How We're Approaching the Melee Rebalance in 3.7.0

Hopefully you'll get it right, I always love to play melee.

I'm not a super good player but I've mainly played "melee" and "tanky" characters throughout the years so here is some of my feedback.


DEFENSES:

1) Way back in the day I made a max block and as high spell block as I could. It was good for packs but not bosses since big 1 shots are a thing, roll the dice wrong and you're still dead - I don't think blocking should be an on/off switch whether you live or die but rather a percentage reduction of the damage you would otherwise get hit with.

2) Evading, same thing on/off switch - some times the stars just align and you get hit consecutively (granted I haven't played an evasion char for some time).

3) Armour - playing it currently with a shield build and not going all in on armour or block. With 20k armour I feel like a rag, I have no clue why blood rage and bleed are not mitigated by armour, otherwise there should be a separate line in the defenses that said how much mitigation you have against bleed or physical(chaos)/dot type damage.

4) Life - 5k for a defensive armour/block build is nothing especially since melee needs to be in monsters faces. 5k life Would be enough if defences worked better.

5) Leech - much easier access to leech ES than Life, unless you do physical damage.

6) Fortfiy being mandatory, if you don't have it you're just gimping your melee character.

7) Elemental reflect being trivialised, at least with Scion to my knowledge.


OFFENSE:

1) Attack speed is king - without that melee is crap because it just doesn't feel fluid. It would be a different story if we could do REALLY BIG hits 1 per second but that is not the case.

2) Animation - can't cancel it, so even if you do see shit coming your way if you're locked into an animation good luck getting out of the way.

3) Too much investment is needed for accuracy if you want to go crit - I'm pretty sure by level 90 or in case of real world example, if you've trained something long enough you've probably learned how to hit stuff.

4) Every skills needs to have an AOE component otherwise you're just like a snail without a shell. I wanted to make a freeze melee character and even though Glacial Hammer fit perfectly for my theme, i'd have to invest into 2 jewels just to get the aoe component - but I've remembered the horror of heavy strike (running up to mobs just to hit them) so I said no thanks to that idea and went with Ice Crash.

5) 1-handers having potentially the same dps as 2-handers.


RANDOM:

1) Skill effects - in my case while Ice Crash was the skill I wanted to work with, it was unviable because with my slow mace the attack got even slower & the effect of the skill made everything in my face so when an attack was placed beneath my feet I couldn't see it.

2) Movement skill for melee could see an improvement. Even though I could use shield charge this new league isn't made for it. So I tried out:
- Charged Dash >> has better range than Leap Slam but is slow (for me at least)
- Conscrated Path >> has huge aoe (good for cursing), fairly fast, but can't jump to a location with no monsters
- Leap slam >> smaller aoe than Consecrated Path (smaller curse radius), slower, can jump to location

Casters have Flame Dash that relies on cast speed and every caster goes for cast speed so flame dash is fast and can "jump" through and to thing. I'm not build chars with super high mobility or attack/cast speed so I can't say if they're in line, but if nothing else Flame Dash feels more fluid that other melee movement skills.

3) Forcing people to do fast builds if they want to do your main content, running from synthesis walls collapsing while killing things. I can't say what the situation was for last couple of leagues since I didn't play.

4) Useless skills or supports in general, why use a skill A with a support when skill B on its own does the same or even better.

5) Make the game more intuitive don't let users spend 90% of the time outside of the game figuring out stuff, that is a BAD business model. Businesses want to retain custumers on their platform not send them away.

6) Give us an option to tesdrive a character build we came up with (level and gear custom made by us, just like in PoB), so we don't waste time coming up with concepts that work only on paper. For players it would be best if we could choose to fight against any boss encounter (just not the latest one so we don't try out the tactics there for free).

7) Doorways, make them bigger.

8) Why do the synthesis mobs attack from 2 screens off, that's not a good game mechanic.

9) Can we have physical builds/gems that don't do more damage when converting to elemental/chaos. If you want everything to be elemental or chaos just make the base weapons do elemental damage and be done with it.

"

Chris wrote:

This post has been intentionally light on specific details because all of the above potential changes are ongoing experiments that evolve as we try new stuff. We'll post more information in the news over the coming weeks (with the majority of it after 3.7.0's announcement in May). We are very excited about these changes and look forward to sharing more information with you.

This would mean that you are actually testing your own game, but many prior leagues strongly indicates that you don't, or at least that you need to get a MUCH better testing team!

have you finally understood melee was destroyed by this league?

Sounds interesting. Now im really courious how they will change the melee problems.

"

ACGIFT wrote:

(...)
[/li][li]Rein in the speed clear meta. The speed clear meta wasn't just a consequence of power creep; rather, it came because the game has a really bad habit of not balancing the risks vs. rewards. A lot of boss fights (especially phased ones!) can take longer than the rest of the map put together, but yield nothing special that a pack of trash mobs would've given you... But has a FAR higher chance of you randomly getting spiked/one-shot to death. So much of the riskier content just has no compelling reason to touch it, hence the best solution for YEARS now has been to just build a super-speed glass cannon, and repeatedly farm easier stuff that gives better exalts & EXP/hr than anything genuinely hard would.

And through this lens, melee has no real purpose, since ranged lets you maintain better mobility by not having to run up to each and every monster. I mean, if every mob pack DID drop something you wanted to pick up (or anything other than one in a thousand packs...) we might move around a bit, but ranged combat just lets us run and take the shortest path through the map, and we only detour if our loot filter explodes.[/li][/list]

This is very true point. Lots of bosses gives nothing and are far more difficult to deal that the entire rest of mobs on the map. You have to spend more time, you risk to be one-shoot... and as reward you gain no significant experience and no drop (or rubbish drop, which doses not matter). This was also a reason why Delve was so good in my opinion - the risks and rewards were nicely and proportionally increased when player would decide to go deeper and deeper.

I really hope you guys don't forget about wanders at some point... Kinetic Blast is by far my favorite skill in the entire game but it takes so much to build around it and even then it's weaker than most skills in the game right now... not to mention it has 0 single target and it kinda sucks to use Barrage to make up for it!

My serious contribution and wishlist:

- Hit/Combo counters (similar to ruthless or infernal blow) in style of 1-2-1-2, 1-1-2 or 1-2-3 that are builtin or come from support and can enable extra effects like:

- Animation while moving
- Splash
- Lunge/dashes
- Some kind of tank while in contact

These could be incorporated to existing support gems i.e. splash, deals bigger splash on 2nd hit, or kaboom dmg on 3rd stuff like that, fortify blocks next 1 or N hits, life leech 3rd hit is insta etc

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Spear weapon class please!