Why does GGG hate melee and love spells?

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SaiyanZ wrote:

So what did I miss?

Nothing, everything is fine, melee is now super good and we're all obviously delusional, you're wasting your time here.

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raics wrote:

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SaiyanZ wrote:

So what did I miss?

Nothing, everything is fine, melee is now super good and we're all obviously delusional, you're wasting your time here.

I think you're the only one wasting your time here because you never have anything valuable to add to the discussion.

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

I think you're the only one wasting your time here because you never have anything valuable to add to the discussion.

Hardly the only one, but yeah, a man has only so much effort he's willing to invest shouting into an empty wine barrel. Go a few years back if you want quality content, it's just a place to casually chat about the failures of modern game design now.

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Kulze wrote:

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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.

And now, after seeing those numbers, do you feel that they support your statement from before?:

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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.

Because to me they are contradicting it. Your statement makes it look like the best melee skill would be far slower than even an average ranged skill, and far slower, in my terms, would be at least a minute, if not more. But here we have 3 former FOTM skills all finishing the same map in roughly the same time with less than 10% timedifference between them. We could spend hours now arguing back and forth how it would turn out with equal budget, how map mods influence the whole thing and so on but ultimately I don't think any of that will change the results drastically. It's just a matter of perception here. If 10 seconds difference embodies that huge gap between melee and casters in your perception then I am not going to argue against that, but I can't really understand it either.

If you are really fixated on maximum efficiency, getting highest farmspeed for lowest possible cost then casters will surely win. But a time difference of this magnitude isn't even noticeable unless you actually do what you and I did here, measure it in seconds.

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raics wrote:

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SaiyanZ wrote:

I think you're the only one wasting your time here because you never have anything valuable to add to the discussion.

Hardly the only one, but yeah, a man has only so much effort he's willing to invest shouting into an empty wine barrel. Go a few years back if you want quality content, it's just a place to casually chat about the failures of modern game design now.

No wonder GGG doesn't read all these threads anymore then. They have to filter through all the trash to get anything worth reading. Waste of resources and time for them.

Rather not say anything instead of taking up the time of others if you have nothing worthwhile to say/contribute to the discussion which a GGG employee would find worth the time to read.

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SaiyanZ wrote:

No wonder GGG doesn't read all these threads anymore then. They have to filter through all the trash to get anything worth reading. Waste of resources and time for them.

Well now, that might seem like the chicken and egg conundrum on the surface, except it isn't, we know what came first.

"

Rather not say anything instead of taking up the time of others if you have nothing worthwhile to say/contribute to the discussion which a GGG employee would find worth the time to read.

Funny thing you say that.


On the topic tho. Did some rudimentary math on armour changes (with spikes of 25k AR on some mobs) and phys builds are in the dumpster again. Fast hitting phys only got MURDERED. Slow hitting is already thrash.

They claimed that we will get extra mods to combat this. Check new tree. You can realisticaly get -25% (for some weapon types) total. This mod has beed added to the most undesirable crap nodes (like armour cluster near blood magic) that noone is going to travel to.

You can go bleed but then forget about good damage or any kind of build diversity.

Phys spells are not a thing so casters wont notice. But melee (and bows, true) with full phys setups.. you got shafted BADLY.

OH. YEAH. punishment gets -20% on top of its present bonus. It is a curse for people who had no idea. Worst curse in the game that works only AFTER a mob HITS you. Wow. Saved! :)

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

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?

Which shows me that you haven't properly comprehended it, so that's another issue then.

If you would've read in detail then the suggestions where the following:

Either discerning Melee versus ranged directly, which comes by functionality.

The functionality of melee is obviously being sturdy, dishing out high single-target damage and having far superior mobility in terms of positioning during a fight via skills.

This means a possibility to get the respective amounts of skills into play to make that actually possible. The majority is already existent but heavily underused. What's needed are skills for engaging which have some sort of cooldown to hinder zoom-zoom playstyle, solely meant to reduce the space to a mob-pack so you aren't in the line of fire for too long.
This takes obviously care of one of the major downsides, time to engage.

The second is already provided to a degree via the movement-skill like dash. The ability to move at a moments notice. Since Dash and every other skill need to be targeted though the solution for that is a single-use skill with a short cooldown to dash in a specific direction. For example we could call that one 'Sidestep' and it simply move you away from an incoming hit in a moments notice without the need to target.

The third is a skill to quickly disengage, dealing damage while either knocking the enemy back or actually pushing yourself backwards.

Those are the main issues to be taken care of in term of mobility.

In terms of being able to actually survive melee needs skills which either give them a very short moment of actual invulnerability against skills like the beam-attacks from the syndicate-bosses or the freeze from uber-elder, a skill-based gem which needs proper timing.

