How would you improve melee playstyle

I think of a couple things.

-Firstly they should add melee splash nodes around the tree as well as on some weapon nodes. Strike skills feel so limited because you have to use multiple supports to make it work. Investing into a couple splash nodes on the tree can alleviate a support gem for something else.

Consider that if this would be added. Then you can invest into splash on the tree and invent into mods with strike skills hitting additional enemies. Perhaps then we could see strike skills free up even more sockets.

-More skills need some of that added damage to it (Even some bow skills need that as well). I liked the idea of this because it really does help you get started into the early/mid game.

-Life nodes need to be adjusted. Not just the right side of tree though, even adding 1-2% to every node goes a long way. Top side of the tree has access to ES/MoM to create large pools of life. While life builds have to take every life node possible and even then break somewhere between... 6-7k on average. The average life base needs to move up into the 7-8k mark with BiS life gear pushing you around the 10k+.

-Life rolls on gear need adjustment. There needs to be higher tier rolls for life on all sorts of gear. Aside from the chest piece.. most of gear in the game can have the highest life roll on before you even enter maps. Getting item level 80+ gear should net you the possibility to roll further tiers.

-Oh and this one I still don't understand... Why does 75% of the melee skills have a built in less attack speed into. Meanwhile Cyclone is running around with 300% More. Like I understand the faster hitting skills generally have lesser damage on them but.. what.

-Bring back stat sticks. This was one of the more unique things about PoE that crippled melee. Many uniques fell out of flavor as well. And they really didn't make changes to actual dual wield. While they were some items that gave tons of power.. melee needed it. You can even ditch the dual wield bonus for characters that actually dual wield and not stat stick it.

I could go on and on with this but I'll stop here..

- Fortify removed as a gem and added to all melee STRIKE skills.
- Better damage scaling/effectivity for elemental conversion gems. Once there was a time where conversion was by far the best with high investment now it gets brutally beaten by low investment impale cyclone.
- Targetting fix, more range for every melee STRIKE gems
- less Clunckyness: Multistrile need more attack speed maybe not 99% but 79% would be fine. Balance berserker right back if your servers got problems GGG.
- Skill Gem Berserk should be sustainable for longer periods of time with melee STRIKE skills.
- Improve Single Target damage for melee STRIKE skills. By being mechanically inferior and more in danger than anything else it only make sense to have highest single target dps therefore:

MAKE ANCESTRAL CALL HIT SINGLE TARGET WHEN IN BLOOD STANCE

This is not a low hanging fruit @Rory its neccessary if you care for melee STRIKE skill balance.

Melee will never beat ranged in terms of clear speed so changes should focus on increasing what should be melees strong points, single target DPS and tankyness.

-Remove the Melee tag from all skills that have a "Movement" tag.
-Change Endurance charge on melee stun into Endurance charge on melee hit
-Add Area of Effect and range as inherent properties on active skill gems and make them decrease the damage effectiveness of the skill. That way, the more range and and AOE a skill has, the lower it's damage will be.
-Increase the defensive capabilities of Marauder/Duelist ascendancies other than Juggernaut. Right now it feels like you can improve any given melee build just by turning him into a Juggernaut. Easier access to End charges via End charge on hit support would be a first step but some other changes wouldn't hurt.
Give melee skills autoaim.

1. Add "reduced damage taken" to all melee notable nodes.
2. Let melee skills to be able to use while moving.

The things that come to mind again and again when talking about melee, is:

1) Nodes on the tree
There so much they could do here. More Fortify effect. More defensive effects. Especially on those "end nodes" in different weapon wheels, nodes that other "archetypes" deem too inefficient to get.

2) Weapon Scaling
They did a lot here in Legion league. But they need to do more. More flat damage to really "feel" those levels. We all know everything can be done as melee.

3) Defenses. Melee need more. Everything can't be "kill everything before it gets the chance to kill you".


