Does Trauma Support 'fix' melee strikes?

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innervation wrote:

Not to catch all this rain in a bucket and dump it down the drain but if you're using a 6 Link totem for damage and running around hiding behind walls for safety while your totem clears the content, would we more accurately call that a melee build or a totem build?

See?

This.

This right here is why "Melee" will never be good.

The definition of "Melee" for melee people is "I run up to within six inches of one singular enemy, hit it with my Hittin' Stick, and then hit it again on repeat until it falls over." Nothing else qualifies as melee, so it doesn't matter if those other things are good. Until Stand And Bonk is somehow better at bossing AND clearing than every other build archetype in the game, melee people will keep complaining.

Can a melee build use its other related tools to achieve a level of flexibility that allows it to respond to more diverse content, using the options available to it to clear whatever's in front of it however it's best to do so? NO. No it cannot. It must Stand, and it must Bonk. It can't have a Spectral Throw on a four-link to deal with shit you shouldn't stand next to. It can't have a heavily linked ancestor totem to augment its damage and give it extra reach. It can't use any of the huge diversity of tools that is Path of Exile's strongest feature to solve its problems, because those tools are not Standing and Bonking.

It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's why Grinding Gear is honestly probably entirely correct to give up on "Fixing Melee". Nothing can fix 'Melee' for you people. No matter what Grinding Gear does, Stand and Bonk will always be structurally, mechanistically weaker than wider-area or chaining abilities at clear, and if they tune the numbers on Stand And Bonk to where y'all want them for bossing then the Rleigion of Zoom people will deal so much Uber DPS they'll invert time and kill Uber bosses before they even enter the Uber arenas.

It's a fool's game to even try.

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rapind wrote:

Anyways, I was just stating that "technically" boneshatter is showing top ST DPS this league on poeninja at over 3b. Maybe that's cooked DPS, but it also happens to be the deepest delver this league (as usual).

Rudy didn't move into the deepest Delve build till week 7. Most people quite 4 weeks before he even was on the board.

Week 6 the deepest delve was 5982, that was a Blazing Salvo build. Week 6 the deepest Boneshatter build was.... 2502.

Rudy has what might be a multi mirror build going on in week 7 and looks like the same week he made the character.

Yes someone threw so much currency into a build that he could lots of damage, what's new in PoE? But mirror build is not what should be called the standard. Subtractem the other day was talking about what he considerers a reasonable starter build. He said being able to get all his void stones for 10D or less.

How many melee builds can do that? 1? Crafting and 800 pDPS axe can cost you 10D if your a little unlucky alone.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Well most of the damage comes from the melee skill, the totems are buffs that can also do a bit of damage and distraction. I'd say it's a melee build with added benefits but you can call it whatever you like really.
You issued a challenge to do sanctum with a melee build using the tools he mentioned which included totems. I am just pointing out that it's most likely doable.

I most certainly didn't issue a challenge to do it with 'a melee build', I specifically said a slam build with low aps.

and to 1453R

I was going to offer tons of time stamps from this video

https://youtu.be/XFifgGBANl0?t=513

where Chris brags about how Sanctum will be 'build agnostic' and how the devs are taking great pains to make sure melee players have a good time in Sanctum, but something tells me you're not looking for anything close to truth or facts. Fact is if you're offscreening a mob from safety around a corner with a totem you're not a melee build. Pure fact. This isn't some grey area nuance, well this skill has aoe or this skill has +5 strike range so you can kind of hit a monster from an inch away. A totem build is not melee. That whole post is shameful obfuscation from the fact that you will never take a melee build into sanctum despite bragging about how good its toys are.

To everyone else, I just said yesterday in another thread I don't think melee is broken - I play melee whenever I feel like it. What's broken is monster design like Sirus and Sanctum that offer a tiny fraction of dps uptime to melee. The design isn't fair. And that would be ok if, like when Heist debuted, Ziggy asked Chris 'hey the community is kind of worried that minions won't be good at this mechanic cause they'll raise the alert level' and Chris said 'yeah, bringing a horde of stupid clamoring minions into a vault heist sounds like a bad idea.

In sanctum he said the content would be balanced for melee. It wasn't. That's the difference.

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1453R wrote:

Can a melee build use its other related tools to achieve a level of flexibility that allows it to respond to more diverse content, using the options available to it to clear whatever's in front of it however it's best to do so? NO. No it cannot. It must Stand, and it must Bonk. It can't have a Spectral Throw on a four-link to deal with shit you shouldn't stand next to. It can't have a heavily linked ancestor totem to augment its damage and give it extra reach. It can't use any of the huge diversity of tools that is Path of Exile's strongest feature to solve its problems, because those tools are not Standing and Bonking.

It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's why Grinding Gear is honestly probably entirely correct to give up on "Fixing Melee". Nothing can fix 'Melee' for you people. No matter what Grinding Gear does, Stand and Bonk will always be structurally, mechanistically weaker than wider-area or chaining abilities at clear, and if they tune the numbers on Stand And Bonk to where y'all want them for bossing then the Rleigion of Zoom people will deal so much Uber DPS they'll invert time and kill Uber bosses before they even enter the Uber arenas.

