Nioh 3 did ARPG melee right

Active Mitigation:

Nioh understands that if a boss is fast, the player needs to be faster

PoE2 bosses have Elden Ring complexity (at least it tries), but our characters still move like they are in slow motion (very true early)

Cancel Windows:

Nioh allows you to cancel into dodges or blocks at specific frames

PoE2's dodge roll is a start, but the startup frames on most melee skills make it feel like you are playing on 200ms latency even when you are at 20ms

Positional Reward:

In Nioh, melee feels right, you dance with the enemy, you are in control of your character, it feels snappy, right, it feels satisfying, your attacks combo right from LVL 1

In PoE2, melee still feels like "stand and trade hits until one of you dies, or sloproll until you can attack", or activate an animation and wait till it ends, then repeat, a boring rotation


The Weight Illusion:

GGG is confusing slow with heavy

A Mace swing should feel heavy because of the impact it has on the enemy (hit stun, screenshake, knockback), not because it takes 2.5 seconds to wind up while a white mob stuns you out of the animation


The Reality Check:

If the meta game for PoE2 ends up being "play ranged or totems because melee takes too much damage for too little uptime" then the sequel hassn'ot actually fixed anything


Minimizing Piano gamin, Maximizing Rhythmin:

The Wolf (Druid) is a step in the right direction because it hints at a flow state, it feels more like a cohesive kit

However, it also exposes the biggest issue of PoE 2: button bloat

GGG is so focus with the idea of "comboing" skills that they are asking us to manage eight different keyybinds just to perform a basic "rotation" (i hate that word)

To fix this, you could design a system that allows skills to have built in combos that chain with each other through contextual inputs

- Followups: Instead of requiring a separate keybind for a "followup" let the primary skill gem morph into the next logical step in the chain after a successful hit

- The "Nioh Solution: In Nioh, you arent managing 20 different active skills, youre mastering the variations of a few, PoE2 should allow us to "embed" active support skills "tag than Combo" into our main skills, where a second press during a specific frame triggers a different branch of the move set

We shouldn't have to replicate "Flask Piano" but with "Rotation Button Piano" just to feel effective, if i use a Leap Slam, my next input for a Rolling Slam should automatically inherit the momentum, instead of telling people to jsut dodge cancel (LUL), perhaps even sharing a single button through a "sequenced skill" slot

If GGG doesn't streamline the inputs, melee isn't going to feel "tactical", it's just going to feel like a slog

We want to fight the monsters, after all


Conclusion:

GGG needs to realize that "challenging" should not mean clunky, if they don't find a way to make the player feel as agile as the encounters demand, the player base is going to keep continue their 1 button build chase, back to the zoom zoom meta of PoE1

META in PoE 2 should be skill expression, not brainlessly blasting

Most popular archetype should be Melee, not Ranged

Missing archetypes are all Melee, please, do what ever it takes to make melee shine, the current vision is good, but the implementation is horrible


TLDR: GGG needs to trade clunky animation locks for Nioh style fluidity by replacing button bloat with built in skill combos that actually reward being meleeing, it needs to double/tripple/quadupple its animation team, and focus on melee!

I wanted to expand and include "Enemy AI", "Skill Design", "Traps of a Forward Progression based Map Design", but i can't be bothered for this TED Talk, maybe for another one

Now put 50 enemies on every screen in nioh 3 with the player expectation that all of them shall be instantly killed or else 'game bad' and I will take this comparison semi seriously.

poe2's main problem is that it doesn't really know what it wants to be.

We have some signs of a more engaging combat system, but the game still floods you with hundreds of mobs per second, which incentivizes building 1 button, or even 0 button characters.

I don't know what it will take for somebody at GGG to realize that flooding the screen with monsters is not the only way to design an arpg, and that they could fix A TON of problems (performance anyone?) by finally moving away from this antiquated notion.

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arandan#3174 wrote:

Now put 50 enemies on every screen in nioh 3 with the player expectation that all of them shall be instantly killed or else 'game bad' and I will take this comparison semi seriously.

poe2's main problem is that it doesn't really know what it wants to be.

We have some signs of a more engaging combat system, but the game still floods you with hundreds of mobs per second, which incentivizes building 1 button, or even 0 button characters.

I don't know what it will take for somebody at GGG to realize that flooding the screen with monsters is not the only way to design an arpg, and that they could fix A TON of problems (performance anyone?) by finally moving away from this antiquated notion.

You nailed it

But one goes with the other, you can't have 1 to 1 combat if your melee feels dog shit

And you can't have good melee if your goal is to explode the whole screen filled with zombies

My point is that the only reason you feel melee characters are too slow is because your screen is being flooded with mobs.

In a game where it is trivial to build characters that will instantly delete 2+ screens of mobs, ranged builds will ALWAYS be 'quicker' and more efficient.

Couple that with the fact that the entirety of the looting system is centred around IIQ+IIR (aka pulling the RNG lever as often as possible) and you're left with a scenario where playing anything but the aforementioned is intentionally gimping yourself.

You could fully remove any animation build-up from pure melee skills and they'd still feel shit to play, because you cannot delete the whole screen with a press of a button and that is essentially what this entire game is forcing you to do if you want to be efficient.
That is why the only few usable 'melee' builds are centred around turning low aoe skills into full screen clearing ones via supports.

There is no fixing this unless they start developing a different game, instead of just reskinning poe1.