Some feedback on Sanctum mechanically from a melee perspective
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GGG "fixed" melee in sanctum by reducing resolve lost the nearer you are.
its really just a crutch rather than a real fix. i ve been playing this league HARD using viper strike echoforge. my POB dps is roughly over 1 million dps so i clear things fast but not as fast as others. here's my 2cents Movement skills
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movement skills should all have an invulnerable window. it simply not fair that casters can easily lightning warp out to the opposite side of a beam without getting hit. the counter argument is that "oh but you could just use lightning warp yourself etc". nah man, poe is a game lauding player choice. i like dash more than lightning warp and i dont want to be forced into using it. similarly players are forced to use frost bomb to negate regeneration at least melee players have another option via pantheon. but i digress. the fact of the matter melee's movement skills are INFERIOR to lightning warp when talking about sanctum. in the sanctums last floor, desecrated crypts are so damn unfair to melee. the "proper way" is to deal damage then "teleport" to the other side of the incoming beam. using dash u still GET HIT by the beam. its even worse when you have fast traps. the easiest fix is to make players invulnerable or just "dont exist" until they're at their destination. Off screen shots
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This one effects even ranged characters, so its helpful to be addressed either way.
POE always has people like me complaining about the lack of telegraphing while others argue that they prefer the immersion. i would say in rogue type games, telegraphing is extremely important. the game had to be designed in a way that everything is clear and nothing is obstructed. POE was not built for that. we have a ton of walls that do not "go transparent" and ranged mobs will fire their shot at you with little time to react. it really helps if we could see them but in many cases we simply cant. GGG REFUSES to zoom out which could help a huge lot. maven's arena is a good example. or even sirus. but GGG chose not to. so how do we fix this? theres no easy solution, the only thing i can think of is a red arrow pointing towards a guard that has targeted you and the arrow's colour will gain intensity the nearer it is to finishing the attack animation. Boss specific Most of the bosses i feel are fair and balanced however a few stand out Reliquary Boss
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I actually like how the boss's pattern are as it challenges ranged characters a little. but for melee its can get messy. it has 3 main attacks, the ground slam, dash attack and direct frontal wave. the issue is "when is it our turn to attack". ground slam is straight forward, GTFO and come back to sneak hits, but when you come back in you barely can sneak a few hits before the boss goes to the next attack. usually frontal wave. so that means you have to keep dodging. oh then theres a third dash attack where you have to GTFO AND then play a mini bullet dodging game. you can play safe by waiting for the bullets to disappear but if you do then you still need to chase the boss again. to which the question becomes "when is my turn".
there needs to be some way for melee to have time to actually go up to the boss face and punch it. End of floor 3 boss
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similar to reliquary boss but on steroids. reminds me of michelle yeo's movie. "everything, everywhere, all at once".
starts pretty reasonable with the regular slice and charged slice. but once the beams start appearing and the boss starts dashing around, bullets are everywhere. ggg gave us the benefit of a long corridor, which on paper is good but if you run to the other side you dont know what the boss is doing "look at my earlier issue called offscreen shots". the only thing i can suggest is removing the beams and keep the rest. the battle is hard enough without the beams but at the very least players can concentrate on it. End of floor 4 boss
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lycia final form is reasonably easy compared to all the mentioned before this, lycia pre final form is also a cakewalk.
lycia at the start of the room feels simply unfair tho. for starters as a melee i need to be wailing on her up close. her starting location has her standing directly BEHIND red fog. if i stand in her face my resolve goes down. this is "right in front" of her, not behind, not to the side. the easy solution is to have her stand in the middle of the corridor rather than with the back directly behind the fog.  this should also help with another issue which is the fog itself. to be honest the fog by itself isnt the problem, but when lycia does her lightning aoe, the area behind her is usually full of fog and is inaccessible, while the area in front doesnt have much place to maneuver. its ironic that shes more difficult to deal with at the start of the encounter rather than during her actual arena. theres no easy solution as the "proper way to dodge this attack is to run circles around her which is not possible in the early phase. my best suggestion is just to disable that skill entirely until we get to her arena. the guards themselves can be messy but i guess theyre still doable. the the one i have the most issues are the ice mage, specifically when he summons the 3 balls. so many things to keep track of. as well as the trapper. if you're playing single target, you need ancestral call or else you're gonna have a bad time. actually the guards are all fine ALONE. but once you put them altogether it becomes "mechanically unreasonable". the average aarpger will find it very difficult to avoid taking damage. with all that said. i would say its "mechanically unreasonable" for a melee striker to ever clear the sanctum without getting hit. unless of course you use the low tier sanctum manipulation and have super high dps to burst bosses asap [Removed by Support] Last edited by exsea#1724 on Mar 7, 2023, 2:41:33 AM Last bumped on Mar 7, 2023, 4:51:59 AM
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I full cleared countless of sanctums with 4 different melee builds in SSFHC, I'm sure in trade leagues you could just throw currency at some other skills and clear Sanctums no problems.
