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

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mnieradko wrote:

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this allows less downtime with melee

except monster auto attacks in POE2 hit incredibly hard and your maneuvering speed is a snail compared to POE1

coupled with zero flask replenishment in combat and POE2 melee will have an incredibly amount of downtime

this is while mr. ranged dances around while shooting singing "I can do this all day."

at some point one must assume all this absurdity is intentional, and not just years of built up dev ignorance.

how many years have melee players been clamoring for strong built in defenses for melee in POE1 WHILE PLAYING MELEE SKILLS? nothing was provided but the joke of fortify support, and nothing is being provided in POE2

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Totem builds are not unpopular because they suck, they are unpopular because the vast majority of the playerbase finds them terribly unfun to play and slow at mapping

Totem builds are strongly recommended because modern POE1 design has devolved to the absurd point that seeing your enemy on your screen means you have already failed and you will die. This isn't an ARPG anymore but instead some bullet hell dark souls version of frogger with 2 pixels of brightness provided to discern what the hell is happening on your screen

all that you and many others have said is true. but based on what the interview it seems that the devs know every single one of our concerns. its to the point i dont see the need to make any new "melee is bad/here is why" sort of posts.

the devs are indeed trying to improve the game with melee in mind.

how true or how far they go is all up to them.

the fact that johnathan went up and said melee is bad shows their commitment towards melee. they did not shy away from it. in fact josh actually has a new vid on his channel that is just a cut of the entire "melee is bad" portion from his interview with john.

GGG is putting pressure on themselves to "prove us" that they get it.

'commitment'? Then why have there been no melee changes aside from collateral damage nerfs in more than a year? Melee lost a lot of power and QoL in the removal of alt quality gems and helmet enchants and has gained basically nothing aside from legacy borrowed power in standard used to make builds that don't implode on entering melee and can do dps. Quite frankly they may want to do a full rework of melee and it may need one but it would not be hard to meaningfully bandaid it, revert most of the slam nerfs buff the base fortify cap (the literal maximum possible achievable currently is 61 and that requires using the ritual base that crushes you and a ton of mirror cost legacy gear + replica badge of the brotherhood) to 40 or 50 and have every melee skill give inherent fortification not just vigilant strike, fold the boni of the ancestors totems into melee skills in general and suddenly melee works an awful lot better.

That 12 minute POE2 melee segment of Josh with Jonathan is 12 minutes of nothing but word salad with excuses that are completely unrelated to why melee sucks both offensively and defensively.

"Melee isn't strong because of rigging and animation issues blah blah"

What?

Who cares if you make the best animations in the world if you hit like a wet napkin and take a dirt nap as soon as something threatening looks in your direction?

The entire 12 minutes segment screamed to me "we don't play these archetypes in the game that we made."

I left a comment on that video telling people to ignore Jonathan's comments and just go watch the POE2 melee playthroughs from people like Alkaizer. Actions speak louder than words and the POE2 melee gameplay is horrific beyond anything currently present in POE1.

As for "fixes" in POE1 it's been said in numerous threads by myself and other people. Devs obviously want low hanging fruit low effort fixes, so the best approach here is to unruin what you ruined, for example:

- new gladiator is bad, revert to old gladiator or something approaching its power
- slams are terrible, revert their gigantic nerfs
- current fortify support is terrible, revert to an older version

Beyond this you simply tune up everything both offensively and defensively. Anyways, whatever, no point of typing more because POE2 gameplay shows that melee garbage is intended. You'll have the most wonderful animations and be in agony EVERY SINGLE MOMENT YOU PLAY.

1. Jonathan is not playing melee (and probably never was)
2. Jonathan is focusing on PoE 2, he donest give a fuck about PoE

Asking him why melee suck and how they plan to fix it is pointless.

Quite true. If you don't think something sucks, why change it? This will end well.

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Aynix wrote:

1. Jonathan is not playing melee (and probably never was)
2. Jonathan is focusing on PoE 2, he donest give a fuck about PoE

Asking him why melee suck and how they plan to fix it is pointless.

He's a founding member and was working on the development of PoE1 until he moved to PoE2. He has some of the most intimate knowledge anyone could have with it. He outlined problems related from both a development and gameplay perspective. There's no need to be black-pilled to this extent.

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hmcg020 wrote:

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Aynix wrote:

1. Jonathan is not playing melee (and probably never was)
2. Jonathan is focusing on PoE 2, he donest give a fuck about PoE

Asking him why melee suck and how they plan to fix it is pointless.

He's a founding member and was working on the development of PoE1 until he moved to PoE2. He has some of the most intimate knowledge anyone could have with it. He outlined problems related from both a development and gameplay perspective. There's no need to be black-pilled to this extent.

Aynix doesn't want to hear an opposing argument ... he thinks melee is fine and so it must be because he got a melee character to level 100.

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hmcg020 wrote:

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Aynix wrote:

1. Jonathan is not playing melee (and probably never was)
2. Jonathan is focusing on PoE 2, he donest give a fuck about PoE

Asking him why melee suck and how they plan to fix it is pointless.

He's a founding member and was working on the development of PoE1 until he moved to PoE2. He has some of the most intimate knowledge anyone could have with it. He outlined problems related from both a development and gameplay perspective. There's no need to be black-pilled to this extent.

I listened to entire thing and his answer to "why GGG hates melee" (because that was the question from Josh) is just a bunch of nothingburger.

Im also in camp "melee not bad" because it isnt. Its expensive. Instead of thinking how to make melee better they should think how to make it cheaper to build. Melee will never be able to be comparable to ranged just by the simple fact of how the current PoE is. It will always be better to have a gun instead of a sword. Thats just how it is.

making melee better than ranged would require truly stupid numbers and is not what people in general are asking for. People are asking for melee to be buffed so its not either make the character basically invuln with a few million dps for an absurd investment or make an expensive glass cannon that dies to white mobs. Also basically everyone wants ancestor totem's boni folded into the base skills because dance around the totem is stupid and feels awful.