Why i m hyped for POE2 (MELEE)

as per my standard, long post warning. TLDR is melee. you have been warned. dont complain about my post being long.

POE 1 is GGG/Chris's lovechild. but as much as it was his dream, i would say GGG at that time we practically winging it at the same time they had to make sure the game got funding.

they had to carefully try to cater to the players as well as their top spenders (hi charan). it was a balancing act and they had to make compromises.

and POE1 is the result of such compromises for better or for worse. It was a place for GGG to learn how to perfect their game.

they had laid a GRAND VISION. a game to be meant to be played forever.

anyone remember the original announcement for POE2? pretty sure many of us do. POE2 would be an expansion ON TOP of POE1. your gear/characters/mtx all carried over. we got the best of both worlds and older POE1 mechanics could retire and POE2 would "fix POE1".

BUT.

GGG realized something. they realized that they had wound up in the unenviable situation that they themselves created. they wrote themselves into the corner. many decisions piled up and they realized POE1 is flawed in so many ways. too many ways.

a lot of us had bitched about MELEE BAD. to GGG's defense, they listened. they listened and they got real serious about this issue. POE2 would fix melee. the big issue is they realized that to fix melee, many things that exist in POE1 would not work.

how bad?

so bad that GGG took the HUGE ASS decision to DITCH their grand plan. the plan for POE2 to be an expansion and make it it's own thing.

they knew, they are not dumb. they knew that there would be backlash. they were going against their word. their "promise". i for one, am one of those persons and was very vocal about it.

so much salt.

it took me months. MONTHS to finally realize how it got to this point. ITS ALL BECAUSE MELEE IN POE1 SUCKED SO MUCH ASS THAT GGG CANT JUST FIX IT. there needed to be lots of change.

it was so bad that GGG was WILLING to separate POE2 from POE1.

as much as i was so salty about it. after seeing all the interviews and all the teasers, i came to the realization of how CRUCIAL the separation was.

like it or hate it, POE1 was the first experiment, the prototype of a game. the proto man to megaman. the megaman to megaman X.

they decided the best course was to go tabula rasa and scour the game so that POE2 could start anew.

its a huge decision. but i hope that they get it right this time. in fact, i went 180 from turning my back from GGG to being hyped for them all over again. such as arthas culled stratholme, GGG had to make the tough decision that was best for the future of the game. (i still am upset at how they've been handling STD tho)

that said, i am really eager to see how melee plays out in POE2.

so far theres one thing that i feel kinda sad for in POE2 tho. which is melee skills are now restricted to weapon types even more so than POE1.

but i guess if that's the price we have to pay for melee being good. i ll bite.

on a sidenote, i really have a bone to pick with all the melee is fine defenders.

poe 2 is separate from poe1 a huge part because of melee.

You are right in a sense. GGG being so unhappy with POE1s animation system is likely a reason they separated the games and they are claiming that all melee needs are better animations. See Jonathans interview a month back. I do wonder however whether your expectations of melee becoming good will be met with just better animation? I have my doubts...

Keep in mind, the lead designer of the game you are hyped for thinks that ranged NEEDS to have more damage than melee because it's disadvantaged against bosses. How does a statement like that mesh with your thoughts on the matter?

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

You are right in a sense. GGG being so unhappy with POE1s animation system is likely a reason they separated the games and they are claiming that all melee needs are better animations. See Jonathans interview a month back. I do wonder however whether your expectations of melee becoming good will be met with just better animation? I have my doubts...

Keep in mind, the lead designer of the game you are hyped for thinks that ranged NEEDS to have more damage than melee because it's disadvantaged against bosses. How does a statement like that mesh with your thoughts on the matter?

it all boils down to balancing.

imho ranged characters should get high damage but low attack speed and encourage kiting.

enemies should force characters to kite via area denials/huge aoes/telegraphs.

this is all and fine if you're ranged. the problem is melee. how do you make it a problem to ranged characters without amplifying this problem to melee characters?

to solve this, you need to invent ways to encourage people into melee range. this actually creates a new problem. how do you DISCOURAGE people that play range from going into melee range?

this is difficult to solve, i have ideas, for example melee characters gaining significant damage resistance or bonus to health recovery while in melee range. a ranged character could get penalized by not receiving this bonus.

but then this is also hampered by the fact that players could simply equip melee weapons on their secondary swap to tell ggg "hey, we're melee too hehe". to try and cheese their way to get the melee bonus.

thus my best guess is that ranged characters in poe 2 should get a ranged attack bonus where they get more bonus while further away.

