Pure Melee skills don't need a buff .

Before you come with torches at me, let me explain!

Mechanically speaking, GGG has achieved decently good feeling skills for melee (thinking more of the mace category here) some of them even requiring skill play to use such as perfect strike which is amazing... however they feel weak compared to every other ranged option out there or the more speedy/vaulty variant on the monk.

The problem is however everything else in the game really. What do I mean by that? Simple! The more slow and methodical gameplay of pure melee simply doesn't work as well in the current landscape because of the following:

1) Monster density - there are simply too many to deal with.
2) Monster health - monster health is generally too low.
3) Monster speed and action speed - generally too high.
4) On death effects - important note here is that these would NOT be a problem if point (1),(2) and (3) weren't a problem. Not even for the other playstyles as well.
5) Ranged skills or generally easier to use skills achieving the same or better then the slow skills of melee.

Essentially, with every other type of ranged character you get to either heavily control the whole screen of enemies or kill them before they get a chance to do anything (which in itself defeats the whole purpose of better combat with these in particular). Why does this happen? Because of points (1),(2),(3)(4) and (5) combined.

All those points make screen clearing almost mandatory not only in terms of efficiency but also in terms of survival. However even if we look at it from the point of efficiency alone which is by itself a big deterrent for playing pure melee... again the problem isn't how melee itself works but instead what it tries to work against. If a ranged character can clear a whole screen with a skill use, why would you subject yourself to doing it 5 times slower with melee, right?

For example, let's say they buff the damage of rolling slam with another 1000% more damage... Would that fix the issues? definitely not. It would definitely make him able to trivialize bosses (again, bad) but nothing beyond that really since it's not just about the numbers.

Okay but some of you might say... how about give him 1000% more AoE on his skills? That would solve the issues right? Wrong... they would still be too slow. Okay then make them fast too...YAY melee is fixed.. but wait, what would you be left with at the end of that? Essentially a ranged character with a melee weapon skin that plays almost the same as any other, losing all combat feel in the process as well.

Lastly, some of you might wonder why the hell do I think everything else should change around how melee works basically? Simple! Better combat was the whole purpose of PoE2 and all those issues I've mentioned not only go against the concept of better combat but also the melee skills themselves. Build diversity gets killed heavily in the process as well.

Although not exclusively related to melee, Kripparian's recent video feedback on armor is quite relevant to most people that have tried to play a class such as warrior where one of the ascendancies actually revolves around that as well.

In his video comment section there was this gem of a comment:

"The theory behind armour is good, it works better in PoE 1, but the practice is highly contextual, because armour is designed to be defensive against a swarm of enemies implying you'd take their hits, but you still have to be mindful of big foes"

Now why is this comment so important for my topic here? It reflects exactly the thought process GGG has had for armor for a long while now and why it is that way in PoE1 but more importantly how it directly ties to my number (1) point.

Long story short, armor is designed to be defensive against a swarm of enemies, a swarm of enemies that shouldn't have been there to begin with in PoE2 for multiple other reasons other then armor itself.

Essentially, a system working on the base of another bad system.

If they don't manage to treat the root causes first, we won't get anywhere with PoE2.

"Turns out in true GGG tradition the best form of Defence for a melee character is to put on a dress"

While this other comment is funny, I'm sure we can all agree it shouldn't be this way and it is quite ridiculous even from a visual fantasy standpoint alone.

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IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

Before you come with torches at me, let me explain!



1) Monster density - there are simply too many to deal with.
2) Monster health - monster health is generally too low.
3) Monster speed and action speed - generally too high.

All bad takes honestly. This genre is about farming for gear and killing hordes of monsters. White mobs don't need loads of health and no one wants to spend 20 seconds fighting 5 white mobs. If these are what you're looking for, you're not looking for this kind of game

"

Herbeh#6842 wrote:

"

IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

Before you come with torches at me, let me explain!



1) Monster density - there are simply too many to deal with.
2) Monster health - monster health is generally too low.
3) Monster speed and action speed - generally too high.

