Does Trauma Support 'fix' melee strikes?
" I was agreeing with you and your response. It fills up too much forum space to copy in every single quote. Sorry if you thought it was about you. I've edited to make it clear. I'm struggling to come up with new goals to keep me playing this game. Last edited by hmcg020#6029 on Aug 7, 2023, 5:43:13 PM
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As a melee only player (no slams and I do have one frost blades character that I did enjoy playing, but it felt more like shooting a gun) I have adjusted my game play with the understanding that pinnacle bosses are mostly out of my reach and I just enjoy the upper limits of what my guys can do. Boneshatter is by far the best I have. I have a Vaal Reave in Standard that I like to play but it is not as good as my boneshatter guy there. Oh well.
I hope for melee improvements every league. I would like to see Cleave made viable once again. "Gratitude is wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk." Rumi
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" +1 NP, when I re-read it I thought, well it could be either. Last edited by Valkaneer#5171 on Aug 7, 2023, 5:47:39 PM
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" People were doing Ubers with Frost Blades this league, so it is doable. But to reach that level, you need some serious investment. I've invested quite a lot of divines into my Frost Blades character this league and it's 'almost' Uber viable, at least for someone that knows their mechanics. So it begs the question: How much investment is "OK" for doing the toughest content in the game, and how accessible should it be? Personally, I'm totally OK with the fact that I'm not really able to do them. Yet. Gives me something to strive towards. But I still think they should ease the investment needed on some/most melee builds, especially early on. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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" A'ight. Lemme see about this, then. " Nevber said melee was in A Good Place. May seem that way, but nah. I know melee isn't great in Path of Exile. I just disagree with "Melee Enjoyers" that think that the only thing they need to do to Fix Melee(TM) is to give all melee skills fifteen times the base damage of every other skill in Path of Exile, as well as giving all melee skills a built-in ninety percent all damage negation while the animation is active, melee would be Beautiful And Perfect Forever. It's not a problem with the numbers. You yell about the numbers being bad because you have fewer chances to do damage, those chances are shorter than other builds' windows, and you have to absorb more damage and put yourself in greater risk to do that damage. Okay. Why do you think tweaking numbers is going to solve any of that? None of it is a "Numbers" problem, it's a qualitative game design problem. Melee is bad because melee animations are stiff, awkward, and terrible and they forcibly lock you in place and rob you of reative mobility. Ranged skills and spells also suffer those problems, it's a universal issue with PoE skill/animation design, but those abilities are less impacted by the issue due to being further away from the source of harm. You can slap-patch the issue by giving melee stupid huge damage and negation bonuses, sure - but at that point you're not fixing the problem, you're just paving over it with dumb math that will cause you untold issues with any future decisions you make because you've given a certain class of skills blanket ultrabuffs you can't take back or adjust after the fact. " Nobody I've ever heard speak of "Melee" has ever considered Reave, Blade Flurry, or Sunder to be Melee Skills. Quite the opposite, I very much remember the deep and abiding scorn the playerbase had for Blade Flurry when it was new. Even beyond its overtuned release stats, people hated it because it was hitting guys with phantasmal echoes of yourself with a ghost dagger, not TRUE AWESOME MELEE. It's why I get so frustrated with "Melee Enjoyers" - they always, always, ALWAYS scream about how "MELEE" means running up to a dude, hitting that dude one time with a melee stick, and then repeating until morale improves. AoE attacks like Cleave or Earthquake aren't TRUE AWESOME MELEE. Hybrid attacks like Lightning Strike or Frost Blades aren't TRUE AWESOME MELEE. The ONLY thing that counts as TRUE AWESOME MELEE is basic strike skills, and even those are not allowed to have secondary knock-on effects - Molten Strike requires you to walk up to one dude and bonk him one time with your Bonkin' Stick to function, but it's still not TRUE AWESOME MELEE because it then flings a bunch of fire poo in a small area and that means it's a dirthy filthy projectile skill. It's absolutely maddening, because there's no way to make basic strike skills do what these people want basic strike skills to do - that is, deal overwhelmingly high Boss DPS while also being nigh-immune to Boss Skills no matter what those skills are - without breaking the game. And also because basic strike skills that have no interesting secondary components or effects are super boring. Why not just scale your basic attack, at that point? Basic Attack is a [iu]Stand And Bonk[/i] as you can get. " they're addressing