the first step is to get rid of any "Point blank" sort of abilities.

so the question now is "why should range get damage buffed"? the answer is ideally ranged has to kite MORE than melee.

the big issue with boss fights now is melee has to kite MORE than ranged.

to combat this its up to the devs to design boss fights that require melee to GTFO by SIDESTEPPING or making a small circle back to the boss avoiding danger areas. it should be SAFER to be near the boss rather than away from him. this is achieved by making the attacks easier to avoid when you are nearer to the enemy and harder when you are further away. a good (or maybe bad) example is diablo in d2. his lightning attack. if you're not too far from him you need to run less to outrun his channeled lightning barrage. if you're further you need to run even more.

and thus GGG needs to solidify that ranged hits hard but gets severely punished for getting hit.

melee needs to be the king of SUSTAINED damage. so the damage should not need to be too high but should be balanced by having lower down time via spending less time avoiding stuff.

in theory it balances out.

but at surface level, if you just take the statement "range should have higher damage than melee" of course melee-ers are gonna be upset as they get nothing in return.

i think this is the failure of GGG making that initial comment without a solid follow up letting us rest assured that melee has something to compensate.

to add, Monster hunter also encourages ranged characters not to cheese fights by having a sweet spot where if you are too far the damage simply falls off drastically. i think this can help a lot with balancing and prevent players from abusing near offscreen spamming.

There's a lot of limitations to melee from a mechanical point of view. In my eyes, melee only feels good in PoE 1 when you have A LOT of attack speed. That may have to do with animations, but also with the speed of monsters, the amount of monsters and other stuff.

With new animations and timings, I think melee has good chances of feeling good in PoE 2.

That said; one of melee's biggest problems when it comes to balance/competitiveness is damage uptime. A lot of bosses in PoE 1 is designed in a way that forces you to move a lot. In addition to that, they have invulnerable phases too. In PoE 2, a game that seems to be designed for "combos" from the ground up, how will the damage uptime for melee be when you all the time have to create "damage multiplier oppurtunities" by using combination of skills? And will bosses be designed with this challenge in mind?

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

You are right in a sense. GGG being so unhappy with POE1s animation system is likely a reason they separated the games and they are claiming that all melee needs are better animations. See Jonathans interview a month back. I do wonder however whether your expectations of melee becoming good will be met with just better animation? I have my doubts...

Keep in mind, the lead designer of the game you are hyped for thinks that ranged NEEDS to have more damage than melee because it's disadvantaged against bosses. How does a statement like that mesh with your thoughts on the matter?

That's not what he said.

He said there's no reason for ranged characters to do LESS damage than melee, to be weaker than melee, because being melee is not always disadvantageous the way TRU MELEE people constantly carp about. He's right. Melee can much more easily sidestep and avoid certain shapes/styles of enemy attacks, the same way ranged can more easily avoid certain kinds of attacks.

Good example: the heavy shield knights in Act 1. They block all attacks from the front and counter enemy projectile attacks with a spell bolt. Melee A.) doesn't care about the counterattack because it doesn't trigger it, and B.) can easily circle around the target and attack its vulnerable flanks. Ranged characters have to get hinky and equip certain skills to get past those enemies.

The animation issue really is at the heart of the constant "MELEE BADD" griping. The new animation rigs, and the new things they let grinding gear do, will solve mist if not all of the real problems with melee. The rest is just a numbers game, and numbers are easy to tune over time.

Step attacks, attack while moving, and everything else the new system allows is what's going to Fix Melee. The whole "MELEE NEEDS TO DO TWENTY TIMES THE DAMAGE AND HAVE TWENTY TIMES THE DEFENSES OF RANGED AND SPELLS BECAUSE THAT CRAP IS FOR PANSIES" business is not a GGG problem, it's a community problem.

I think the first step is for GGG to have a clear definition of what skills are melee skills.

Frost blades is not a melee skill as much fun as it is to use. Melee should be only about hitting monsters with things that are hard and/or sharp.

Once that is clearly defined, the rest is easier. I haven't seen GGG's definition for POE2 yet.

the TLDR could have been a lot better TLDR just being melee? pretty sure the title said as much.

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Phrazz wrote:

There's a lot of limitations to melee from a mechanical point of view. In my eyes, melee only feels good in PoE 1 when you have A LOT of attack speed. That may have to do with animations, but also with the speed of monsters, the amount of monsters and other stuff.

With new animations and timings, I think melee has good chances of feeling good in PoE 2.

