Is melee good now?

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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.

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Deathstar699 wrote:

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.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

so its been years and years since i tried an actual toe to toe melee build. im on standard right now messing around so hey, lets give it a go, see what its like. tried a viper strike build, ci shadow. its got plague bearer so its way better than an actual toe to toe but occasionally it has to go toe to toe to charge up.


unplayable. actually unplayable.



i had 18.5 million dps viper strike, 8500 energy shield, about 20k evasion, capped spell suppression, spellbreaker, wicked ward, lots of faster start of es recharge, ci chaos immune, 78% all ele resist.


im not joking, just running yellow maps with normal mods the game is unplayable. as soon as i get within melee distance of blue mobs or above they do about 4k damage every hit on maps with virtually no damage mods. i got a lot of evasion but once i take a hit its in the zone of the next hit potentially killing me and i have to run away. i just get completely swarmed, when ive got plague bearer its alright but as soon as its down and i have to recharge it, even tho i can recharge it very quickly monsters are just all over me and i die stupidly fast.

thats the gear i was wearing. cannot even function in red maps.


same level of gear i use on every build i play and they all cakewalk the same red maps. the idea that i would ever die would be ridiculous. were talking about casters, bows, melee like frostblades where you hit from a distance super fast and it freezes + clears half your screen.

I think if i had about 30k armour + 4 endurance on top of what i have now the build would be upgraded from literally unplayable to painfully trash but just about able to function by the most basic definition of the term.




its even worse than i thought it would be. i thought it would be so clunky and terrible to play that you would have to hate yourself to do it, and it is that, but it also doesnt even function to the point where you can clear the most basic t16 content safely.





I think if people out there really want toe to toe melee to be there thing, just give up. forget it, its not that game, its so far from that now that youre wasting your time. get into bows, spells, maybe some gigajuiced reave or boneshatter thicklad spec if you really must. the damage spikes are so high and mobs so relentless its a complete waste of time.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Yeah, zero mitigation ES builds don't work for melee, even less so if the only recovery is recharge which is obviously shit if you get hit all the time. And then it's dot melee on top of it. Honestly what the hell made you even think this would work? You can't slap a melee gem on a caster build and expect to rock the boat with it. If even longtime players like you don't realize something this basic then it's no wonder everyone fails their melee builds.

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Rextec wrote:

you have less phys mitigation than melee chars that use abyssus, the problem is you don't know how to build defensively, lol, only lvl 16 grace, no immortal call setup, 38.5k evasion with flasks up, which you won't have perma uptime on, you're even using legacy evasion flask, work on defences and you'll stop dying. i play melee, and have no problems with proper defences

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Yeah, zero mitigation ES builds don't work for melee, even less so if the only recovery is recharge which is obviously shit if you get hit all the time. And then it's dot melee on top of it. Honestly what the hell made you even think this would work? You can't slap a melee gem on a caster build and expect to rock the boat with it. If even longtime players like you don't realize something this basic then it's no wonder everyone fails their melee builds.

that would have worked in the past easily, if you played that 5 years ago you would be virtually unkillable and it would simply be painfully shit to play because you are toe to toe melee with no aoe.


most builds now have about 4k life and nuke the entire game, so if i had 50% phys reduction from armour or a lightning coil + modern taste of hate i would be in the same place as having twice the hit pool with no phys reduction. I would get hit, lose half my life pool and have to jump out and pot because the next hit would kill me.



part of what what you said is right, and its the point. you cant slap a melee skill on a caster build. the caster build would have just killed the entire screen before anything got close. were putting this option up against casters and bows, they have 4k life, they have about the same level of defence as this character, often less. they have the comparable dps but it hits half the screen instead of 1 monster at a time.

like i said if you put 30k armour on that character it would go from being unplayable to just being awful.




i put bladefall on that character and it could clear red maps safely without even repseccing it. i then spent about 20 regret orbs switching out the claw nodes, put on a wand, not even a proper built from scratch bladefall character and it could now clear t16 maps with ease and would never die if you ran 100 maps back to back. i can put an attack wand on it and clear t16 maps with poison kb essentially with its original spec.

you go from 0 danger fast mapping to taking about 10x as long to kill things because you are 0 aoe walk up and hit everything face to face and you need probably 4x the ehp just to survive reliably but you are still in more danger. the game is just not fit for no aoe toe to toe melee, things hit way too hard now. in 2014, 2016, even 2018 you could have played the highest tier of maps with 8500 es + some evasion and gone toe to toe with monsters.

now what? if youre not running grace + determination + other things type setups its not even playable with that style of build. you take no damage, then as soon as you entire direct melee range the incoming damage is insane.

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Rextec wrote:

you have less phys mitigation than melee chars that use abyssus, the problem is you don't know how to build defensively, lol, only lvl 16 grace, no immortal call setup, 38.5k evasion with flasks up, which you won't have perma uptime on, you're even using legacy evasion flask, work on defences and you'll stop dying. i play melee, and have no problems with proper defences

you dont have a single melee character equipped on your account.

i actually do, but theyre not toe to toe melee.

yeah, cyclone is playable, frostblades is playable. alkieser is happy playing his boneboy with a ton of defence. i watched videos of him doing ubers recently, he had 2 million dps because he had to invest so much into tanking.

i know you can make aoe melee work m8. i could make aoe melee work with those same caster defences, if i switched out to frostblades id just clear the entire map and nothing would get in melee ranger of me ever.