most of them, I'd wager. By creating Path of Exile 2. Which is a newer, better game that corrects the fundamental qualitative game design issues holding melee back. But let's look at this list, shall we? Should be fun. " You don't have to use Ancestor totems. You can play melee without them. Sure, your damage will be lower than a build that does use them, but spellcasters/archers don't get the option of totems that boost their own self-cast damage at all. Archers, admittedly, get ballistas and Mirages that have a sort of similar effect, but spellcasters are just SOL. When was the last timne you saw a caster build that utilized totems without also being an Ancestral Bond totem-only build? " Um, yeah? That's the point. It's melee. Y'all want to be close. if you didn't, then stuff like Frost Blades, Sunder, Reave, or pre-buttfucking Blade Flurry would've actually been celebrated as Cool Melee Skills instead of Filthy Degenerate FAKERY. " Yeah, ramp time is an issue. It's why I don't think Trauma Supporet is going to go anywhere. Melee people want to be big bursty types, they don't like ramp-up. Does make me wish Rage was easier to maintain between packs, or that melee builds had a way to infrequently spike Rage very quickly. Something like a Vaal Berserk perhaps that instead of expending Rage, instantly granted you maximum Rage and enhanced Rage-based buffs for the duration of soul gain lockout? " You have improved access to Stun, you have improved access to Endurance charges, you have exclusive access to Fortify, all melee-focused Ascendancy classes include defense-oriented nodes, the "Melee" section of the tree (i.e. west/southwest) has a dizzying profusion of defense-oriented nodes...yes, melee takes more damage, but it's given a large bag of tools to help deal with that. Enough of a toolbag? Dunno. But if you can't build enough defense as a melee character I'm not sure how you can do it as anything else. " Compared to what? Melee skillgems have higher base damage and higher multipliers than any comparable arrow/wand gem, and spell scaling is a totally different beast. " They do. It sucks. Jonathan has mentioned that in PoE2 he wants gem level to matter more for melee/weapon-based attackers, both because it's dumb that gem level is kind of irrelevant to weapon builds and because it'd help normalize costs for melee builds. I'd honestly be down for all weapon-based attack skills to get built-in flat damage the way some attack skills do, it's kinda booty that so few of them do. The ones that do are infinitely better for 'Budget' weapon builds than the ones that don't, you can actually get Ice Shot off the ground for less than a hundred divines now. " See above - they bloody well should. " Gonna be honest, never quite figured out why quivers were a thing other than Diablo 2 Reasons. I imagine back when the game was new bows were weaker than 2H melee sticks to account for the presence of quivers, but that's clearly not the case anymore. I think it'd be kinda cool for GGG to introduce a "Scabbard" or "Baldric" gear piece that's functionally the melee equivalent of a quiver. Don't have any idea why a magic scabbard would affect your DPS but hecc if I can think of a better "2H Melee Quiver" stand-in. " Not sure what this means? Are you saying that spellcasters shouldn't have one-handed weapon types? because that's honestly weird, melee gets one-handed weapons why shouldn't spellcasters? " True. Perhaps you should consider diversifying your recovery. I've recently been running an interesting Elementalist build that combines ES regen via Zealot's Path, ES recharge via Wicked Ward, life recoup, enhanced mana regen and mana recoup while taking damage across all three resource bars at once using The Burden of Truth, an ES mastery node and Mind Over Matter before recovering it in a bunch of different ways at once. It's been proving surprisingly sturdy given how little I've been able to invest in the character overall, and it lets me do better against "No [X]" critters. "Players Cannot Regenerate" map mod is still a no-go sadly, but it's been fun. I do wish life recoup was more viable for armor/mitigation-based characters. I'm using Energy Shield BS to make life recoup viable/valid, but for some reason it's extremely difficult to invest in recoup in the Melee area of the tree. Seems like a weakness. You do get way better access to raw regeneration, but building enough raw life regen to be a meaningful recovery mechanic is resource-intensive compared to leech. Which is, of course, why everyone leans too hard on leech alone as a recovery mechanic and gets stuffed by No Leech maps or "Life Cannot Be Leeched" rares. if it wasn't so awful to reach, say ~10% life regen/second, leech wouldn't have to be the only answer. " Will admit, no idea what the Leap Slam bug is. Legitimate request: what is this? " Man, wouldn't it be great if melee builds had a way to throw their melee weapon at enemies to manage hit effects...maybe even something like throwing a spectral copy of it... " Sniper's Mark can be pretty bonko, yeah. It overrides any other damage curse the character might want to use unless they invest in additional curse limit, which is either expensive or annoying unless you're ion the Witch area of the tree. That said, I was today years