It's a fool's game to even try.

Ya, that's why D4 has no problems with melee, why no one is complaining that melee sucks in D4, in fact the very opposite has been happening. D4 melee is miles better. But in PoE anything melee can do casters can do far better, far faster, for a fraction of the cost. But keep trying to gaslight the entire community with your BS.

So give us your viable melee build alternatives. Then we will compare prices, clear speed, and survivalbity to a caster build

/sarcasm - Hey I got this new idea. It's uses a wand, and it shoots fire balls out it, it burns people, but how you scale it is with melee damage.... It's a melee build after all ... gtfo

Well then that's a fuck-up from Chris because super slow melee bonk builds aren't going to do great in Sanctum. I didn't bother playing Sanctum League so I don't know the mechanic well, but I know that armor/mitigation/absorption is worth jack monkey squat in Sanctum because you'll bleed Resolve like a hypochondriac and go bust right away regardless of whether you can survive the damage just fine or not. Sanctum heavily favors Don't Hit Me Bruh builds because reduced resolve loss from your defenses semi-applyinbg to Resolve is still worse than no Resolve loss from, say...permafreezing everything in the instance before it can hit you.

Which should not really matter, because if you're interested in heavily investing in Sanctum you'll play the permafreezer, not the Slam Jammer.

Edit: Quoted wrong post, but the logic between a totem and zombie doesn't' change.

By your logic, a zombie build is a melee build.... The only difference between the zombie and a totem is the tags. In fact Zombies actually physically hit something so I guess Minion builds are more melee than totem builds. Just because you say don't make it so.

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Valkaneer wrote:

Ya, that's why D4 has no problems with melee, why no one is complaining that melee sucks in D4, in fact the very opposite has been happening. D4 melee is miles better. But in PoE anything melee can do casters can do far better, far faster, for a fraction of the cost. But keep trying to gaslight the entire community with your BS.

So give us your viable melee build alternatives. Then we will compare prices, clear speed, and survivalbity to a caster build

/sarcasm - Hey I got this new idea. It's uses a wand, and it shoots fire balls out it, it burns people, but how you scale it is with melee damage.... It's a melee build after all ... gtfo

D4 has "no problem with melee" because A.) D4 has a problem with EVERYTHING, not just melee, and B.) it's a vastly different game. Also a much newer game, with an animation system that allows for far better melee combat animations and underlying structure.

As for "give us your viable melee alternative"? Not sure what you're asking for. Are you asking me to give you my best melee build? I don't have a current one - my best melee build was a Frost Blades Raider a few years ago in Expedition, her build doesn't work anymore with the passive tree changes and the elimination of Dodge as a defensive mechanic. She was a White Wind build anchored on very high Dodge chances supplementing the Raider's mobility and Frost Blades' speed and range to do what I love doing - skirmishing and evading enemy force while skewering my foes with rapid salvoes of chaining darts.

That said, according to my old PoB record of her on the 3.15 tree she topped out at a smidge above 700k DPS under normal mapping conditions. Here's your "haha this girl sucks everybody should ignore her and listen to me bitch about melee instead" win for ye - I'm not good at Path of Math and finding a way to scale damage into the hundreds of millions. My best builds tend to float between one to two million DPS and are generally assembled on a budget of five-ish divines tops because I never have the currency to do more. Currency generation is extremely difficult for me, so I generally have to content myself with builds budgeted on a divine or less unless I get very lucky with easily saleable drops.

Surprise: it's hard to scale to 500M Uber DPS on less than a divine. I don't do a lot of melee because to make melee work you generally need a very powerful weapon, melee builds are more expensive than casters. Nobody ever disputed that. But to all y'all who make anywhere between twenty to two hundred divines a day because Religion of Zoom, that's a nonfactor. You can afford whatever you want, scale anything you like to that 500M Uber DPS mark, so what the hell's the big flaming deal anyways?

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Valkaneer wrote:

Ya, that's why D4 has no problems with melee, why no one is complaining that melee sucks in D4, in fact the very opposite has been happening. D4 melee is miles better. But in PoE anything melee can do casters can do far better, far faster, for a fraction of the cost. But keep trying to gaslight the entire community with your BS.

So give us your viable melee build alternatives. Then we will compare prices, clear speed, and survivalbity to a caster build

/sarcasm - Hey I got this new idea. It's uses a wand, and it shoots fire balls out it, it burns people, but how you scale it is with melee damage.... It's a melee build after all ... gtfo

1453R appears antagonistic in every post I've seen of theirs. Straw-manning the entire melee player-base then basing everything they're saying off that so it's easy to attack it. Extremely disingenuous and just comes off as nasty and ignorant of years of feedback from the community.

You're lucky to see 3 melee builds in the top 15 most popular builds in poe ninja each league. That's enough of a starting point to ask why the community veers away from melee.

