Big problems with true melee skills

Hello people, true melee/heavy strike enthusiast here wanting to share some frustrations and some things I think that need to be looked at.

Firstly this post isn't about skills that have the strike or melee tag but are not really true melee (not to belittle any of them at all), i.e. flicker strike, lightning strike or generally any "melee" skill that shoots projectiles or zooms you across the map without any relative danger as they're in a decent spot.

I'm mainly talking about skills that are meant to be in melee range like double strike, dual strike, viper strike and my main favorite heavy strike. These class of gems really just feel like outdated and forgotten skills that have had no use for a good while and have let down many with the true warrior fantasy down.

The problems in my opinion are quite simple, the skills are just way too weak with improper scaling or having to invest way too much into offense to even have somewhat "viable" numbers while also not being a glass cannon. Viable in quotations because your DPS is very deceiving, being melee means you have inherent downtime in between boss mechanics so what you're actually looking at is often 1/3rd of the actual damage you can output, which is fine, because it's how melee should be in terms of actual gameplay and there should be drawbacks to certain avenues of gameplay. But having drawbacks to said avenues of gameplay should also have equally as rewarding mechanics to play with, but that's just not the case with this entire gem class of skills as it just feels like you're constantly handicapping yourself with little to no upsides at all which is very disheartening.

I'm not asking for these skills to be s tier skills or to breeze through the entire game without "decent" investment, I just want to be able to play out my favorite fantasy in an a-rpg without needing ungodly amounts of currency or gimmicks to do so.

I'm not an expert in game design and I'm not in a position to propose changes but all I know is that something needs to be done fast, I sincerely believe the only reason these skills are not played are simply because they're irrelevant currently. After all, why play something with 5m DPS and 25% uptime when you could just play something with 5m DPS and 90% uptime? Thank you for reading and that's all :)

(Apologies if this isn't in the right section of the forum but I felt it broad enough to be posted in feedback and suggestions)

PS. The Boneshatter build is an outlier and uses arguably not intended mechanics to achieve 1,000's of trauma stacks and endless DPS (it also costs more than a mage blood as far as I'm aware to pull off)

There's some dumpster fires like Heavy Strike but there's also good strike skills. Ones that are so good I'm often confused at the community's thought process at strike skills being dead.

Dual Strike, Heavy Strike, Glacial Hammer, Frenzy, Infernal Blow - Stay away.

Most the others are fine and ones like Double Strike / Wild Strike are exceptional.

Viper Strike is because Pestilence Strike is just better.

The main issue I take with "true" melee is how confined it is. If you DW. You're using Abysus and Savior. Not even a choice. Otherwise you're using a Shield + 1H. That's about it.

I mean yeah there's some ones that shine more than others, maybe saying they're completely dead is overreacting but they're all just worse than anything else you could play and heavily underperforming which is very sad to see

Agreed, true in your face skills definetly need a buff

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Xzorn wrote:

There's some dumpster fires like Heavy Strike but there's also good strike skills. Ones that are so good I'm often confused at the community's thought process at strike skills being dead.

Dual Strike, Heavy Strike, Glacial Hammer, Frenzy, Infernal Blow - Stay away.

Most the others are fine and ones like Double Strike / Wild Strike are exceptional.

Viper Strike is because Pestilence Strike is just better.

The main issue I take with "true" melee is how confined it is. If you DW. You're using Abysus and Savior. Not even a choice. Otherwise you're using a Shield + 1H. That's about it.

Going to have to disagree on Glacial hammer, you could probably still get a good build following one of mathils, though it would need some tweaking now, it should still be powerful.

I've wanted to play a real melee build for a while but haven't due to this really. I know they are trying but nudging the dps numbers up each league isn't the way to fix them. To be honest, I think they do enough damage per hit as is. The problem I think lies in melee weapon attack speed.

Attack speed just doesn't make sense in this game. Has anyone ever wondered why a Despot Axe is 1.4 atks per sec (this huge beefy 2H axe) while the fastest dagger is barely faster at 1.5 atks per second? In what world can the best of the best wield a dagger only marginally faster than the dude with the 2H axe?

