Quick heads up: Melee is completely terrible.

Melee sucks ass. Everyone who thinks its fine is retarded or doesnt even play the game. The fact that u get so ez surrounded by enemies and the fact u cant even roll out of it and just sit there stunlocked until ur dead is fucking horrible. For example the area "Freythorn" is so god damn narrow that u CANT doge shit ur just stuck there and die over and over again as melee if ur not overlvled. hell my melee is fucking lvl 11 and cant clear this fucking zone. legit made me quit and start over with a new class.

Yeah melee in POE2 is completely underwhelming and worse than POE1, somehow. "Made new game to fix melee" they said. You sure about that? Swing dodge roll swing dodge roll. Blow your brains out gameplay. Played warrior but now I don't even want to play at all until they fix it.

Right now warrior is carried by big dmg hammer/supercharged to do single target and armour break explosions for clear.

But having to stop in place to slowly attack is often a death sentence, as opposed to anyone playing WASD and being able to move while using abilities.

Things like hammer, warcries can be cast while moving and feel a lot better than any abilities that force you to stand still


Also for some reason they removed a lot of life regen from the game and life is currently inferior to ES



Monk doesn't have the issues that warriors have for a couple of reasons - a lot of monk's skills have built in melee range so they can attack from far away, a lot of the skills can be used while moving (WASD), fast attack speed skills, and monk has access to both ES AND phys mitigation (with invoker)

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GenJack#2539 wrote:

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LaraDorren#2828 wrote:

My monk feels very strong. Significantly faster clear speed than my sorceress, quick and fluid playstyle, fun combos.
I don't know what you are having trouble with.

Play a warrior with a singlehanded mace and shield, get to act 2 and tell me how good it is then.

Please, I need a better build or something.

I switched from a mace and shield to a quarterstaff as soon as a rare one showed up. Much better. And when I got one with a socket!!!!!

I'm halfway through Act 2 atm and not having any real problems. I'm using lightning support.

First character I rolled was melee and got massacred by all the early bosses.
Meanwhile both Merc/Witch felt super easy by comparison.

So yeah melee needs to feel like a viable choice.

First time posting in the hopes that someone in the dev team will see this. Just want to acknowledge that many many parts of the game are awesome, but maybe not this.

I don't think melee sucks "per se", I've played my friends monk for a few hours and the monk slaps pretty good, and quarterstaff skills feel good.
Rather, for me, it's the mace skills just don't feel good to use mechanically, which is the bigger issue aside from their balance (which isn't great either).
In a vacuum a lot of the mace skills feel and look good but when you try to play in the increasingly hectic harder content it feels poor.

The animations on a lot of the skills just feel too long making them clunky, too many extra frames on the tail end or in other words the recovery portion of the attack. I find it difficult to chain together smooth combos of attacks because I've pushed the button for the next attack when my character is still in the really long recovery animation (which feels like it should be over already), causing my button press to not register, and my character stands there doing nothing for a half second while I realize that nothing has happened. Even timing everything well it just doesn't feel as smooth as it could be, using both fast and slow maces, my character is "doing nothing" for too long.

Balance wise I think that most of the slams are okay damage wise, but the "set them up and knock them down" playstyle is very weak overall with mace skills, Ill leave it at that.

So the same as in PoE 1 then. Nothing's changed.

The only playable "melee" builds are the ones that use attacks which have a big range and are usually projectile-based.

So much for "We realized we can't fix melee in PoE 1 so we're doing it in PoE 2 instead guys" "PoE 2 will save melee." etc. lol

Currently end (?) of Act 3. Warrior definitely feels like it's at a disadvantage. I have some strong skills that hit hard, I'm probably at a rough spot in the campaign where I don't have a lot of currency/resources and my armor sucks, but a lot of things in this game have been a struggle where I have watched some of my friends playing ranged breeze through.

Sanctum and Ultimatum being the trials also feels like it works against Warrior. If I'm being honest, I just didn't like them in PoE 1 and just didn't play them because I had the freedom to avoid them. These two specific mechanics personally feel even worse as melee.

I don't understand why GGG is so consistent on making melee feel worse than ranged builds. It's okay to let melee have some super strong things considering all the ranged classes have them.

reroll ice sorc....oh wait

reroll witch ....hahaha

and ranger is next on the nerf list...

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

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Questing#4931 wrote:

If you're thinking "WHAT THIS GAME SUCKS" reroll caster or minions. Melee is nearly useless at the moment. Don't judge the game by a single class, there is work to be done here. If you think melee is bad, thats because it is actually completely trash, its not just your imagination. Melee classes need massive buffs, cooldown reductions and move speed increases across the board, period. Just play something else for now.

WELP, so my barb dream is fkn gone, because melee does fkn suck ass, plus barb/mara cant use fkn axes? lol

I realize this is old and this may have been answered, but you will be able to use axes on your warrior.

I think there is some confusion here.

There are only 6 playable classes now:

Warrior
Monk
Sorc
Witch
Merc
Ranger

6 more are coming:

Huntress
Druid
Marauder
Duelist
Shadow
Templar

With those six will be more weapon types.

Right now axes aren't in the game. They will very likely be added with Marauder.

I hope this helps.