3.20 barely scratches the surface on imbalances between casters and melee

After watching the Reveal, the Q&A, and looking at the patch notes I don't think the new melee changes are going to really help at all. I'm glad to see some new skills, but melee is going to suffer from what it always has. The patch notes give buffs, but those buffs come with nerfs too. Melee splash has always come with less damage single target, so is taking the melee splash node going to perma nerf your ST? If so that's not helping because you could at least switch out the gem which most guides told you to do for boss fights. Longer lasting Ancestory buffs, but losing placement distance means we have to be 50% closer than we use to, that's a survivability and clearing nerf.

Also the "Added a new Attack Mastery that provides "Strike Skills target 1 additional nearby Enemy", which replaces the "Strike Skills target additional Enemies can do so from 30% further away" Mastery." What does that even mean? seems like a straight up nerf to the mastery? That's worded very vaguely.

I saw nothing to address the gulf in cost between melee and caster builds. Melee cost IMO about 10 X more to do the same thing a caster can do. Everyone knows the vast majority of a casters damage comes from the level of the skill gem, while with a melee the vast majority of damage comes from how good a weapon they have. A lvl 21 caster gems is cheap compared to a weapon that provides the same level of power you get from a lvl 21 caster gem.

I would like to see Chris Wilson watch KobeBlackMamba's video on why melee is bad and see what Chris Wilson as to say about it. KBM makes some really good points on the difficulty of being melee. Casters can off screen their targets, melee has to be standing on them. When melee is not standing on its target the damage is zero unless it's a DOT build, and GGG has has nerfed melee DOT builds into the ground for bossing. 10 million melee DPS is only good if your able to stay on target. KBM said even though his DPS is 10 mill it only averages 2 mill, and took him over 20 min to do an UBER boss with Boneshatter, melee's best skill when talking about dps for currency spent.

While the new Vaal skills look better than the old, they are still skills that have to be charged to use. You don't see your average caster having to charge up their skills just to be average DPS for 4-5 seconds.

I would also like to see what the drop rate is of gear. I don't hardly ever have a problem getting the gem slot colors I need as a caster, yet it's a constant PITA for melee, unless you're playing a few certain builds (Boneshatter cough cough).

There is a reason after all Boneshatter was being played by so many people in the events.

Let's talk about leveling as melee. There was only really one good way to level as melee. Shattering Steel > Spectral Helix all the way to 75. It was a joke watching the ladder competition in the events, damn near everyone was doing the exact same path for leveling melee. So now we see a nerf, but where is the buff to other melee skills to bring them up to a caster while leveling? Melee while leveling is going to be SO MUCH SLOWER than caster. Lots of casters don't even have to stop moving to kill entire packs.

GGG has this problem that when one skill is being used by everyone they think that it needs to be nerfed to bring it in line with other skills of that type. When it comes to melee though nearly all of it is slow. Caster builds are leaps and bounds faster. Ya spectral Helix over performed... AGAINST ONLY OTHER MELEE SKILLS, but was just average vs caster skills. Spectral Helix was the only skill that allowed melee to compete.

You only need a +1 Caster wand and you can take that lvl 3 wand all the way from act 1 - act 10. No way in hell you can do that with a melee weapon. The imbalances between melee and caster are so drastic, and none of this has been addressed.

It's been obvious for quite some time, that without some major mechanical changes, and mob interactions, melee was never going to compete. The gamble here is that while significant melee changes are coming in PoE2, will that end up being half the players because of how things are right now.

The league doesn't appear to be bad, but it doesn't appear to be really that good either. And with a fairly lacking balance pass, the league mechanic is going to have to carry hard, and who knows how that will actually work out. I won't be playing, but that was going to be true regardless. I hope for their sake it goes well because the next 2-3 leagues with Diablo 4 coming, is going to be a nuclear winter landscape in terms of players. Meh leagues are just not going to cut it, but with talent stretching thin for PoE2, it is what it is.

There is literally nothing to be that hyped about this cycle, which is unfortunate.

hopefully i am missing something but this "Resolve" does not seem very friendly to melee either.

Problem lays between interacion of boss and player
Most of bosses designed that way, that you have to move around to not die (e.g. uber sirus with his cloud)
If you have to stand still while dealing damage - you mostly cannot fight them

Burst rpg problem - too small windows for dealing damage, like standing and spamming Arc can be worse than bonk with Discharge and run around until you can bonk again
Casters have Unleash, which can particullary solve this problem by "packing" multiple casts into one
I dont think most melees have anything simular, because closest gem is Earthbreaker, which isnt even close to Unleash

great post! I really hope they read this and think hard on it but i doubt it.

I was so greatly disappointed to hear of the mastery boneshatter nerf and the massive nerf to helix. I was looking forward to trying boneshatter for the first time, i doubt it will be a fast effective mapper anymore. As OP said there is nothing to replace helix/boneshatter.

Now i feel like i am forced to play seismic yet again, which somehow gets a massive buff like wtf?


Still might play boneshatter and accept that it cant target so far accross screen. Excellent post anyway

What? Read the notes again, melee is going to be crazy strong.
Also, melee splash as a node will not have reduced damage.

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plaguefear wrote:

What? Read the notes again, melee is going to be crazy strong.
Also, melee splash as a node will not have reduced damage.

3.20 notes?

there is nothing there that makes melee 'strong'. the only 'crazy' thing out there is thinking that there is.

+strike/splash is a wash, you would know that if you had actually played melee

what else is there? few vaal skills? cool, it is always some kind of a plus. unless the vaal version is garbage/quirky (like Cleave)


if you want to stick to your claim:
could you POB a Dual Strike build? you can use 2 450pdps 1handers of your choice. remember to tick 'pinacle boss' :)

some credit is where some credit is due. some effort is being done to improve melee. even though it is so slightly, i feel its just a step.

i've been playing TLI more, recently. the melee skills maybe are a little lagging behind non melee but its a much more "fun" experience than POE's melee.

the way they balanced it is by making melee an obscene mid range skill (think cleave) where its easy to just increase the attack range that you hit almost 3/4 of the screen with ease.

funnily i find myself feeling it feels more like range rather than melee as i am able to kite the bosses.

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exsea wrote:

some credit is where some credit is due. some effort is being done to improve melee. even though it is so slightly, i feel its just a step.

What we got is literally the #1 laziest thing they could do (pinnacle weapon buff), and a gimmick (vaal skills).

Honestly, no idea why they aren't they changing the weapon base damage more often, the beauty of that is you can revert it whenever you want and it has the added perk of making flat damage rolls less impactful so it's easier to roll something usable. I'd like to see them go "ok, for this league we will double the base damage of all melee weapons as an experiment, we'll see how that goes but don't get used to it". Compared to harvest league, that kind of an experiment is pretty much a whoopee cushion next to a landmine.

Yeah there aren't big melee buffs here there are very small increases that probably only effect a tiny portion of players anyway

The only thing that genuinely looks good enough to crutch a build is buffed disfavour and buffed voidforge, i'm not sure buffed starforge is actually good enough to carry one still.

Odd tbh, the lack of skill changes is odd in general especially as the ones we got were mostly negative.