Melee balancing suggestions - Remove Giant's Blood requirements

After playing both melee classes, warrior and monk for 200 hours it is clear monk is more powerful, and not just because of the quarterstaff. But the defenses.

Invoker is perfect defensively it is what every melee should be like. It has overpowered defenses, which melee should have, evasion to armor and energy shield and can also go CI.

Warrior has more armor and also block, so it should be equivalent right? No. Because of the Giant's blood requirements. And almost every warrior needs Giant's blood. 3X Strength is just too much. It means not only you have to invest every piece to have strength but also chaos res, while monk can just go CI. And still not able to use the most powerful maces unless extremely min-maxxed.

That means that warrior needs gear that has 1 or 2 more stats than monk. Strength and Chaos res, and still be inferior defensively. So he is immensely harder to gear.

CI has always been the easy way in PoE, but at least remove the strength requirement. And CI is vastly more powerful in PoE2, to the point I don't see why anyone would not play CI. But that can get tuned.

My suggestion is to remove the 3X from Giant's blood, make it 1.5X, or even none at all.

Then the warrior will be able to compete with the invoker at least defensively.

The duelist etc. I feel will be fine they can scale evasion and armor and the combo is OP in PoE 2, if they also have some defense mechanism in the ascendancy, they will be OK.

But block is to the warrior what evasion is to the dexers, it needs to be as easy to get.

In the initial reveal for PoE2, Giant's Blood was 2x the requirement.

Why they increased it to 3x, who the heck knows. 2x would have been the best spot for it, IMO.

Keystones generally should have a very specific benefit and drawback, like CI and Vaal Pact, for instance.

Edit: What should be applied to this is the benefits of dual wielding weapons. When I played around with GB, I didn't see any of the benefits dual-wield offered historically, those being an attack speed increase and chance to block.

But CI has no drawback in PoE2. Life is usually limited so the drawback is none at all. And Chaos damage is very prevalent so being immune to it is massive. And there's even ways to recover energy shield with potions and whatnot. Bleed also doesn't affect you, poison doesn't affect you and there is even charms for freeze and stuns.

Moreover it was my mistake I said 2 stats that warrior needs but it's actually 3. Life + Chaos res + Strength. Monk and CIers need nothing, just a high energy shield role, while warrior still needs that same armor roll.

CI completely removes the need for Life and Chaos Res on your gear. This is absolutely massive and no Keystone can even remotely compete and the drawback is nothing.

The drawback for CI is you need to farm fairly decent gear and generally invest heavily into ES for it to work.

The drawback for ES is that it doesn't mitigate physical damage like armour/health do combiined.

There are certainly lots of negatives tied to CI and ES...

It is much, much easier to stack ES in PoE2 than PoE1, and the benefits of doing so in this game outweigh all the crap mechanics GGG put into the game. My current toon is a hybrid ES/Life hexblaster chronomancer. I'm only at 2k ES at level 65... mostly because my gear is SSF garbage. This game is unrewarding to the melee archetype health and armour defensive layer users and somehow GGG still can't get melee right while every other diablo-like ARPG somehow does.

Note: edits

Nah you don't need to farm nothing in trade league. A few exalts worth of gear will easily land you to 3K, you can switch as soon as you start maps and get your first crappy gear and be immortal. And like the devs said the game is balanced for trade.

You are thinking in PoE 1 mentality where the tree scaled life, though tbh CI was still overpowered then, but it is extreme now.

It is actually the opposite now, you need no gear for CI to work, while you need gear for the non-CI versions. And CI is more powerful while requiring less gear.

And you forget about things like Grim Feast, which means you have 8K instead of 3. And potions recovering ES.

Trust me invoker defenses are absurd you need no gear to be immortal, and you still have these suffixes-prefixes empty to do anything you want with them like rarity, while the warrior can't.

I'm not saying invoker is bad, melee should be more defensive than ranged but warrior is lacking, mainly due to Giant's blood requirements and of course mace being inferior.

Your edits don't change anything, I specifically talk about invoker monk who combines ES with evasion AND armor.

