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

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Baharoth15 wrote:

The question is which number

ALWAYS a balance between all of them. Damage, clear, speed, feel and cost/investment needed. Skills that find themselves in a good balance between all those categories, quickly become the META. Hell, that's what a META is.

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I still think Trauma Support is the wrong way to go here. Sure, we all know Strike Skills can be scaled pretty far with investment. But Strike Skills without a secondary effect (Double Strike, Heavy Strike, Dual Strike) are just so damn obsolete, because you have to use at least one non-damage support gem to even make them "work". On top of that, you are always up close and personal, something that requires defense. A support gem that removes a large chunk of your sustain on skills without built in AoE just sounds like a dud to me.

Wow this thread blew up since my initial reply haha. I do want to preface this with "I don't care what the meta of poe ninja is or who is playing what." I just play to build and tweak what I find interesting.

I mentioned Viper Strike initially because it is very high damage (fresh league start at Vaal Oversoul has me doing MORE damage than my old Incinerate hiero with dual added spell damage wand crafts, which is insane because that hiero guy had 2k dps at that point in the game) but it also has even less range than Heavy Strike (due to claws/daggers being shorter than 2H axes/swords). This skill is pretty much as melee as you can get because you are close enough to kiss the guy you are killing. And it has more than enough damage but it's not usable in the campaign without twink gear unless you want to take a week to get to maps.

How is it fixed? By using supports that basically drop its damage back to what a "normal" skill would be at while giving it AoE, range, etc. In other words, the more viable this skill becomes, the less "melee" it is until we get to the point where it's just easier to start with a ranged skill and scale that up because they both mechanically end up the same.

"But can't you just put all your investment into defenses since the skill does so much?" I wish you could but the silly thing is spells that kill screen-wide outscale everything else in endgame and endgame is balanced around THAT. I never understood why that was okay.

I agree with the folks here who have said that the constant scaling up of enemy mobs is the real reason "true melee" doesn't work. The skill can literally be an auto-delete whatever you target button but if it stays as 1 target at a time with zero range, it will never be viable.

If we want a game where true melee with no range and no aoe is viable and strong, changing the skills themselves does nothing. We need to change the balance of the game itself: Both you and mobs need to do drastically less damage so that range/spells/other aoe stuffs take several hits to kill something while in your face melee 1-2 shots. Because as long as the guy who clears the screen can do it with 1 click, infinity damage single target melee with no range can never compete. This rebalancing will never happen hence I suggested that GGG give up on melee staying the way it is and just make the relevant supports that make it ranged AoE be buffs and not nerfs to damage, and to be widely available to all classes at the start.

These are the same problems every other game with a melee vs ranged dichotomy faces.

Mainly melee is tactically inferior due to positioning requirements. It requires to move yourself into position to do damage, which hinders dps and kills per minute and by the same token it exposes the player to higher amounts of damage.

Most games solve this by giving melee an identity, making it tougher and doing more dps. This simply is not the case here where everything is available to everyone.

My solution would be to give melee both better scaling than range damagewise AND some sort of damage mitigation mechanic exclusive to it and not accessible to ranged classes.

Something like an x% damage mitigation passive buff that only applies to enemies with in a certain range and requires a melee strike to be kept active.

Damagewise, what we really need is a way to maximise both an aoe skill for a weapon set, and a single target skill for the other weapon set AT THE SAME TIME. The tradeoff is the aoe will always be subpar vs ranged due to simply the nature of positioning and the single target one should always be leaps ahead of anything ranged could do. There you get your trade of and identity, melee becomes the boss killer.

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TemjinGold wrote:

If we want a game where true melee with no range and no aoe is viable and strong, changing the skills themselves does nothing. We need to change the balance of the game itself: Both you and mobs need to do drastically less damage so that range/spells/other aoe stuffs take several hits to kill something while in your face melee 1-2 shots. Because as long as the guy who clears the screen can do it with 1 click, infinity damage single target melee with no range can never compete. This rebalancing will never happen hence I suggested that GGG give up on melee staying the way it is and just make the relevant supports that make it ranged AoE be buffs and not nerfs to damage, and to be widely available to all classes at the start.

OR you do what PoE 2 is going to do with Melee Skills: rather than more coverage on the "attack", apply more coverage to the "character". All melee skills should have less ranged coverage, but should offer more utility of movement from one pack to the next a la Flicker Strike. GGG devs said they can't do that in PoE 1 because of some sort of blockage in the code, but I don't buy that. Flicker Strike exists. Shield Charge exists. Whirling Blades exists. All of these "melee" skills have a baked in movement component to them. So why can't unusable melee skills have some type of movement component ADDED to them?

As Temjingold said, if the skill is targeting 1 or a tiny group of enemies at a time, no amount of damage will make that skill usable in the current PoE gmaeplay loop. The fact that you have to stand still to use them is an insurmountable obstacle to its actual utility as a viable skill. BUT if you were able to speed up your path from one enemy to the next then that would also effectively speed up your clear while retaining the actual "melee-ness" of the skill. I think it would be uber cool if melee was the fast-movement option, whereas ranged skills are the AoE option.

Lets use LS as an example: it's identity was as a shotgunning, ranged skill and not REALLY as a "strike" skill. But what it COULD have been was something similar to D3 Monk Lightning Fist: instead of firing off projectiles everywhere, why not have it be a baked-in short range teleport skill that you could chain movement between packs of enemies into. Upon teleport, offer a short-range explosion of lightning damage and then speed up attack speed. No more cheesy shotgunning or pseudo-ranged skill but rather a "true" melee approach with good coverage and fun mechanic.

Dual Strike/Double Strike: what if this had a baked-in D2 Frenzy-like effect? Like the new momentum support gem, except put directly into the attack itself (and more useful than momentum....).

