Some thoughts on melee after leveling a new character fresh in SSF

Made it to 91 tonight, still feel the same way. Tried out a decent 1her (by SSF standards) the damage is just pitiful. Im at 330 strength now and can probably get to around 450 at best, which means not only do I have to find a good 2her, but it also has to roll reduced attributes, ive gotten 2 decent ones so far that I've bricked trying to chaos that mod on.




I've kept the best 2her I have intact just to play around without a shield and try real melee every now and then and I just get obliterated randomly like once every 3 maps or so, vs only dying once between 88-91 going totems.

Theres really no realistic way to fix my shitty hp pool, or chaos res without another few days of banging my head against drops and gambling, maybe I could get 3k+ life and 60 chaos res in a few days. But there is just no way in hell im going to get 600+ strength to use a good 2her without attribute reduction mod on it.

armor is at 14k unbuffed, 18% phys reduction, 20% pure damage reduction from ascendency and big phys hits will take me to low life.

I know these stats are pretty mediocre, but its a window into what 90+ you can except in SSF, if I was in trade id be GAMING right now but ya.


Also chaos orbs are a massive bottleneck for """Crafting""" in ssf later on, i've got more exalts than I can ever realistically use, but I have a tab full of gear that needs to be hit with chaos orbs before it fully bricks. Tons of items that just need 1 bad mod removed and a decent one in its place for it to be equipable. Also don't even understand why annuls exist when chaos has the function it does in this game, literally only usable with omens, why not just bake annuls into omens at this point? I've also found more divines than annuls somehow.

Lastly I found out that armor doesn't scale honor like ES does, thats just horrible lmao. I can do trials, but there is no way in hell im killing the last boss in sekehema with 3.5k honor lmao. My ES character in trade had 15k base with just resist relics and maybe 20-30% max honor. I had no idea that was the case.

Just wan to say thank you for the feedback, both for the melee part but also for for the SSF part. Really gives a good picture how much harder SSF is compared to Trade.

Ya i really think people telling new players that if they hate trade to go ssf are doing them a massive diservice.

Its significantly easier to fix holes in your character trading no matter how new you are to it or how bad you think it is than having to find or """craft""" gear yourself in the current state of things.

SSF always was, and probably will continue to be a mode where players who have hundreds/thousands of hours in standard trade leagues and know the game in and out go to find some extra challenge. Its not a realistic alternative to trade for most people unless some drastic changes are either to the games crafting system so that it is not only a top 0.0001% activity, or ssf itself is adjusted to make drops better.

Id be able to reccomend ssf to newer not new players if we had poe1 crafting bench and alts,scours, old chaos, but with how its just gambling now people are going to hit brickwalls they cant get out of. Builds in ssf matter a while lot more as well, you cant count on build defining uniques, you cant league start a build that requires a good weapon you have to play something that easily scales with things you can realistically get ahold of like gem levels which is why I had to go totems for now until I find this mythical drop, which would be like 50x easier to obtain in poe1's crafting system.

Also here is the "mythical" item I need to start playing actual melee

https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Standard/rpmX55gTQ

Something I could buy on trade for 10-20ex, which has eluded me for over a week now in SSF. I've had 2h maces much better than these, just no reduced attributes, been bricking them with chaos praying, been finding ones with reduced attributes and "crafting" them, have my loot filter setup for the bases.

The only other option is to get higher strength, which is also very limited in reality in SSF. A lot of my gear already has 20-30 str on it, refitting my tree I could probably get 400-450 at best, id need a lot of extra strength on gear, while keeping the mediocre stats I have intact, and thats honestly less likely than finding this mace in any kind of realistic time frame.

If armor based characters are buffed next patch, maybe I can get away with playing without a shield, but until then I don't see it as a possibility, maybe I'll find a mirror tier 1her lol. I just dont see the point in playing melee if im going to die constantly, or im going to be doing 5x less damage than totems while also being significantly more squishy losing 20% DR, losing the ancestral meat shields, and the ranged playstyle.

Problems I could easily fix in trade, but I wanted to play SSF to get a rough idea what newer players are dealing with since that keeps my gear very limited.

Linked my gear and progression above here for those interested in what the gear actually is in SSF high level.

Made it 96, 3rd highest warbringer in SSF, but no one is playing warrior so that isn't really that impressive.

Still havent found a good weapon to switch to melee, did find out I can use soulcores to get the attribute requirements down to what I can use, but that means I'm out 40% increased phy damage from runes. Have 2 good candidates that just need a good chaos hit.

Completely removed white/magic items from my filter, really wish I could filter by tiered items because magic tiered gear can roll well but I just dont want my screen filled with dogshit. Speaking of I also pretty much dont pick up non tiered rares that aren't for my character in slots that are already decent (I pick up gloves and chests). After IDing 1000's of base non tiered rares and just getting garbage 99% of the time its just not worth it anymore period, its a massive tedious slown down to mapping speed for not much gain, selling lower tier magic/rare waystones sell for more gold anyways.

I've given up on crafting bases, only 3:1 on top tier bases like dualstring bow (next char) and steel plates etc. I also don't pick up augs/transmute orbs, shards anymore, not even breach shards, I have the gloves and picking up ~1200 on average just to get another attempt to get a good corruption on HOWA is in my mind not worth it anymore, really wish they reduced shards needed to 100 and reduced drop rate by 2/3rds.

Here's the currency tab at this point, chaos orbs absolutely need a drop buff, just an absolutely massive roadblock to crafting in SSF.


So still completely given up on crafting, and now I even feel like ground loot besides tiered rares are pointless as well at this point outside of top tier bases, and even then its just a massive cope.