Melee bad - Feels good and bad to have devs confirm it

Melee used to be fine in PRE 3.15, there is no reason it should be as bad as it is now. They know it. They even said it. They set it as high priority.

The question is: what will they change? I personally want to see totems gone, small fortify rework(either mechanical or let me scale it on gear and tree, so duration can be 20s+), mana costs reduced or removed or lifetap buffed, numerical/scaling buff skills like tectonic slam, infernal blow, glacial hammer, cyclone. Remove trauma support - it was horrible bandaid fix anyway.

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JVTriton209 wrote:

But I bet playing it will still be harder than playing ranged and some people will still say "melee bad" in that game too.

i think melee will definitely have its disadvantages, and perhaps would still have problems such as downtime or area denials.

but my hopium is that the gap between melee and other playstyles is reduced.

the melee movement skills etc that POE2 employs looks so damn good and provide so much utility.

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eduloots wrote:

Yup I'm facetanking ubers as poison molten strike pathfinder, just had to invest 200x what a hexblast build needs to beat ubers hahah

Fk why do I love melee.

And GGG keeps saying stuff like, in poe2 this, in poe2 that. You guys CAN make changes to make melee a better experience, it already has all downsides from being in melee range (duh).

You just don't want to expend resources in PoE 1 to improve it, but I'd be gladly proven wrong next league (please).

besides uber elder/shaper (not really ubers) i havent ever defeated an uber yet. i did think of trying but the cost to even try now is much more expensive that i've accepted i m not gonna be doing ubers.

but yeah what you mentioned is one huge pitfall of melee. melee only starts feeling good once you have invested damn a lot of currency.




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on a separate note, digressing a little, i find it weird that people actually check peoples profiles.

i remember how back in affliction i was doing quite well, i was at 94? having a mageblood and was blasting thru maps.

i had expeditions end and around 75% crit chance so i was shattering things like mad.

there was a forum topic that popped up i forgot about what but i chimed in and also gave my 2 cents. i vaguely remember saying how i HATE porcupines. i still hate them back then i still hate them now. i gave my reasons why and i gave my solutions on how to solve them.

people went in checked my profile and started talking shit about me "has a mageblood but cant deal with porcupines".

bitch. my build that you just had a look HAD NO PROBLEMS with porcupines. i was shattering all of them. but others quickly piled on criticizing my build and taking a shit on me because i had a mage blood and "still couldnt handle porcupines".

i called them out for it but used rough language. got reported and the post was removed.

really makes me feel its weird checking people's POB.

My two cents on attack based melee is pretty simple, its workable but it demands vastly outsized investment and it often suffers in comparison to other builds, I spent about 100 divs making an endurance stack melee character tanky enough to do serious endgame content without dying instantly, that character has about 3 million PoB dps. for those same 100 divs I could have spun up a gimped copy of my CoC EB ice spear inquistor with about 110 million PoB dps and similar tankiness against everything except phys hits and chaos, while also having the advantage of either being able to move while dpsing(cyclone) or super long range and easily hitting the 10.1 aps breakpoint for CoC (lancing steel of spraying). The investment in tankiness needed to make the build not randomly get ripped by white packs was more defensive layers than most ranged builds will ever need to consider (full 90% pdr, 80% max resist legacy loreweave + edamnation and transcendence via maxarius militant alongside 23 fortify, molten shell and vaal molten shell with 60k armour and some phys taken as elemental) because ranged builds, especially ones that can offscreen or dps while moving can get away with sub 10k phys max hits in mapping and as long as they break 20k can even survive alright vs ubers, my endurance stack jugg has a phys max hit of about 60k, an ele max hit of more than 150k and still occasionally gets blown out by a bunch of enemies with leap attacks or similar and if it was any less tanky would die so often as to render mapping an enormous hassle.

TL:DR being melee demands an absurd investment in tankiness and even if you do manage to hit that value, your dps is going to suffer and be limited by your melee range, melee needs better access to defensive layers and damage not being tied to totems at absolute minimum to not be a miserable experience without absurd game knowledge, legacy gear and a huge budget.

Played Omni LS this league on a 200+ Divine budget and while I could clear specifically rolled T17 maps it felt way worse than any Ranged build I have played in the last few leagues. Why?

1. Punished by boss mechanics, while it is true being in melee range is a bonus a lot of the time ranged get to choose when to make use of this advantage and when not to.

2. Off screening is the single best defensive mechanic in the entire game once you have enough DPS. A lot of monster mods circumvent defenses but nothing circumvents distance (Except Ambush Rares).

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Izrakhan wrote:

I'll bite.

I've played the game since warrior. So 2013? Something like that.

I play melee almost exclusively every league. Getting immunity to elemental ailments, bleeds, corrupted blood and high phys reduction is necessary. I also play SSFHC a lot.

I have seen some of my characters get destroyed even during campaign runs. This league I lost a jugg in A10. With 6 endurance charges, 80% phys reduction, 80% ele reduction. He was one shot by Avarius's cleave attack.

