Why are the melee and especially bow archetypes so behind the spellcaster archetype?

Since metamorph, when they blindly quadrupled monster life and increased resistances all across the board, melee and bow archetypes have been struggling to catch up ever since, but especially bows.

Why would anyone even play a bow build (especially one that uses skill gems which rely on weapon damage e.g. lightning arrow) when you can slap a spell skill gem on a spellcaster ascendancy and deal millions of damage, have decent clear speed and projectiles that shotgun JUST BECAUSE (blazing salvo for example). Historically, the right side of the tree where ranger starts has been extremely bad. Life nodes are lower than everywhere on the tree, damage nodes don't scale as well as everywhere else and why is that? Because you get to 'attack from afar'? It's 2021, safe distance doesn't exist anymore. You get swarmed in 0.3 seconds and you NEED to clear stuff or die instantly unless you have 493 layers of defense. Bow builds used to shine when game was slower, but now they're too behind because the philosophy has remained the same, while the game evolved past that philosophy. As of now, bow builds are the most fragile archetype and the least damaging one at the same time because you have to invest so much if you want to catch up with others.

You would say that melee has slams and that they're amazing and powerful. To an extend, that is true. They have tons of damage and survivability, but they lack severely in clearing speed. They're glorified boss killers that are very exhausting to play (warcry rotation). Why play that when you can play a spellcaster that blows any boss up with mines or something, has obscene amount of ehp due to overlapping defense layers and also clears very fast?

Maybe it's time to finally do a meta shift, GGG? For real this time.

Are you basing this off the impressive array of caster builds you've played?

If your talking about HC Archmage is single handedly responsible for most of the caster imbalance and propping up design fails.

Slams don't lack at clear either but the idea that slams are melee is an absolute joke, if your attack can be used anywhere and reaches the edge of the screen you are ranged.

Crutches aside balance between most stuff is fairly even, they obviously have some kind of mathematical equation that balances most things to within 10-20% of each other which is why the skill list is a bit zzzz however the game is defined by outliers in the modern era because being a meta cuck is the norm.

Just to cherrypick an example for spells as thats what OP's complaining about, spell cascade is a more multiplier for some arbitrarily chosen skills. This is actually the spell equivalent of original shotgunning where a gem intended to increase coverage (GMP) infact increases coverage and damage.

Personally i don't think thats bad for the game infact I think its pretty flavourful, the issue becomes that skills that don't get similar interactions are statistically worse due to be tied to the original normalised formula but without any possible cheeses.

We have Cyclone at the top of the usage ranking with 16%, a melee skill. Out of those 16% around 5% do not use CoC which makes it still a top contender in the meta. We have Burning Arrow, Elemental Hit, Tornado Shot and Lightning Strike all at 2% and above. Slams seem to be a bit out of favour this league in SC but were pretty high during the last leagues.

Looking at the top ten for SC trade league disregarding alternate qualites, vaalskills and support skills we have:

2 melee
2 bow
2 minion
4 spells

I mean is that really the kind of "imbalance" that we have to make such a fuss about? Considering that spells are the archetype with the most skills by a mile and has like a dozen sub categories is 4 spells in the top 10 really an indicator for a huge balance problem?

I don't know about this. I think you have no studied a large enough data pool, before you made this comment.

ED Is the only build that's been around for ages that's OP AF and not getting touched.

I see far more Steel and slam builds one shotting all content in the last two leagues, than any mage class, and before the nerfs this league, Bleed Bow was the top dog for couple leagues.

Baharoth raises the real point I probably failed to highlight which is 5 skills make ~ 50% of usage, basically impossible to have any meaningful discussion of archetype parity with values like that.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Baharoth raises the real point I probably failed to highlight which is 5 skills make ~ 50% of usage, basically impossible to have any meaningful discussion of archetype parity with values like that.

Real question would be how much of those 50% is due to (im)balance and how much is due to people blindy following guides or whatever is popular on poe ninja/YT/Twitch & co.

Id argue not many out of those 50% created the build they are playing themselves, they are simply trying to follow the Path of least Resistence aka playing whats popular. Which obviously leads to rising prices for those builds because supply & demand are out of whack and then having the same people complaining about the game being unplayable unless you are no-lifing to get rich and casuals are suffering consequently.

Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy and downward spiral, that has very little to do with balancing.

Builds are popular because they are strong. If they weren't we'd have cries how hard the game is, how the exp penalty must be removed, etc.

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Orbaal wrote:

Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy and downward spiral, that has very little to do with balancing.

I agree with your overall point but not the last part, it has everything to do with balancing - now I totally agree that players exacerbate this problem but I think of it as a multiplier on whatever the base balance is. The more out of line some abilities are the more players funnel towards them.

I say this because i've seen old things become meta, tried and true builds from the past etc but i've never seen a bad or mediocre build become meta which would occur occasionally if it wasn't directly tied to power.

The major exception to this rule is cyclone, which holds its position entirely because of its unique nature and perfect fit for the way the modern PoE is designed. Cyclone would have to be nerfed to be borderline unplayable before it wasn't popular.

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Orbaal wrote:

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Baharoth raises the real point I probably failed to highlight which is 5 skills make ~ 50% of usage, basically impossible to have any meaningful discussion of archetype parity with values like that.

Real question would be how much of those 50% is due to (im)balance and how much is due to people blindy following guides or whatever is popular on poe ninja/YT/Twitch & co.

Id argue not many out of those 50% created the build they are playing themselves, they are simply trying to follow the Path of least Resistence aka playing whats popular. Which obviously leads to rising prices for those builds because supply & demand are out of whack and then having the same people complaining about the game being unplayable unless you are no-lifing to get rich and casuals are suffering consequently.

Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy and downward spiral, that has very little to do with balancing.

Its due to people blindly following guides more than likely. Theres plenty of OP stuff in the game people dont know about or dont play but since most people cant make their own builds and only want to follow streamers, youre left with a huge difference in variety.

Its why people should invest more time and effort into creating their own rather than following streamer builds that cost 300ex and then whining that "everything is gated". When in reality it isnt and you just want to play their build when theres a ton of budget builds that can clear all content for a fraction of that price.

The game has always been "farm to make your dream build" so its pretty hilarious to me when people whine about not being able to immediately have ridiculous gear and that "i cant play this build because everythings too expensive, stop "gating content" ".

One example i gave to someone else is how i was playing BA Elementalist 4 years before it because meta and now everyone and their mother is playing it. Make your own builds, stop relying on others and youll find cheap as fuck play styles with ridiculous amounts of power that people dont know about or overlook entirely.