strike skills - will these be ever competetive and non self-gimp choice?

TL;DR: they are terribad and while you can make them work, the outcome (cost to result ratio) is VERY rarely better (or different in significant way) to simply NOT picking strike skill in the first place


'Melee rebalance' is almost univocally considered a GIANT flop. Cyclone league they call it and there is a point to that. What people miss is that EVEN then Cyclone was used in (almost) majority of cases as a trigger skill, not a real damage.
You read it right: best melee skill ever, overbuffed and OP as f.. was STILL better off used as a trigger mechanism rather than to rely on its own damage. Despite what many people say - melee's problem IS damage. The Saviour shows that easily. Meh setups suddenly work better if you give them 100% more damage. Yet mines and summoners still sh.. on them easily.

But back to the Strike skills.

Right now Strike skill is a single target, namelock sub-set of melee skills. In common view (and missconception, later on that) they are 'single target, big damage'. In reality they are mostly auto-outclassed by any similar non-strike skill in a given role.

Three main issues with Strike skills:

1. POE's targeting system is obsolete and does not fit to a 'modern' game. Without targeting crutches playing Strike skill (with exceptions like Static Strike etc) is unrealistic. Even swords (largest range) will miss more often than not.
Strange thing is - POE has working 'auto target' mechanic already (Multistrike, AC, +strike skills all use it) yet for some reason players are expected to hit buggy hitbox and expect that THIS TIME targeting shall work as expected.

This has SIGNIFICANT effect on damage and gameplay

2. The damage is.. not that great after all. Sure Strike skills have high %damage effectiveness, some exceeding 200% but.. AOE or ranged skills have that as well. Optimistic outlook: Strike skill on average deals maybe 20% more base damage than similar AOE skill. It varies a lot between skills and builds but that is the 'average average' number I should start.

Problem is: unless you are great fan of constant gem swaps/jewel swaps you have to pay DEARLY for the privilege of gimping yourself with style.
a) skills that have 'splash threshold jewel' are -1 jewel slot already. This jewel is mandatory. congrats, you just lost 6% max life and 12% crit multi MINIMUM. just to have a working skill.
b) skills that DO NOT have such jewel HAVE to use melee splash (pre 3.8 we had Slayer's node for that, now it is gone). Congrats, you are one 40%+ more damage support short already.
c) skills that have 'an AOE component' (like Wild Strike) or work in a funky way (Static Strike) are better of, yet still suffer horribly from issue no 1.
Molten Strike was very strong because if didnt suffer from this issue AND had other, non-melee scaling avenues.

Once you solve your splash issue, there comes the necessity to solve the 'hit the damn thing issue'. Three options:

a) Ancestral Call. Works well, auto-gimp for bosses, requires gem swap. aggravating gameplay experience, slows gameplay down, put player at risk.
b) EXPENSIVE +strike Hunter gloves. Two issues with that: first they are expensive and I do not remember other 'archetypes' requiring end-game piece of gear to just FUNCTION at all. Second: opportunity cost. +strike skill gloves, even very good ones cost you Intimidate chance from the same slot (you 'can' get both rolls on these but then prepare your mirrors for that). That also means you cannot use (strong) unique options.
c) Anoint. 2ex anoint. Anoint that robs you out of other good anoint (if we are in Golden Oil range - the alternative options are REALLY good). That means: if you want to play your strike skill and not lose sanity swapping gems - your build just lost 10% maximum life or 'damage-o-plenty' notable.

Remember - that is not a luxury, we are talking 'build doesnt work without' stuff here. Sure, AC is the 'obvious choice' and most players who step into 'melee trap' use it, yet it is garbage experience that only shows when you are asked by a significant other 'why the hell you fiddle with this inventory screen mid fight'. Somehow other games dont ask their players to do such stuff. Neither most other archetypes in this very game


Last damage deficiency vector is scaling. You are already down on damage thanks to 'splash and strike' solution but now you can actually start scaling this stuff up.

And.. there is a big problem right there. Most Strike skills have very limited set of scaling vectors. You cannot slap Conc Effect on there, gem levels are mostly worthless, all the chain/fork/pierce interactions POE is very rich with are absent. All you can do is mostly stack crit multi, flat phys and attack speed. LOTS of it (because slow melee builds are unplayable completely).

Several skills got 'blessed' in recent rework with 'added flat elemental damage' tied to gem levels. That is mostly worthless because current supports greatly favour all in approach and mixed scaling is simply inferior in most cases while conversion is the preferred one.

Then there is the generic issue of weapon types and why SIGNIFICANT majority of melee players uses DW swords. Weapon range is garbage mechanic and should go yesterday. Attack speed is tied to movement and action speed such making high aps weapons mandatory for dodging/movement skills. Sure, you can use 1.15 aps gavel and deal some damage but.. why? and how often that choice is going to kill you when your movement skill is just too slow to dodge?


