How is this game playable in melee?

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kuciol wrote:

In a world where melee skill can kill end game bosses in 0.1s there is no room for improvement in that regard.

I guess if you're spending a mirror on a weapon then you might, and I say might be able to pull off a .1s kill. but that means nothing because that build is going to cost you multiple mirrors to pull that off. Most caster builds cost about 1/3 to 1/4 of what a melee build does to do the exact same thing.

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kuciol wrote:

Im wondering how you want to fix that fundamental issue. Giving melee more damage is just stupid, its has plenty. Moving power from weapons to gems? Thats making a spell. Giving it more splash? Thats no longer melee. Easier access to defense? Ranged can use that too, and killing mobs is superior form of defense anyway. How do you want to tackle that?

Well that's actually easy. The major difference between melee and casters is that you need a unicorn weapon to pull off what a caster can do with a lvl 20 or lvl 21 skill gem that you can buy for cheap. So the fix is either to require casters to be just as reliant on a good weapon as melee or to make good melee weapons a lot easier to obtain.

People defending melee by spending $500 or so on gear and gems and being like 'totally viable' or referencing streamers who do this as a VERY competitive job is why melee is trash.

This is why its worth some time taking down white knights. There is an impact on game balance.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I've leaguestarted melee this league. It was essentially my first league start since Bestiary since i am mostly a standard player.

Went for a 2 handed elemental based slayer build aiming for Voidforge as my endgame weapon. Started with double strike but switched to frost blades during yellow maps because my new weapon had low added cold and i compensated for that with conversion. Could have switched back later but didn't bother.

Thank you for this. Out of curiosity, does this include Sanctum?

I had more questions but I've just looked at your character setup and can see how it ticks. Slayers are great. PS LOL Double Strike on the wand -- as good a place to store it as any.

Yes, this obviously included Sanctums and yes i fully cleared them. Probably not with the same successrate as i could have done with a pure proxy damage build but decent enough for me at least. Sanctum is more about damage than about range. Most of the guardians are actually easier to deal with at close range and the one case that's admittedly a pain as melee (the blue mage with his 3 spheres) get's easily done in by dropping totems on him. Totems also block the magmar balls on floor 2 and 4 btw so they felt more beneficial than ever before this time thanks to the league mechanic.

And yes, slayers are great but i could do the same with pretty much any marauder/duelist ascendancy maybe outside of Gladiator.

So why is it so enticing to click my attack skill in the enemies face rather than 10ft away, there is no combo strikes or any skills to melee or caster, you click, skill plays, stuff dies (hopefully). So I am interested why so many people want melee in a game where I couldn't feel much difference to melee vs caster other than where I stood to attack?

Just for reference, I tried to do t16 sanctums with my Jugg at different levels of DPS, using boneshatter.

At 2-5mil I was limited to floor 1 and 2, I manager to get to boss 3 with about 7-8mil DPS but couldn't burst the boss in time. FIrst time I passed floor 3 was at around 10 mil dps.

Then I said fk this shit and respeced a lot of HP/defence nodes into pure crit nodes and went up to 19mil dps. With 19 mil I finished about 8 or 9 FULL 4 floor sanctum runs in a row successfully and earned the Grind 50 floors challenge, and that's w/o any prior knowledge of floor 4.

I'm pretty sure any ranged/spell build could do that without any sweat with just a few mil dps. With melee it was if not impossible then very very hard and annoying at that DPS level.

And yeah, I might not be the best POE player ever, but I've been doing this for years and I got 38 challenges in less than a month so I bet I'm far above the average player when it comes to using melee builds.

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But melee IS fine, its not just when you compare it to ranged options. In a world where melee skill can kill end game bosses in 0.1s there is no room for improvement in that regard.

There actually is. IMO strike skills in particular struggle the most in acts where you are starting out and have zero budget and unspent passive points. Actually the gearing thing might not be specific to melee, I recall bows having a hard time leveling up because they were as gear dependent, if not more so than Melee was but people only looked at the 10 shaper per second Tornado Shot builds that had high investment and complained about Headhunter ruining the game.

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Well that's actually easy. The major difference between melee and casters is that you need a unicorn weapon to pull off what a caster can do with a lvl 20 or lvl 21 skill gem that you can buy for cheap. So the fix is either to require casters to be just as reliant on a good weapon as melee or to make good melee weapons a lot easier to obtain.

Well the minion changes from a league ago I think it was proves that they will 100% make casters require hard to craft gear if they are able to get around to making those changes. They will do anything that points in the direction of adding valuable items to the market rather than what would actually help the player more.

1) Revert all strikes range or count, skils aoe range, projectiles count nerfs on all skill gems that has melee tag.
2) Revert all damage nerfs to all skill gems that has melee tag, and add even more flat damage to them.
3) Revert all nerfs to passive tree and ascendancy that increase melee damage.
4) Revert all the nerfs to berserker's Blitz, Crave of The Slaughter, and Rite of Ruin. Make it like 3.7
5) Remove map mod "physical damage reduction" and make overwhelm can penetrate physical damage reduction below zero.
6) Buff impale
7) Make cyclone and strike range to be like in Legion when slayer can just cyclone the whole screen.

Just make everything that has melee tag and melee archetype ascendancy to be strong af, but the downside is you need to deal damage at 5-unit radius. Or, just revert back cyclone aoe + strike range shenanigans, and revert back lightning strike nerfs, so they can be the "viable melee" build.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

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But melee IS fine, its not just when you compare it to ranged options. In a world where melee skill can kill end game bosses in 0.1s there is no room for improvement in that regard.

There actually is. IMO strike skills in particular struggle the most in acts where you are starting out and have zero budget and unspent passive points. Actually the gearing thing might not be specific to melee, I recall bows having a hard time leveling up because they were as gear dependent, if not more so than Melee was but people only looked at the 10 shaper per second Tornado Shot builds that had high investment and complained about Headhunter ruining the game.

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Well that's actually easy. The major difference between melee and casters is that you need a unicorn weapon to pull off what a caster can do with a lvl 20 or lvl 21 skill gem that you can buy for cheap. So the fix is either to require casters to be just as reliant on a good weapon as melee or to make good melee weapons a lot easier to obtain.

Well the minion changes from a league ago I think it was proves that they will 100% make casters require hard to craft gear if they are able to get around to making those changes. They will do anything that points in the direction of adding valuable items to the market rather than what would actually help the player more.

A mage blood make melee viable. Really that is what it comes down to. Go look at the deepest delve build right now, it's a melee earth shatter build. Then take off his mage blood and that alone is what's allowing him to do that. The investment required is so high to be on par with a caster.

Nearly all of the player made uniques are what has made the meta what it is. These players keep making uniques for caster mainly and we end up with more and more caster build because that is who the most powerful uniques are made for and then those caster builds keep winning because they got to make themselves the most powerful items in the game.

my solution would be to have built in defenses when you choose certain classes. maybe like under used classes ... like Glad, Berserker, Guardian, Slayer.

where when you are using a specific weapon set you get bonuses to defenses. for example (i am not a numbers guys so this is just an example)

if you play Gladiator and you are wielding an axe/hammer/claw/sword and a armor based shield you get .5% spell block for every 1% attack block

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kuciol wrote:

Melee will never be "viable" as long as we are able to one shot monsters and are able to recover any dmg in 0.01s. End of story, stop crying, it wont ever change.

Melee worked just fine for literal years before getting hit with heavy direct and indirect nerfs multiple patches. I'm still farming 100s in SSFHC on melee, but the number of viable builds is much more limited, and the viable stuff is much worse than it would be prior to 3.15.

Really stupid take, you should practice reading the things you write before you post them.