All bad takes honestly. This genre is about farming for gear and killing hordes of monsters. White mobs don't need loads of health and no one wants to spend 20 seconds fighting 5 white mobs. If these are what you're looking for, you're not looking for this kind of game

Right, so other then saying "bad takes" where's your actual feedback? How would you make meaningful combat work, how would you fix the issues the game has related to all of this?

Also how are any of those points a "bad take" when it is exactly the relation between pure melee skills and the points I've brought up?

Example: What exactly will happen if you do a rolling slam in the middle of a swarm of ranged enemies in an endgame map? Think about it.

1) Since there are so many ranged enemies you will get killed during the process of you killing a small part of them.
2) You will have more then enough damage to kill those you manage to land the hit on, but was that amount of damage even required? No, because they had low hp.
3)Part of the reason why those ranged enemies killed you so fast was also their speed.

This post is absolutely correct and should be taken seriously by anyone who is thinking critically about improving melee combat, and about improving the game overall.

Melee cannot, and will not ever be suitably balanced for the context it exists in, without forcing melee to conform to the game in such a way that it will no longer be recognizable as melee, but yet another variation of AoE screen clear that uses melee weapons instead of ranged or spells, to accomplish the exact same task.

And that task, is to wipe the screen as quickly and as efficiently as possible to compete with the meta in obtaining loot, and to comply with the "kill or be killed" dynamic between monsters and players, where monster damage has been scaled to offer counter-play to existing builds which delete the screen before monster attacks & mechanics become relevant.

And that is to say nothing of the high degree of player hit-pool sustain that the monsters have to overcome in a very short window, usually in the form of one-shots.

For melee or 'tank' to have any hope of withstanding the incoming damage from monsters, they would need a level of defensive strength that could utterly eclipse the defenses of ranged builds, who already sport the superior defense of having very few incoming attacks to mitigate in the first place. How that sort of immense imbalance can be segregated between those archetypes (ie. rangers not adopting some measure of the defense a melee char uses) is an impossible feat.

If however, the game was designed around the concept of attrition style gameplay, where players had to engage with the monsters on a depth that exceeds hitting the delete key, then suddenly the balance between these two become a much more interesting and dynamic interplay of damage and defense, the melee style has a distinct identity, and can actually survive as that archetype when the incoming damage is not balanced to instantly kill them.

Maybe GGG still hasn’t figured out how to position melee in POE2. So far, there’s only one true melee class, Warrior, while the spell and projectile classes are basically complete. It’s clear that melee design is much harder for them. In my view, the Warrior and hammer skills focus heavily on impact and require close interaction with enemies, which sets them apart from POE1’s design. This reflects their intention for POE2 to slow down, emphasize action, and move toward a true action RPG.

But at the end of the day, it’s still an online loot grinding game. Compared to the ranged classes that carry over POE1’s design philosophy, slower farming speed is inherently a disadvantage. The framework of the game as a whole isn’t built around melee, and as new patches come out, fast clearing becomes more and more important. How to balance the melee system,and whether they will revert to POE1 style 'melee' skills that are actually large area, mid range, high attack speed abilities, seems to be where GGG is hesitating as they try to preserve the unique identity of POE2.

"

But at the end of the day, it’s still an online loot grinding game. Compared to the ranged classes that carry over POE1’s design philosophy, slower farming speed is inherently a disadvantage. The framework of the game as a whole isn’t built around melee, and as new patches come out, fast clearing becomes more and more important.

Well put.

Enemy design when it comes to loot drops and new content types needs a severe 180 turn away from the swarm fiesta we've seen so far, among other things. Having massive swarming hordes of fodder enemies is fine as a content type, but it being a vast majority of the content has clearly become problematic.

Item Rarity on gear yet again rears it's controversial head here as well. Melee characters gravitate towards stacking survive-ability modifiers on their armor pieces. Ranged characters, meant to kite, aren't nearly as pressured and can fit more Item Rarity on their gear which further multiplies the disparity.

I'm tired boss, but hope is not lost until the patch notes drop. Then we can doomer post after.

Melee should be the only specs with good sustain. Rangeds should have no access to leech whatsoever.