Why i m hyped for POE2 (MELEE)

I really just don't understand what Grinding Gear can do to make TRU MELEE better in a way that would actually make TRU MELEE people happy.

"Melee should have better defense because we have to be close to the monster!" You do - melee has near-exclusive access to Fortify, which is an extremely powerful defensive buff.

"But casters can get Fortify by using Shield Charge!!!" Not really. Not anymore, since the change to 'Fortify Stacks' from binary Fortify On/Off. You have to meet a minimum damage floor to get enough Fortify to bother with, and spellcasters using a 3L Shield Charge almost never meet that floor. And frankly? The whole "nonmelee can get melee's toys! DX" thing is what happens with an open-ended system like path of Exile where anybody can use any item or gem.

"Well melee should have way better damage then, because [long listed of various reasons of various levels of dubiousness]!" Disagree. Bosses/monsters can be designed in ways that make being ranged just as harrowing and punitive as everyone always assumes melee always is. Giving ranged/spell builds a severe damage onus so TRU MELEE can feel better accomplishes nothing save pissing off ranged/spell players for no valid gameplay reason. Damage is damage - melee can scale to utterly ludicrous Mavens-per-second DPS as well as ranged or spell can. is it expensive? yes. So is every other "endgame" build in PoE1. The sub-one-divine budget build is no longer a thing - a hundred divines apparently counts as "mid budget" now. Insane as that is.

"MELEE means one sharp/hard object hitting one monster! Nothing else is MELEE, and that means making those things a fix to MELEE is wrong!" No it doesn't. Like Forever says, the origins of the genre frequently have 'melee' weapons enchanted to produce beams, waves, or explosions of elemental destruction as an Ultimate Goal. I have never ONCE had a TRU MELEE player tell me how they expect to clear content at the pace they insist it be cleared at when they restrict themselves solely to heavy striking one monster to death at a time, with absolutely zero AoE or multi-target potential whatsoever.

And yet, that is exactly what TRU MELEE is supposed to be to TRU MELEE people - attacking one monster with a melee weapon. People constantly bag on Frost Blades because it includes a long range frost stab as well as a fan of projectiles, saying "THIS IS NOT MELEE!! DX" Perhaps not. But it's fun. And effective. Whereas Heavy Striking your way through a pack one monster at a time will never be either of those things no matter what numbers you attach to it. That one-at-a-time heavy Strike build could have infinite damage and it would still feel terrible to clear with, and it would feel cheat-y and unengaging to fight bosses with.

TRU MELEE will never get what it wants in Path of exile, because as best as I've ever been able to tell? TRU MELEE mostly wants nothing else to exist. It wants a game where Heavy Striking one monster to death at a time is the only way to play, without anything else to show it up as being awful and inefficient, and for the game's pack density, loot rules, and everything else to be balanaced exclusively around the idea of hitting one monster at a time with a piece of wood until it falls over, then moving on to the next.

You will never get this in Path of Exile, regardless of the number following the title. Either stop asking for it, or find a new game.

Nice post ^^^

"You will never get this in Path of Exile, regardless of the number following the title. Either stop asking for it, or find a new game."

Of course we won't get those things. We don't develop the game. We aren't in charge of its codebase. The ones that are in charge think everything is fine and/or by ignorance don't play the archetypes that are garbage. Plenty of this is suggested from recent interviews with Mark, Jonathan, etc.

The ones that may influence those in charge are the streamers, many of which have significant income from playing this game. Since the viewpoint of a person is clouded towards a particular subject IF they derive appreciable income from that subject, said streamers are often "ya GGG can't do no wrong bro" or "ya everything is fine bro" or "git gud bro" or some mixture of these responses. The best example of course here is Zizaran since he plays this game 26 hours a day, or perhaps Mathil.

Assuming everything I just said in the previous two paragraphs is wrong, then POE2 melee should be a much better state. No, instead it is all of POE1 melee issues magnified 100x each while casters/ranged are dancing around killing stuff on the move and laughing.