The last major issue is:
3. Strike skills are inherently more risky than non-strike skills (AOE, ranged, proxy) because they require user to sit in front of angry stuff. Nothing on strike skill makes the user tankier. Tank/no-tank is a build choice. Spectral throw can be exactly as tanky as Dual Strike + ofc it is ranged so most short-ranged dangers/fixed degens etc is auto-avoided.



Solving 2 out of 3 would make people actually play them for reasons other than 'fluff'. For every 'successful' Glacial Bummer builds you can make cheaper, faster, safer Cyclone build. Simple as that.


Note: I know you 'can' make them work. My recent 93+s were: Smite (very weak), Pestilent Strike (cool, but mostly caried by poison profil, Gyre/Lash with prolif performs on average better) and Cold-Wild-Strike (nice clear, very bad single target.

Problem is that most builds with Strike skills look like typical 'melee is fine. Mathil' build: Abyssus, LOTS of crit, LOTS of attack speed, kill them all before they hit me, DW swords/2h crit. Or 'but accshulee..' dual Nebuloh Jugg.


In short, if anyone wants to experience HARD HARD game mode - try melee strike skills. Some of them are fun (some are truly hopeless tho) but dont expect much. Youll pay more to get less and without targeting crutches you wont get anywhere at all.


GGG - time to fix this, like 3 years ago.


PS. ~70% of poe.ninja Cyclone users use CwC or CoC to proc spells. 'melee problem is not damage' :)

Honestly, don't you have anything better to do? What's the point of this little crusade that you are leading here? If you don't like playing with strike skill then don't? Keep playing spellbuilds/summoners and be happy?

With several lvl 100 builds lvled as melee i can confirm that in relation to everything else melee strike skills suck. Be it Cost/Performance or Benchmark against other builds. Melee itself is stressed with more dangerous situation and dps losses due to dodge times and close combat. While there isnt much to distinguish melee from other builds.

Judging melee strike skills by its own is the wrong approach here. When put things in relation with other skills/builds the picture becomes clear and it should effectively lead the GGG employees responsible for balance to conclusions.

As a melee-only player, it hurts my soul that cyclone is the best skill while it is the most generic skill ever that exists in every ARPG now.

yep.

I bet there is not a single dude in GGG that ever picked warrior in any rpg in his life.

And to be honest, is it just me or was melee in 3.6 actually better than after 3.7?

I mean in 3.6 we could just scale spellcaster tier flat ele damage with abyss jewels and had some fat ehp thanks to MoM. That worked much better than all this unreliable molten shell cancer and flat phys or phys conversion scaling.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Honestly, don't you have anything better to do? What's the point of this little crusade that you are leading here? If you don't like playing with strike skill then don't? Keep playing spellbuilds/summoners and be happy?

Good for Sid for keeping up his “little crusade.” Consider me a willing knight.

We want this game to have a fun set of choices for play, not to be forced into a tiny group of preset options at the whim of developers (or due to their incompetence).

Yes, numerical changes like damage can make a difference, especially if strike skills are intended to have single-target value. No, we don’t have to wait around endlessly with a poor status quo for some mythical overhaul that’ll never happen.

GGG should take more pride in the content they designed and released in the past, rather than let it wither and die. In this case we’re talking about a significant percentage of skills and builds that just don’t function properly in the current state of the game.

I just want the fucking targeting problem resolved.
Grim Dawn - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Wolcen - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Diablo 2 - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Diablo 3 (fuck that game) - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Last Epoch - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Lost Ark - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Titan Quest - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Torchlight 1 - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Torchlight 2 - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function
Warhammer Chaosbane (this game is a mess but still has better melee combat) - no melee targeting issues, no crutches just to get melee to function

Path of Exile - melee targeting issues, at least 2 crutches needed just to get melee to function
Path Of Exile 2 - (Bet money melee will have targeting issues and still need crutches just to function. Worse case they just remove it because melee is difficult to get to function like no other ARPG didn't solve this problem years ago)


The sad thing is melee functioned better in 3.6 (it was shit but it did not have any flies on it yet). How did they screw up this badly?

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bionicg2040 wrote:

The sad thing is melee functioned better in 3.6 (it was shit but it did not have any flies on it yet). How did they screw up this badly?

Oh boy, I am really not the only one thinking it :3

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Path of Exile - melee targeting issues, at least 2 crutches needed just to get melee to function

The main issue is strike skills will never be good unless they become AoE due to the pace of the game. They might be usable once PoE2 comes out with the new gem system so you can easily have one AoE setup and one Strike setup without trade-offs.

Edit: Though I agree, dynamic targetting like in Grim Dawn (no name-lock) would be great to have, and I don't know why it isn't in PoE yet.

I dunno how mele can be fixed honestly. POE is a game where you grind stats then benchmark said stats against very basic content. The Mele problem is the delivery of those stats.

Everything else delivers their attack multipliers ranged or aoe, mele has to walk up and deliver its attack stat single point one by one. Mele is bottlenecked by design and POEs underlying lack of complex gameplay plays a principle part in that.

It's like everyone else gets to play whack a mole with plyboard paddle, but mele gets to play with a pencil.