Also actualy Crowd-Control which is fitting for melee are important, we don't have anything like that. The easiest way would be to re-work stun for that, for example a 'Knockout' skill with a cooldown again which causes the enemy you're engaged with to be stunned for a short while, enough to reposition yourself or to secure the kill when they are low. Obviously not with a threshold like the normal stun but with a guaranteed one, the stun-time being the thing which is affected for it.

That's the way for discerning better between melee versus ranged.

If you instead want to discern between AoE and single-target then the situation is a bit different, both types aren't mutually exclusive though.

This means that spells and ranged attacks need to get a large nerf in damage, causing them to be sub-par in comparison to single-target for killing any single enemy by quite the margin.

Also AoE for single-target needs to be nearly non-existant there and causing it to change the properties heavily, that means your Heavy Strike with AoE becomes similar to earthquake but with less damage even but a hefty knockback to control the enemies. While on the other hand Scourge Arrow would need to loose the absolutely absurd inherent damage multiplier via the pods... or get the damage nerfed down to a level below split arrow to make up for the extra functionality of hitting many mobs.

Obviously if you can adjust single-target to be AoE then you should be allowed to adjust AoE to single-target as well. This means in the example of Scourge Arrow to only shoot a single arrow which then would sprout the pods on the enemy and dealing massive amounts of single-target.

Build-variety is the name of PoE after all, so skills which change their properties regarding their supports should be a common things after all.


With that we can properly differentiate between the play-styles of different builds, also it allows to have content tailored to them specifically. Farming common loot for clear-speed and farming specific valuable loot for single-target. Obviously trying to do the part of each other would cause you to miss out heavily overall, so specializing to a field would be the go-to example.

A mix between both can also definitely be possible, though then it needs to be sub-par to both individually, meaning you'll get less loot overall rather then specializing but depending far less on either switching characters or trading.


But yeah... no way in hell that GGG would even remotely go anywhere close to any of what I wrote. I don't give them the credit (anymore) to have such ability sadly. They disappointed far too often in the last leagues especially.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Because to me they are contradicting it. Your statement makes it look like the best melee skill would be far slower than even an average ranged skill, and far slower, in my terms, would be at least a minute, if not more. But here we have 3 former FOTM skills all finishing the same map in roughly the same time with less than 10% timedifference between them. We could spend hours now arguing back and forth how it would turn out with equal budget, how map mods influence the whole thing and so on but ultimately I don't think any of that will change the results drastically. It's just a matter of perception here. If 10 seconds difference embodies that huge gap between melee and casters in your perception then I am not going to argue against that, but I can't really understand it either.

If you are really fixated on maximum efficiency, getting highest farmspeed for lowest possible cost then casters will surely win. But a time difference of this magnitude isn't even noticeable unless you actually do what you and I did here, measure it in seconds.

First of all I made sure that map-mods aren't buffing the resistance or life of mobs in any way obviously.
Also as mentioned I used Harbingers as a Zana mod. Harbingers are slow-paced for Ed/Contagion as the Harbingers only re-cast new mobs when a specific amount of the already summoned ones are dead. Since ED is a DoT it means the Harbingers will do other attacks in-between or move, slowing it down further compared to Cyclone.

Next up in that is that my Cyclone is a raider, hence culling-strike (since boss-killer) and starforge, that's a fairly decent weapon. That alone costs more then the Ed/contagion in total.

Also, once again take into consideration that the ED/Contagion is set up as a glacial-farmer, that means it was used in T2 maps and not meant to do much more after barely managing to deal with uber-elder, he never got an upgrade, much unlike my Cyclone-char which was actually meant to get into 5-way Emblem runs if I hadn't lost my drive because that league was such a disaster for end-game mechanics.

Which brings us once again to the WO-char. Again to remind you, it got nerfed in 3 ways from the initial build. The ascendancy got 2 concurrent nerfs which reduced the survivability heavily, WO got the damage while moving halfed and Mark doesn't work anymore and I have simply switched that ring out for a generic res-ring. This means... that char is utter trash with the current setup.

Still, as you've seen all 3 times are nearly the same, that alone should give a good example of the difference. Heavy-investment Melee is on par with no investment ED/Contagion and old and broken WO.

"

sidtherat wrote:

OH. YEAH. punishment gets -20% on top of its present bonus. It is a curse for people who had no idea. Worst curse in the game that works only AFTER a mob HITS you. Wow. Saved! :)

That one is actually fun for minions... but since there are far better options nobody ever takes that crap, you're absolutely right :p

"

Kulze wrote:

"

SaiyanZ wrote:

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?

Which shows me that you haven't properly comprehended it, so that's another issue then.

