Why Melee will always suck

Respeced my GS mara into EK mara... same dps... but I got +2k life\1 endurance charge\30% armor.... go figure.. mage... love this games balance....

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thorsten139 wrote:

to be honest...melee is super strong early game...it only suck in endgame, or start to really show in merciless...

melee rip the first 2 difficulty to bits...most of my characters leveled as a melee until level 50...

This is what I find too. Melee does more damage early, has more damage potential, has significantly more weapon drops / mods that benefit them (if you don't spec into specific nodes / can handle the stat restrictions). I have a line of great weapons, from a 16 cleaver/shield to a 20 rare 2h sword to a 34 2h maul and a lot of great weapons in between. Any comparable bows do ~20% less DPS it seems.

Likewise melee skills early game seem cheaper, do much more reliable damage unsupported and don't necessarily need to be levelled.

IF Melee has any trouble, as far as I'm concerned it is late game which to me is more symptomatic of troubles with late game maps. Also in 10.2 a lot of melee gems got a significant DPS buff. Melee should be doing more damage more reliably with the big trade off being hit by more damage received.

I've done melee, ranged and spell to cruel act 3, and of the 3 melee is far superior in survivability, DPS and utility. Having said that end game is a different bag altogether and I have no idea how good/bad melee is end game. Also, I personally never do a melee build that isn't Templar or Marauder with Enduring Cry.

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BrotherLaz wrote:

Melee cannot apply player skill to damage avoidance. You can't dodge or kite, you have to go in and face tank. Therefore high difficulty is much harsher on melee than on ranged.

......

When is melee viable?

=

When they have ways to cheese out of having to actually itemise for both damage and survivability (because they get one or the other for free or have a way to bypass the need for it).

I'm glad somebody knows what's up.

When I play melee, I'm always having to make a choice between great armor/evasion and poor resists and mediocre armor/evasion but max resists. And I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't. I need to get as much armor as possible to be able to mitigate even normal physical damage mobs, and having lower than max resists isn't an option either because judging by how much elemental damage everything does, GGG balanced the game on the assumption that everybody has at least 75% resists.

Marauder can cheese itemization by spending a bunch of passives on that resist wheel near his start. Templar can partially cheese itemization by wearing a shield with intrensic resists and taking the "+15% resists while holding a shield" nodes. You might say that that requires sacrifices from other passive areas, but it's really only temporary. Eventually you'll find end game armor with good resists AND good armor/evasion, and then you can regret out of the points you used to cheese the itemization. No other classes get that option when playing melee, at least not without pathing into the marauder and/or templar tree. Duelist has no decent resists in his tree, and the armor and evasion passives he can get aren't going to be real effective when his base armor and evasion are gimped from having to focus on getting resists on his armor.

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D2 1.03: WW barbs spreading Iceblink freeze with their AoE whirlwind. They didn't really tank, they just bypassed the hazards of melee by preventing anything they touched from fighting back.

Coincidentally, I tried something like that. A shadow wielding 2-h Mace or Staff with high physical damage with Hatred and using a quality Added Cold Damage gem, Frostbite, and the Freeze passive to get freeze on hit. While I could destroy single targets by permafreezing them with Glacial Hammer, Cyclone wasn't really effective at freezing. At 8% chance to freeze (or about 20% with Frostbite (and it gets real old cursing every single mob group)), the chance to freeze wasn't terrific. When monsters did freeze, it was for a fraction of a second and probably not long enough to get out of range of their damage. And this was in Fellshrine, so odds are most stronger monsters wouldn't freeze at all. It would probably work if you twinked the character with a really nice weapon or if I had made him a Marauder or Templar instead.

Most ranged are not gear dependent early game, most depend on skills rather than weapons.

Melee require a good weapon throughout the entire game, most range can skate by early game.



The best way to fix melee is through gems.

Not by class/passives.

In other games they give melee flat reduction.

Not possible here since we all share the same passive tree.



(E) ( IMO - Melee is alot more fun, exciting, i kinda like it the way it is as far as the defensive aspect of melee goes.)

@BrotherLaz
Iceblinks in D2C were worn by players ONLY to avoid effects of "XX % chance to make monster flee" mod on weapon.
Iceblink wasn't superior to any regular (rare) armor for any player besides that.
There was no need to freeze mobs in D2C for defensive crowd control.

