How would you improve melee playstyle

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Destructodave wrote:

Fix it so range spells dont go 2 screens off the screen. I mean seriously, why is this a thing?

Most melee skills root you in place, and barely cover the screen if they even go that far. Most just cover a quadrant to half the screen max. This coupled with the fact they are melee, and generally in harms way more often than not.

Meanwhile most ranged skills kill stuff you cant even see; projectiles and effects go like 2 screens over.

The only melee skills that keep up are something like cyclone that can keep moving, to offset the sheer aoe power of most ranged skills. Doesnt make sense to me why a lot of melee skills AoE is too small, and why so many ranged skills are not at least screen limited. You really notice it when you play with a friend and hes shooting some ranged skill and hes 2 screens back and his projectiles and affects are appearing on your screen.

Man I wish people would stop spreading false information. Projectiles / spells do NOT go 'two screens' over, at all.

I play on an ultrawide, or 3440x1440 21:9. I can see the projectiles / spells stop, well before the edge of my screen. Even if they DID go right to the edge, it would at MOST be out an extra 30% over our view, which it isn't.

They don't go two screens over, they don't go one screen over, they reach the edge on a normal aspect ratio, and some go a tiny bit over.

lots of good suggestions for melee here. Hope GGG takes notes.

The %60 attackspeed multiplier and such that some melee skills have should be bumped to 100%. Damage adjusted accordingly of course.

The issue will however remain the same which is the inability to offscreen, having to move too much to aim at an specific mob, not tanky enough to deal damage in melee range vs bosses with plenty of AoE slams and one shots. And when you compare it to totems or minions it has the disadvantage of not being able to pick up loot while enemies die.

Nullifiers, detonate dead, lightning mirages... all extremely rippy mechanics at melee range.

Also btw, how do you guys find clearing a legion in an open map with namelock melee skills?

Here we go:

1) More defensive/HP/Fortify nodes on the tree, preferable build into already existing weapon/melee specific nodes, so the nodes would be more or less useless/inefficient to grab for non-melee users.

2) Even more flat added physical damage on melee skills to make leveling more smooth, and to diminish the gap in gear requirement that separates spell builds and melee builds.

3) More/a greater variety of secondary effect support gems like Shockwave and Melee Splash to further alter skills to fit your personal playstyle. Secondary effects is a much better way to go, than to just make every melee skill ranged or have a huge AoE.

4) More defensive aura/herald options, like the Aegis effects we get from some unique shields.

Disclaimer: I'm not one of those that feel like melee is in a (very) terrible spot. It's fully playable, and you can "easily" do all content as melee. What melee needs more than power/damage, is defenses - and some QoL.

Something i forgot in my last post. Since Dual Wielding is incredibly strong compared to Weapon + Shield due to implicit bonuses grnated i think some bonuses should be granted when wearing a shield and using a melee (strike) attack.

Examples could be: 10% damage reduction, 10% more damage, 10% more attack speed.
Or maybe a shield exclusive extra socket that acts like an link extension to equipped Melee Strike Skills where the melee skill must not have a Movement Tag and not a Channeling Tag.

Melee issue can´t be solved easy.
Why not make melee to range with Support gem or Notable passiv.

For example like this:

Skills always hitting the next nearest target up to +XX range.
Works only with Melee tag.
Can´t be used with Movement/Totem/Projectile/Trigger tag.


Too strong?
Balance Exemple:

Add you can only leech if the enemy close to you,
or other things.

With this combination you can attack with melee in range, evade/dodge things from bosses/enemys and for health you must near them.

Sorry for my bad english.

One thing Melee playstyles seem to lack is a definite strength, some reason to actually pick it over other playstyles. Ranged has clearspeed and safety, minions are good at distracting enemies and fairly autonomous, etc. Currently there really isnt anything that melee can do that cant simply be accomplished better by other playstyles. The question is what SHOULD melee be doing to distinguish itself and how can that be accomplished.

One thing i think melee needs to excel at is single target damage. Due to the necessity of being right on top of the enemy to actually hurt them, melee is currently among the worst boss killer archetypes because they cannot immediately return to dealing damage after having to dodge out of whatever big telegraphed boss move you happen to encounter. So to compensate the actual melee attacks should really feel like they are just tearing an enemy apart while you are actually in the position to use them. The other archetype theat melee should embody is the classic tank. They should have enough durability to survive the moments where they are not in the position to deal direct damage. This is also an area where melee is currently among the worst, due to their proximity making it hard to manually avoid attacks, as well as melee monsters actually having the chance to hit you before exploding near the edge of the screen. Unfortunately i think this is much harder to fix without doing a major overhaul of the entire defense system (which probably needs to happen anyway but that is beyond the scope of this discussion)

IT will also be helpful to differentiate between True melee skills and False melee skills. True melee is things frost hammer, molten strike and even cyclone, where (barring rediculous area scaling) you generally need to be in close proximity to the enemy to actually deal damage. These are the ones that take higher risks and therefore need to be rewarded with higher damage or more defence or both. False melee skills are things like tectonic slam and lacerate, that are hitting enemies at significant range with comparatively little investment. These can use some declunking but are comparatively in a much better spot than the true melee skills.

I have a couple of additional ideas which may help some cases

The first thing i would do is rework melee splash. IT can be as simple as adding a line like "attacks deal X% more damage with strike skills". This would allow it to not be such dead weight for melee skills without overbuffing the minion skills which also frequently depend on it. IT may also be interesting to see an added bonus if the splash does not hit any additional targets, though maybe not that necessary. The other option (as i have seen elsewhere in this thread) is to simply make melee splash available from the passive tree.

One major problem a lot of melee skills have is they just feel really slow. Attack speed tends to have a disproportionate effect on the actual "feel" of a build. Faster builds generally feel better to play. A lot of melee skills have a reduced attack speed mod built in to them, and there are not many effective ways to increase attack speed outside of ascendancy choices (where it often comes at the sacrifice of durability) The rework to multistrike is a major contributor here. Having it transition to a more "ramping damage" type of gem is okay, but something else needed to step in for actually giving an attack speed boost. Rage is nice, but it takes far too long to build, especially if you are actually doing enough damage to kill things in one hit so you dont get the chance to build up stacks. And in the event you do die its loss can often feel crippling trying to return to the boss that killed you (I think it should gain multiple stacks per hit against unique enemies) There is absolutely room for the "big slow attack" kind of archetype (earthquake and sweep seem to use it well) but currently this feels far to much like the default state for melee.

One idea i had is a sort of defensive field dependent on using melee attacks. Basically, anything within a radius of you will deal less damage to you. Hitting with melee attacks would add stacks which increase the radius of this effect. Stacks decay if you arent attacking. Basically it is the mutant crossbaby of fortify and rage. This could come from a keystone or a support gem, or an actual aura. It would be important to actually make it dependent on melee attacks. The expansion mechanic would make it harder to just stick onto a movement skill and reap the benefits for non melee builds like they do with fortify. IT may also be possible to do something similar with block, as it is a very strong defensive mechanic and having a lower investment way to access it unique to melee playstyles would fit the niche


TL;DR melee needs some gameplay niche it actually excels at more than other playstyles. I suggest single target damage or defense. Towards that end it needs some support mechanics not easily adopted by the other playstyles. Consider increasing the general speed of melee so it doesnt feel as bad to play.