Why no ARPG made melee feel good - part 1: mobility

Little post before i head to sleep (i'm very sleepy, so this post quality will suffer, so please excuse spelling errors and weird phrasing, i wanted this out before i forget about it tomorow)

Movement skills are way too OP.. when you have insane attack/cast speed, and the more the harder it becomes controllable

They somewhat solved it with Dash/Frostblink, but it's charge based, so you can't scale it

The "it's an ARPG dude" is not a valid argument, the goal is to make 1v1 combat feel good, not to subscribe to what ever someone did in the past

Hence why no ARPGs in the market has good melee combat, they all feel garbage when you don't do ranged/aoe

For melee to feel good it needs to be reactive and impactful

Reactivity:

MOBILITY is key

How does it feel when you try to dodge an incoming attack, do you wait and see what the RNG dice rolled? boring... this is for turn based gaming

Or do you time your movement skill and make use of your "player skill" to handle incoming threats?

Yeap, the latter is the one that enhance and make combat feel good

The RNG is no longer choosing for you, your player skill is what will decide if you can keep fight or no

But how to do it in a game?

There are may ways, the way PoE choose to do is to give you multiple movement skills to choose from, problem is

- they are limited in use (they have huge cooldown, or very little charges)
- they scale from attack/cast speed wich makes it uneven across character progression
- bad at the start, because it takes an eternity to use, and have limited charges
- bad at the end, because you have too much attack/cast speed and it becomes hard to control, still too little charges

The movement should be reactive, it's the AVAILABILITY that should scale with your character progression, not its power or its speed

How do we do availability?

Simple, stamina

How do we scale it?

Perhaps a new stat?

Perhaps with your most prominent stat

- caster? most likely int, the roll becomes something ethereal to match the style

- agile? most likely dex, the roll becomes a dash

- strong? most likely str, the roll becomes.. well stick to roll :p

But.. why should a str stacker be move agile then a non str stacker, they are tanky, not speedy

Well, i mentioned AVAILABILITY, not how fast you use it

Speed would scale with movement speed perhaps? or somple be a linear curve, no change at all, or perhaps an ascendency passive that increase it slightly (no multiplier)

This way movement skill feel natural to your playstyle, scale its availability (longer use for longer fights in endgame), and helps melee feel good as well as uniformize ways to dodge in the game while still maintaining some form of customization (per archetype), and you can add bunch of MTX aswel!

TLDR: i play a lot of elden ring, and i like using rolls to dodge

This way i can handle strong bosses just with my player skill, not thanks to some RNG dice

Fun enough that's how Diablo 4 does it too, did it help their melee? no, so why bother? well, their implementation is bad, it doesn't scale with character power, it's CD based

Mobility is not always the answer but melee does need perks for being melee which is an inherent flaw. General options are more damage, more durability and more CC.

As a point of reference Diablo 1 had no movement speed. Everything was the same speed however the Fighter is a strong class late game. Why? Because they got inherent Shield block bonuses, block speed, Crit chance per level and they didn't have to deal with resists.

Every class got Teleport so it wasn't a matter of mobility. Fighter and Melee Rogue could just take a ton of abuse in order to gap close and maneuver. Teleport was for the most part Dash skills in this game, except when a melee hit an evasive enemy. They were getting stun locked.

So in this example. More durable and more CC.


This goes deeper into how bosses are designed with their same o'l mechanic tricks apposed to engaging enemy designs. Safe to say when you have between 25% and 150% movement speed in your game. Things are gunna get screwy and in PoE's case screw up the entire way the game is played. Even for non-melee. Spam is how you play this game melee or not and it sucks.

Melee-exclusive layers of protection would be nice.

They have to be in the fray, constantly getting battered by enemies, yet their defences aren't better than every other spec in this game. Because every character can build any kind of defence. You can play a spellcaster that has 90% ele res, a fuck ton of armor and 7k life. You can play a ranged attack build that has 15k ES, 40% leech per second, spell suppression and 90% evasion.

'Median XL' modification for Diablo II introduced a Melee Mastery skill. It's a 1-pointer that provides additional 20% damage reduction from all sources. It locks out any ranged attacks or spells. You can only use melee attacks and buffs with it allocated.

It's not ideal but it's something. Something exclusive for melee characters. You CANNOT have a caster sorceress that has this allocated.

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Esubane wrote:

Melee-exclusive layers of protection would be nice.

fortify? Pretty much close to melee exclusive unless you play as champion which is more of a rare HC scenario rather than a standard game play thing

A high level melee char can go really fast with Nightblade, Rage, Challenger charges, and other buffs.

Problem number 2 is that the majority of non-melee have access to similar buffs too, and there is possibility the monster threats are tuned around them.

This brings us to problem number 1: Defenses. I was fighting an essence monster with the rare mod to trigger homing fiery orbs. It is T14 map with 81% more monster life and -12% to player max res. It always triggers four orbs at once. They are spawned on the spot where the monster is standing. Two orbs enough to kill my char. There is little time to react as Molten Striker. I portaled and changed my skill to Lightning Strike. I'm able to kite the monster to death even though it took minutes.

