Ben_ on why POE1 melee doesn't need POE2 animation to "save melee"

some hyperbole here but on point, POE1 doesn't need POE2's animations to have improved melee competitiveness.

https://clips.twitch.tv/QuaintSlickTortoiseOhMyDog-wyBsaINKgaJpWcIX

he goes into more depth after the clip (click the vod to watch if you'd like)

IMO there's plenty of low hanging fruit. Give cleave an effect that slams monsters (or their corpses) into other monsters causing damage. for example. A fresh mechanism to give it better AOE.

In many cases we just need under-performing melee skills to get buffs, some mechanical tweaks and maybe a few extra pathways to scale them or some buffs to the scaling itself. Oh and removal of the horrid negative attack speed multiplier which makes melee feel bad to use at its baseline.

Easy stuff:

Give melee better dots so that we don't need to stand in place as much
Give some added mechanical scaling potential to non projectile melee attacks
Give some knock on effects like Boneshatter has like "shrapnel" from splintering armor, flying stones from a ground slam, or exploding corpses from some crazy new necro themed melee attack (or how about tec slam). how about Making Puncture into an skill that ALSO IMPALES when used as melee.
Revert the terrible fortify rework, that makes many smaller hitting melee skills unable to keep stacks up.

Give melee a "hamstring" skill; the melee equivalent to Ensnaring arrow... Why does my weak ass bleed build need to weapon swap to a bow to get (very lackluster) boss dps?

Ben I feel nails the essence here in one example, contrasting cleave to molten strike. Look at Boneshatter, its got multiple mechanical and numeric advantages. Comparing these two skills to other melee skills shows you there's plenty of room for improvements.

Also in before they nerf Molten strike yet again because of this clip lol.

Just to throw my random experience in here. I was testing league starts with some off-meta stuff that seemed fun and checked out Viper Strike with a Shadow. In PoB up through end of Act 2 (with blank gear), Viper Strike literally had 2x the dps as Cobra Lash. It was enough to 1-shot a ton of stuff out the gate. But because Viper Strike has literally zero strike range, trying to actually use it while speeding through Act 1 got me killed over and over. With Cobra Lash, despite the dps being half, I cruised through no problems.

Overhauling melee isn't just "let's tune the numbers higher." Viper Strike as is could do 1000x the dps and it would still suck in Acts 1-2. That's because if you stand still to kill something at zero range, you are asking to be killed. The only way melee as a whole can be fixed is if melee characters either had way more durability (w/o needing investment) or literally every melee skill needs an absurd amount of strike range so that it becomes ranged.

As is, whenever I feel the itch to play a melee character in endgame, it is very telling that the best way to make such a character is to NOT play that skill until I get to maps and am high enough level to swap in all my real gear.

You can't make the first couple of Acts brutally unfair while also claiming you want to fix melee.

The suggestions kinda showcase the sadness of the situation. All of them are literally "make melee less melee". This game simply isn't suited for actual melee to have any place in it. Imo they should just ditch the melee tag from the game. Just leave it as "attacks" like the steel skills.

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TemjinGold wrote:

Overhauling melee isn't just "let's tune the numbers higher." Viper Strike as is could do 1000x the dps and it would still suck in Acts 1-2. That's because if you stand still to kill something at zero range, you are asking to be killed.

This is not a melee problem this is a you problem. Boneshatter, Dom Blow, RF, Chief Reap were all effectively melee builds and among the tankiest meta builds in the game. Being near the enemies isnt the problem its being near the enemies while doing LESS effective dps than the people who arent near the enemies.

Carne won the race with Slayer boneshatter, and that was in HC SSF like being in melee isnt the issue.

