so.. the melee is FINALLY dead now? :)

I went into my starter PoB and it lost almost 40% of its power and I didn't even account for the gem changes yet LOL!!!

Not sure what to play atm, I'll figure something out.. maybe even boneshatter..

Trying to plan a Perforate Totem build since its considered a slam. 4 totems with multistrike spamming blood stance spikes on bosses should be a win. I just find it hard to play totems.. so not a win for me :(

Pure phys melee in the gutter. Well at least next gauntlet will be interesting i guess?
Overwhelm almost entirely removed. Was it that broken? I only noticed it at the Warlord Exile.

Edit: Ice Crash 70% additional damage effectivity. It was the strongest oneshot slam already lol.

so, ive slogged trough the patch notes. im pretty sure ive missed stuff because this type of wall of text is simply boring to read. (i bet devs have the same issue, it is simply too much, too similar, not exciting)

and my more informed stance is.. there is a lot of weird or unexplainable stuff going on in the patch notes. some related to melee (300% life multi on Lifetap, +mana cost% on almost everything), some related to other stuff (Hypothermia/Bonechill not applying to DoTs.. like WHAT THE DUCK?)

overall.. it is a mess. not 'good mess' or 'bad mess'. it is a mess, everything all over the place, 1000+ changes to interlocking systems that might be 'sensible' in isolation but no way they were tested or even modeled as a whole.

melee in general got treated with 'gentle' axe cleave, not a full-on butchery like archmage but.. i still cannot shake the feeling that:


a) all meme builds are dead. like outright dead. my DW Cleave with Temple swords? barely did ~2mil with really good gear. after the changes it is ~650k just because it happened to eat each and every collateral effect of various nerfs. it is a disaster. seriously, all build diversity on the meme end is DEAD, GONE.

b) we surely did not get compensated with damage. some melee skills got as little as 8% buff, while Ice Crash AGAIN got buffed to high heaved DESPITE being the skill that actually DOES NOT use the high multi supports.. so far this is the winner of all the melee changes

c) the defence gutting continues. fortify effect, good mods replaced with %armour. the mana multiplier on CWDT.. mana stacking is STILL the better option, melee defences (aka Armour) are worthless, stun is worthless and melee will simply eat so much more hits now. lol why bother

what is left is Bleed EQ (nerfed but 'relatively' not by much, altho some changes to cluster jewels escape my understanding), Ice Crash totems and thats it. other choices are either dangerous or weak(er)

and because melee was already SO CLOSE to 'threshold of viability' there is no space for weaker builds


a general impression of this patch: this is what happens every cadence in politics, when one team removes EVERYTHING the previous team did. no matter if good or bad.

i dont see how this patch is making game fun. it isnt even about the nerfs. ggg might want to make a game for nolifers, cool, dont care. but the game is a mess right now. you move too many systems at once and for some time nothing is 'right'. the only reason why they do it now is that poe2 is closer than we think and they cannot afford changing one area at a time.

Compared my lvl 95 SSF EQ bleed Ascendant pre and after the Seismic cry changes.
DPS are shite compared to the grand sheme but some numbers.

Before changes: Stationary bleed: 1.8 mill / Moving bleed: 5.1 mill
After changes: Stationary bleed: 1.2 mill / moving bleed: 3.4 mill

Also this is still with the OLD support dmg numbers so dps will be even less.

"

sidtherat wrote:

a general impression of this patch: this is what happens every cadence in politics, when one team removes EVERYTHING the previous team did. no matter if good or bad.

The vibe I was getting is "dude, the release is in a week, there's no time left, we have to do something about all this crap on the list, doesn't matter what as long as it goes in the general direction".

No need to complain too much, show our anger by not buying any cosmetic.
When sales drop GGG know what happen.

Just about every melee gem listed in the patchnotes got a numerical damage buff and we still have the same 5 people whining about melee, again.

Melee is the least affected by the mana multiplier changes. Guess what mana leech is a thing for melee builds, it's not for spells. Trigger mana costs shit on spells much more than melee because melee barely relies on triggers at all, that includes cwdt.

Spell dots didn't "win" this patch, they are beyond fucked. Cold dot is absolute trash with the support gem changes, specifically the hypothermia changes. Chaos dot was already weak in damage, and when I say weak I'm not talking about the nonsensical bitching everyone loves to bring up about "melee" builds. I am talking: it is extremely hard to make spells like ed do more than 2 mil dps even after dumping dozens upon dozens of ex into it.

"

yamface wrote:

Just about every melee gem listed in the patchnotes got a numerical damage buff and we still have the same 5 people whining about melee, again.

Melee is the least affected by the mana multiplier changes. Guess what mana leech is a thing for melee builds, it's not for spells. Trigger mana costs shit on spells much more than melee because melee barely relies on triggers at all, that includes cwdt.

Its obvious that melee skills got numerical buff since Chris Wilson said so in the interview with ziggyD because melee was "gutted" the most by the gem support nerfs. So those numerical "buffs" were just the announced compensation.

About Mana cost for CoC if they didnt fix Laviaga Unique Mana Flask as a loop hole to the CoC changes then i can see the end game meta being full of Cyclone/CoC again. Melee will have to use Lifetap support in a lot of cases which is not too bad as the gap between good supports and lifetap is not soulcrushing anymore.

After we saw patch notes my prediction still stands: Traps/Mines, Minions and Spells will be meta. We will be lucky to see 5% melee played combined in SC trade.

"

sidtherat wrote:

Seismic Cry - slams were the reason to play 'melee', every other option was weaker. and slams without Seismic Cry (noone is going to use this new version, its trash) do not exist. Fist of War is hardly worth it, exerting attacks is pointless now, Second Wind change makes warcries clunky, you actually need to get damage from the tree now.. so slams are gone. and slams were the only melee 'on par' with the rest. good job.
:)

Seismic Cry will still be used as a bandaid because all of the slams except for Earthshatter have ridiculously small base AoE, and because actually investing in AoE in 2021 since the AoE nerf, I mean rework, sucks because theres too little of it on the tree and I even using a 6/23 awakened AoE on your melee skill would still make the AoE suck while giving no damage, so Seismic Cry will still be used.

Also Fist of War is still a top tier gem, even post nerfs it gives you more damage for that 1 hit than any other support gem in the game, it's not like you'll have anything better to replace it with lmao.

"

kole wrote:

Also Fist of War is still a top tier gem, even post nerfs it gives you more damage for that 1 hit than any other support gem in the game, it's not like you'll have anything better to replace it with lmao.

A small correction here: Ruthless Blows now has the same multiplier. When attackspeed is higher than the cooldown of Fist of War (which btw is not hard to achieve) then Ruthless Blows clearly wins over Fist of War in terms of dps.