Is melee good now?

With the amount of QOL melee has received over the years is it good now? Because I have tried a couple of builds through the acts and have breeched some endgame with them but I have some thoughts on the matter.

Slam Skills

These feel amazing, almost perfect for clear thanks to all of the supports making the hit hard hit once playstyle work and also making the class not too terribly reliant on attack speed. However I feel like these benefits the clear speed more than the single target and the damage bonus doesn't often feel like a good trade when you have to spend a second charging a big attack. Unless you one shot constantly these constraints this playstyle has feels awful and inferior to attack speed based builds.

Strike Skills

Trauma support has helped most of these skills but only the skills that really can trade the damage for more tank. And it seems more catered towards the juggernaut/marauder than it does towards the Duelist, Ranger and Shadow when you indulge with strike skills with them.

There is also some skills that are melee that don't really fit in either category well enough that are doing okay in some cases and rather badly in others. Take Frost blades which is still doing well but I hardly see a good Perforate or Double strike build as bleed feels more conditional than impale. And the other melee skills like Reave, wild strike and blade flurry just don't seem to be living up to the fantasy they are advertising.

I am hoping we get more support gems to assist with attack speed stacking melee skills in future.

There is a lot you can do with melee in sc. hc its still pretty dicey just because of visual clarity and uptime on bosses. boneshatter is good for mapping but nothing else really.

I really dont know why they screwed over trauma support after 1 league. makes no sense at all imo, they nerfed heatshiver and trauma support at the same time double nerfing the only strike skill that was a good all arounder.

That being said, i played rage vortex of the berserker in hc and died at 89. not because it wasnt tanky, but because my 1 button on my mouse quit working for a couple hours. I played it on zerker. You can also use rbb on any melee ascendancy and play this skill with the charm for rage per warcry power if under 25. I will be revisiting this in hc once i have fourth vow xibaqua defiance of destiny combo.

You can make a few of the slam skills work. Ground slam still a good choice same with volcanic fissure. I’m sure there are others, those are just a couple I pushed to end game and that was when archnem(not the league, but when rares were first made base archnem) was released in its broken state day one. Nothing is hitting that level of crazy now, so can definitely do those.

I guess it depends what you want from it. You can push all except maybe high sim and Ubers with those. If you’re mathil level of knowledge you could push them to high sim and Ubers but I won’t put that on ya.

Melee will never be good in this game.
The game designed in such a way that EVERY affix affects melee, while ranged doesn't care about most of'em, and melee doesn't get anything in return.
Melee still rely on 2 totems.
Fortify is still chump only.

Slam skills only feel good when you oneshot everything.
But as soon as cycling damage reduction, attack block, any other form of immunity/high dr - they turn in to pain.

Strikes - low dps uptime.

Generals cry and cyclone/frostblink/stampede are the only 'melee' skills which feel good to play for me. I hate totems with a passion and refuse to use them. Cyclone and generals cry together let you dps while moving and feel amazing with giant slams on generals cry. with cyclone/frostblink/stampede you can avoid most damage while generals cry cleans up.

This is a really funny thread:

"With the amount of QoL melee has received over the years...."

GGG and PoE is FAMOUS for adding basically ZERO QoL for melee characters lol. Melee right now is in a FAR WORSE spot than it ever was 3 or 4 years ago, which was also much worse than where it was a few years before that.


I can even name most of the melee anti-QoL over the last few years, none of which has received any attention (except perhaps damage a BIT):
1) Damage slashed: indirectly or directly through more difficult crafting, gem "balancing", LACK of modernization of melee skills vs. every other skill.

2) Mana issues: All triggers cost mana, MELEE skills cost high mana, removal of easier -15mana chest and elreon jewelry, etc. Great planning....punish the class of play that isn't even supposed to have high mana.

3) New content consistently designed to give Melee the shaft: massive and ubiquitous degen pools. Boss effects that turn off regen. Fortify gutted. Most powerful boss attacks are almost always melee range.

4) Movement skills changed and nerfed: more ways for Melee to be unable to dodge attacks.

5) Dual Wield massive nerfs



The only "melee" builds that exist right now in PoE are basically non-melee playstyles or inferior projectile builds.

usually people tend to say "melee is fine".

a lot of the times it is because they are using specific melee builds or use good gear to supplement melee's weaknesses.

anyone who say melee is fine can try rolling a shadow.

shadows start with viper strike.

go ahead and use viper strike against the tidal island boss.

tell me how it feels.

oh wait, i was supposed to graduate and use cobra lash?

"

sckiff wrote:

Melee will never be good in this game.
The game designed in such a way that EVERY affix affects melee, while ranged doesn't care about most of'em, and melee doesn't get anything in return.
Melee still rely on 2 totems.
Fortify is still chump only.

Slam skills only feel good when you oneshot everything.
But as soon as cycling damage reduction, attack block, any other form of immunity/high dr - they turn in to pain.

Strikes - low dps uptime.

bro you can get fortify on any char with eldritch body implict


there are some good melee skills, look into my other posts i've listed the ones i've played or seen played

just because totems have been mentioned and i dont think it deserves its own thread, but gonna tack a bit of extra melee feedback in here...


can we get rid of the totem bs please? why are we using totems on every melee build? its so stupid, feels thematically wrong, ruins the playstyle but is forced on every melee player because damage. weve been bribed into ruining our melee play style by using totems.



they need to remove the totems adding damage to you and make them do very little damage themselves if you are not somehow heavily invested into them.


and then they need to give all that lost damage back to melee by just buffing the damage of all melee skills to be putting out what they would have been doing with a 4 link totem out.




the game would be better if they had just never added those melee totems.

Yeah this is quite the issue, all melee builds heavily rely on totems now days instead of being able to work independently. I sort of wish we kind of got more love for melee skills because honestly it doesn't feel right that bow builds can kill things off screen. But if you stand still for one second in a melee build you get deleted off the face of the earth.

Then again I feel like some of these replies are more doom posts than actual critiques. Because this subreddit is just filled with a lot of people who have negative views on everything in the game and come here to just vent that out.

Honestly I just hope the POE devs look into melee and make a good decision about it going forward.