Guards are incredibly easy to dodge, you dodge all of them by just using a movement skill behind them, occasionally you jump away from the ice guy when he does the AoE slam thing and you occasionally run sideways when the archers are drawing their bows, in the end though, it takes very minimal skill to dodge the guards. It really reminds me of Dark Soul's boring combat which people hold to a high standard of being ''skilled'', when in reality it's just rhythmic combat where you have to time your roll or in PoE's case movement skill and attack between attacks. The only annoying guard is the trapper one, but he's not hard, just annoying. Floor bosses are all a joke except floor 3, her lacerate animation is weird and the lasers can be confusing to dodge, so she takes some effort, but other 3 are a joke. " Easy solution is just scrapping Sanctum forever and forgetting about it, it's the most mind numbing boring content I've ever played, I can imagine the only reason most people who engage with it are doing so because it's incredibly rewarding and lucrative, otherwise I can't imagine someone doing sanctum just for the ''fun'' of it. It's a good decision that they decided not to add Sanctum to the core game, but I am not happy with them not scrapping it completely and contemplating a potential rework in the future, the mechanic is simply bad, and if they are going to readd it with watered down rewards and no relics then they might as well not bother reintroducing it ever. HC balance should be separate from SC I don't care which outdated 1993 game dev philosophy this goes against. youtube/twitch.tv/DESPAIR268 REVERT SUNDER :) REVERT SEISMIC CRY :) REVERT IMPALER :) REVERT GAME :)) MAKE DUALWIELD GREAT AGAIN :) Last edited by DÉSPAIR#2084 on Mar 7, 2023, 3:25:14 AM
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" i may disagree on some points but i fully agree with you on this. also during this league, sanctum constantly gives me motivation to do one more map, each map i do is guaranteed a sanctum. if GGG were to water down sanctum to be more in line with other league mechanics, say 8% natural occurrence and 30-40% occurence when atlas is allocated, it will already feel "less impactful". [Removed by Support]
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I do agree that it's kind of lame that flame dash is the only viable movementskill for dodging mechanics but that's not a melee issue, it's a simple consequence of the choices you made. As you said yourself, you can just use flame dash on a melee build, all my builds use it so i can testify it works just fine. It isn't even that off fluff wise if you care about that.
" Just 3 days ago there was a vid on reddit of someone doing hitless sanctum using heavy strike. Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it's impossible or "unreasonable" how you put it. Ultimately Sanctum is the same as all content in POE, get enough DPS and it becomes triva. |
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" i assume youre talking about this https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/11h6ri0/hitless_sanctum_melee_heavy_strike_with_mageblood/ let see now, he kills guards in 2-3 hits which is roughly 1-2 seconds. they cant pull off any attacks. then when hes up against lycia, the first area he takes her down in also a short few seconds. dude this is not SKILL. he's just bypassing all mechanics via dps. anything melee is significantly easier if you have such a high dps. not to say hes without skill, he does have skill but having the ability to vapourize everything before they become a problem helps a huge lot. i was so absorbed typing out my post earlier i totally forgot to anticipate people who would just go "get more dps". lol let me pose you this question then which would have an easier time doing a full sanctum run if sanctum league was restarted? i complain about mechanics and your best answer is brute forcing a way to avoid the tough mechanics altogether? sheesh. [Removed by Support]
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So you are saying you can do a hitless Sanctum run on some 1 mio DPS caster build? Vid please. If you take ages to kill everything doing a hitless run becomes exponentially more difficult, doesn't even matter what you play. Even proxy damage stuff like totems or traps will have trouble avoiding everything if you take 20 seconds per guard.
Besides, why do you even bring that up in the first place? It's not neccessary in any way to clear sanctum hitless. It's not even a challenge so GGG obviously considered it to be too difficult. What's the point of even making the argument "melee can't do sanctum hitless so sanctum/melee is bad" when for all intents and purposes it's completely irrelevant how many times you get hit as long as you have 1 resolve left after killing lycia? " POE in a nutshell " fixed that one for you. " If you want to have it as easy as possible then obviously going spark/dot or proxy damage is the choice to make, not melee. My question is, what's the problem with that? Not every build/archetype is equally good for every content. As long as nobody is left out differences in difficulty are just fine and there are plenty of melee players besides streamers who do/did full sanctums using melee it's not even that difficult even with just ~5 mio dps. |
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