so, about that 3.25 melee rework - how to not kill melee entirely in few steps:

People have been expecting a melee buff for how many years now?
I think it's time we stop the melee hopium, it won't happen, you can see how much they are investing into the game when every league is almost the same options, 4 month league with poor performance and a bad league mechanic+ no events, league is theoritically dead at 2 months but GGG hasnt got enough devs to work on a fucking event that they can just copy paste and add a litle bit of new code, add some kind of cool mechanic like they added on the chinese server which is you steal one buff from rare monsters, but naaah gotta add that 200$ supporter pack, mtx get more love than leagues do lmao

"

roundishcap wrote:

I have thought a lot about physical ailments recently and boy do they suck.

Melee builds can have easy access to bleed, stun, crush, impale. Too bad they all suck.

Let's look.

Bleed is a much much much worse ignite and poison. Can be good but needs a rebalance. Bow build builds aren't strictly better, but just much smoother to play.

Stun. Useless. Investing into stun really lowers your dps. Meanwhile freeze is easy and free comparatively. The opportunity cost is too high. ( a theme here) just compare what it takes to stun the minotaur versus freezing it. We are talking like 2-3 cluster setups versus 2 5 point passive wheels and crit. Maybe an exaggeration but not really.

Crush. Hey its free damage, kind of, but the easiest way to get it is to use maces which is a huge dps nerf. Mace nodes are less good, axes are just better in every eay. At the point where crush is a buff enemy physical resistance is near zero anyway because of the incidental physical damage reduction overwhelm on the tree.

Impale. Hey its also free damage, can be easy to get. It does next to nothing. It scales worse with attack speed. Imagine if impale was just enemy takes 20-30% more phys damage.

It is sad that +1curse and skitterbots are better than all of these things combined. Honestly ggg failed melee here and buffing these would go a long way to "fixing" the problem.

Like imagine a unique jewel that converts stun to impale. Or what of they let enemy physical resistance go below zero. So many ways to make these work.

bleed - looking at how melee's supports and passives are worded - is supposed to go ALONG hit damage (unlike poison/ignite) - thus Cruelty is a thing. given unlimited budget it actually works like that, it is a damn nice %more multiplier on top of hit damage BUT, there are few 'buts':
- chance to bleed is rare, it actually one of few 'the' setups, or significant investment to get it high enough to matter
- monsters get A LOT of %PDR nowadays, bleed has limited options to handle that
- melee bleed unique options are limited to exactly 2 items that happen to be good but oh man how do they suck compared to lets say.. Indigon?

Stun - correct. freeze (does the same thing) is A LOT cheaper to get and you can prolif it. it is insane how expensive getting stun to work is and there is no reason to go half-in: there is no chill equivalent for stuns (well, maces get it from mastery - it is actually GREAT mastery)

Crush - yes and no. this is where i think you might miss the mark. mobs can get A LOT of %PDR nowadays. you are very mistaken thinking that you can reduce it all with 'accidental' investment. you need Crush and as much Overwhelm as you need. the 'yes' part is that Crush is lousy, weak and difficult to get.

and finally, Impale.

I do think you got something wrong with damage calculation. Impale works and impale deals f.. of damage, and is attack-speed neutral

what you need to get your impales to work (easy version, there is a much more finicky one):
- you impales ignore %PDR. this is MANDATORY, you MUST take any you can find. if you dont, your impales (small hits) will be cut by A LOT. and pretty much nullified by bosses who get in excess of 20k AR + accidental %PDR from zone mods. this is THE MOST important stat for an impale build!
- any %PDR that does not state 'hits'. Crush is good, Poacher's Mark is good, Overwhelm is bad
- Impale Support is actually fine because of 40% impale effect is a lot
- Impale effect is direct %more multiplier that is not suffering from any previous increases, no diminishing returns here.

sadly, it all takes A LOT of resources
- at least two impale clusters (you need two to get 25+15 %PDR reduction for impales)
- impale support meaning youll overcap impale chance (good for some map mods tho)
- impale effect sources: there is Crusader roll (its rare, hard to craft for but VERY strong), jewels
- you should take Poacher's Mark that means +curse is mandatory and you cannot use Warlords/Assassins

even without sources of extra impales, you get ~double damage with 5 impales, 100% impale effect

there are even more fun tricks with 'non-impaled enemies' and methods of quickly cycling trough impales (the impale masteries are surprisingly well designed) but if someone is willing to perform such dance around mechanics, there are better builds to do it


my biggest gripes with phys damage builds are:
- phys weapons are hard-to-roll yet garbage. 600pdps 1h is incredibly hard to roll yet it is easily beaten by any 'rainbow' setup or XXXstacking for fraction of the price
- bleed, stun, impale are interesting but they cost 1/4th of the tree to spec into, while alternatives - like freeze - you get for ~free. nobody at GGG played this so they simply do not see just how incredibly expensive this stuff is
- proliferation of %PDR on mobs kills bleed and to lesser extent - impale. map mod + altar == capped %PDR. phys build on such a map is not a joy to play.

it is a convoluted mess. meanwhile Reap has all this built-in and numbers better than TWO mirror-tier 1h glued together. beat that.

If they do ONLY THIS it will be a MASSIVE improvement:

1- Remove totems and incorporate a big part of their power directly into the close melee gems.

2- Remove penalty to attack speed from melee gems.