Finally, there exists a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge middle ground between the current joke state of POE1 melee and posts such as the one I am quoting. Since this forum only argues in extremes, we can't have nice things and nothing will be accomplished/changed.

I look forward to passively observing POE2 melee gameplay in the future in which 99%+ play caster/ranged/totems (I assume minions will remain a joke) while melee are getting their face rearranged by unavoidable auto attacks and special boss moves that are only dodgeable by caster/ranged/totem playstyles. It should provide some good comedy and meme material. The resulting forum conversations should go something like:

"Yo my melee is getting hurt so bad"
"That's fine bro you just need to use X,Y,Z defensive tools"
"Ya GGG didn't code that into the game"
"Whatever bro git gud"

And this is exactly what I mean.

The entire post could be summed up as "Melee is utter dogshit, anyone who disagrees is dumb, ignorant, or a shill, and both GGG and all the streamers are invested in keeping it shit out of sheer malicious hatred of melee players."

There's no discussing that. There's no debating it. There's no conversation to be had. You've made up your mind - Melee is Dogshit, it's so easy to fix, but GGG hates melee so they refuse to fix it, anyone who thinks anything else is an idiot or a shill, and there's nothing else to say.

Okay. Find a different game. You've made it plain there's no possible way you'll ever accept anything else, so why stay? I don't like telling people to go elsewhere, but if you simply can not accept that Heavy Striking one single enemy at a time will never, CAN never be 'Good'? You'll never be happy with PoE.

Melee People yell at me when I say it, but I've never seen a "MELEE SUX" conversation that didn't boil down to people thinking melee could be "fixed" by just giving melee characters five to fifteen times the damage of every other archetype, and fifteen to fifty times the defensive bulk. In essence, 'just make it so 10% melee damage uptime is equivalent to 100% everything-else uptime, and so melee doesn't have to dodge or juke or evade or move or interact with boss mechanics AT ALL, and everything will be fine!'

Sure. Your build would be more currency-farm viable then. It wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be satisfying. It'd be a cheap gimme and everybody knows it. That sort of "fix" is nothing more than nothing less than just giving up.

Stop. Go play something else. You'll be happier.

"

e1337donkey wrote:

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...

This...but don't worry it will all work out.


The eagles are coming...

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

Hi.

(Back to reading OP)

Done.

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.

omg loot priority i totally forgot about that. yeah... the amount of ninja looting was insane. people were scrambling to pick up exalts/chaos orbs whatnot (and even eternals). lol i think friendships could have been lost back then.

i would say GGG COULD NOT say melee is fine. they did acknowledge in many interviews that they wanted to improve melee and they actually did improve melee

why do people use "tru melee" when you can swing your sword and a lightning/atom bombs/dragons fly out. coz we like the visceral feel of bonking enemies with our stick. d4 melee has a lot of pitfalls, i barely touched the barb as i went necro, but when i did try barb, it felt mostly melee where his attacks were mostly doing damage when his weapon made contact with the enemy (the wind devil cyclones are def not melee and is not considered melee).

ironically i didnt play melee in d4 as i'm much more hyped for poe2's iteration of melee.

CQC not being the concern of ARPG is to me a sad way for diablo clones to evolve as thats how melee started in ARPGs. d1's warrior has the most classic melee feel. i feel it would be a loss for devs to just "give up" on trying to make melee work. NRFTW is very melee centric and i believe can act as a good example of how a game can be designed to be melee centric.

and for sure what i mentioned in this post is my speculation/theories. POE2 is definitely not build solely around melee, but i strongly believe that the reason why POE2 was split from POE1 was so that they could make design considerations based on their melee rework. melee rework by itself is not enough. GGG is putting a lot of effort making melee feel good in POE2 and the second part of making melee feel good is to make sure that the encounters/boss mechanics do not overly punish melee. with all the effort that they put into improving melee, they logically not want to make all that effort go to waste by not putting melee into consideration for said encounters/mechanics.

this leads me to theorize that a lot of design decisions in POE2 will be influenced by the mere existence of melee.

and yeah, they may or may not read my thread. the decisions etc are already made and i m putting my hope that they make it a good game with design decisions made without neglecting melee.