That said; one of melee's biggest problems when it comes to balance/competitiveness is damage uptime. A lot of bosses in PoE 1 is designed in a way that forces you to move a lot. In addition to that, they have invulnerable phases too. In PoE 2, a game that seems to be designed for "combos" from the ground up, how will the damage uptime for melee be when you all the time have to create "damage multiplier oppurtunities" by using combination of skills? And will bosses be designed with this challenge in mind?

to me melee in poe1 sucks ass because theres literally no reason to go melee.

if you play ranged or caster, you can have the same defences as melee (on paper) but with the added advantage of having your damage applying from many different distances.

the uptime that you mentioned is a huge reason why melee in poe1 only feels good with attackspeed.

attacks take too long to come out and leaves you too vulnerable. with range you have time to actually wind up.

when you're melee you could get interrupted and stunlocked.

i will always remember one dumbass that retorted to "melee is bad" by showing a vid clip of someone completing a no hit original sin sanctum run melee. lol the dude was clearing all mobs in 1-3 seconds even the boss melted before she had a chance to do anything.

melee is fine guys, you just need to be that strong and its fine. lets not talk about the part before you get there.

also i remember one bloke who i have MORE RESPECT for. he actually went out to prove that melee is fine by rolling a melee character to prove that melee is fine. he quit the character and rolled something else before level 91? cant recall. his excuse was it was his first time and he went in blind. right. anyway i still respect him a lot more for actually trying.

Hi.

(Back to reading OP)

Done.

Okay so there is a lot to be said about this but very little I haven't said before to most of you at some point.

In short because thumbs: melee's true strength in PoE was loot priority. You sacrificed the safety of ranged to get first dibs at the drops. Melee became much more of an aesthetic, subjective choice of play once FFA loot was removed or at least set aside for stranger friendly, oddly padded walled options like allocated loot. This is ancient history but it remains the one time GGG caved against their vision and entirely to the game's detriment. Remove that basic balance between risk and reward and you are forced to find others. Let me be clear here: they never did. Melee became an increasingly arbitrary concept once proximity to mobs no longer held any real allure. Closest they came was the bubble and tell me that isnt one clunker of a mechanic. Sure, it isnt a PoE exclusive but only in PoE does it really stand out as a bad idea. Again -- because it is trying to restore a balance that never really existed.


So technically melee is fine because melee is whatever they say it is.

I only hope they say it's something a little more in line with traditional CQC with PoE 2. If not, meh. Who cares. As I said elsewhere, the apotheosis of melee in arpgs has almost always been ranged and aoe. You can keep using your basic weapon swings but why, when your super sword fires beams of light and charging it up does a huge aoe circle?

I don't think PoE 2 should be made with CQC as a main concern. It just doesn't suit the genre anymore. Sure, you can be a bash barb now in DIV but I am fairly sure even that move has some aoe associated with it. And that's fine too. It's a game, not a hand to hand fighting simulator. I am a big fan of geometric weapon attacks in arpgs. PoE 2 better have them even on basics.

As for combos, they can be pretty rewarding but shouldn't be mandatory. Its good to remember that the first combos in games were incidental. Players found them. As with the trading situation, things can go sour quickly when a dev tries to reproduce something organic. But I am more than open to the idea of guild wars/daoc style combo strings in an arpg. Make them rewarding enough and I see nothing wrong with implementing them.

One last point. We will never know why PoE 2 is a new game and not a mere add on to PoE 1. We will all have our theories and ideas. Most of us will be right to some degree because the only thing we can agree on is it probably was more than just one factor. Was it PoE1's creaky, ship of Theseus engine? I think so. Was it a means to escape a decade of bloat? That too. Was it because the new gem system would be an utter nightmare to shove into the existing one? Yeah. And so many other reasons. At this point, there is no point dwelling on it. It is what it is. It will be what it will be.

And only GGG will pay the price if it isn't up to PoE 1's now towering legacy. Not you. Not me. Them. So as disappointed or excited as you may be, spare a thought for how intense this must be for those staking their futures on it. And no. I don't mean anyone who at some point had shares in GGG. They're fine. I mean the dudes in the trenches actually grinding away who probably never even read this. And good on 'em. They have a game to make.

May it be every bit as worthy of hefty support as its predecessor. And, failing that, able to nickel and dime as ethically as possible, heh.

Ow my thumbs.

I am kind of neutral. I can't possible be hyped when I just don't faith that they can do it. Animations aside there are many things they could be doing to make melee feel better to get into but they don't do anything on it.

On the surface it looks pretty solid but idk...