Why does GGG hate melee and love spells?

"

The_Human_Tornado wrote:

my theory is that new zealand is fairy land where just elves and fairies live.

In Europe, Asia, Africa and America everyone has quite a culture of beating each other and his neighbours for thousands of years. MELEE STYLE.

But in Ozeania things are quite different. They dont have it in their blood, they dont feel it, they dont know it. They cant properly put in their game.

And another theory is that they just balance phys damage around 1000% facebreakers with 5 damage flasks for damage and kaoms heart for life scaling.

That's kinda cute :D

I think you forgot the existence of the All Blacks though!

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

That just goes back to what I first said. People don't really know what they want regarding melee. They have an idea but have no clue of how it can be implemented in the game. So when something new gets added it's never enough and the melee complaints will always be around.

Players are not supposed to implement anything in the first place ...

The whole powercreep, stupidly high mod density & co are the main culprit in what makes melee 'bad' in the current version of the game, and people are voicing their opinion about it.
It's not about people "wanting" something specific for melee character, it's about GGG finding a way to make melee characters feel good to play, and that include being aware of the powergap between different archetype and trying to reduce it.

"

RocketDragon wrote:

If i'm wrong i'm sorry, but i think the problem You see here is mele skill's need acuracy to hit monsters everytime, spells don't have this problem, and it's a ponit, the GGG try to scale this somehow and they delete an option for mages that allow them to leech mana while using spell's. In addition, mele archetype's get an aura that pump up acuracy at the start of the lvling character.

The initial deduction is right, yes. But that's only part of the issue.

One part where you've missed is the leech-ability for mana regarding spells. With the mana-bottle rework this issue has immediately being removed again, just use one which doesn't stop regenerating mana when you're full and it's already solved. Not to mention that this provides further survivability for a MoM-build or MoM-EB -build that wasn't existing before, on par with using marks formerly.

You also have to look at the functionality of the archetypes on their own.
Melee has to get close to enemies, this gives them more time to attack. Usually games counter that by giving melee vastly more abilities to survive then ranged characters, in PoE that isn't the case, some spell-based builds have superior abilities to survive even, which is counter-productive to solve that issue.

Secondly, if you're actually playing a melee-build (and not a re-imagined ranged-build which just is called 'melee') then you'll at most be able to pop a single group of enemies, all the while leaving you prone to be attacked by any other groups in the area. That's vastly different compared to a ranged build which often can clear the whole screen or more during that time easily.

So, to make up for it melee not only needs more abilities to sustain damage during such situations but also increased mobility in combat compared to mages/archers, limited to skills which are only used in point-blank range. The further away a character can be from danger the less ability to sustain damage and to use extra mobility are needed to counter the differences. In PoE again... archers are extremely quick and clear far beyond their screen. Usually as an archer you die because you simply overextend and get up close to enemies, or get lulled into a false sense of security and stand still for a bit. Otherwise you generally won't be in much danger as the a large portion of enemies only show their capabilities in close-range.

"

Albinosaurus wrote:

The quintessential melee skill in the whole genre "isn't melee," somehow? Okay... lmao. I agree melee needs help, but this is a ridiculous notion.

If Cyclone is a melee-skill then so is RF and so is any nova-spell. They have the exact same AoE-type and just slightly adjusted mechanics compared to each other. Also they aren't 'point blank' which is a necessity to call it melee, weapon-range only, not what GGG wants to tell you might be something similar.

A prime example for a melee-fight which is balanced would be something like this (and not existing in PoE in such a manner):

Engaging with Flicker Strike, hitting with a skill like heavy-strike or dual-strike, repositioning with dash or whirling blades and a skill to swiftly disengage by hitting an enemy while it moves you backwards or to the side.
To make up for the needed mobility which any ranged skill doesn't need.

"

Albinosaurus wrote:

It's the result of the game's evolution toward clear speed meta, mobility creep, large numbers of ways to produce enormous aoe or triggered effects, enemies becoming very binary in their threat level toward players, and enemies generally being one-shottable.

Which needs to be heavily addressed and the first step (of many) is done with 3.9, less options to get through defenses of enemies and increasing their overall life-expectancy.

Next step is to reduce the AoE so clearing screens is harder and further along to adjust the damage-output in general of both players and mobs. Last but not least to implement the mentioned options for mobility regarding melee to give them a place where they excel heavily compared to any ranged build.

"

Albinosaurus wrote:

I think this next league (Metamorph) may help highlight what identity melee should have in this game. While people can disagree with me on what that is, I would suggest that it should be tuned toward bossing and longer endurance fights while ranged can have its clear speed.

