Melee Ignite

They should make multiple "hold down the button to charge up while moving" melee skills. Channeling a big melee slam while moving could be a support gem. its also a completley overlooked and unused design space in POE. One that could "fix melee"*

They should also make several melee skills that don't cause you to stop in place. Or a strike support gem that does this. Would need to not work on Boneshatter or fast attacking skills like Lightning strike though.

And they should delete the disastrous negative attack speed multiplier that clearly no one at GGG will touch because the lead dev who I can not name (will be Auto moded) proudly and publicly talked about on a Beaclast episode inserted the disaster into the game as a way to sooth his own aesthetic desire to not see 'bionic monkey attack speed builds' . And then apparently he never once play tested how that change feels (play a Templar with GH for 30 seconds).

Anyway if I sound salty its because the problems are so obvious, and the solutions are so obvious... but GGG is not introspective enough to acknowledge mistakes, so they will never be fixed. I 100% expect them to be as bad OR WORSE in POE2... Because they still seem to think animation and specifically making your character move out of your control; is the way to fix it. But this very obviously is NOT the most important problem to fix. Thew biggest problem is that almost all Spells are Numerically and mechanically superior to almost all melee skills in almost all possible regards.

* melee in general, AKA not boneshatter and the couple other okay melee skills that are not mechanically and numerically inferior to all spells.

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e1337donkey wrote:

Bleed is bad as well. PoB says tons of damage, game says I can't kill anything.
I thought bleeding the trial enemies as they walk towards your totems was going to be big this league, I tried several times and nothing worked.

I farmed up an Uul Notels axe, had Utula's chest piece.. ton of life. I even went low life and bloodthirst. I didn't even bother with defenses. Ruthless, Fist of War, Chance to Bleed, Bloodthirst, Volatile... still felt like the enemies were regen life at times.

I was baffled so much that I honestly thought I should just quit the game. Like I just don't know how builds work anymore, it was that bad.

I feel this bro... My favorite build I ever played in the game since launch ( I still remember shutting D3 down for the final time (literally never played since) to download POE. Anyway fav all time Glad EQ bleed... My best SSF attempts capped out around a mill and three quarters to 2mil damage, this was "target is moving" using a Quill rain/ensnaring arrow in my weapon swap and an Elder mod 1h axe.

Then they nerfed it because Steelmage managed to beat a community race Maven (only barely getting by) with the Elder mod, and someone at GGG really does hate melee so...

For perspective that same timeframe I was doing 80million dmg with Toxic rain with better defenses (Champ) on similar investment SSF gear. Other people from range were doing 100million elemental hit bow dmg, and then 55million after the nerf.

Glacial cascade mines were doing 20million, Guardians were running around with 7-8 million damage and 22,000 ES...

BTW most of these things are still un-nefed to this day and many of them are actually more OP.

but they nerfed bleed... Steelmages build was doing 2.8mil...

completely disconnected from reality...

I don't understand why Sadism exists. Taking DOTs and reducing their duration to tinier and tinier lengths to increase their damage is just a calculus problem where the limit approaches what we call a "hit". Which already exist for people to use if they want something with sharp damage instances scaling well with attack speed.

'damage' supports are all calculus problems

20/20 Sadism is 0 damage gain for poison, but for Ignite and Bleed it actually CAN be a serious effective multiplier. Does it beat 'regular support' is another matter - it can, but it heavily depends on starting conditions

Ignite duration, damage variance (it is a terrible support for Ignite Arc, great for skills with low variance like Fire Burst), access to 'deals damage faster' and/or Temporal Chains. all these HEAVILY affect effective damage output. I think it is actually great support

Contrary to Controlled Blaze - this one is just PURE bait, it doesnt have a viable use scenario other than 'I will force it into a build for the science'


just like mixing Stuns and Ignite :) anyone sees a connection between these two?

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sidtherat wrote:

20/20 Sadism is 0 damage gain for poison, but for Ignite and Bleed it actually CAN be a serious effective multiplier.

Oh I know, I wasn't questioning its effectiveness.

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e1337donkey wrote:

Bleed is bad as well. PoB says tons of damage, game says I can't kill anything.
I thought bleeding the trial enemies as they walk towards your totems was going to be big this league, I tried several times and nothing worked.

I farmed up an Uul Notels axe, had Utula's chest piece.. ton of life. I even went low life and bloodthirst. I didn't even bother with defenses. Ruthless, Fist of War, Chance to Bleed, Bloodthirst, Volatile... still felt like the enemies were regen life at times.

I was baffled so much that I honestly thought I should just quit the game. Like I just don't know how builds work anymore, it was that bad.

Tons of damage over what duration is the question. I had an EQ Jugg who did 13 mio damage per hit, but that was over 6 seconds so just a bit over 2 mio dps and that was assuming a moving target.
Regular bleed is in a REALLY bad spot atm. Nothing really changed in the way you scale it and it's base damage is based on the weapon, which also hasn't changed in ages. Monster life meanwhile has multiplied several times over in the last few years. If you have a top notch weapon you can make something usable with Crimson dance but regular bleed is a quin build, zero dps over long durations. It would help a lot if GGG introduced a melee pendant to ensnaring arrow at least but i doubt even that is gonna happen, they just don't care.

"

They should make multiple "hold down the button to charge up while moving" melee skills. Channeling a big melee slam while moving could be a support gem. its also a completley overlooked and unused design space in POE. One that could "fix melee"*

They should just fix/rework what's already in the game instead of introducing new stuff. Otherwise we just get the BS/HS situation where a new skill is introduced that makes an older one completely obsolete...

Sometimes a mechanic works well for one build but is horrible for another. Sadism seems to be great for parttime damaging ailments, with the exception being poison. My fast swinging frenzy builds that have 15% to 25% chance to bleed are loving the "deal damage faster" effects. My damage exploded with it, but I use Usurper's Penance now.

I will likely jump into an ignite build next year.

I am a super casual player so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

They should just fix/rework what's already in the game instead of introducing new stuff. Otherwise we just get the BS/HS situation where a new skill is introduced that makes an older one completely obsolete...

completely different issue that I somewhat agree with. But tbh I kinda hate when they take something thats fun and turn it into a completely different skill (see old Sunder or old Firestorm)

But we're talking melee DOT's, considering that melee is already littered with obsolete poorly scaling junk that doesn't have a use case outside of Quin/hipsters try harding to make something do red maps on overly expensive/investment levels that are not worth the returns. Whats a few actually effective gems on top of the pile going to matter?

Ben talked about this early league I posted a clip. Tons of melee could just be numerically improved and it would help massively. GGG overthinks things too often. Make the juice MORE worth the squeeze, is still an improvement even if it can never be truely as worth it as other archetypes.

But by all means take 20-30% of all melee skills and supports and redesign/revamp them so they are relevant instead of making new things... Just don't ruin shit that people already like. Make some of them not root you in place, make some of them much better at DOT's, I mean why does Tec slam not have a big ailment/ignite multi? Conc path could have a mini fire prolif. maybe even give some of them there own special DOT dmg that is scaled by melee damage (you know like so many spells have, Reap, cold DOT fire DOT etc.).

One of melee's biggest design spaces that would help it is DOT dmg...