3- All melee gems should grant 20 stacks of fortify(for 10s) instantly upon hitting enemies IN CLOSE RANGE/NEARBY.

That's it. Not a big list.

"Oh but then X would happen and X skill will broken or X item will be broken or casters will be able to get fortify by doing Z..."

So what? Deal with these cases one by one later, after buffing melee.

It won't be the first time something is broken in PoE...

"

robert2003 wrote:

People have been expecting a melee buff for how many years now?
I think it's time we stop the melee hopium, it won't happen, you can see how much they are investing into the game when every league is almost the same options, 4 month league with poor performance and a bad league mechanic+ no events, league is theoritically dead at 2 months but GGG hasnt got enough devs to work on a fucking event that they can just copy paste and add a litle bit of new code, add some kind of cool mechanic like they added on the chinese server which is you steal one buff from rare monsters, but naaah gotta add that 200$ supporter pack, mtx get more love than leagues do lmao

+100

with so much resources allocated to poe2, its logical to assume that it would take a long time before we see any reworks. if it ever happens at all.

tbh, ggg has NO REASON to improve poe1 melee anymore.

its a huge work balancing. if they make melee good it might become too good. if they dont make it "good" theres no difference.

the reality is the game evolved with ZERO consideration for melee.

i've been high on hopium for 4 years after the first exilecon. all that hopium vanished when they announced the games were separated.

Exactly, the only skills that are allowed to be too good are spells/proj skills.

We will more than likely be stuck str stacking again. It is what it is.

Buffffgfffffffffffff meleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee pleaaaaaaaaaassssssseeeeee 😭😭😭😭😭😭

Started my own melee rage thread the other day didn't see this. Plus one from here - warcries are pointless apart from making spell damage good... what? LOL! Brutality barely gets used sept on BS (where I see it in most builds) and ironically the most dps you can pull from BS is not using it but infact doing a hatred build around BS with skitterbots what what not..

Brutality needs a huge uplift, warcries should be abolished why should we have to punch 3-4 more buttons than the ranged folks who literally just press one button whilst watching tv and do 300% more damage, more area clear, more move speed, more tankiness due to energy shields etc.

Completely agree with aura/supression - you double your armor and sit with say 75k and it's like wearing a bathrobe anyway - phys reduction from armor needs a a rework - a massive shield and 1 hander should actually make you a tank, 2 hander with huge 4-5k armor should make a very tanky - its stupid that you can have 120k armor and it means NOTHING but you can spec into a bit of spell supression as a raider, max it out, avoid some chill and phase through enemies and take more hits, its so fricking crazy! Melee armor should have an actual benefit! a BIG one - there should be more life on melee classes too, not 19k hp on my friends righteous fire along with his 50k+ energy shield - Melee, traditionally in EVERY SINGLE RPG/MMORPG/Board game etc - more HP, better armor than caster and ranged who are traditionally paper canons... GGG has gotten it so off track in an attempt to create more options.

Melee is an absolute joke. I hoped over the years with each patch it would get a buff but nope, GGG bro's just actually hate it and make it so clear that they do it's kind of weird/creepy.

Personally when it comes to Glad. I would just turn the Bleed bonus into a global bonus with some conditions. Don't fully restrict him to Dual Wield but it would be cool for both Glas and Assassin to get back some DW value. Not a fan of "I get X bonus pick me" Ascendancy.

Call to Arms was 100% correct. My Ele made better use than melee prolly. I wouldn't mind seeing Zerker get back Warcry perks. Ones that matter. I hate stat stacking builds but it really is just about numbers for melee both Defensive and Offensive.

Many have already suggested that Fortify be Duration based, not stack based. I generally agree with this but think it should be additive to a max duration. So rapid dual wield hits will generally have to same outcome as slow big hits.

melee is fine, just give it some mana on kill and everythings good ;D

"

Sydneydonza wrote:

Started my own melee rage thread the other day didn't see this. Plus one from here - warcries are pointless apart from making spell damage good... what? LOL! Brutality barely gets used sept on BS (where I see it in most builds) and ironically the most dps you can pull from BS is not using it but infact doing a hatred build around BS with skitterbots what what not..

Brutality needs a huge uplift, warcries should be abolished why should we have to punch 3-4 more buttons than the ranged folks who literally just press one button whilst watching tv and do 300% more damage, more area clear, more move speed, more tankiness due to energy shields etc.

Completely agree with aura/supression - you double your armor and sit with say 75k and it's like wearing a bathrobe anyway - phys reduction from armor needs a a rework - a massive shield and 1 hander should actually make you a tank, 2 hander with huge 4-5k armor should make a very tanky - its stupid that you can have 120k armor and it means NOTHING but you can spec into a bit of spell supression as a raider, max it out, avoid some chill and phase through enemies and take more hits, its so fricking crazy! Melee armor should have an actual benefit! a BIG one - there should be more life on melee classes too, not 19k hp on my friends righteous fire along with his 50k+ energy shield - Melee, traditionally in EVERY SINGLE RPG/MMORPG/Board game etc - more HP, better armor than caster and ranged who are traditionally paper canons... GGG has gotten it so off track in an attempt to create more options.

Melee is an absolute joke. I hoped over the years with each patch it would get a buff but nope, GGG bro's just actually hate it and make it so clear that they do it's kind of weird/creepy.

What if + strenght nodes from the tree gave innate + life or %damage reduction... or both?

Other classes would still be able to get them, but at a cost...