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Pashid wrote:

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Esubane wrote:

Melee-exclusive layers of protection would be nice.

fortify? Pretty much close to melee exclusive unless you play as champion which is more of a rare HC scenario rather than a standard game play thing

Yeah, fortify was a good idea, except they spilled the milk by making it too easy to get for everyone, and with crap like 'fortify others for bajillion seconds on hit' for vigilant strike. Then they spilled it again by making it too much of a pain to get for some legit builds in some situations.

And they had options, the easiest one would probably be merging close combat support and fortify, assuming they also remove that dumb restriction to swords and axes on close combat, of course, and reduce fortify duration to 1s or something. So, you got fortify as long as you're close to something and dealing melee damage, easy for 'real' melee builds, a lot harder for others.

The exclusive bonuses should be baked into the melee skill gems, requiring players to actually use it to gain the buffs. To prevent players from abusing this as a defense buff gem, make it so the buffs are lost if you use any other skill that isn't comparable to it.

For instance, if you're a ranger running a TShot build, you can't use Glacial Hammer for a huge defense buff then go back to using your main DPS skill, because the defense buff would be instantly disabled. However, if you're a marauder running Heavy Strike and you wanna use Glacial Strike as a CC, you won't lose the buff since you're still using a melee skill.

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Xzorn wrote:

Mobility is not always the answer but melee does need perks for being melee which is an inherent flaw. General options are more damage, more durability and more CC.

As a point of reference Diablo 1 had no movement speed. Everything was the same speed however the Fighter is a strong class late game. Why? Because they got inherent Shield block bonuses, block speed, Crit chance per level and they didn't have to deal with resists.

Every class got Teleport so it wasn't a matter of mobility. Fighter and Melee Rogue could just take a ton of abuse in order to gap close and maneuver. Teleport was for the most part Dash skills in this game, except when a melee hit an evasive enemy. They were getting stun locked.

So in this example. More durable and more CC.


This goes deeper into how bosses are designed with their same o'l mechanic tricks apposed to engaging enemy designs. Safe to say when you have between 25% and 150% movement speed in your game. Things are gunna get screwy and in PoE's case screw up the entire way the game is played. Even for non-melee. Spam is how you play this game melee or not and it sucks.

Durability/Defenses is an ACHETYPE of melee, we can't just condensate melee's problem into just "defenses problem (without s)"

In my part 2 i'll cover name locking and the reason why high mobility doesn't help improve anything alone if name locking isn't removed

Name locking is an artifact of turn based rpgs, it is one of the reason why no ARPGs managed to make melee feel good, except maybe lost ark, while melee feel good, they still didn't manage to capture melee feel from other Action RPG (elden ring for example, even if it has flaws)

combat + mobility + defense layers + kite/combo mechanics

We have to take into account the full spectrum of a combat system to be able to improve melee

Melee != tank

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ryuukk33 wrote:

Durability/Defenses is an ACHETYPE of melee, we can't just condensate melee's problem into just "defenses problem (without s)"

In my part 2 i'll cover name locking and the reason why high mobility doesn't help improve anything alone if name locking isn't removed

Name locking is an artifact of turn based rpgs, it is one of the reason why no ARPGs managed to make melee feel good, except maybe lost ark, while melee feel good, they still didn't manage to capture melee feel from other Action RPG (elden ring for example, even if it has flaws)

combat + mobility + defense layers + kite/combo mechanics

We have to take into account the full spectrum of a combat system to be able to improve melee

Melee != tank

In my example both are using shields. Shields generally mean durability though they can be weapons. Both class types also got bonuses to using shields. Fighter innate bonus and block speed while rogue got 255 Dex allowing high block rate and armor due to the stat itself.

Durability + CC was the only (official) melee perks they could do for Diablo 1. There was the Hellfire Barbarian Cleave with 2handers but it wasn't as effective.

The other I mentioned being more damage is just a basic compensation for DPS up-time.

Mobility is a problem perk for melee because much like Shields everyone can get it and be good at it. In most cases the most mobile builds are the ones that don't need to be. This is something I don't feel can be manipulated unless they slow characters down globally.

Name Locking is something some like and some don't. I personally prefer Poly hitboxes. This is what Lost Ark uses and what D4 uses. Your attacks take up a physical area in the game world and hit whatever the box collides with. It's traditional for 3D games just not ARPGs.

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Xzorn wrote:

Name Locking is something some like and some don't. I personally prefer Poly hitboxes. This is what Lost Ark uses and what D4 uses. Your attacks take up a physical area in the game world and hit whatever the box collides with. It's traditional for 3D games just not ARPGs.

Or they could just have a sane move/attack system. You hold the button with the skill and the character moves around, if something gets close enough they start swinging, it's simple and it works well.

They wouldn't even have to do any major reworks to the skills themselves and it would work well with a controller too. But who knows, maybe it can't be done in their engine for whatever reason.