Why Melee will always suck

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Since most ranged builds don't use much str the buff for them would be minor, but major for close combat players that use str making many new str builds very viable. It would not create any stupid must have nodes that are not welcome and will never be accepted by GGG. No hidden mechanics, pure simplicity.

Ranger class is not equal to ranger.

a simple increase would be and keystone that increases melee gem damage by let's say 30%. A ranger and shadow class melee should be able to grab it so it should be in the middle.
Here are some proposed spots for that

http://i1093.photobucket.com/albums/i428/revmysleds/poe_zps3dd59f0e.jpg?t=1367884464

What kind of ranger has 300 str? At best they can have 120-150 if they go with iron will. Stop with the keystone already GGG said no before.

I had a simular suggestion: change +armour% to +armour and armour effectiveness%

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lososthefish wrote:

What kind of ranger has 300 str? At best they can have 120-150 if they go with iron will. Stop with the keystone already GGG said no before.

Common hardcore builds like lighting arrow or rain of arrows go easily for 270-280 strength, you obviously haven't played as a ranger much?

Like I allready suggested.

Make a change to melee gems. it can be different from skill to skill.

If you hit a target with your melee attack, you get a buff for 0,3 to 0,5 sec that reduces damage taken by a percentage. This can also scale with the gem lvl.

like 0% at lvl 1 and 10 to 20 at lvl 20. depending on the skill.

- you don't have to screw up the passive tree.
- you get to keep all things like totems, traps and so on as melee
- ranged doesn't get any benefit.

I would also suggest to rearange some of the axe, sword passives in the tree so melee can get some more phys DPS out there.

Shouldn't be to hard to implement?

sry for the bad spelling.

Survivability would not have to be changed, I like the risk of playing as melee. But in my opinion, the pay-off of melee skills isn't high enough to warrant the extra risk of being a sitting duck.

In your face skills like cleave/sweep/leap slam feel horribly underpowered compared to pseudo ranged skills like lightning strike and ground slam at merciless level.

Here's another problem: ground slam is mace only. Currently I feel restricted to lightning strike as the only effective attack with an axe.

Which is a shame because the restrictions to using cleave/sweep would suggest some benefit that only axe/sword users have. Especially sweep seems completely useless. The damage is extremely low and the risk is enormous. Leap slam I only use for jumping on ledges.

Solution seems easy. Up the damage for cleave/sweep and maybe leap slam by a lot.

EDIT: Funnily enough, in these types of games there never seems to be a 'ranged sucks compared to melee' thread :)

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Dakrath wrote:

I dont know why this still hasn't been addressed by GGG.

All it takes is a simple 'Flat Damage reduction' node when you are a melee class. Code it in so it doesnt work with ranged ability's and were done!

Diablo 3 was poor at best... but damn, the monk/barb (melee) flat damage reduction % over ranged didn't take a genius to figure out

It's as simple as this but we'll have to see. Having a ranged character capable of the same armor as a melee character leaves only damage output to be different, in which case you could make melee do double the damage of ranged and it still wouldn't be worth it.

As it stands now the only real way of soaking hits is using totems and summons since no amount of armor will save you.

Keystones and Gems are bad fixes for this issue as they become requirements.

Integrate the following mechanic into some skills (exclude pseudo melee ones):

Every hit generates a "melee" charge which reduced incoming hit damage by say 1%.
Have it stack up to 20 with base duration of 4 seconds, refresh them like normal charges.

Lower duration if it gets abused by whirling blades or simply add a cooldown to whirling blades :P

necro thread spotted
should be "less" and not reduced so it will not scale stupidly with fortify ;)

also 15% is enough, now that we have fortify on top of enfeeble, if you stack everything... you become godlike.