Heavy Strike: This one is kinda tough in general to deal with...because now slams exist. I would say why not have an earthquake-like short range effect added to Heavy Strike, but then it would just be a slam. this particular skill is simply outdated and I personally can't find a way to "fix" it without it becoming one of the other skills that now exist.

Vaal Cyclone is another interesting mechanic that could be used to change the gameplay of other melee skills. The vacuum-like reverse knockback effect can be explored in other situations.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

OR you do what PoE 2 is going to do with Melee Skills: rather than more coverage on the "attack", apply more coverage to the "character". All melee skills should have less ranged coverage, but should offer more utility of movement from one pack to the next a la Flicker Strike. GGG devs said they can't do that in PoE 1 because of some sort of blockage in the code, but I don't buy that. Flicker Strike exists. Shield Charge exists. Whirling Blades exists. All of these "melee" skills have a baked in movement component to them. So why can't unusable melee skills have some type of movement component ADDED to them?

It's not that simple too. There is an example of attack which has inbuilt movement but nobody want to play it (this may be why, for me personally) - Charged Dash. In PoE 2 you mostly can choose if you want to move or not when attacking. In PoE 1 for Charged Dash and Flicker Strike you feel like you can't control your character and it gets you killed all the time. Also in PoE 1 skills like Shield Charge are extremely annoying to use too, although they behave similar to PoE 2 skills AKA further you click, more movement you make. It would probably work fine with PoE 2, but with a lot faster pace of PoE 1 alternating clicks in the center and at the edge of a screen is exhausting in the long run. Only semi-solution which comes to my mind would be incorporate autotargeted shorter distance dash for strike skills. It shouldn't be too fast, cause you may want to cancel it. Still, any solution applied to PoE 1 speeds is going to introduce a lot of clumsiness/wrist strain.

For those of you that dont know history, back in the day, before FRIDGES where a thing, you had to use ICE to cool your food.

There was an entire industry developed around the delivery of ICE.

When FRIDGES came around, the smart companies got out of the Ice delivery business but some did not, some invested in Faster Trucks.

History proved the latter approach to be foolish.

This is literally arguing for giving melee faster trucks.

They need to stop treating melee's tactical limitations like a bug, and treat them like what they are, a FEATURE.

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xxvaderxx_ar wrote:

For those of you that dont know history, back in the day, before FRIDGES where a thing, you had to use ICE to cool your food. There was an entire industry developed around the delivery of ICE.
When FRIDGES came around, the smart companies got out of the Ice delivery business but some did not, some invested in Faster Trucks. History proved the latter approach to be foolish.

This is literally arguing for giving melee faster trucks.

Faster trucks with mecha arms and deal.

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xxvaderxx_ar wrote:

For those of you that dont know history, back in the day, before FRIDGES where a thing, you had to use ICE to cool your food.

There was an entire industry developed around the delivery of ICE.

When FRIDGES came around, the smart companies got out of the Ice delivery business but some did not, some invested in Faster Trucks.

History proved the latter approach to be foolish.

This is literally arguing for giving melee faster trucks.

*ed: sorry, you clarified your analogy in an edit after I quoted you. Original analogy was pretty nebulous...Yes, I agree!

Regarding Charged Dash: thats an example of movement done poorly. It is essentially an ANTI-movement: you have to stand still for a length of time just to engage the movement aspect of the skill. It is exactly the same problem that melee skills without movement suffers from: the need to stand still. I stand by what I said earlier, but I neglected to say that movement, like anything else, can still suffer from poor design (a la charged dash). It needs to be a fluid and automatic process, not something that requires additional obstacles simply to engage. As an example, my idea for LS can easily be translated to work the SAME WAY for Charged Dash. In fact, remove charged dash entirely and make LS be a fusion of the two skills, without the channeling and without the projectiles.

I disagree about Shield Charge: some of the most fun builds I have ever made in this game have been shield charge builds, and I have rarely ever felt any stress on my wrists or lack of control as soon as I got used to how the skill felt. If you are using it as your main attack, it doesn't really matter whether you click near or far because you are clicking on enemies like any other skill, and are almost always close enough where you won't misclick. It's more of a positional learning curve than a true functional limitation. Although the background obstacle problem is a legit problem...
Flicker Strike...yea the randomness is a precise feature of the skill itself. You either love it or you hate it, but it still functions as a viable and exciting melee skill in ways that many of the other skills do not. That is because of the movement of the skill. I'm not saying every player is going to love EVERY melee skill. But some kind of functional movement is essential to ALL melee skills in order for them to work at a baseline level. Or I guess I should clarify: non-slam melee skills. Slam skills get and should get inherent AoE that other types of melee skills simply should not have. My LS mini-splosions should never come close to the same AoE as your average slam otherwise it loses the identity of a strike skill.

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zzang wrote:

The GGG solution: "We heard you Boneshatter is the only played melee skill because of its damage so we make all Strike skills Boneshatter"

Source: https://twitter.com/pathofexile/status/1688297392502927360

So what you are saying is, unless we play marauder or a tanky class melee is still dead.

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AintCare wrote:

When fridges came out they used toxic gas- amonia(?) and they leaked. so i would def give business to fast ice ice bby

god i hate analogies

I mean...if you are going to purposely misinterpret the entire analogy I can imagine why you hate them. Reading comprehension skills take practice.

How many of those fast ice trucks are around today hmm? THAT is the point of the analogy. Short term fixes = bandaids. In the short term, faster trucks might have still had a place. But long term it does and amounts to nothing.

Devs might not get the balance right on their first attempt at infusing new mechanics into the melee gems....but in time it WILL be the way to fix melee overall. They already believe that to be the case...which is why they did it for PoE 2.