Absolutely one of the many viable options there. Sadly since the ability to sustain damage is the same for ranged and melee build that won't happen with 3.9. With the patch-notes we can easily see that melee is worse off then ever before.

Spells got buffed, extra damage for conversion got nerfed, armour was actually increased so it does something (and hence reduces viability of phys-melee further), maim from the chest-piece is gone, extra life from the chest-piece is gone... that's quite a lot of downsides there which they got compared to ranged.

"

Albinosaurus wrote:

The core issue with melee, as I see it, is that it needs to outscale ranged in damage and defenses to make up for its disadvantages in aoe/clear speed and the inherent extra danger of just being closer to enemies. The only place in the game where your positioning plays a major role in the fight is against bossing, so this is where melee must shine. Right now, ranged builds have such big advantages and can easily do enough dps that the emphasis on bossing next league in combination with the bow reworks points to melee only falling further behind.

Sadly, TS is still king by far after all, the changes won't do anything. Barrage support allows for dedicated boss-killers easily now as well. And with volley-support the slight nerfs to the utterly ridiculous scaling-mechanic of Scourge Arrow will not stop it to easily kill uber-elder as soon as you enter maps, or any other boss in that regard.
And since ele-pen is easier to achieve with any skill that scales off of gem-levels rather then gear-stats this only means that melee has an even bigger disparity compared to ranged.

"

Severance2hBlade wrote:

I mean why destroy a reasonably powerful single target skill like HStrike by linking it with 2 AoE elements? Can't u use it as it was meant to be used - like as a strong single target skill and in conjunction with another reasonably good pure AoE skill?

Absolutely right as well, though that goes both ways.

If you want to differentiate not via melee versus ranged but instead single-target versus clear-speed then you also need to adjust your outlook accordingly.

This means that AoE of any kind needs to be low damage but able to wittle down groups reliably over several shots. So trash mobs need to at least survive 1-2 shots worst-case. On the other hand a single-target build would then need to easily kill such a mob in a single shot.

This would allow any AoE-build to clear a map fairly fast and acquire basic currency and rares far faster then a single target build. On the other hand they would heavily struggle against any sort of boss where the single-target shines suddenly, making up for the time they lost during the overall mapping-experience and giving them the ability to obtain more specialized loot at the cost of currency and rares.

Sadly to have something similar the whole map-drop system needs to be adjusted to allow both sides to reliably advance the atlas.

"

The_Human_Tornado wrote:

my theory is that new zealand is fairy land where just elves and fairies live.

In Europe, Asia, Africa and America everyone has quite a culture of beating each other and his neighbours for thousands of years. MELEE STYLE.

But in Ozeania things are quite different. They dont have it in their blood, they dont feel it, they dont know it. They cant properly put in their game.

And another theory is that they just balance phys damage around 1000% facebreakers with 5 damage flasks for damage and kaoms heart for life scaling.

Just wanted to quite this since I love that post :p

Feels like it, yeah. Thanks, gave me a smile :)

"

Telzen wrote:

I hadn't seen the numbers on Ice Crash now so I didn't know it went so high. For a while there Heavy Strike had the highest percent damage for melee attacks. Well Heavy Strike does have an attack speed modifier of 85% over 70% for Ice Crash and so much of Ice Crash's damage being elemental just means its going to be cut by enemy res anyway.

Yes, but the difference between most melee-skills and ranged skills is that they scale in a vastly different way.

To increase the damage of a spell you want to increase the level of the gem and slap %inc on it as the initial damage already is high, adding any sort of flat increase does comparatively little.

On the other hand melee gets %inc left and right, so it needs base damage, and that only comes from your weapon. So while ranged can quite easily get those stats from belts, rings, amulets and so on... Melee can nearly only get their most needed stat from 1-2 items, which is their respective weapons, and to increase their damage they need to seek out extremely rare rolls while most ranged skills can easily advance with barely mediocre items overall.

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Agreed. Question is, is it such a big problem if some melee skills are shit? I mean how many shitty spells and bow skills are there that nobody ever uses? Personally I don't really give a shit. Maybe it's because I've played so many card games where like 10% of the existing cards were actually usable, I am just used to the fact that not everything can be viable.

Yeah, that's true, not everything is usually viable.

The problem comes when a whole archetype feels sub-par to everything else in the game by far. Barely able to get close to mediocre skills of the others, having to stand in the middle of fights rather then the ability to kill from a distance, having less area-coverage then those as well. It just feels like they are allround worse.