As ben said the issue is the ways you can augment projectile mechanics are way in excess of straight up melee stuff. The reason boneshatter is used so much in melee is it actually scales with pack sizes. Scaling with pack sizes means you jump into the pack and hit them the pack dies. The issue with being fragile as a melee is because you need to pump so much damage into your build to kill stuff you dont have room for tanky stats, SO you need to use only the melee skills with enough flat damage or scaling mechanics to still do damage while building defense. Increase the base damage performance and people will gravitate to more defense to smooth out the play.

Totally. Melee is more than fine. This is a me problem.

Pretty cool strawman

There are 2 things being talked about:
Melees performance as an archetype?
If melee is underperforming and we should fix it whats the way to improve it?


We both agree melee is bad but your claim that changing damage to some arbitrarily high number WOULDNT make melee better is a bit asinine.

My point was to contradict your claim that its a safety thing first and foremost, there are a lot of very tanky builds in poe and many of them are melee if not using melee attack skills, they are still standing where a melee attack build would as well. The issue is if your skill gems are poor then you need to give up tanky stats or mechanics to make the skills stronger. All of the super strong melee builds use gems which are strong and have more hooks or utility to scale.

If you tripled cleaves damage you could say "well damage isnt the problem" but I would counter "If you had more damage without investment, you can invest more into other stuff like survival mechanics"

Poe is a game about exchanges you dont need to be elementalist to ignite stuff, you could just get ignite chance, you dont need to be a pathfinder for flask uptime you could do balbala, or massive flask investment, or ascendant or ....

You can usually approximate any mechanic through some other system or interaction of other mechanics, the issue is opportunity costs. Melee needs to make concessions on its defense because of the gems offense. To make claims or imply they arent intrinsically connected is to miss how the systems in poe work.

The only thing ruining viper strike is GGG and their rampant destruction of PoE1 in the last couple patches.

Legion was such an easy-fix to stop ranged/proliferation/etc classes from completely obliterating the content over melee which was supposed to be able to be competitive that patch.

But look at it now being one of the biggest money makers for RMT.

@Bobby: you are completely missing one of the main points lol. Temjin is saying that, no matter what the damage numbers are, it FEELS bad AND it requires you to be absurdly close.

So yes...you are correct that if you had higher damage numbers you could invest in more defense and survive longer...but that does nothing to solve the core of the issue: that melee FEELS bad to play. You have to get close, stop, survive, and attack. You need to be stun immune because you will constantly be getting hit and interrupted. You need to be ailment immune because the second you get chilled or frozen, you are dead. You need to be nigh immortal because the second you start to attack, you will be surrounded by every single enemy on the screen all attacking you at once. And you can't move because then you can't attack. So take that 100 million dps you have, and it becomes ZERO dps. 500 million dps? becomes zero just the same.

Melee can be BETTER with higher dps numbers, but that doesn't and will not ever make it GOOD. In order to be good, it needs to feel good to play. And that means, in a PoE world, that there needs to be movement involved in the attack. Anything short of that, and it changes nothing on the entire archetype. The reason Boneshatter, RF, Dom Blow, etc. (all the "melee" builds you mention) work is that they aren't truly melee. The damage is either totally passive in the way of dom blow and rf, or it has enough range that its basically a ranged skill started in melee range, boneshatter.

tbh melee just needs a better lvling-mid game experience. The end game is more than ok when you got a proper crafted weapon(with some of the skills needing some QOL/flow changes).

Why not finish the job on currently half-baked fortify support? They did stop fortify from being used in everyone and their dog's builds, but also made it too weak/useless for melee.

- Instead of making fortify a weak support gem no one uses, make "fortify on hit" as innate modifier of all strike/slam skill gems, make its damage reduction scale with those gem levels to various extent (gems with less aoe and range would get more fortify to compensate)

- Remove fortify scaling off hit damage, make it flat damage reduction amount per skill gem level per stack (meaning per cast).

- Remove all fortify stacks if non-strike/non-slam attack was used or a spell was cast.

- In case character alternates between 2 strike skill with different amounts of fortify per hit, store both lines of stacks on character, but only the strongest fortify would count when character gets hit.