That's just one example. I've seen the same thing happen to Glads, Melee Chief, Berserker, etc.

The Jugg died because he was a super slow EQ build. That was intentional to max the hit and the aftershock. He was slow enough that the A10 boss had enough time to cleave him on his way out. Dead in one shot.

So you say melee is fine but you set your profile to private. Mine is public. I've no problem with others looking at my builds to back up my statements.

Ok i'll point out the obvious again, this game is NOT balanced around SSFHC. That's not the mode balance decisions are based on, it's an additional "challenge" that players can take if they want to.

You losing a character in ssfhc is sad and all but it's part of the HC gameplay loop you decided on. It wouldn't even be an issue if you played the main game mode and by no means does it mean or prove that you can't take melee builds to 100 in ssfhc, there are hundreds or thousands of people who have done that already.
With how out of whack monster damage can get in this game from stacking mods and how basically every defense mechanic has at least one counter mechanic that nullifies it you will never be truly immortal in this game, there is always that one mod combination that can kill you. This game just isn't balanced around HC which is why HC players typically play by tiptoeing around anything that might even be remotely dangerous.

All that being said, there is a large difference between "I get oneshot every 100 maps by some random bullshit combination" and "I need 6 portals everytime there are porcupines in a map". OP belongs to the latter group. Last league he was complaining how porcupines are the bane of melee while playing a viper strike build with like 20k ehp and sub 5 mio dps that used both a mageblood and kalandras touch. 200+ divines in a build and he still died to porcupines and blamed the game for it.

@HMC You say the bitterness isn't warranted by i think it is. OP has a history, this isn't his first post on the matter. Plus he basically called anyone who thinks melee is "fine" delusional so he isn't exactly a child of innocence even when just looking at this topic.

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Wondahbread wrote:

Played Omni LS this league on a 200+ Divine budget and while I could clear specifically rolled T17 maps it felt way worse than any Ranged build I have played in the last few leagues. Why?

1. Punished by boss mechanics, while it is true being in melee range is a bonus a lot of the time ranged get to choose when to make use of this advantage and when not to.

2. Off screening is the single best defensive mechanic in the entire game once you have enough DPS. A lot of monster mods circumvent defenses but nothing circumvents distance (Except Ambush Rares).

strikes without range feel bad. you need a lot of range to make strikes feel "comfortable" but even then the best way is to have the strike skills attack one additional enemy node.

ranged doesnt need anything extra to be able to have range. it doesnt need to fix it's range.

similarly aoe skill are usable from the get go. every increase in aoe makes it more fun to use but you dont necessarily find it too necessary as usually the base aoe is still better than melee range by default.

the sad fact is theres only a few ways to enjoy melee in poe

1. super tank that can barely die but usually low dps
2. super true in your face melee that deletes everything in seconds (before you get there its sooooo unfun, also reaching that level need soooo much currency)
3. make melee as unmelee as possible. aoes that fill the screen/projectiles everywhere etc.

2024 and they are still traumatized by those whirlwind d2 barbarian chads

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Doesn't really change the fact that 90% of the problems people in this forum are having with melee including you come from bad builds and not whatever problems melee has.
But good for you. You finally got a proper excuse for not trying to improve yourself. Now you can just keep on wailing nonstop and feel justified doing so.

Meanwhile i am doing t17 maps deathless with 3 fps on average cuz my cpu is 7 years old using melee builds. I wonder who is living in a fantasy here.

Never fails when see someone say this , they have their account private so you can't see if they are lying or not, or they do have a character, but they spent a mirror to make their build that way. Oh ya, well I got melee build that one shots the entire map, and so melee is sooo easy... /endsarcasm

Your argument really is mute, since you can make the worst possible build do ubers if you throw enough currency at it. It's really a bad faith argument since nearly every person knows and understands that when someone says "melee is bad" what that means is melee is horribly inefficient and not remotely close to casters .

What I don't get though, is why Johnathan says melee is bad, but then one of the hardest nerfs to melee since the block Nerf and Vaal Ground Slam nerf was the nerf to Warcries this very league.

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Valkaneer wrote:

Your argument really is mute, since you can make the worst possible build do ubers if you throw enough currency at it. It's really a bad faith argument since nearly every person knows and understands that when someone says "melee is bad" what that means is melee is horribly inefficient and not remotely close to casters .

Just get better gear 4head.

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Aynix wrote:

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Valkaneer wrote:

Your argument really is mute, since you can make the worst possible build do ubers if you throw enough currency at it. It's really a bad faith argument since nearly every person knows and understands that when someone says "melee is bad" what that means is melee is horribly inefficient and not remotely close to casters .

Just get better gear 4head.

You were just here a few weeks ago confirming exactly what I said. My money would say he's lying since some of the best players in the game are saying T17's are hard, and he's not one of those people, and he says he's doing them at 3fps..... Sure he is....