Casting penalty / Bow speed penalty when monsters are too close

Hey there

There's something that have been on my mind for a while : why can casters and bow users freely shoot at full efficiency when engaged in closed combat ?

I mean, if you're firing arrows ... you need to focus, and it's much harder if somebody else is close to you. Same could be said for spells, assuming that casting spells requires some focus from the character, it seems natural than casting from a distance is easier than while being hit by something right next to you.

And we have had the "melee problem" since like ... forever pretty much.


So my suggestion is simple :

/!\ Numbers that will be used here are placeholders, not well thought and calculated values /!\

Let's say ... from 25 units to the character, up to 5 units to the character, bow attacks and spells would suffer respectively LESS atttack speed and LESS cast speed, from 0% up to 100% ( which would reduce either by half, not completely block a character ).

Example :
A monster is at 25 units from your character : 0% LESS bow attack speed & cast speed
A monster is at 15 units from your character : 50% LESS bow attack speed & cast speed
A monster is at 5 units from your character : 100% LESS bow attack speed & cast speed.

And there you go, now range characters need to be afraid of monsters entering their melee range.
I realize that this would not change many things in the current state of the game since most things die in the blink of an eye far away from range characters ( in an optimized build ).
I also realize that such changes would need to come from a significant rebalance of many things to make sense.


BUT, this would be a basis from which melee characters and range characters could porentially be balanced, because at the moment it's just not doable, melee has no place in this game when it comes to relative viability to range archetypes honestly.

This could also open up new potential keystone / specific spells which would work the other way around : bonus at short range, malus at long range ( although with the number of 6L in PoE 4.0, that might just be a bad idea, idk )

nop

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I_NO wrote:

nop

Are you actually checking the feedback section ?
huh, I though you'd only be in threads in global before they get thrown here.


Anyway, thx for the bump :<

A noble sentiment, but one that I fear whose time has long passed ...
(and does not play well with the "cage-match" Arena mechanic)

Back in the turn-based days, the rock/paper/scissors principle was almost supreme (except for Dragons and their ilk which could move fast, attack at both range and melee, and were well armoured). Fast movers and range attackers tended to be fragile. Melee attackers took time to get in position but hit single target for a ton and were quite tanky. It worked out when you were managing a six Character party with time to think between moves. But real-time in part, and the rise of the single Character seemed to eventually lead to "well rounded" Characters - which over time just kept losing their "traditional" weaknesses (ending up with Dragons being everywhere, including the Player Characters). So as far as I can tell in POE today, "Melee" just means a skill that is limited because you have to be close (which both exposes your Character to Risks, and limits how many Targets they can hit). The only thing Melee seems to have going for it is if you enjoy the close up experience. I think that that is still a big draw, but it comes with a lot of frustrating draw backs vis a vis ranged attacks.

I would imagine that GGG would have some real headaches if they tried to restore some semblance of the rock/paper/scissors balance, including how it played out with single Character versus Groups. But it probably starts with reducing the Monster count.

Nerfing the higher range archetypes in low range situations would just discourage their shorter range instances and encourage offscreening.

Who would want to play Point Blank anyway? Just go Far Shot all the way!

Melee needs solutions for clearspeed and defence, not an advantage in close range dps.

Are we just pretending point blank keystone as well as short range spells don't exist? Dumb change. Especially when you consider how common boss fights in small, cramped spaces are becoming.

What melee needs is for more monsters to fall into the really fast moving or can offscreen the players category. Too much of the game involves monsters that are incapable of hurting ranged players. The game has slowly been fixing this every new league. Pretending you can fix melee with gem changes is just that, pretending.

Edit : keep in mind, we already see people crying about these new monsters offscreening players so I don't know how much further GGG will be able to tune this.

no. bad idea.

While discussing bad ideas, you missed the even more obvious fact that an archer isn't going to be able to really run around with many dozens of arrows let alone the multiple thousands being used in an excursion now.

In a world with Magic, the answer to "Why?" truly becomes "Why Not?". It comes down to decisions made by GGG regarding what is bound by reality and what is enabled by Magic.

Mana acts a proxy for Endurance, but only where GGG requires it. So Archers have bottomless quivers, but Melee Fighters have tireless arms. Armour may slow you down, but you can run forever if you desire it.

The Reality Card is a strong, but fickle friend when used as support for design changes.

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DER_PSYCHOPATH wrote:

Nerfing the higher range archetypes in low range situations would just discourage their shorter range instances and encourage offscreening.

Who would want to play Point Blank anyway? Just go Far Shot all the way!

Melee needs solutions for clearspeed and defence, not an advantage in close range dps.

Melee will never have "solutions" for clearspeed and defence though, so far GGG has never been able to add some way of tanking that range characters are not able to use.

Melee archetypes need to have some appeal, to have something better than range archetypes somewhere.
And it just hasn't, yet you always need to put your character in more dangerous situation.

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walkjohn55 wrote:

I would imagine that GGG would have some real headaches if they tried to restore some semblance of the rock/paper/scissors balance, including how it played out with single Character versus Groups. But it probably starts with reducing the Monster count.

I completely agree, I think that monster density is a problem and that it has been causing balance issues for a while.

Would it be possible to have a game with high monster density and range / melee archetypes balanced ? Probably, but it would be quite a different game imo.

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Kahirn wrote:

Are we just pretending point blank keystone as well as short range spells don't exist? Dumb change.

Did you read the OP at all ?

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Fruz wrote:

I also realize that such changes would need to come from a significant rebalance of many things to make sense.

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Kahirn wrote:

What melee needs is for more monsters to fall into the really fast moving or can offscreen the players category. Too much of the game involves monsters that are incapable of hurting ranged players. The game has slowly been fixing this every new league. Pretending you can fix melee with gem changes is just that, pretending.

Edit : keep in mind, we already see people crying about these new monsters offscreening players so I don't know how much further GGG will be able to tune this.

And somehow. having monsters to offscreen players (which would be stupid honestly) would not mean that melee characters (who need to go all to way to close range to the monsters, while being shot from a distance) would take more damage before even having a chance to hit the monsters ???

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walkjohn55 wrote:

The Reality Card is a strong, but fickle friend when used as support for design changes.

But is required to build any game.
You need elements that people will understand, and you need consistency to have everything work well.


Back in DaoC (not an arpg, just a rpg, but this is not relevant for the point I am making), all archetypes had their ups and downs, it made sense from the standpoints of the rules that the game created, and those rules were based on a world similar to ours in many ways, because creating everything from nothing is much more difficult, and its much more difficult to have it appeal to potential players.
Path of Exile isn't that different in this regard (like most games realls), we have sword, bows, character are human being, potentially bleed when they get cut, and if they take too much damage, the character dies.
Daoc was much more extreme than what I suggested though, if you were hit while casting a spell, it interrupted you, you had to care about your positioning, you were not tanky (in most cases), but you had the range and the damage.