So it wasn't "build enabler" by any means.
It was just a way to mitigate that single possible negative effect on weapon.
And I'm pretty sure that such 'synergy' wasn't even planned by D2 devs - that make mob flee mod wasn't intended a negative property, since D2 has given up on D1 concept of 'cursed' items/mods.


Melee issues in PoE now are caused by two things:

1) survivability
There are no reliable safeguard besides HP.
And even if there are other reliable safeguards, taking HP nodes will be always better then stacking several other types of defenses since it's universal and it's present in the tree in large quantities.
So the problem is not that hp universal solution since it is every arpg, the problem is that it's overpowered comparing to other types of defenses.
What's more
Since incoming damage is highly unpredictable due to various game mechanics (mobs crits and all effects non-linear damage mitigation from armor and so on) player has to always assume that he will be hit hard.
UP to X k of hp out of the blue.
Hence he stacks HP which in 99% of encounters is not needed at all (since mobs won't crit for high dmg since he can evade dmg via other means like block evasion and so on).
But on that 1% of encounters it allows him to withstand incoming damage.

Pegging various other mechanics to HP (like life leech rate, regeneration, stun and other effects duration) and allowing it to be a player resource pool (blood magic) makes other types of defense even more outmatched comparing to it.

2) killing efficiency.

Main causes here are mobs AI and their moving speed.
AI issues are that annoying running back and forth for unknown reasons instead of rallying at player.
Melee attacking mobs withdrawing when player is surrounded and they can't land an attack on him
A lot of mobs that tend to scatter in different directions not just in one direction when they are attacked.
plus some desyncs issues

Those are main reasons in my opinion.
Others like being more gear reliable then other classes and so on are shared by many other arpgs and it does not make melee that much unplayable as in PoE.

Support disparity should be addressed to the large extent in upcoming patch.

Might sound weird, but maybe they could just bake some damage reduction into all melee weapons. I mean, I guess they already sort of do that with blocking, so maybe just increase the effectiveness of blocking and add blocking to melee weapons that traditionally don't have it. Perhaps melee weapons could add a % to armor also. Just throwing ideas around.

Bake in some Damage-reduction in each of the Major DPS-Nodes


Let 2-Hand Melee Weapons also have +Max Life

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Xendran wrote:

PoE is just a glorified numbers game because enemies use almost no interesting or unique skills. The apparent bandaid fix for this was to make everything do 50 billion damage. I HOPE that they intend to eventually fix monster AI and give them all much more varied movesets instead of just keeping up with the stupid high mob damage.

I feel i can NEVER let myself get hit by ANYTHING unless i want to die, even in pure HP builds.

This hits the nail on the head. PoE is an extremely simple game following in the footsteps of diablo games. You point, you click, you click, you click, you click some more, then you point somewhere else, then you click some more.


You cant add genuine difficulty to a gameplay formula that consists of nothing but positioning yourself and using the same action repeatedly. No matter how many bells or whistles you add to the system (oh crap lightning thorns-- better stop attacking for a few seconds), it's still going to have the same problem.

the only thing who will solve melee at lvl 80+ is a close proximity buff

close proximity buff
-**% damage from all sources
last 1.5 seconds only work with pure melee gems
must be in close proximity of enemies: 5+ units maximum
activated by dealing melee damage

preemptive proximity buff
-**% damage from all sources
last 2 seconds only work with pure melee gems
activated by using a melee damage skill
after 4 seconds goes into a 10 seconds cooldown


close proximity buff
by level
at 70+ 25% damage reduction from all sources
at 75+ 35% damage reduction from all sources
at 80+ 40% damage reduction from all sources
at 85+ 45% damage reduction from all sources
at 90+ 50% damage reduction from all sources
at 95+ 55% damage reduction from all sources

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Cruxation wrote:

The only thing I can ever think of is to give holding melee weapons an inhernet % reduced or less damage taken. However there are loop whole in that mind set because dagger can roll spell damage and spell crit and be used for casters. I haven't come up with anything that makes sense because it would help ranged just as much as melee and would allow the game to be facerolled.

How about this:

When you start attacking in melee your character becomes "obscured" and harder to hit with ranged attacks (seeing as enemies would be shooting through each other). This would give melee tank a little more survivability - particualry because melee charactors usually have to stand and fight enemies while taking ranged fire while ranged characters and shoot and move much more effectively.

I'd say 50% less chance to be hit with enemies within 1 second of attacking in melee.