The largest problems with melee, is the danger of being up close, the expenses because how weapon scaling work and lack of defenses, especially for people not scaling armor to (ab)use Vaal Molten Shell.

I think, one of the biggest problem that prevented GGG from buffing melee is the following:
With melee chars you are right next to the action of monsters and bosses. So you are an easy target for their slams, ground effects and other staff that could kill you. So you need a lot of damage migration and defenses. While range classes, range spells, or summonor could stand at the edge of the screen and do damage nevertheless.
The tree is open for every other class(additionaly through anointments). Even defensive gems are usable for other classes , if you stack the required attributes. So every attempt to buff the defensive of melee chars, will balancewise mean, that you buff every other class too. This will result in more unkillable meta characters.

One thing to prevent it, would be to add some archetypes in the aszendencys, or reduce the freedom of character development, GGG is so proud of.

Next problem is, that GGG orientate their decision to nerf something to much on the top 2% of players and streamers. But they forget the vast majority of players, that will never reach this kind of knowledge and currency that is needed to build chars in top of the poe.ninja list.

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juyevon wrote:

One thing to prevent it...

The best way to prevent it, would be to buff certain notables in weapon wheels around the tree. Not many non-melee builds would spec into axe/sword/mace/dual wield wheel to get defensive buffs at the end of it. All "reduced damage" notables on the tree, are non-weapon specific, meaning that everyone can take them without wasting points (one exception being the melee area wheel). These nodes should be worked into melee-specific notables, because no one needs reduced damage taken as much as melee.

But we all know GGG are afraid of defenses. The moment Endurance Charges+Fortify becomes a good defensive setup, the nerf how Fortify works with other defenses. And I'm pretty sure (Vaal) Molten Shell will be nerfed next patch. Why? Because it actually lets you survive stuff, without using your offense.

We all now everything CAN be done as melee. But this whole "stack crit, percicion and attack speed on every character, and kill stuff before it can kill you" gets boring. Give us options. Give us better scaling. Give us the chance to cheeze content through defense, the same way as we can currently cheeze content with offense.

Get rid of Namelock and Multistrike.

VMS needs changing anyway, its exactly what melee need but its restricted to armour. Evade based melee feels absolute garbage now in comparison like even 80% evade 75/75 dodge is bad compared to 30k 15s molten shell. Make it work off evade too ^^

As to how to fix melee Tbh anything would have to be fairly sweeping, i'd say add 2 nodes that give extra strike on the passive tree, revert pulverize to a more area multiplier so its actually fun again.

All of the elemental conversion hit skills just about need a rebalance especially now they buffed monster resist, a basic well geared non-crit Infernal blow chieftain does less damage than a single skeleton.

That brings onto another thing that needs addressing which is crit vs non crit, you can currently play non crit phys and its actually viable but non crit elemental damage is bleh especially with the point cost, location and clunkiness of EO which feels mandatory for elemental builds.

On the defensive side its mostly a passive point allocation problem, most defensive nodes require a substantial buff. Soul of Steel is fantastic that is the high bar but they need more hybrid life + defense nodes in the melee areas. In the same vein they should add 1-2% life to melee damage notables so that their life pool is slightly higher than ranged overall.

Thats about all i've got, Tbh im playing a heavy strike dude right now and loving him, i'll die to some BS but melee is at least vaguely playable for some skills atm thanks to molten shell.

Evasion based melee can't work from the beginning. Evasion works for ranged builds because you're not getting hit all that often to begin with, if you then stack evasion so 9 out of 10 attacks miss you're good to go in terms of survivability. As melee you will get hit non stop, even with 90% dodge you will still get hit plenty of times and without mitigation that means death. Melees can sustain themselves well with high mitigation to reduce incoming damage and high life leech to counter the damage income. If the incoming damage comes in form of high damage spikes every now and then this isn't working anymore. For melee you need mitigation more than anything, some evasion on top is nice to have but you can't ride on it alone.