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

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Cence99 wrote:

The main issue is strike skills will never be good unless they become AoE due to the pace of the game.

This. Right here. This is the problem.

I've said before that the best melee I've ever played in an ARPG was Marvel Heroes. In that game, EVERY melee attack was AoE, at bare minimum it hit a small cone in front of your character. This made targeting really generous, but more importantly the pace of the game was 1000x slower than PoE. More than power creep, PoE has long suffered speed creep. Everything just moves too goddamn fast, and it just keeps getting faster.

Honestly if you were to ask what my ideal pace for this game was, I'd say it started with Talisman and ended with Abyss. After that, the game just started getting way too fast.

thank you to (almost) all of you for at least reading trough it. i specifically avoided all 'melee is bad' etc areas because
a) melee is not THAT bad
b) diluting a problem is a sure way of making it not a problem. one problem at a time

playing both melee and non-melee, strike and non-strike i can see that - aside from certain HORRID balancing issues like summoners - melee 'can' be viable, and strike skills can be 'ok' as well. IF and this is a very big IF - you apply some mandatory crutches AND you accept you are already behind other, better choices.


no other playstyle requires certain build/gear/skill choices to even work. closest one i can think of is Low Life but: a) technically you CAN play it without Shavs b) LL is a damage multiplier, not an archetype. except aurabots (that are horrid idea btw) you can play any LL build as non-LL just with different scaling

playing melee Strike skill without splash+hit-the-damn-thing solution? IMPOSSIBLE

opportunity cost of this solution is HUGE, cutting both into damage and creative space. both can be solved, GGG simply opted for applying PR bandaid and further covering it up with Cyclone.


Strike skills requiring one mandatory support link? sure but make said skill deal enough bonus damage so it at least matches AOE skills

We are 2020 now? sure, just make melee attacks hit nearby targets in a 'smart' way. All other ARPGs did that so it cannot be THAT hard


And for f.. sake add some scaling options to things like Heavy Strike - check current list of elder/shaper/plumber/gardener/driver influences and just tell me how many of new ones actually apply to skills like Heavy Strike. almost every modern mod is HEAVILY geared towards spells and phys spells in general are in mod-heaven. meanwhile Impale (that is going destroyed in 2 weeks) is the only mechanic added in recent years that actually is worth talking about

compare +5% increased damage per Endu Charge to +1 intelligence skills.. there is no comparison.
attacks and strike skills in particular got shafted in recent power creep bonanza when almost nothing applies to them (and that one thing that applies is actually mandatory - +strike)

it is abandonware. GGG forgot these skills exist and instead buffs Blade Vortex (for Nth time) despite it being one of the last skills to buff..

but you cannot sell Heavy Strike MTX, can you?

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Powertrip wrote:

I dunno how mele can be fixed honestly.

Ultimately, an ARPG is about speedclearing low-HP enemies for loot. The amount of damage is ultimately irrelevant because it's subject to potentially 2000% increases, etc.

So the only factors that matter for balancing purposes are: range, AoE and "attack" speed. In PoE, viable skills have all 3 of these Factors. Strike skills, by design, do not.

The way to make strike skills viable would be to prevent any skills from having all 3 Factors — for instance, only allowing 2 out of 3. At this point there's no way to balance true melee without nerfing ranged, and quite frankly that won't happen in PoE1. That's why viable melee skills are either zero-cooldown movement skills (actually, skill) or melee in name only.

again, it is not THAT bad

Wild Strike (any variant, altho lightning one is wicked sick) is pretty good at clearing (it really is)
Frost Blades
Infernal Blow
even Glacial Bummer as a Herald of Ice proc
Flicker Strike, Lightning Strike, Pestilent Strike, etc


they all clear at least 'ok' but - you f.. need to solve two design issues: POE targeting is ancient and some XXth century games did it better, and due to INSANE mob density 'splash' of sorts is needed (no, this worthless splash from weapon swing does not count. remove it, noone cares)

and while you spend 'resources' on making Strike skill 'work', other skills simply buff damage because they do not have to fight the system.

it is a case similar to summoners. they were always GOOD. but they sucked mechanic and gameplay wise. resummoning spectres after each logout? hunting for spectres? dumb AI? sounds familiar?

Strike skills are in very similar spot. they are fun once you (over)spend to make them work. they actually are. but having to pay 50% more to get 50% less and still die 100% more..

GGG, just sort it out

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

So the only factors that matter for balancing purposes are: range, AoE and "attack" speed. In PoE, viable skills have all 3 of these Factors. Strike skills, by design, do not.

The way to make strike skills viable would be to prevent any skills from having all 3 Factors — for instance, only allowing 2 out of 3. At this point there's no way to balance true melee without nerfing ranged, and quite frankly that won't happen in PoE1. That's why viable melee skills are either zero-cooldown movement skills (actually, skill) or melee in name only.

Pretty much, many games of many different genres do give the mobility advantage to melee archetypes, which makes complete sense because they need to get close to their target and they need to be better when they are there (and range at a disadvantage at close-combat range).

But in PoE ?
Nop, when GGG added smite it kinda looked like they wanted to go that direction .... but no, they just didn't.

Strike skills suck so hard without ancestral call and melee splash its ridiculous

they should at least deal 5 times the damage and they would still be crap

My last build was Double Strike with about 34 melee range and Melee Splash (no Ancestral Call or extra strikes), and it worked pretty well. Although it did come at the cost of having gloves with range and a unique amulet that is pretty bad aside from giving +2 range, and picking up all range nodes from the skill tree, as well as +2 range from Slayer ascendancy.

It would be great if melee and unarmed range was easier to get and stack, so that you can actually clear with Double Strike without having to get Ancestral Call or Melee Splash. This was actually advertised as a selling point of 3.7 melee rework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO-bpM0fnkg

See how he is able to clear entire packs with 1 or 2 hits just by having huge melee range? Unfortunately, this is not the reality in game. Of course skills like Heavy Strike do not benefit from range in the same way, because it only increases the distance from which you can hit (I think).

I played the previous league under Stun build and tested a lot of different settings. Of course, we are talking about Heavy Strike and Ground Slam because they have REST. Heavy Strike has worse damage on a single target than Ground Slam because it does not work with Concecrated Effect and Pulverise, it is downright funny because why play with something that does not have AoE and causes less damage, so that stun when I do it on one target and all the rest beats me and shoots me when Ground Slam beats and stuns the whole screen? That's all about Strike.

I've thought a lot about this for the last week while planning out my leaguestarters, and I think doublestrike is actually in a really good spot right now. But the only reason for this is that Vaal Double Strike is really, really good.

So maybe all of these other trashcan-tier strike melee skills just need a vaal version offering them some kind of temporary clearspeed viability?

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

So maybe all of these other trashcan-tier strike melee skills just need a vaal version offering them some kind of temporary clearspeed viability?

Seems like yet another dirty bandaid to me ...