will melee EVER get some love?

why does it seem that melee has been dead for a looooong time
what ever happened to the "hack slash and smash "aspect of poe?
thoughts?

I've been advocating for some melee love for a long time now, and it's difficult, because at the very high end, melee is more than fine. But leveling through maps, especially reds, is a pain on a lot of melee builds/skills, unless you pick a skill that levels itself, like Boneshatter.

That said, melee is better than ever this league, as it rains currency, and 'most' players can afford to make melee good.

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Phrazz wrote:

I've been advocating for some melee love for a long time now, and it's difficult, because at the very high end, melee is more than fine. But leveling through maps, especially reds, is a pain on a lot of melee builds/skills, unless you pick a skill that levels itself, like Boneshatter.

That said, melee is better than ever this league, as it rains currency, and 'most' players can afford to make melee good.

I agree - somewhat. Most notably this picture refers to Molten Strike which is actually one of the hardest-hitting skills we have in the game right now. There are other good melee skills that have a solid standing, be it Boneshatter as the low-budget delve king or Glacial Hammer as a solid gem in general.
What I am missing is different ways to scale em and pure physical melee skills could use some love, namely impale. Voidforge / Trinity / Hatred is basically the easy-to-go answer to bring any melee build into the millions of damage. Things like rage-stacking could be a solid option for multiple different builds, yet I remember they even deleted some rage from the tree, so yeah...

Molten Strike is as strong because it takes the best of both worlds: Melee dmg multipliers paired with projectile scaling. I would much rather see a new way to build melee, and I think this is what people are mostly complainig about: It feels like your options are limited, and I personally agree with that.

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Vennto wrote:

Molten Strike is as strong because it takes the best of both worlds: Melee dmg multipliers paired with projectile scaling. I would much rather see a new way to build melee, and I think this is what people are mostly complainig about: It feels like your options are limited, and I personally agree with that.

Yeah... "Stacking" is clearly the way to go these days, be that armor, attributes or charge stacking. Throw in a Nimis and some mark effect on top of that, and you have a winner, as long as you pick a projectile skill. And when Ralakesh gets nerfed next league, we'll have even fewer options. Though, I doubt Sniper's Mark will survive next league's patch notes.

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im_a_manatee wrote:

why does it seem that melee has been dead for a looooong time

Because you are stuck with a mindset that its bad and you refuse to touch it unless it becomes meta/fotm.
I played 2 melee builds this league, neither of them was Boneshatter and I had a blast. I play melee every single league and unless you plan doing ubers, there is no reason to not play melee IF YOU WANT TO PLAY MELEE.

melee requires to much investment for something with lower clearspeed and that often involves more danger than ranged.

2 things that would help melee:

1) make melee skills add flat damage per level in an increasing way like spells, how much is to be determined but some need it more than others.

2) make weapon attack nodes give an additional defensive buff while using that weapon type.

for instance:
*all mace nodes +30 armor, all mace keystones +150 armor
*staff attack nodes +3% increased life and ES, staff attack keystones +8% increased life and ES
*sword nodes could give spell suppression
*claws nodes could give block/spell block
*dagger attack nodes could give critical resistance
*axes could give % reduced damage taken

@OP There were a lot of topics on both reddit and here advocating for melee buffs before Sanctum league, enough to cause GGG to promise "melee buffs". We then got a bunch of vaal gems which i believe, see zero use.
The only thing that you could actually count as a melee buff in the recent years were the buffs to endgame weapons, with voidforge being the main factor.

I think those 2 facts speak for themselves. You'll either have to adjust to how melee is right now or drop it in favor of other stuff. If there is change then it's most likely for the worse like this league with the loss of alt gems and helm enchants. Personally i believe GGG considers melee to be in a good place and they refuse to buff it because of that.

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I would much rather see a new way to build melee, and I think this is what people are mostly complainig about: It feels like your options are limited, and I personally agree with that.

Agreed. But they don't even have to introduce new ways of scaling. It would already be a great improvement if they updated the values on all the unique weapons in the game that have essentially become pointless from all the recent monster powercreep. You just can't do endgame content on a 200 pdps onehander or 500 pdps two hander anymore. Anything below 400/700 dps might as well not exist.

As long melee wont be TOP meta plastyle people will always complain that "melee need buffs". People want to play melee but only if its the best thing possible. It being "good enough" is not enough. If there is anything else in the game that is better than melee, it doesnt matter they want to play melee. They NEED to play best thing possible!
Its people mindset about all that crazy minmaxing that needs change. Start playing this game for fun. If you want to play something, do it. It doesnt matter that its worse than X.

A support gem that scales bleed with gem level would be fun.

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Phrazz wrote:

I've been advocating for some melee love for a long time now, and it's difficult, because at the very high end, melee is more than fine. But leveling through maps, especially reds, is a pain on a lot of melee builds/skills, unless you pick a skill that levels itself, like Boneshatter.

That said, melee is better than ever this league, as it rains currency, and 'most' players can afford to make melee good.

One of the HUGE problems for melee is lack of mid range weapons. It's so easy to get a caster wand to do red maps. There are literally like 50 uniques to use for casters. But when it comes to melee, there is are very few mid tier weapons and 90% of the time have major downsides that are so bad that you really want something else. Sinvicta's for example has only a 330 top end. The 2h hammers are absurdly slow. What there are really only 3 good 2h weapons you can use in red maps that are uniques. 4 if you want to count Trem, but not many people level flicker.

The other issue is the insane amount of buttons you have to push as melee. I decided to play a str stacker Volcanic of Snaking recently. I have at least 6 buttons I need to press and track constantly. It's much harder to play compared to nearly any caster build I have played in the last 3 leagues.

Let's talk about how easy it is for the right and top of the tree to do anything the left side can, but better. It is easy for casters to get full suppression and 75% armor/ 56% evasion or flip flop. But it's damn easy for them to get their defenses online compared to the left and bottom side of the tree. I've been seeing more and most caster base classes using melee skills as of late because they do melee much easier due to "free" defenses (they don't require gear) that melee classes don't get.

There are way to many easy to get low STR items that massively inflate armour, and way to many spell suppression nodes on the right side of the tree. It Should be easy for the Left side to cap armour, easy for the top to cap suppression, and easy for the right to cap evasion. If you are kitty-corner it should be difficult to cap that defense, but that's not how it goes. For left side you must use Rog, that's one of the only ways to cap spell suppression. But the right has it easy, they use a shield or a body armor that double defenses and they don't require 200+ str.

Then we have Skill Gem tags. They seem not to be able to limit tags on skill gems to only benefit melee, and not ranged or casters.

Last Ascendance, they seem dead set on removing every last good ascendancy node melee has. Chieftain was stripped of it's identity and nearly all of it's melee based totems and melee based attack power. Now Chieftain runs DD, Righteous Fire and Traps.... WTF is that? Chieftain should be rocking Tectonic Slam, melee totems, and Generals cry.

These things are not hard to fix IMO.