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

Playing melee feels horrible. Worse than almost any other ARPG in history. The "grand melee rework" made it even worse. I just cant belive that this quality is acceptable at this stage of the game.

Im not even talking about balance or anything like that. It just feels crap. The only thing you can do to alleviate the pain is to stack as much attackspeed as possible.

And now the balance issues:

Melee splash should be built in by default for strike skills. You can make 3 screens of monsters explode with almost any skill in the game (without damage penatly), so why the hell are supports like melee splash still exsist???

Look at the new blade blast... Pure physical spells that make your screen explode, can explode a second time. Like wtf? Why would anybody start melee at this point???

CONS FOR MELEE:

- melee needs a good weapon to even start dealing damage
- melee needs to spend more on items and still gets inferior results
- melee needs to spend more passives for defense (still gets one-shotted by random crap)
- melee skills do not provide enough damage to compensate for the lack of passive points
- accuracy
- almost all of the f*cking content is timed. Therefore builing defenses is counterproductive. If you do not reach the DPS treshold you cant progress/lose income
- there is a sh*tton of effects that only punishes melee
- in boss fights you cant even sustain that pathetic DPS you have, because you are busy dodging instakilling sh*t all the time. AND THE FKING GROUND EFFECTS
- the game is turning into a giant pile of GFX vomint and you dont even know what the actual f*ck is going on. Good luck with manual dodging.
- no combat log. You cant identify which color of vomit is the most painful on you screen
- multistike is death sentence if you dont have enough attack speed
- 2-handers are trash. If you tripled the damage on them. They would still s*ck
- even if you build defenses the map mods(-block&armor/unlucky dodge) will nullify them. Like wtf?? They are trash to begin with. ARE YOU SERIOUS?
- i hate that i need to use herald of ice. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. YOU NEED TO USE HERALD OF ICE. ALWAYS. So much diversity...

The point is: GGG is stuffing a lot of OP broken stuff into the game every time, but when it comes to melee they dont give a cr*p. There is a million ways to improve melee gameplay, but they dont even try.

Feel free to continue the list. It is endless.

Honestly I just want the slow gameplay of old PoE back. Then melee would not be so bad, and the gameplay would not be so shallow in general. But I know it will never happen, not even in PoE2.

(I mean slower gameplay in general, not complete turtle ResidentSleeper)

"

Cence99 wrote:

Honestly I just want the slow gameplay of old PoE back. Then melee would not be so bad, and the gameplay would not be so shallow in general. But I know it will never happen, not even in PoE2.

(I mean slower gameplay in general, not complete turtle ResidentSleeper)

I wont slow down. It just cant. Because there are some major design decisions/flaws (subjective) that does not let them slow down.

When i started to play SSF, it became pretty obvious why the game is in this state.

1. reason:
You cant get what you want, nor can you directly make progress towards it. For example in D2 if i wanted a certain item i ran Pindleskin/Mefisto/Andariel ect. to get it. I did not get it even after the 1000x time, yet i knew that im doing the right thing to achieve my goal, and i was still excited for the DROPS. It is the so called "target farming". Target farming still exists in poe in the form of divination cards, but you cant get each and every item with them, and the droprates are adjusted to trade league standards. They were not made for you to collect them, but to buy them from other players. Since the game is balanced around trade your best bet is to farm currency AS FAST AS POSSIBLE and buy your own gear from other players. Grinding Gear Games became Grinding Currency To Buy Gear Games at this point. You almost never farm directly GEAR in this game. This is one of the reasons why top speed farming is your best bet.

2. reason:
GGG wanted to avoid targetfarming as much as possible. They think that targetfarming is boring and repetitive, so they switched it with "exciting" and rewarding random encounters instead. Most of these encounters have multiple layers of randomness, so directly farming things is not possible. While these encounters in most cases really are rewarding they come in the form of currency. So yet again your best bet is go AS FAST AS POSSIBLE and play the good old slot machine game, and turn your winnings into gear via trade.

Path of exile is pretty interesting experiment. If there is something i learned from it, it must be that you should not remove gear farming from a loot-hunting ARPG. I just cant bring myself to call POE a D2 successor, because of this.

I really like target-farmable items like Monster Infrequents in Grim Dawn, but that is not a reason for why the game is so fast. There can be 0 target farming but still a slower paced gameplay, as in, slower monsters, slower projectiles (so you can actually dodge), less mob density, movement speed cap, attack speed cap, etc. etc.

I know it's unrealistic, just explaining what I mean. Grim Dawn has great pacing because movement and attack speed have a cap and projectiles are slower than in PoE too.