Review the history of melee: why mace's design makes me angry

Hi wanna talk some old history of melee and why the mace's design is not only terrible but also unforgivable, as it shows that GGG has not learned from the experiences and feedback from players over the past three to four years. Instead, they continue to make the same mistakes as before, or even worse.

Let's take 3.15 as the starting point for our discussion, as going further back would make the issues more complicated and tedious.


What's the problem of 3.15?

-Monsters are too fast too strong too tanky too many ailment, and melee was bad at both defence and offence at that patch.

People were angry, and Chris Wilson went to a lot of interview and podcast to take a lot of feedback.

In these interview, Chris admitted that melee is bad and promised that they would gradually improve this issue.

Actually, they didn't.

In the next ten patches, melee has hardly received any substantial improvements; instead, everyone's defensive capabilities have gradually improved with patch updates and numerical inflation.

Up until 3.25, melee players actually received "sufficient survival but ZDPS" or glass cannons. However, compared to other builds' glass cannons, melee glass cannons are much higher risk and higher cost, and there is no reasonable return.

In the past three years, I have continuously protested on GGG's Twitter about Chris not fulfilling his promises, but I have faced a lot of mockery.

One of the most ridiculous rebuttals was when a defender of GGG asked: "What do you think should be done instead?" I said: "I would rather they mindlessly add 10% more damage to all melee skills than see them do nothing at all."

That defender replied: "This is the worst and most foolish suggestion I've ever heard, and melee doesn't need any improvement at all."

Guess what? In version 3.26, all melee skills received a 50% more damage.


The buff at 3.26 shows 2 things:
1. GGG implicitly admits that they are fulfilling Chris's promise from four years ago (as they only removed the totem now, which was one of the promises made 4 years ago).

2. This is a method that lacks creativity and aesthetic appeal, and they could have done this at any time, meaning that melee players have been playing the game with 66% damage for the past 3-4 years.



This is why I often find many defenders to be foolish; the mockery from these people over the past three years shows just how little they understand the imbalances in this game.They like this game, but they are ignorant like babies.

Even, with 50% more damage buff in 3.26, melee still just feels "Okay", because the core issue has not been fundamentally resolved. The massive 50% more damage is a lazy, braindead solution, and they even refuse to do that in 10 patches.

Clearly, GGG is about to abandon POE1, turning it into a neglected and unupdated graveyard. The last patch before the abandonment barely fulfills a promise that was delayed for nearly four years, almost like giving a handout to a beggar, because GGG will no longer care about the balance issues of POE1 from this point on.

So, what's the melee's core issue, the fundamental problem of melee skills in poe1?

1. the strike skills targeting

Strike skills have bad targeting problem, and they are slow, low aoe and zdps, highly depend on weapon damage, and you have to spend 5-6 passive point on melee splash to make it merely "worked".

While spell and minions got good base damage, good aoe, no targeting issue and easy to scale the damage, without any useless investment on passives.

The "strike" tag was introduced in 3.7, and since then, most strike skills have been a pile of garbage, as they can't even perform a swing to prevent the monsters that are about to spawn.

Interestingly, among the strike skills, only flicker strike truly operates according to the characteristics of strike skills, while Lightning Strike breaks the principle of "effects by hitting enemies."

These two skills are often used by GGG's defenders as an excuse to claim that strike skills are not bad. However, in reality, GGG has never dared to truly nerf them, which would expose the fact that they have never addressed the issues with strike skills.

Even in version 3.26, strike skills with highly inflated values, such as dual strike, still have serious targeting problems, while the vast majority of skills do not need to consider this issue at all. The targeting problem may no longer cause my death in 3.26, but this is based on the premise that "everyone" can obtain sufficient defensive capabilities.

I'm pretty doubt that the guy who invent the strike tag really didn't play melee before.



2.slowness of slam skill

Just like how the strike skill requires hitting a target to take effect, giving the slam skill a high slowing effect was a foolish idea from the very beginning.

In the early game, the slowness of slam will makes players die because they can't interact any damaging effect from monsters; in the endgame, slowness of slam stops player from scaling enough damage.