If you give me the choice between a Lightning Strike build and a Scourge Arrow build I'll immediately take the Scourge. Heavy Strike or flame totems? Totems. Flicker Strike or nerfed zombies? Still the nerfed zombies (and oh damn they got pummeled to the ground in the patch-notes).
Obviously as soon as you implement an AoE-attack which has a similar hit-zone then some ranged-skills then it becomes a bit harder... but as soon as you look at how they scale it's once again the ranged skill, simply because it's superior to scale in nearly every way, basically same mechanic with less investment.

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

So either they want melee to no longer be true melee where you hit half the screen (eg. Cyclone, Reave, Tectonic Slam, etc.) or they want spell or bow nerfs. Bows clear speed is getting nerfed so melee complainers should be happy?

Yep, definitely going for the spells/bow nerf in conjunction with extra mobility and utility for melee.
Then we can start saying they're even remotely comparable. Remotely.

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

That just goes back to what I first said. People don't really know what they want regarding melee. They have an idea but have no clue of how it can be implemented in the game. So when something new gets added it's never enough and the melee complaints will always be around.

eg. Fortify and Impale are melee specific and their boosts are in the melee region of the tree. These things were developed and new/improved at some point and they fit into your "want" criteria, however you are obviously not satisfied.

Because extra damage doesn't do anything against the shortcomings of melee.

You can get nearly any skill to kill uber-elder with quite mediocre investment. 5ex at most, 10 ex if you want a rather expensive build for uber-elder. More is luxury.

But then we got something like my ed/contagion from legion, 1 ex for uber-elder... and that 1ex was a single wand close to the start of the league. I killed uber-elder with ilvl 54 (56? Something like that) gloves, non-capped res (missed a few % somewhere) and really not good equipment at all. Well, even after upgrading a few items it still can't be called 'great'.

Same with my summoner in blight, sub 2ex investment, and it only got that high because I rolled convoking wands with fossils a little bit, if I'd bought them directly I would be sub 1ex there.

It's always the same, to get roughly the same performance with a melee-character I would've needed at least a 5-10ex weapon, and then it still feels a lot weaker.

It's not about clear-speed or single-target. It's about functionality. Melee simply lacks that to make up for the shortcomings. The same options to mitigate damage as ranged, some defensive skill-gems which require you to use specific melee-weapons would be a good start. Options to recover quickly after disengaging an enemy rather then having to sustain by hitting. Mobility to position yourself in a way to survive the far smaller window of opportunity to get out of danger in close range. It's those things we need, not some 'moar damage' thing. Nearly every build can clear all content, it's just that melee is slower and more clunky in nearly all of them.

"

Kulze wrote:

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Agreed. Question is, is it such a big problem if some melee skills are shit? I mean how many shitty spells and bow skills are there that nobody ever uses? Personally I don't really give a shit. Maybe it's because I've played so many card games where like 10% of the existing cards were actually usable, I am just used to the fact that not everything can be viable.

Yeah, that's true, not everything is usually viable.

The problem comes when a whole archetype feels sub-par to everything else in the game by far. Barely able to get close to mediocre skills of the others, having to stand in the middle of fights rather then the ability to kill from a distance, having less area-coverage then those as well. It just feels like they are allround worse.

If you give me the choice between a Lightning Strike build and a Scourge Arrow build I'll immediately take the Scourge. Heavy Strike or flame totems? Totems. Flicker Strike or nerfed zombies? Still the nerfed zombies (and oh damn they got pummeled to the ground in the patch-notes).
Obviously as soon as you implement an AoE-attack which has a similar hit-zone then some ranged-skills then it becomes a bit harder... but as soon as you look at how they scale it's once again the ranged skill, simply because it's superior to scale in nearly every way, basically same mechanic with less investment.

I really question if the difference is actually that big. After all the discussions here in the last weeks I made an experiment and tried to speed run tier 16 guardian maps.

I am usually a slow player, picking up rares using up half my portals to identify stuff etc so I have no practice doing that. Also my chars use almost entirely selffound gear there are like 5 gear pieces on all my chars that I've traded for, so my gear level is miles away from what it could be.

Afterwards I compared my run times to speedrun videos I found on youtube and guess what, the time difference between me and the fastest runs I could find was about 1 minute. If I had optimal gear, more practice and maybe a movement speed flask I could easily triple my damage if not more and increase movement speed as well. Shouldn't be too hard to reduce the difference to a like 10 seconds, if that. Ultimately a 20 million dps TS deadeye will still be faster than any melee build, I am pretty sure about that, but I don't think the difference is even half as big as people here make it out to be.

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Spoiler

I really question if the difference is actually that big. After all the discussions here in the last weeks I made an experiment and tried to speed run tier 16 guardian maps.