old when I realized Warlord's Mark generates a bunch of Rage on stun. Hm. Now if only Pinnacle shit wasn't basically immune to stun...man, I'm really glad Grinding Gear is fixing that in the new game. " Oh piff, nobody magic-finds anyways. ANy investment into MF is a waste of currency and everybody knows it - you're better off investing the currency into MOAR BETER SPE3D and just clearing shit faster as a comparative Quantrity modifier. Y'know, unless you're gonna play the new game where Magic Find actually does its job and improves currency and other nonrollable drops as well as just making blues into yellows and yellows into uniques nobody wanted anyways. " Again - y'all WANT to be close. You don't get to yell at the ranged builds for using range. Path of Exile's camera is already claustrophobicallyt close to the character as is, if you do the Delve thing and say "everything more than nine units away from the character is INVULNERABLE TO ALL DAMAGE", what's the point of bows or spells even being in the game? That said, sure - want to introduce a scaling damage penalty to offscreen damage so it's harder to do? A'ight fine, do what ye gotta, but if you remove offscreening then why should you also get the enormous, game-breaking damage and mitigation bonuses Melee Enjoyers keep asking for? You made ranged builds nigh-impossible to play, everybody is 'Melee' now, so suck it up. That about cover it? She/Her
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" Cleave is viable, but... you need to spend a mirror to do it. I was rolling a cleave build and it was doing just fine, this very league, but fact is Boneshatter does everything cleave does better. Travic made a cleave build last league that could clear nearly the entire screen in a sec or two, but he spent over a mirror doing it. What gets me, is what Chris said in the Subtractem interview. While I appreciate Chris stating intentions, IMO it's a lazy argument. There is certainly easy changes that could be made to help melee, but what's needed more is that casters need to be brought in line. They are frankly out of control in their ability to do everything a melee can do but better. I don't like saying that casters need to be brought in line, but they have many privilege's that melee should have without paying a price for it. Casters walking around with 60-80k Armor.. Seriously? |
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scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
" Wut? " Who is yelling at range? You like to make stuff up, don't you? You love hyperbole, do you have blue hair? Sorry TMI, disregard that. The problem is range easily has as much mitigation as melee. Were not yelling it, we're stating a fact. Range can clear the screen in less than a second and move on to the next screen with their ultra mobility. Melee actually has to take time to kill stuff. Very few melee builds can cover an entire screen in less than 2 seconds. My strongest caster build I could run across the map and everything died as I moved. I just ran full speed and everything died. Basically not possible on a melee. |
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" Care to cut PoE's monster density by ninety percent, slow the game's maximum possible character action speed values by a larger number, and completely redesign the core numerical balance of Path of Exile to make it more like Diablows Mour? Because Grinding Gear is doing their version of exactly that. It's called Path of Exile 2. And people all seem to fucking hate it. " I'm not gaslighting people. I'm arguing against "Melee People" screaming that melee is "easy" to solve and that everyone else who thinks otherwise is an idiot. You don't like me doing that, fair enough. I don't like Melee People screaming that every other character archetype needs to take a Nuclear Apocalypse level of nerf just so they feel less bad about Stand And Bonk being qualitatively bad. Especially when one of my favorite skills is one of those "quasi melee" skills you explicitly shit on later in your post and actively request be cut out and left to rot from your "Melee Fix" " No, I'm not telling you that spells or minions are melee skills. I'm saying that people saying "a melee Stand And Bonk build that also has a secondary 6L linked-up Ancestor totem which it uses when its Stand And Bonk skill isn't ideal to do things is not a melee build, it's a totem build with delusions of Bonk" is fucking stupid. What the fuck else are you gonna do with that second 6L? Clearly not rig up a second Bonk. And if you're using the totem anyways, why not deploy it when it makes sense to do so? Path of Exile is a game of combining tools in interesting and innovative ways to create unique solutions to problems. "Melee Enjoyers" denying literally fucking everything being "Melee" other than Stand And Bonk basic single-target strike skills means y'all aren't gonna get what you want because those will never be good. They could magnify the damage of basic single-target strike skills by a factor of one thousand and those skills would STILL be terrible because you can't Stand And Bonk your way through the demon hordes of Wraeclast. At some point y'all have to lighten the fuck up and allow things like slams, Cleave, Sunder, or other such skills to be considered "Melee" again. " Any jackass can write words on the Internet, yes. If it was really so braindead easy as that, with nothing else getting in the way or causing knock-on effects, why do you think Grinding Gear wouldn't have done it yet? They take it in the ass every damn league over The Melee Issue, if the fix was really so simple as you claim they would've done it. " Oooh, I love lists. Two of them back to back! Okay, let's go. " Sure. Mid-tier melee uniques should absolutely be better. I'd maybe argue against the idea that 800pDPS is somehow 'average', or if it is then man the scaling has really gotten truly out of control. But the core point that melee characters should have access to more-or-less readily available uniques that can carry them into red maps is a good one. Might honestly be a better idea to simply improve all melee base items instead, make the core weapons better so the things are less reliant on stupid levels of mod scaling, but that's a huger change with world-shaking ramifications on core game balance. Nobody needs to make things any damn easier on Religion of Speed ultracomps than it already is. Still, I feel like baseline improvements to the damage of the underlying weapons would be easier to implement than tweaking hundreds and hundreds of jank uniques. " Frnakly, spell suppression fucking sucks. I'm not saying "spell suppression is bad and you don't need it", I'm saying "spell suppression is way too good and should probably be knocked on the head a little". It would not go amiss if the base damage reduction from Suppression was 30% rather than 50%, I think, and you had to invest heavily into it to improve that percentage. As it is, I hate the fact that every build considers it mandatory to get to 100% spell suppression no matter what kind of build it is or where it's located on the tree. Heck with that shit. Suppression needs to be revisted. That said, the PoE2 demo showed buckler-style Dex shields with no Block chance, instead carrying a "40% chance to Deflect". I'm presuming "Deflect" is more-or-less Attack Suppression? If so, it'd be interesting to see how that would improve defenses/durability for melee characters. If it ends up being mandatory for everybody the way Spell Suppression is then ew no, but maybe they can find a way to do it better? " And here we have more of the "only Stand And Bonk is TRUE AWESOME MELEE(!!!) and everything else should SUCK AND BE TERRIBLE FOREVER!" garbage. A skill is melee or it isn't, and shit like Cleave, Reave, Blade Flurry, and similar are not "fake" melee. Stop. It. This is why people hate Melee Complainers. " Because strike skills fucking suck. Path of Exile is a game where any given pack of critters can be 50+ critters strong and any given map can easily have well over two or three thousand monsters on it. You will never get anywhere by stand-and-bonking your way one demon at a time through a map, and according to your Point 3 and your spiel about how other skills aren't TRUE AWESOME MELEE(!!!), you're clearly not allowed to have a Cleave or a Sunder or a whatever else running sidecar to your strike skill to actually fell the demon hordes of Wraeclast in a reasonable timeframe. Give. Up. On the idea of single-target-only, no-splash, no-chain, no-extra-targets strike skills somehow being made good. They never will be, doesn't matter if they deal infinite damage. Yes, you'd one-tap Uber shit and be broken, but you'd still never get to it one-tapping your way through the hundreds of thousands of critters you'd need to kill to get to Uber shit. " Does anybody really care about the leveling experience? You all gripe about it being necessary and practice techniques to skip it as quickly as possible anyways, what does it matter if casters can get a +1 to gem level stick in Act 2 or 3? Maybe, instead, melee skill gems should get baked-in flat damage everywhere, or some other mechanic that stops "+1 to level of socketed Melee gems" from being a meme roll. " Don't be dense. Yes, you have to spec into the nodes that support the weapons you're dealing damage with. Casters have to spec into the nodes that support the spell damage types they're dealing damage with. You spec for Sword nodes, I spec for Fire nodes or Bow nodes Damage nodes are damage nodes, everybody has to spec them. If you're complaining about spellcasters being able to freely jump from wands to sceptres to staves to wands again? Well boy howdy whoo, if caster sticks had half the impact on spell builds that weapons did for weapon builds maybe you'd have a point, but even the most gonzo spell sticks pale in comparison to the shit you can do with most weapon builds. Battlemage is the next best thing to outright broken for a reason. " I've been a big advocate for a long time for making movement speed something you invest in rather than something you just BS with Shield Charge and three billion percent attack speed, and in turn making movement speed something that feels good to invest in. I know there's movement speed nodes in the Ranger area of the tree but nobody ever takes them because they're all so fucking tiny you could spend 12 nodes to get less movement speed than one decently rolled pair of boots. Hell, people tend to shit on and yell at anyone who does take those nodes as being dumb stupid