GGG want player to scale big slam damage by interact with warcry, but they nerf warcry hard since 3.10.

Slam players are forced to use warcries, and during the warcry, they cannot deal any damage. In fact, the real DPS should account for the time spent on the warcry. From a global perspective, slam is an inconvenient, clumsy, low-damage, and foolish mechanic, all because "GGG wants to teach you how to play the game."

In the end of the story, the slam skill in 3.26 has turned into a way to use automatic warcries to avoid these ridiculous penalties, and there are only 4-5 skills that are barely "worth using" in this sad category.

By the way, the warcry passive of the chief after the rework is completely useless. Unless they are planning to abandon POE1, why would they keep proposing more useless reworks for such an poorly designed Ascendancy?
Oh wait, they really do want to abandon POE1 so nvm.


3. the skills that are not slam nor strike

cleave: dogshit
cleave of rage: cool but highly depends on weapon, when you got a weapon that can carry you to endgame, there are a lot of better skills.

rage vortex: one of my favorate melee skill, got nerf a lot of times for no good reason, got NO buff from 3.26.
rage vortex of berserking: one of the best clearing skill in melee, got NO buff from 3.26.

Chain Hook: pure dogshit since it was created.



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Sum up:

In poe1, the playstyle of strike skills and slam skills are both inconvenient, clumsy, low-damage, melee gets no return from the clumsy system.

And GGG actually didn't fix this core issue, only at the last moment did they give it a little bit of numbers to avoid Chris Wilson's four years of lies, and the entire game was abandoned without fulfilling the promises.



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Let's take a look at what happened to maces in Poe2:

1. Strike skills still have targetting issue and are extremely slow.
2. Slam skills are more than twice as slow compared to Poe1; it's not just a matter of playstyle adaptation, but the overall gameplay experience is quite clumsy.
3. Most melee skills have shockingly low damage.
4. The high damage from large aoe of rare mods means that melee characters face risks far greater than in Poe1, and the slow skills force players to cancel their skills to dodge these shits, making the feeling of being punished much higher than in Poe1.
5. It must be acknowledged that Poe2 theoretically allows for big slam damage to actually exist, which makes slam skills feel more rewarding in boss fights compared to Poe1. However, due to the stun mechanics and rare mods, 70% of monsters cannot be hit for big damage at the right time.
6. Only specific combinations can handle late-game content, and the feeling of "GGG wants to teach you how to play the game" is quite off-putting.
7. Most melee changes after the EA release have been poor and foolish, such as the slowdown of supercharge slam. With both passives and skills making attack speed so slow, I doubt anyone can fully charge in front of late-game bosses. Did the dev decide to slowdown supercharge slam test the new version himself? I don't think so. Proposing patchs that you haven't properly tested yourself is a very ridiculous thing. Shame on you dude.

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Regarding the current situation, my thoughts are as follows:
1. Cancel the stupid cast time for slam skills, or at least reduce it to below 0.5 seconds. The way these strongmen drift through the air at a speed that defies the laws of physics is visually uncomfortable, not to mention that this delay reduces player damage and makes it way easier to die.
2. Resolve the targeting problem that has not been fixed since version 3.7 of PoE1. The monk's solution is to make every skill behave like Flicker Strike, allowing it to teleport to the monster's face, while the mace has nothing. Just a reminder, version 3.7 was five years ago, and I reported this issue since the patch of the rework; GGG seems to have either never understood it or has been avoiding it for five years.
3. One-handed maces probably come from PoE1, as it seems GGG intended to abandon this category from the start, or it was meant for using Chain Hook, because this skill, like the one-handed mace, is born dogshit; they were created for the same purpose.
4. You can move while shooting, you can move while casting spells, and even the monk can move while using melee skills. I can accept that players cannot move while using mace skills, but there must be corresponding rewards for that. However, I guess GGG is afraid to do this because the moving speed of boots is so ridiculously precious that the rewards for being unable to move while using skills would be too great for GGG to handle. Ironically, the mace skill is now being punished with "unable to move while using the skill" without any reward.