How is this game playable in melee?

i was expecting you didnt get it.

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The main problem with melee is not the damage

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"lets make skill broken"

how can infinite dmg make melee broken by your own words ?
at least you admit damage can fix a skill, we re making progress. but you contradict yourself

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give all the skills infinite dmg and guess what? Range will still be better.

and also melee dmg and range dmg can be independent. you know , balance and stuff.

It's okay only less than 10% of the player base uses melee so there is no need for a rework (this is a buff by the way) Please enjoy some of our ranged skills, many other players like you have enjoyed these recently. Thank you.

I mean even if we go with that absurd hyperbole of yours. Yes, a skill with infinite damage would see some play for bossing, no matter how much of a mechanical pain it is and despite other restrictions. But that's it.

It would be a choice for one, minor, aspect of the game and only because it can do that aspect without any investment. Once other skills invest properly they again start to overtake the infinite damage skill because they kill just as fast but are mechanically superior and have less restrictions. For mapping and farming the infinite damage skill will always be inferior due to his limitations.
So at the end of the day, Kuciol is close to the truth. Even if you make a hyperbole out of it, damage doesn't fix most of the issues and giving infinite damage just creates new issues. If you actually stay in reasonable boundaries then damage buffs are going to do very little because any proper build will have good damage even now.

People asking for damage buffs typically either don't understand the underlying problem or want GGG to fix their bad builds or both.

not everyone goes for the currency per hour.
yes on a currency per hour scenario you want coverage but that s only a small percentage of players. most melee skills today have more than enough screen coverage for most players. for instance the classic play chill and go for 7/7 pinnacle then uber pinnacle.

all strike skills have enough coverage. a lot of slam skills too.

and EVEN for lower coverage skills, more base damage or synergy damage means more room for defenses, as it has been said. so more enjoyable gameplay for a lot of players.

and again, yes, for stuff like 5 ways you wont use melee skills. but then again for 5 ways, farmers use one skill only.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

People asking for damage buffs typically either don't understand the underlying problem or want GGG to fix their bad builds or both.

people refusing to consider damage to fix stuff are usually people that copy top build makers and think that make them smart.

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SerialF wrote:

not everyone goes for the currency per hour.
yes on a currency per hour scenario you want coverage but that s only a small percentage of players. most melee skills today have more than enough screen coverage for most players. for instance the classic play chill and go for 7/7 pinnacle then uber pinnacle.

But that's exactly what it boils down to when people want melee to be competitive with spells or talk about how it's weak relativ to spells. If it's about just "finishing the game" then even most melee haters will agree that it can be done. Melee is fine relative to the content, it's in relation to (top meta) spell caster builds where it falls short.

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people refusing to consider damage to fix stuff are usually people that copy top build makers and think that make them smart.

Hate to break it to you but i wouldn't even know where to look for a "top build maker" that specializes in melee. Are there even any?

My builds work because i invest time and effort testing stuff and working out the kinks and improving them over time, unlike 99% of the "melee is bad" faction here in the forum who league start it and then drop it for some ranged build before they are even out of the campaign because they run into some obstacle.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

...unlike 99% of the "melee is bad" faction here in the forum who league start it and then drop it for some ranged build before they are even out of the campaign because they run into some obstacle.

This feels like a jab at me, so I feel obliged to react.

It's not that I've ran into some obstacle, but rather that I've played a wide variety of builds over the time, so I've got some sense of how strong should the character be at a certain stage.

When I see that I can double my single target and triple my clear by vendoring the claws, getting a 3C bow and buying lvl1 gems for it, I find it difficult to conclude anything other than that the melee gem I was playing with has some serious inherent problems.

And I can also tell that the melee gem in question doesn't have anything that would make it uniquely different from almost all other melee skills (aside from boneshatter and flicker strike, who have their own extra scaling (and maybe frost blades because cold is infinitely easier to scale than any other damage type thanks to heatshiver)).

Yes, I know the melee meta is to play duelist and primarily scale defenses to make the character nearly immortal to compensate for the lack of everything else, but having an exception to a general case doesn't exactly disprove it.

Don't worry, you aren't the first and certainly the last person who did/does that so it's not about you in specific. It's a common occurence and imo is just another example how people always take the easy way out.

You can blame it all on the melee gem if you like but i don't buy it for a second. I never played wild strike but just looking at the numbers between it and LA it doesn't add up at all. Level 1 LA having twice the single target (LA of all things) of a level 10+ wild strike and 3 times the clear using weapons of similar quality? I mean the clear, yeah maybe that's what LA excels at but the single target? No way. Dunno what you did wrong there but must have been a hell of a lot.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Don't worry, you aren't the first and certainly the last person who did/does that so it's not about you in specific. It's a common occurence and imo is just another example how people always take the easy way out.

You can blame it all on the melee gem if you like but i don't buy it for a second. I never played wild strike but just looking at the numbers between it and LA it doesn't add up at all. Level 1 LA having twice the single target (LA of all things) of a level 10+ wild strike and 3 times the clear using weapons of similar quality? I mean the clear, yeah maybe that's what LA excels at but the single target? No way. Dunno what you did wrong there but must have been a hell of a lot.

The single target comes from artillery ballista, which shotguns pretty well.

And what I did wrong was expecting it to play like any other type of build, like bows or any spells or minions or projectiles or whatever else I played in the past, where entering maps with ~3k life, capped resists, and <5 C weapon was perfectly fine... not with a melee skill though.

Though to be fair, some of the problems likely come from the patch - rare modifier 'resist critical strikes' seems to be back to 'takes no extra damage from critical strikes' which neatly counters any crit-based build, and I'm sure there's more new bullshit behind other rare mob modifiers, I just noticed this one in particular essentially meant I was going to grow a beard before killing the mob as I played a nightblade-based scaling crit build.

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Xyel wrote:

And what I did wrong was expecting it to play like any other type of build, like bows or any spells or minions or projectiles or whatever else I played in the past, where entering maps with ~3k life, capped resists, and <5 C weapon was perfectly fine... not with a melee skill though.

Can't talk about the Crucible league mechanic but i did exactly that last league using double strike and a 3c weapon and i was oneshotting everything that crossed my way. Kept using that 3c weapon all the way into late yellow/early red maps before the damage started to fall off. It always amazes me how the experiences of two people playing the same game can be so vastly different.