Does Trauma Support 'fix' melee strikes?

https://youtu.be/DkoNjaa645g

A lot of people say melee skills 'just need to do more damage'. Others say GGG could multiply melee skill damage by 1,000x and it wouldn't matter due to mobs tending to have an easier time damaging things close to them and the general 'feel' of attacking as a melee character being not good enough.

Well, in 3.22 you will be able to turn any strike skill into boneshatter by scaling its flat damage via trauma stacks which also damage you.

Thoughts?

Thoughts? Well, you swap out 30-40% MORE damage for (what I guess is) flat damage and serious self-harm. This doesn't "fix" anything, but it might make some non-viable builds get rid of the "non" part.

A lot of the strike skills get way better with attack speed and the new support is kind of bad (I'm assuming) with attack speed defensively. So it might be a too big a cost in terms of self damage for the benefit of extra damage type of thing. I also feel like a league with sanctum being a big thing now is pretty anti melee.

So I'm not expecting melee strike skills with the support to be popular this league but I mean some people will do it in standard still probably.

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newbutnot wrote:

I also feel like a league with sanctum being a big thing now is pretty anti melee.

Sanctum is opt-in content, I know I won't be opting in regardless of what build I play. But its a decent point - if I were a Sanctum enjoyer I wouldn't go anywhere near a melee build after playing one in Sanctum.

Boneshatter has BOTH trauma and aoe included in the gem, so it gets that and a 6 link while other strike skills have to use trauma gem and get a juniorsplash from the tree. It may be fun for some strike skills, but boneshatter is still superior.

I don’t think we should think of support gems as fixes for skills/skill types.

its for jugger so you can play other skills than boneshatter.

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Tian_Yihao wrote:

Boneshatter has BOTH trauma and aoe included in the gem, so it gets that and a 6 link while other strike skills have to use trauma gem and get a juniorsplash from the tree. It may be fun for some strike skills, but boneshatter is still superior.

Many strike skills have sufficient clear by themselves, like frost blades, wild strike, or lightning strike, they just struggle to scale damage and/or survival at the same time.

Depending on the numbers involved it might help some skills i.e those that have good range/AOE but lack in single target. For others it's not going to do much if anything and i am really not sure it's going to accomplish even that. Boneshatter gets those stacks as part of the skill with no cost attached. If it's a support then it would need basically 40 more + trauma stacks to be good. If it's just 4 per trauma and zero base multi then nobody is going to bother since it's just a support that will be worse most of the time, especially when it counts against bosses.

Melee is bad in POE1 mainly due to how the skills work now. Before we thought that the changes were a set-up for how they would work in POE2. So we kind of took the changes hoping for POE2 to fix them.

Now that is no longer the case and those melee skills need to go back to the way they used to work. Frost Blades is just one example.