moron inefficient Passive Point Wasters. You want to start incorporating more movement speed into the tree, maybe start putting movement speed mods on melee weapons as well as boots? Do stuff with movement speed clusters that makes them interesting and fun to take? You got my vote. " They're trying to get away from over-complicated Ascendancies, and besides - you really want TRUE AWESOME MELEE(!!!) locked behind just one or two Ascendancies? The idea was to pick the one or two warcries that complemented your build and focus on those, not rotate through every warcry in the game. I get that you can scale moar damage by cramming every single temporary buff in path of Eexile onto your skillbar, but if you do that then you get to pay the price and be a Multi Button Build. Frankly if I were designing warcries I'd probably make it so they couldn't stack - attacks can only be Exerted by the most recently used warcry. Stops bullfuckery, reduces the perverse-incentive urge to cram as many warcries into a build as you can physically manage, and allows me the design space to make any given Exert effect way more impactful since it's not having to leave space for half a dozen other Exerts on the same attack. " Some of them would, sure. Would they get Melee Complainers to stop complaining? Not in the slightest. Would they qualify as "Fixing Melee"? Again - not in the slightest. The playerbase wouldn't welcome those changes, they'd only snarl and bitch and moan and kvetch that Grinding Gear didn't do MOAR, didn't go FURTHER, didn't make TRUE AWESOME MELEE(!!!) the only viable build style in Path of Exile by thermonuclear apocalypse nerfing anything other than Basic Strike Skills into utterly unusable ruination. People have constantly suggested removing offscreening in a game where there ism maybe eight meters tops between your character and the edge of the screen because it "just isn't fair!" Where do ranged builds get to live in this paradigm Melee Complainers keep pushing for? She/Her Last edited by 1453R#7804 on Aug 7, 2023, 7:17:01 PM
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" then we agree "again we agree "Flurry, or Sunder to be Melee Skills. - Disagree. Diversity and archetype don't have to be exclusive "- this is you straw-manning. It doesn't help your points hold any more water. "single-target melee strike skills are not in-line with the game's trajectory anymore, which is sad for people who like them. "- agreed. "And be at an even worse disadvantage? Come on, be sincere. "laughed out loud at that one haha. "- good idea "Melee builds typically do have access to fortify which is amazing. All other defensive layers are accessible to other builds due to location on tree and access to independent charge generation, etc. And they don't need to get close. "Melee skill gems' effective damage#% don't equalise like how you've explained; a good weapon is much more of a deterministic factor for melee. "- Yep " "I don't want to take anything away from other builds. Just mentioning what seems like decent chuck of QoL quivers bring. " "I should've worded it better and not concerned myself with it being a bullet point. Basically with wands you get both bonuses if you dual-wield. With weapons you get either bonus and an asinine bonus which any dual wield setup gets. "- Don't tank about ES to a melee-munter. We're still bitter about them taking that away from us. "- you're right about raw regen being more accessible. Reasonably easy to get like 15% with mageblood "We've learned to live with it over the years. You just get stuck 5 - 6 times per map and have to leap 180° to the orientation you got stuck in. "Generally I love sarcasm. Build's are always too gem-thirsty for an additional ST setup to maintain effects though. "Yup "- I would love to know if 100% deli maps with 300% quant cleared in 15 minutes, equates to more currency (directly or indirectly via trading) vs 5 alch and go maps with a 200/500 build in that same timeframe. Over a month etc. I do the first example with an IIQ gem and i make more now than I have ever done. My final point was just a point to address what it feels like for melee to party with archers/spells. It's like we're playing a different game. I don't want to take any clear potential from archers/spells. There's no harm in drawing attention to the differences though. I'm struggling to come up with new goals to keep me playing this game. Last edited by hmcg020#6029 on Aug 7, 2023, 7:38:29 PM
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" You're very fond of telling people what others would and wouldn't do. You know, I think most of the people you are describing as "Melee Complainers" are actually people already playing melee, and would just want some adjustment/buffs to not make it feel like they're handicapping themselves just by playing what they want to. Why are you unable to discuss anything without tons of derogatory terms and kilograms of hyperbole? As long as a melee skill has some AoE and/or secondary effects, it doesn't really take that much to bring melee up to a point where it's viable enough. How long has it actually been since you did serious endgame progress with a melee character? Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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