Melee Skill Thread - Help Me Understand

Hey,

I see the other threads, and this isn't meant to be a meme. Since it's constantly in my face and I can't escape it I'm genuinely asking what skills specifically are unplayable, and what kind of solutions would people familiar with the archetype suggest if GGG gave you their ear for 5 minutes? I'm really ignorant when it comes to this so if anybody can illuminate for me what makes everything unplayable I'd like to know. I mean, if I asked Mathil to come up with a melee build that's isn't boneshatter could he? Could Mark (neon)?

Basically melee lost warcries in 3.24 for most builds.

You either need to:
- trigger them to make them instant again (which has a a 3 socket cost that you cant afford because you will need lifetap, call to arms, and the warcry. Lifetap is mandatory because melee is low mana and the mana multiplier on call to arms is 200%)
- or you will manually cast (e.g. with numlock trick), but then get interrupted with a 0.8 second warcry time every x seconds. (or have to path out of the way to get warcry speed, but even 100% still interupts you for 0.4 seconds).

"

whyBish wrote:

Basically melee lost warcries in 3.24 for most builds.

You either need to:
- trigger them to make them instant again (which has a a 3 socket cost that you cant afford because you will need lifetap, call to arms, and the warcry. Lifetap is mandatory because melee is low mana and the mana multiplier on call to arms is 200%)
- or you will manually cast (e.g. with numlock trick), but then get interrupted with a 0.8 second warcry time every x seconds. (or have to path out of the way to get warcry speed, but even 100% still interupts you for 0.4 seconds).

Thanks for the genuine reply, but these are new changes. I've been hearing the same old song for multiple leagues now. Is there something inherent that prevents people from conjuring up builds? For clarity, I'm not talking about what's meta, I mean anything that's viable that can take you to tier 16 maps and clear all the regular content in the game that's within the average players grasp (15-20div). Thanks again.

Meme thread

Mathil plays 25 hours a day and has endless resources, including viewers that would donate anything he would be missing.

GGG with a straight face implies (through their POE development) that melee shouldn't be in melee range, melee shouldn't stand still, getting killed repeatedly off screen is acceptable, requiring a godmode weapon is acceptable (relative to a caster running some common unique weapon and/or shield), while offering nothing but fortify in return, which equates to holding an umbrella to protect yourself from a category 5 hurricane.

From the very first area of tidal strand the game is constructed top to bottom to make the melee experience oppressively bad and unfair. 10 years later one cannot claim ignorance regarding this development manifesto, or whatever they call it.

Now POE2 makes the melee experience even worse and both GGG and streamers (who got early playthrough access) are implying "ya you just gotta deal with it man, you can't get hit by the monsters."

Like what the hell man, up is down.

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TempestMind wrote:

Hey,

I see the other threads, and this isn't meant to be a meme. Since it's constantly in my face and I can't escape it I'm genuinely asking what skills specifically are unplayable, and what kind of solutions would people familiar with the archetype suggest if GGG gave you their ear for 5 minutes? I'm really ignorant when it comes to this so if anybody can illuminate for me what makes everything unplayable I'd like to know. I mean, if I asked Mathil to come up with a melee build that's isn't boneshatter could he? Could Mark (neon)?

There isn't a single melee skill that's unplayable. Some are better than others but you can make all of them work for any content you wish if you know your stuff and it's not all that expensive either, it's actually cheaper in many cases because most melee items aren't in high demand and therefore cheap.

It's the same thing as with other playstyles really, be it spells, bow skills or minions they all have good and bad skills but for some unfathomable reason nobody ever even mentions that selfcast has been dead for ages or cares about the fact that channeling has never been a thing. But as long as there is a single bad melee skill in the world the entire archetype is considered shit for some reason and every good skill is an "exception" and doesn't count according to the whiners.

As for things that GGG should change about melee. The first thing that probably every melee player in the community agrees with is the removal of ancestral totems WITH compensation for the lost damage elsewhere. Improved base attack speed would also be a welcome change to make gameplay better during the early campaign where you don't have high attack speed.

Many people also want melee to scale with gem levels like spells because it's "better" but i personally disagree with that. I'd rather GGG introduced vendor recipes/crafting methods to get decent melee weapons early on. It's not an issue in trade leagues but playing non Boneshatter melee in SSF is a much bigger pain than it should be because your main damage source will be sub par most of the time.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I'd rather GGG introduced vendor recipes/crafting methods to get decent melee weapons early on.

There is. Weapon + rustic sash + whetstone.
For the early game, the results are really good and will carry you to maps and by then you'll probably have had a lucky drop.


I agree, though, that attack speed is an issue. Or rather that strange attack pattern they introduced some time ago, that results in an average of x attacks per second, but looks like this:
----hit-hit----hit-hit-----
Especially the time until the first hit is annoying and when starting the game, it's often exactly that delay that gets you stunned.

Other than that, my most successful builds (Ice Trapper aside) were all melee.

pointless making any effort to explain, ggg doesnt care.
and on top of that they like the fact that there are some big outlier skills. melee or not. like penance brand last league. even if the shit is busted.
so the discussion doesnt even make sense. list is long. seimic trap/dd/penance brand/melee totem explosion. etc. so it s not even that they are scared of buffing too much and we would discussing carefully balanced numbers, it s a thought through design choice.

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whyBish wrote:

Basically melee lost warcries in 3.24 for most builds.

Tha t is bunch of bs. CHeck my Slam build I used in affliction. It lost NOTHING.

I play melee basically every league, my account is open. Most of my characters gears go to guild or strangers in chat once I'm done because I don't care for standard.

I'll play molten strike or some other melee build this league again. Don't really care if I'm nerfed or whatever, I'll just power through like always because I enjoy the grind, and I enjoy melee even with all the downsides! :D