Even witches are going for armor it seems, because yeah a high ES on its own is inferior than life + armor, unless you delete the screen with uber-geared sorc so you only care of mitigating that one big hit.

But you can go ES AND Armor in this game, like everyone is doing, and like the upcoming druid and templar will do. Or you can go Evasion AND Armor which the right side of the tree does which is also quite powerful.

You really need two defensive layers in this game to be safe, that's why I am advocating of reducing the requirements of Giant's Blood.

And yeah Invoker dips into 3 defensive layers so it will always be overpowered unless changed.

As for GGG not getting melee, they certainly nailed it with Invoker but missed the mark with Warrior it seems.

The fixes aren't as easy as in other CRPGs because in PoE you can't just give melee 30% all defenses because nobody guarantees melee class will play as melee and people might abuse that, but I believe there are workarounds, like 30% defenses when attacking with melee skill.

Or creative ways of triple layer of defenses like with invoker.

But make that extra defenses somehow tied with being melee like for example strength requirement of Giant's blood is fine as a concept, just too extreme.

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Mistok#4327 wrote:

Nah you don't need to farm nothing in trade league. A few exalts worth of gear will easily land you to 3K, you can switch as soon as you start maps and get your first crappy gear and be immortal. And like the devs said the game is balanced for trade.

You are thinking in PoE 1 mentality where the tree scaled life, though tbh CI was still overpowered then, but it is extreme now.

It is actually the opposite now, you need no gear for CI to work, while you need gear for the non-CI versions. And CI is more powerful while requiring less gear.

And you forget about things like Grim Feast, which means you have 8K instead of 3. And potions recovering ES.

Trust me invoker defenses are absurd you need no gear to be immortal, and you still have these suffixes-prefixes empty to do anything you want with them like rarity, while the warrior can't.

I'm not saying invoker is bad, melee should be more defensive than ranged but warrior is lacking, mainly due to Giant's blood requirements and of course mace being inferior.

That's the difference between you and me. I'm SSF. No trade. I don't spend exalts buying gear. The crafting gamble in this game is so utterly worthless 98% of the time as well. The more I traded stuff in PoE1, the less interested I was in the game... so for this entry, I just... stopped trading...

I haven't tried invoker yet. I did Chayula monk and found it to be pretty underwhelming.

As it stands, in SSF, CI is harder to achieve compared to not being SSF. Stacking ES is so much easier in this game and it negates most of the garbage mechanics GGG have put into this game. It's a fundamental design issue that they have with the game at the moment. GGG will almost certainly be nerfing ES soon next year, so everyone gets to suffer equally.

Balancing the game around trade is also an ass decision on their part because it is just sheer laziness. Why balance the innumerable underlying systems when you can just balance around ONE thing and let people sort it out themselves? It is laziness and that's it; and it will come back to get them in the end.

Like I mentioned as well... GGG has never been able to get melee right. The mind-bafflingly dumb design decisions they put into this game actively disincentivize melee players.

Honestly Giant's Blood is a terrible keystone and should be obliterated or at least moved to an ascendancy. The problem is that maces are balanced around dealing BIG SLOW HITS, so 1h maces just don't work which makes giant's blood mandatory. Fix this, and then move the keystone to an ascendancy.

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LaiTash#6276 wrote:

Honestly Giant's Blood is a terrible keystone and should be obliterated or at least moved to an ascendancy. The problem is that maces are balanced around dealing BIG SLOW HITS, so 1h maces just don't work which makes giant's blood mandatory. Fix this, and then move the keystone to an ascendancy.

Heh, if they do that, then my dream of a twink Stormweaver dual-wielding two two handed swords frost blading around will be dead (assuming they add frost blades into the game).

Giant's Blood requirements is easy to get for titans
also the skill tree have -18 % requirements also you are able to get your weapon - 35% reduced Attribute Requirements some item give a lot of strength(+100) same in the skill tree

i make my warrior and directly i just pick up giant blood np

the time ggg fix the armor update adding a few other skill warrior will not be so bad , the 300 % requirements is for other class having harder time to pick up giant blood because is just so strong . endgame weapon are around 1k each