If you would've read in detail then the suggestions where the following:

Either discerning Melee versus ranged directly, which comes by functionality.

The functionality of melee is obviously being sturdy, dishing out high single-target damage and having far superior mobility in terms of positioning during a fight via skills.

This means a possibility to get the respective amounts of skills into play to make that actually possible. The majority is already existent but heavily underused. What's needed are skills for engaging which have some sort of cooldown to hinder zoom-zoom playstyle, solely meant to reduce the space to a mob-pack so you aren't in the line of fire for too long.
This takes obviously care of one of the major downsides, time to engage.

The second is already provided to a degree via the movement-skill like dash. The ability to move at a moments notice. Since Dash and every other skill need to be targeted though the solution for that is a single-use skill with a short cooldown to dash in a specific direction. For example we could call that one 'Sidestep' and it simply move you away from an incoming hit in a moments notice without the need to target.

The third is a skill to quickly disengage, dealing damage while either knocking the enemy back or actually pushing yourself backwards.

Those are the main issues to be taken care of in term of mobility.

In terms of being able to actually survive melee needs skills which either give them a very short moment of actual invulnerability against skills like the beam-attacks from the syndicate-bosses or the freeze from uber-elder, a skill-based gem which needs proper timing.

Also actualy Crowd-Control which is fitting for melee are important, we don't have anything like that. The easiest way would be to re-work stun for that, for example a 'Knockout' skill with a cooldown again which causes the enemy you're engaged with to be stunned for a short while, enough to reposition yourself or to secure the kill when they are low. Obviously not with a threshold like the normal stun but with a guaranteed one, the stun-time being the thing which is affected for it.

That's the way for discerning better between melee versus ranged.

If you instead want to discern between AoE and single-target then the situation is a bit different, both types aren't mutually exclusive though.

This means that spells and ranged attacks need to get a large nerf in damage, causing them to be sub-par in comparison to single-target for killing any single enemy by quite the margin.

Also AoE for single-target needs to be nearly non-existant there and causing it to change the properties heavily, that means your Heavy Strike with AoE becomes similar to earthquake but with less damage even but a hefty knockback to control the enemies. While on the other hand Scourge Arrow would need to loose the absolutely absurd inherent damage multiplier via the pods... or get the damage nerfed down to a level below split arrow to make up for the extra functionality of hitting many mobs.

Obviously if you can adjust single-target to be AoE then you should be allowed to adjust AoE to single-target as well. This means in the example of Scourge Arrow to only shoot a single arrow which then would sprout the pods on the enemy and dealing massive amounts of single-target.

Build-variety is the name of PoE after all, so skills which change their properties regarding their supports should be a common things after all.


With that we can properly differentiate between the play-styles of different builds, also it allows to have content tailored to them specifically. Farming common loot for clear-speed and farming specific valuable loot for single-target. Obviously trying to do the part of each other would cause you to miss out heavily overall, so specializing to a field would be the go-to example.

A mix between both can also definitely be possible, though then it needs to be sub-par to both individually, meaning you'll get less loot overall rather then specializing but depending far less on either switching characters or trading.


But yeah... no way in hell that GGG would even remotely go anywhere close to any of what I wrote. I don't give them the credit (anymore) to have such ability sadly. They disappointed far too often in the last leagues especially.

Yeah GGG won't go close to what you wrote but not for the reason you think.

In the bolded bits, seems you are talking about movement skills with cooldowns which we have. Leap Slam, Whirling Blades, Dash.

The sidestep/quick disengage idea sounds nice but it won't be that useful or work well in practice. Bosses usually do the big hits in an area and not knowing exactly where you are going to end up after using the skill is problematic. It probably will also feel/look like desync.

Regarding extra twitch defenses, Steelskin and Molten Shell have been buffed/added recently which gives some extra instant protection. Maybe they aren't good enough though what would be something that can be implemented without being abused?

The stun/knockout idea would work although I wouldn't called stunning one mob crowd control. You can already achieve this effect with a 4L stun focused Heavy Strike.

And the rest of your post is just the usual "nerf AOE, nerf bows, nerf spells" story. This is not something that is easy to fix or even just improve. "In order to make melee feel better, the rest of the game needs to feel worse" is not a good way to go, especially when the creative space for non default attack "melee/strike" skills is much more. You'll have to drop a bunch of creativity and design space to always keep melee feeling relevant.

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Kulze wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

OH. YEAH. punishment gets -20% on top of its present bonus. It is a curse for people who had no idea. Worst curse in the game that works only AFTER a mob HITS you. Wow. Saved! :)

That one is actually fun for minions... but since there are far better options nobody ever takes that crap, you're absolutely right :p

The funniest thing is that punishment would be hella good if this was a different game.