I understand that just making weapons much faster might unbalance them when used with skills that aren't truly melee so that would need to be looked at but I think for melee to be good (not busted, just good enough to be an alternative to strong non-melee builds), they need to massively crank up attack speed when using said melee. I'd love to see these true melee skills have MUCH higher base attack speeds than other things in the game as compensation for the fact that they only hit 1 target at a time.

We should be able to augment strike skills to a bigger extent and use them while walking similar to cyclone

i.e. add projectiles or aoe effects like lightning strike molten strike
moisten strike instead of the boring melee splash

turn skills like lightning strike into support gems instead and then the base skill double strike, dual strike, heavy strike can be augmented with effects

"

Xzorn wrote:

There's some dumpster fires like Heavy Strike but there's also good strike skills. Ones that are so good I'm often confused at the community's thought process at strike skills being dead.

Dual Strike, Heavy Strike, Glacial Hammer, Frenzy, Infernal Blow - Stay away.

Most the others are fine and ones like Double Strike / Wild Strike are exceptional.

Viper Strike is because Pestilence Strike is just better.

The main issue I take with "true" melee is how confined it is. If you DW. You're using Abysus and Savior. Not even a choice. Otherwise you're using a Shield + 1H. That's about it.

Can you explain to me what I'm missing about Wild Strike? Elemental Hit seems better in every way (minus visual appearance).

"

ShadyC wrote:

Can you explain to me what I'm missing about Wild Strike? Elemental Hit seems better in every way (minus visual appearance).

Kinda two different builds really.

Elemental Hit certainly scales easier. It also performs notably better if you restrict it's Prismatic effect, you're nearly forced to anyways but those can also be downsides. You don't get max shocks or good freezes at the same time for instance. With Asenaths and the multipliers of additional Projectiles / Chain I would say it more favors bows also.

Wild Strike on the other hand doesn't care it since scales off Physical conversion so you can combine things like Hatred and Herald of Ash just fine. If you don't restrict Prismatic then it also makes use of Trinity with no issues letting it freeze and shock pretty easily. The downside of Wild Strike is that you have to pick Strike or the resulting AoE.

I haven't tried Ele Hit in a while just like Wild Strike. I dusted off Wild Strike this league and was quite happy with the results. The Freezes + Blocks really help with Evasion and with 120% Ailment on 87% Crit the shocks were pretty nice also. It feels equally effective but much safer as melee.

it is math problem. strike skill (excluding Lightning Strike that should have its 'strike' tag removed by now, same with Frost Blades) REQUIRES +extra target to function. it is mandatory to have at least one due to GARBAGE targeting mechanic POE uses resulting in your initial swing almost always missing its target.

this means you either waste a gem slot (it is STILL a waste, even with Hydrosphere bandaid) or waste an anointment or waste 4+ passives. it is waste no matter how you look at it. it is a P2Play archetype. no other skill in the game is this rigid. then there is the abhorrent +2 targets Maven gloves craft. 'hey, these skills are garbage to play, but the equipment to make them better is really expensive!'

then there is the 'splash' situation. again, melee splash or other source of MEANINGFUL AOE is MANDATORY. skills that can ignore this step (Pestilent Strike natively or Glacial Hammer via mandatory threshold jewel) are auto-better than alternatives.



and to rub even more salt - the math barely checks out. Heavy Strike while having very high %effectiveness has ZERO scaling avenues and end up dealing less than lets say Ground Slam. mostly because of how many tags various skills have. no, 'double damage' is not worth it. not when game has plethora of sources available for other skills.

each tag has one really good scaling option and several poor ones. skills with many scaling vectors can simply stack only the good scalars and end up FAR ahead.

oh, and i know there are 'successful' strike skill builds there and there. take any of these and replace 'bad skill' with 'good skill' and compare. not only the performance but also how much previously mandatory investment can be ignored now. all these 20ex+ +2 target gloves and stuff like an extra support slot.

GGG still believes that Heavy Strike and Toxic Rain being together in the same game makes sense