"

1453R wrote:

And this is exactly what I mean.

The entire post could be summed up as "Melee is utter dogshit, anyone who disagrees is dumb, ignorant, or a shill, and both GGG and all the streamers are invested in keeping it shit out of sheer malicious hatred of melee players."

There's no discussing that. There's no debating it. There's no conversation to be had. You've made up your mind - Melee is Dogshit, it's so easy to fix, but GGG hates melee so they refuse to fix it, anyone who thinks anything else is an idiot or a shill, and there's nothing else to say.

Okay. Find a different game. You've made it plain there's no possible way you'll ever accept anything else, so why stay? I don't like telling people to go elsewhere, but if you simply can not accept that Heavy Striking one single enemy at a time will never, CAN never be 'Good'? You'll never be happy with PoE.

Melee People yell at me when I say it, but I've never seen a "MELEE SUX" conversation that didn't boil down to people thinking melee could be "fixed" by just giving melee characters five to fifteen times the damage of every other archetype, and fifteen to fifty times the defensive bulk. In essence, 'just make it so 10% melee damage uptime is equivalent to 100% everything-else uptime, and so melee doesn't have to dodge or juke or evade or move or interact with boss mechanics AT ALL, and everything will be fine!'

Sure. Your build would be more currency-farm viable then. It wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be satisfying. It'd be a cheap gimme and everybody knows it. That sort of "fix" is nothing more than nothing less than just giving up.

Stop. Go play something else. You'll be happier.

yeap i ve already made up my mind. and yeap theres nothing to discuss about it. i've already pointed out that melee in POE1 is so bad that GGG separated POE2 from POE1 knowing the backlash they would receive.

find a different game? stop playing poe1?

i've already come to terms that POE1 MELEE SUCKS. d4 bad meme is a thing, POE1 melee bad is a thing too. it simply is bad.

many other games do melee more justice than poe1. heck even with d4 bad, d4 barb is more trumelee than whatever POE1 has going right now. i rarely ever swing a huge ass 2 hander and get stunned rapidly before getting to actually hit an enemy 10 minutes into the game.

this happens in POE1. when it happens in POE it feels bad. i never felt that in d4. in fact this is a uniquely POE1 issue. i've never been hit stunned so bad so early in other games even in Diablo1 which is super old (but for sure stuns in D1 were bad too). D3 melee feels good from the get go. TLI, undecember, GD, TQ. and "tru melee" too.

so yeah i've actually stopped playing poe1 and you know what? chances are i m not coming back. i've stopped checking the feedback subforum. i ve stopped posting there. i literally dont care what happens in POE1 now as i m not going to be playing it anymore.

GGG might rework or improve POE1 melee one day but it wouldnt matter any more as i've already moved on.

as much as this is a "complaint" that "melee is bad", i m not even asking for it to be fixed anymore as it is what it is. the devs are so done with poe1 melee and i find i really find it weird when people still say POE1 melee is fine despite the devs themselves admitting it's not where they want it to be.

in any case i am VERY hyped for POE2 right now.

could POE2 become the new foundation for all POEs to come the same way POE1 was meant to be? we dont know but i m feeling positive that GGG is doing alot not to allow POE2 melee to become whatever melee POE1 has.

Here's the thing. You want TRU MELEE, i.e. bonking one enemy one time with one weapon at ordinary-mortal attack speed, to be ZA BESS WAY TO PLAY POE?

