Would diablo3s approach to melee work?

To give melee a fighting chance in D3, they gave barbs and monks an automatic 30% reduction to physical damage. This was later reverted as time went on and gear became better and better.

Now although 30% is substantial and maybe to much, would providing a similar buffs to characters in POE work? Now exactly what constitutes a "melee" character would have to be decided I guess based on weapons used or something

I don't know maybe this is stupid idea, or to complex. I don't play melee and never will, just trying to think of solution :p

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AthenaUS wrote:

To give melee a fighting chance in D3, they gave barbs and monks an automatic 30% reduction to physical damage. This was later reverted as time went on and gear became better and better.

Now although 30% is substantial and maybe to much, would providing a similar buffs to characters in POE work? Now exactly what constitutes a "melee" character would have to be decided I guess based on weapons used or something

I don't know maybe this is stupid idea, or to complex. I don't play melee and never will, just trying to think of solution :p

People have suggested this. However, as you pointed out, how do you define melee?

Since you could cast with a mace if you wanted to. It's not a stupid idea, just one that is practically impossible to implement in this game.

Its a solution but imo its kinda heavy handed and too direct. What if i dont want to play tanky melee?
Its another example of Blizzard's Apple-like one size fits all approach that shames ARPGs

They should just give melee gear more defence or passives with more defensive power

i dont have any trouble as a melee

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Sanosuke wrote:

i dont have any trouble as a melee

You must be so pro.

One way to buff melee is to add life% on armor nodes. That way the guy who want to be a tank gets more survivability, not the rest. I suggested in a thread to remove some life nodes and add the life to armor nodes, would help make armor relevent.

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sodium777 wrote:

They should just give melee gear more defence or passives with more defensive power

What is melee gear? :P A melee shadow might use evasion / es gear, but a bow shadow may as well.

The only solution, other than overhauling the passives which at this point in time would be a huge mistake, is to introduce skills / support gems that utilize stats other than HP to aid in survivability. We already saw one such skill: Arctic Armor. I gave a suggestion for another skill: shadow veil, which is a lot like WoW's smoke screen. It would be useless for ranged (as they wouldn't be able to target mobs outside the veil), but extremely useful for melee as only the mobs inside the veil would be able to target them.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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AthenaUS wrote:

To give melee a fighting chance in D3, they gave barbs and monks an automatic 30% reduction to physical damage. This was later reverted as time went on and gear became better and better.

Now although 30% is substantial and maybe to much, would providing a similar buffs to characters in POE work? Now exactly what constitutes a "melee" character would have to be decided I guess based on weapons used or something

I don't know maybe this is stupid idea, or to complex. I don't play melee and never will, just trying to think of solution :p

People have suggested this. However, as you pointed out, how do you define melee?

Since you could cast with a mace if you wanted to. It's not a stupid idea, just one that is practically impossible to implement in this game.

You could simply link this "buff" to skill gems, not items.

That being said, I have no opinion on the subject.

It'd be change that would probably mean re-working the passive skill tree but since strength is the melee stat why not just make strength add to damage reduction per level instead of melee damage. That way all the stats would also line up with the defensive stat of their attribute.

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Sanosuke wrote:

i dont have any trouble as a melee

I also don't have any trouble with melee, as long as I stack health like its going out of style and run around the edges of large groups. It would be nice not to have to do either nearly as much.

Add a buff like Blood Rage that adds a DR% and is dispelled when non-melee skills or spells or used (that would be any skill gem which doesn't have "melee" in its description")