What's the point of Crucible in Campaign, especially for melee/ weapon based builds?

Hello.

How often do you change weapons on a league start as melee or weapon based character?
I assume every 2 acts on average.

So these new skill trees for weapons and the Crucible league mechanics seems like a wasted opportunity for weapon based builds that change their weapons often and don't get a benefit of these weapon skill trees.

Caster and minion based i can see this work ,as they are not that dependant on gear that much and can keep bad items longer, on league start but weapon based will likely skip it till maps, when the item upgrades slow down and fully skilling a weapon (for weapon based skills) would make more sense.

GGG doesn't care about Melee builds

they legit said that only 10% of the playerbase plays melee so they are not focused on it.

It isn't just melee, we probably won't be very likely to find an endgame-worthy weapon for any build early on and fully unlock it by the time campaign is done. Unless the unlocking for low ilvl weapons is extremely fast and they have very few nodes, then it might work.

Of course, even if you find a nice weapon in act2, unlock it fully in act3 it probably won't get a power boost big enough to be better than upgrades you find during act4, at that point the gear power goes up too fast. During acts 4+ it might be worth it if you like to drag out the campaign a bit, but for those that want to hit maps in a few hours it doesn't really matter, no league mechanic is good enough to make them stop.

We won't know for sure until we try it, but even the worst case scenario won't be anything out of the ordinary, very few leagues are worth the bother during campaign, the current league is probably one of the worst offenders there.

First of all, they nerfed caster vendor crafts, so they will be swapping weapons more as well now.

Secondly, from a mere point of effectiveness you shouldn't bother with the league mechanics during the campaign at all, in almost every leauge. Delirium was one of the few exceptions as u were able to keep moving while engaging with the mechanic. Everything where u have to stop, go into something or fight anything in one sport is a direct loss in terms of progression speed towards maps

This is clearly an endgame addition. You either dont care about it while leveling or you might find an upgrade for a weapon that makes you not want to change weapons every act because upgrading might be better then looking for new weapons.

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Khallis wrote:

GGG doesn't care about Melee builds

they legit said that only 10% of the playerbase plays melee so they are not focused on it.

It's only 10% because GGG have made PoE so unfriendly to melee. If you look at other games like World of Warcraft for instance when they had a tier that was tremendously unfair toward melee characters you will see that guilds took only melee that was required for certain buffs or debuffs. There were raids in which top end guilds only accepted two or three melee in a 25 Man Group.

This did not mean that only 10% of the raid wanted to play melee, it meant that the game was so unfriendly to melee that no Guild Leaders wanted to take melee to the raid. Since Guild Leaders were only taking casters that's what everyone played even though they preferred to play melee classes, because players actually wanted to be able to raid.

This is basically the state of Path of Exile where the game is so unfriendly to melee classes that people are playing casters because they actually want to be able to compete at end game with other players.

If you were to go back to the league where Vaal Ground Slam was OP you would find a huge percentage of players were playing melee. At the end of that league they nerfed Vaal Ground Slam into the dirt and once again people played something else next league.

So the 10% number is self fulling, it does not actually show what people want to play. It shows what 90% people think melee is not viable for end game. For instance Kobeblackmamba made a video in 3.19 (Why True Melee is Awful for Bossing - From 10M to 1M DPS) and found it took three to four times longer to actually kill an end game boss. This was because there is no way for melee to keep doing damage to the boss when mechanics force them to move, while casters could keep doing damage in the same situation. It's the exactly the same reason World of Warcraft guilds we're not taking melee to raids.

In 3.20 i used one weapon from act 2 to 8, one from act 8 to late yellow, one from late yellow to late reds and 1 for endgame. Not sure how many i had during act 1 but lets say 8 to be generous. I'd say if you get yourself a decent base in late acts for a few chaos you might be able to save the red map switch i had to make. There is no reason or point to switch weapons that often.

like most of the other poe mechanics, crucible weapon unlocking only makes sense in ruthless since progression is slower there.

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vio wrote:

like most of the other poe mechanics, crucible weapon unlocking only makes sense in ruthless since progression is slower there.

LOL, you fluke a rare driftwood sceptre in the Mud Flats and spend the rest of the campaign unlocking its tree.

But yes, if full crucible power is available in Ruthless, it will be a huge buff there. On the other hand it's that much harder to survive the crucible mobs with no supports and at best blue gear...

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Baharoth15 wrote:

In 3.20 i used one weapon from act 2 to 8, one from act 8 to late yellow, one from late yellow to late reds and 1 for endgame. Not sure how many i had during act 1 but lets say 8 to be generous. I'd say if you get yourself a decent base in late acts for a few chaos you might be able to save the red map switch i had to make. There is no reason or point to switch weapons that often.

From A2 to A8, interesting.
What weapon what that if you still remember , also i assume you got it dropped by monsters and did not bought it?

When i usually play melee (in SSF) i replace them like all 2-3 acts since even in this league you still get lots of upgrades during campaign when factoring in the crafting bench to squeeze out more dps.

But anyways this league here even less incentivises players to interact with it during campaign.
Considering you need first a good skill tree to begin with and then lots of time to fully unlock it while at the same time hoping to not drop a better weapon in the meantime.