Many people have fond memories of melee skills like Reave, Blade Flurry, Cyclone, Sunder... And they all used to be great! Back when CI melee was excellent - around 6-7 years ago - Reave and Blade Flurry were commonly used. Admittedly BF was overpowered as f***, and so they nerfed its damage and gutted its AOE. Now you need to use general's cry for it to be of any use.

I don't think GGG is interested in addressing any of the complaints melee enjoyers have when comparing builds with archers/spells
- Requiring totems for attack damage and speed boosts
- Requiring closer range to do damage
- Ramp up times lowering effective DPS uptime
- Being required to take more damage
- Doing less damage
- Builds cost more
- Skills don't scale as well with levels
- Bows get 2-handed damage, extra arrows AND quivers AND 2x6-links?
- Wand's bonuses don't require spells to utilise both hands
- Leech being impossible outside of attack range (a big one rarely mentioned)
- Leap slam bug GGG just refuses to acknowledge or fix
- Hard to maintain on-hit/crit/etc if you can't get in range
- Sniper's mark is just better
- No such thing as an MF melee build really
- Spells and Bows can off-screen clear without taking damage

I can't think of any more off the top of my head atm.

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1453R wrote:

D4 has "no problem with melee" because

Because it actually feels good to play and does comparable damage with the same level of ease to obtain. D4 is not bad at everything. If people were to judge D4 on character combat alone it would probably get a 9/10. It's everything else that's bad.

The deal is you're gaslighting people.

"

It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's why Grinding Gear is honestly probably entirely correct to give up on "Fixing Melee". Nothing can fix 'Melee' for you people.

You seem to think people are to dumb to notice that just because a caster or minion spell has a melee tag that somehow we are all to believe it's suddenly melee. It's we that are the problem not GGG who is telling us this skill gems that functions and looks just like a spell is somehow melee just because they put a melee tag on it. Why should we keep accepting the worst fixes for melee people can think of?

I am not joking when I say a 15 year old could come up with real effective fixes for melee and people would be happy with them. I wrote this the other day on Subtractems video and these would actually do a lot to fix melee issues in PoE.

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1) Viable mid tier unique weapons having to spend 6D to make an axe when a caster can spend 30c one of the many caster uniques. Melee lives and dies on weapon accessibility.
2) Melee spell suppression - It's easy for casters to get 80k armor but very hard for melee to get 90% spell suppression.

(The two above were the main reason cArn lost the 3.21 gauntlet when he was in 2nd place for most of the early competition)

3) separating quasi melee from melee so that melee can be buffed without mega buffing quasi skills

4) Stop adding "another slam" there are more versions of slam than any other skill in the game

5) Bring casters in line - (+1 to all) increase item level req to lvl 54 or something more appropriate.

(If they don't want remove +1 on casters, + % to melee phys should be allowed 1 tier higher at a lower level for example 60%-79% now only require lvl 20)

6) Melee must spend about 10-15 skill points specializing into a single weapon type. Casters don't have any such requirement for staves or wands.

7) Melee run speed could be significantly increased - such as tying run speed into melee key passives, or make rage more accessible to more than just a few builds.

8) Folding some of the shouts into Ascendancies - there are too many buttons and buffs to keep track of with shouts (exerts)

You don't need to do a total revamp of every melee skill right now, but some of these would be HUGE for melee in general.

Tell me those changes would not do a lot to help melee.

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hmcg020 wrote:

That guy is antagonistic in every single post I've seen of his. He's straw-manning the entire melee player-base then basing everything he's saying off that so it's easy for him to attack it. Extremely disingenuous and just comes off as nasty and ignorant of years of feedback from the community.

You're lucky to see 3 melee builds in the top 15 most popular builds in poe ninja each league. That's enough of a starting point to ask why the community veers away from melee.

Many people have fond memories of melee skills like Reave, Blade Flurry, Cyclone, Sunder... And they all used to be great! Back when CI melee was excellent - around 6-7 years ago - Reave and Blade Flurry were commonly used. Admittedly BF was overpowered as f***, and so they nerfed its damage and gutted its AOE. Now you need to use general's cry for it to be of any use.

I don't think GGG is interested in addressing any of the complaints melee enjoyers have when comparing builds with archers/spells
- Requiring totems for attack damage and speed boosts
- Requiring closer range to do damage
- Ramp up times lowering effective DPS uptime
- Being required to take more damage
- Doing less damage
- Builds cost more
- Skills don't scale as well with levels
- Bows get 2-handed damage, extra arrows AND quivers AND 2x6-links?
- Wand's bonuses don't require spells to utilise both hands
- Leech being impossible outside of attack range (a big one rarely mentioned)
- Leap slam bug GGG just refuses to acknowledge or fix
- Hard to maintain on-hit/crit/etc if you can't get in range
- Sniper's mark is just better
- No such thing as an MF melee build really
- Spells and Bows can off-screen clear without taking damage

I can't think of any more off the top of my head atm.

??? So who are you saying is antagonistic? Your post is making nearly the same points I've made multiple times in this thread.