Okay. Then the game will have to slow down drastically and pack density will have to fall to nearly nothing. Five monsters onscreen at once would be a huge horde; ten would be an untentable wipe situation. Pack density would have to fall to the point where taking twenty seconds to bap one goon to death is not an unbearable time/clear loss.

No Rest for the Wicked gets away with what it does precisely because it's dramatically slower with less stuff happening than Path of Exile. You want PoE to feel like PoE? Then you need to accept that TRU MELEE has fallen off. You can BS it with junk like Melee Splash or accept that Cleave counts as TRU MELEE even though it's an AoE ability. You can invest in Ancestral Spirits that help you hit stuff with your weapon, if you like. But that "visceral feel" of hitting one guy one time with one weapon once per second is simply not tenable in a game as dense as Path of Exile. You will get swarmed and killed no matter what your defenses are.

If this is what TRU MELEE people want, i.e. "I want to feel powerful and deadly and super strong and awesome while using my axe to directly strike anything, and nothing but axe blows to demon faces will satisfy this craving"? You won't get it in PoE. You can be powerful and deadly and super strong, able to smash even the mightiest foe to flinders with nothing but your axe and the mightiest thews of your Maroider arms...but you will always be slow, slow, slow.

If that's fine? Do it up. I'm never against someone playing PoE at a slower pace than the breakneck Warp 99 nonsensical idiocy that is the Religion of Zoom Meta. But that never seems to be what folks want. They want to get that feeling of lethal strength and power, crunching faces with axe blows, WHILE ALSO being just as fast and clearspeed-y as an AoE spell or multi-arrow build in addition to being the undisputed king of boss crunching.

You cannot get that. You will never get that. AoE builds will always be better at clearing packs than TRU MELEE, and ninety-eight percent of Path of Exile is pack clearing. TRU MELEE people need to either clamp it or get with the program and start considering skills or supports that can clear packs TRU MELEE.

Melee Splash is not your enemy. Cleave is not your enemy. Slam skills are not your enemy.

TRU MELEE doesn't have to be single target.

Look at Golden Axe or Streets of Rage. You throw a punch/kick (or slice your axe/sword) and you'll hit everyone even if there are 10 enemies within your range.

Guild wars 2 has cleave baked into melee attacks.

One of the reasons why melee can be unsatisfying to play is that you swing your weapon into 10 enemies and it will only hit one guy.

In Diablo 2, Zealot and frenzy barb felt better because they were quick. Zealot could even target multiple enemies with a single cast.

In Diablo 4: Season 4, they gave bash a cleave effect and bumped its damage and that's why it feels so great. You swing your weapon, you hit everyone it touches.

Even an old indie diablo clone like Blade & Sword had cleave built-in (those 99 hit combos were fun).

Okay. Riddle me this, then.

What the hell's the difference between this passive cleave effect you're talking about, Melee Splash, and Cleave-the-skill?

I get that allowing passive cleaving means not having to sacrifice a support gem for Melee Splash or incorporate Cleave-the-skill into your kit. That is indeed a benefit. But if "I swing my weapon and hit a bunch of guys" is allowed to be TRU MELEE, why isn't Cleave-the-skill TRU MELEE?

Let's be real here - there is a very small number of skills you can make out of "I swing my weapon, hit a bunch of guys for face-crunching damage, and absolutely nothing else happens because the skill is supposed to be nothing but I-hit-dude-with-metal-stick". Cleave is kind of it for a sweeping AoE, and between Heavy Strike, Double Strike, and Dual Strike they've also just about hit every other reasonable version of single-target smack skills. What's left to do? How can Cleave not be TRU MELEE but other skills that can clear mobs are?

And hell, you don't even need to sacrifice a support gem or use Cleave-the-skill to get the equivalent of passive cleave - path down to Tribal Fury in the southwest corner of the tree and get always-on passive melee splash. Which, given the execrable state of PoE1's animation system, is going to be way more reliable than passive cleave anyways.

Long posts are fine as long as the formatting is clean.

This one needs a onceover.