I am usually a slow player, picking up rares using up half my portals to identify stuff etc so I have no practice doing that. Also my chars use almost entirely selffound gear there are like 5 gear pieces on all my chars that I've traded for, so my gear level is miles away from what it could be.

Afterwards I compared my run times to speedrun videos I found on youtube and guess what, the time difference between me and the fastest runs I could find was about 1 minute. If I had optimal gear, more practice and maybe a movement speed flask I could easily triple my damage if not more and increase movement speed as well. Shouldn't be too hard to reduce the difference to a like 10 seconds, if that. Ultimately a 20 million dps TS deadeye will still be faster than any melee build, I am pretty sure about that, but I don't think the difference is even half as big as people here make it out to be.

Well then, I've tested it out personally as well since I wanted the exact difference. The test was only 1 map each, one for my Ed/Contagion which has fairly cheap equipment and one for my Pure phys Cyclone with Starforge. The tested map was T16 Phoenix, for timing I used the atomic clock online and separated the map-clear and boss-clear. The Cyclone-char was made to kill guardians, the ED/Contagion was a glacier-farmer.

To make mapping slower I used Harbinger Zana-Mod, this is clearly a negative for my ED/Contagion to even the field a little. Also My Cyclone had all Harbingers at the same spot unlike my Ed/Contagion.

Cyclone:
Map-clear: 2:25
Boss-clear: 0:24
Total: 2:49

Ed/Contagion:
Map-clear: 1:59
Boss-clear: 0:38
Total: 2:37

12 seconds difference even when we take into consideration that the Ed/Contagion should've been worse because of Harbingers and quite bad bossing-speed... it actually came out first.

Total investment per character:
Ed/Contagion: 2ex
Cyclone: 12ex

And for good measure let's add my WO-trickster from Synthesis:
Map-clear: 2:07
Boss-clear: 0:49
Total: 2:56

Investment: 8ex

And that's from a character which got nerfed in 3 different ways and is an utter disaster at the moment. Nearly as fast as a decent cyclone.

I mean lets be honest

Its cause they wanna see more angry threads and laugh at how people have no control or power in the game

So still lots of complaints but I can't see anyone with any actual idea that can be implemented in the game.

Just saying make melee less clunky or more survivable is not material enough input that can be worked on and programmed into the game.

So yeah, this complaining will continue forever without a doubt.

"

raics wrote:

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

That just goes back to what I first said. People don't really know what they want regarding melee. They have an idea but have no clue of how it can be implemented in the game. So when something new gets added it's never enough and the melee complaints will always be around.

As I said, speak for yourself, fairly sure a number of people here understand game design enough to pull something on that scale off, and if we could do it, they could too. The question is only if it would be worth their time, you'd have to dig pretty deep because of how the game gradually ended up and some things are fairly established at this point. Poe2 would be a good time to do it, sure, the question is only if they think it would be worth the time, probably not.

But, as I said in that removed post, that doesn't mean we should stop asking. If you ask for the impossible there's a high chance you will get something that is possible, in this context it's something they aren't keen on doing rather than actually impossible, but you get the point.

Maybe get those people to post their implementable ideas here so that we all and GGG can see them. You and others just complaining doesn't really do anything.

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

So still lots of complaints but I can't see anyone with any actual idea that can be implemented in the game.

Just saying make melee less clunky or more survivable is not material enough input that can be worked on and programmed into the game.

So yeah, this complaining will continue forever without a doubt.

Just a suggestion, go and actually read my post.

Might enlighten you about the 'missing solutions'. A bit of comprehension-ability isn't asked too much, even in the PoE-forums.

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

Maybe get those people to post their implementable ideas here so that we all and GGG can see them. You and others just complaining doesn't really do anything.

There are entire novels on the subject already buried in here, and, as evident by their attempt at melee rework, it didn't do anything. They went in and started rediscovering what we've been writing about for years, nobody read a single letter except for moderators.

So no thanks, the time for that is passed, now we do it like this.

"

Kulze wrote:

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

So still lots of complaints but I can't see anyone with any actual idea that can be implemented in the game.

Just saying make melee less clunky or more survivable is not material enough input that can be worked on and programmed into the game.

So yeah, this complaining will continue forever without a doubt.

Just a suggestion, go and actually read my post.

Might enlighten you about the 'missing solutions'. A bit of comprehension-ability isn't asked too much, even in the PoE-forums.

I read it all before I posted. It's just the generic reduce AOE, nerf bow and spell damage post.

GGG has reduced AOE a couple times now over the years and bow range/clear is getting nerfed a bit this league. Damage is still high but that's up to GGG on where they want to be.

As for the maneuverability of melee you want, GGG has added Dash and has also made Leap Slam instant if you're not spamming it.

So what did I miss?