it crashed the game for the first month of this league :)

I saw FastAF build, this is his pastebin
https://pastebin.com/zL2JAMDu

His crit is 30% with Blitz, mine is 75% with Blitz. He has 6K life i have 7.5 eHP. His total dps on Shaper 1 million dps with Berserk on, mine is 4 million without rage and Berserk. FastAF life recovery/s is 2K and mine is 6K life/s being able to tank 3 UE spears or 2 Shaper balls without a problem. That's enough tanky Berserker to me.

There are things FB is superior at and definitely where GH is and the way char is built around GH. Clearing mobs is just a part of the PoE puzzle and shouldn't be looked at so narrow.

GH is very good skill and it's far from bad. There are bad builds and exploits of the skill.

I saw the Fireball Assasin video you posted. I won't argue that clear is bonkers but i wouldn't enjoy such build.
Also Metamorph league is upon us. Winter is coming and we'll see who will have hotter "balls" vs bosses, Fireball Assassin or my Glacial Berserker. :P

GGG announced in the most recent interview on "Dropped Frames"

That they dont like where melee is and are going to improve it

There's no point in complaining about melee anymore, they dont like it either

We need to just wait for them to address it with patches

We might see some melee buffs in 3.9

We already got upcoming support gems like Ancestral Call "PLUS" and other mods on gloves that will help melee

Just wait till 3.9 and then talk about melee

"

benjaminbona wrote:

GGG announced in the most recent interview on "Dropped Frames"

That they dont like where melee is and are going to improve it

There's no point in complaining about melee anymore, they dont like it either

We need to just wait for them to address it with patches

We might see some melee buffs in 3.9

We already got upcoming support gems like Ancestral Call "PLUS" and other mods on gloves that will help melee

Just wait till 3.9 and then talk about melee

Do you have a link to that interview?

Here is GH vs UE video

https://youtu.be/hoV-O7jgqKg

I haven't got the time to practice so this is my "best" play with the char for the time being. I haven't used flasks optimally.
One thing you can notice, i haven't used life flask one single time...

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

"

benjaminbona wrote:

GGG announced in the most recent interview on "Dropped Frames"

That they dont like where melee is and are going to improve it

There's no point in complaining about melee anymore, they dont like it either

We need to just wait for them to address it with patches

We might see some melee buffs in 3.9

We already got upcoming support gems like Ancestral Call "PLUS" and other mods on gloves that will help melee

Just wait till 3.9 and then talk about melee

Do you have a link to that interview?

https://youtu.be/HZqxIteqKaQ

"

TorsteinTheFallen wrote:

Here is GH vs UE video

https://youtu.be/hoV-O7jgqKg

I haven't got the time to practice so this is my "best" play with the char for the time being. I haven't used flasks optimally.
One thing you can notice, i haven't used life flask one single time...

nice kill but i presume it is not the first attempt (yet again 0 XP bar.. and that dodgy start. next time take saphire/Taste of Hate as most damage you take here is cold)

remember this?

"

That triggers ice projectiles and all hell breaks lose. Same with shaper. His beam is easy to avoid but i hope you know it has AOE and you cannot atand close to him even when behind. Bit of micromanagemt that ranged can ignore saving time and keeping the dps up.

someone here tried to convince me that it is not an issue.
check your fight at ~1:00 when that exact AOE almost kills you. it is ofc 'minor' and 'not worth talking about' etc etc. but there are many such 'minor' things that simply keep stacking

"

sidtherat wrote:

nice kill but i presume it is not the first attempt (yet again 0 XP bar.. and that dodgy start. next time take saphire/Taste of Hate as most damage you take here is cold)
remember this?

Yeah it's not first attempt. It was 3rd. UE fight with my pc causes some major lag spikes and at that point death is unavoidable. You can see that when I enter the arena I wait sec or two to see if it's loaded at all cause half of the time i play with invisible things in that fight (not loaded) or screen freezes.
I'm not here to bullshit anyone.

"

check your fight at ~1:00 when that exact AOE almost kills you. it is ofc 'minor' and 'not worth talking about' etc etc. but there are many such 'minor' things that simply keep stacking

Are you serious right now? Moment you are referring to i was taking degen from Shaper beam + Ice Spear followed right away by Ice Spear shotgun (so 3 Ice Spears total) and I haven't even used a life flask. Because I knew it can tank it. Most chars would be long gone before that point.
This was a demo to show the char performance not to play it perfectly. Believe me i've done hundreds of UE so with little practice with the char I could do this without taking any damage at all from spears or balls.

I don't really see much wrong with the OP's assesment.

In the terminologie of PoE, i consider a melee play-style "more" disadvantaged then both spell casters and bow play-styles.

Fundamentally melee offers nothing unique mechanically beyond it's play-style component. You don't get unique defensive layers that are prohibited to other play-styles and since damage has power-creeped so hard even this has become a non-argument.(leaving alone the inherent flaws damage had when it came to two-hand, dual wield and single wield when damage was still a relevant argument which broke down the melee satisfaction argument in even more fragmented parts)

PoE bassicaly demolished it's tri-fecta mechanical model over the years, being defense/offense/resource or sustain. And this in return punished melee more when compared to other play-styles(or in essence, it made its flaws increasingly obvious and unmanageable)

Torstein is correct that melee is viable, but it has always been viable so i don't see much point in putting forward this argument.

What differentiated the three play-styles in the old PoE(for people that still remember) was that spells had a clear advantage early in a league because it required little item investment to pull off.
At the later stage of the league both melee and bow came "online" when items of sufficient power became available and could outperform the spellcasters in the long run.

This provided a "league evolution" based balance over the play-styles.

But since offense and resource management have become afterthoughts in character development this no longer holds true, people no longer need 90% of their offense potential to handle endgame content and resource management isn't even a consideration for most builds in PoE today.

We could emphasize this issue by for example giving torstein his GH character a bow, respeccing some of his weapon passives into bow notables and letting him run the same map with ice-shot and seeing explicitly what happens to his "effort to clear the map" or "solve the issue".

This would demonstrate the disparity without making the claim that melee is not viable or cannot be succesfull. It obviously can, but compared to what alternatives is the main issue when it comes to a tri-fecta based game mechanically.

with a lack of actual thoughtfull trade-offs, the whole model crumbles and so does character design, because if the choices are irrelevant then the character in itself becomes just a doll like figure dressed up in meaningless choices.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

sidtherat wrote:

'place the cursor over the target'?

And that's an issue with party play not with melee targeting. The vast majority of people don't even play in parties.