The ONLY way to make melee feel good is by slowing everything down

What would be changed on melee if "LA/Spark/Frostwall" got nerfed to the ground ?

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Biovital#3172 wrote:

This might come off as rude but I honestly don't think GGG will improve melee at all and they have zero idea how to do it in relation to caster.

All these super slow, charge up abilities need their damage upped by x5000% to even be on par with these gigaranged builds at this point.

tbh, melee does feel good as is. the game should be tweaked around melee as melee is right now.

and i agree the charged skills feel weird. especially for bosses where you barely have any time to pull em off.

as for balancing against other skills, i m a believer that nerfs are better than "buffing weaker skills".

ggg has always tried buffing weaker skills until they realized THE GAP is now so big that its futile to try buffing them anymore.

also buffing weaker skills is how we get power creep. power creep is where we get stupid t17s and uber pinnacles that require player to have the absolute best gear with hyper efficient builds.

i would also point out that the reason we dont see "reflect" mods is because GGG believed the damage numbers were acceptable. if we dont want to see reflect, ggg will have to nerf player damage down.

thus other things have to get nerfed.

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vpalmer#6391 wrote:

GGG: "your wish is fulfilled." *XP_Gain_Multiplier = 0.01*

lol nice trollpost.

"

finisterre#5659 wrote:

What would be changed on melee if "LA/Spark/Frostwall" got nerfed to the ground ?

if everything was nerfed besides truemelee skills, melee players would not feel punished for playing melee in comparison. it would be "unfair for everyone else" but i would argue its how the game should have come out on release.

but in anycase its still up to ggg.

i do want to point out that they separated poe2 specifically to design the game around melee. they did a great job tbh. needs more polishing. but all their efforts become trivialized when melee is the shittiest build to play in comparison to every thing else. would it not be a huge waste of effort if everything is going back to "poe1" playstyle where melee is still shit?

i would ask you. what is the benefit of playing "truemelee" in poe's current state? why would anyone want to play truemelee in poe2 right now?

what is the benefit of playing melee?

or should ggg just acknowledge melee just sucks and delete truemelee from the game and have all skills have huge ass aoes?

melee in poe2 really is awesome. the devs actually did solve a lot of things. just in comparison, theres no reason/benefit to play melee. the only way to change this is to weaken everything else.

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Radonegsky#6656 wrote:

When I start PoE 2 I have choose Monk. And this was fun - kind of Ninja style (move back and forth, combos, etc.) Then I decide to try Warrior and stayed here... Recently I have played with my friend-monk. And it was absolute counter - there was no melee! He was kinda mid-range mage with tons of projectiles, and he rumbles thought the map like thunder... And was there was 1-2 buttons he need to use... when I use all my keyboard.

I don't want to be this sort of monk...

monks currently are mages with melee weapons lol

"

If everything was nerfed besides truemelee skills, melee players would not feel punished for playing melee in comparison.

I can understand the context including expectations. If something similar were to happen, we would need to change our mindset before changes :)

For me, the ideal "melee" state is being able to find a way out of a generally pessimistic situation, so I get a little worried when I see people hoping for a relatively optimistic situation.

I am more than sure we will have a "berserker" archetype.

Edit
Ultimately, I think making the situation of our character easy to understand (for better or worse) was GGG's intention, with new players in mind.

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exsea#1724 wrote:

the weird part about monk was it looked a whole lot like it could be real fun as a pure melee.

but then with its high crit,fast attacks it just blitzes everything.

the firing off projectiles when the monk was first revealed looked balanced because it seemed slow, slows you down so it felt like "ah man now i m forced to go ranged so i ll have to use this".

instead we get poe1 lightning strike in poe2 in a way.

i loved flicker in poe1 but in poe2 its just disgusting

In regards to fast attacks I just don't know if its even correct of the game to offer so much, the game just seems forced balanced to deal with Breach, 3rd/4th stages of Rituals and whatever absurdly high debuff maps you can muster.

Then with all this attack speed, I just need to proc certain things and shock on bosses and down they go in a few seconds...just pointless grind really and I honestly couldn't say if I had more challenge in Vampire Survivors...

Flicker strike does appear to be busted, you can reduce the charge % by a lot AND it seems bugged at certain times and more so when you interact with a rare mob (possibly its modifiers), the skill just keeps going until the mob is destroyed.

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finisterre#5659 wrote:

Ultimately, I think making the situation of our character easy to understand (for better or worse) was GGG's intention, with new players in mind.

There's a lot of detail on skills but I don't see how this game is easy to understand at all, at least when delivering accessibility to the End Game.
IMO there's a huge demographic of players who are uncomfortable or who are struggling to understand balancing defenses, which you need 2/3 of, you can't just focus on 1. Distillments and applying them to amulets say aren't even showcased to the player via a quest or a simple notification, which adds a tremendous boon of power if used correctly.
I could mention a few other things that I think are essential to making a character comfortable to be able to do T10+ maps + I bet a huge portion of players don't even use a good Item Rarity+ % and they're essentially doing maps for no decent progression.

I think especially for slow melee, like maces, to work the game must be slowed down dramatically. Players and mobs.

As long as players can one-shot monsters from afar, there is no point to play melee. I think, melee in PoE will never work, for some reason GGG just can't make monsters tough enough.

For some reason melee was fun in Diablo 3.

(I dislike Diablo 3, but this always stood out to me.

I think the reason was partially invincibility frames, leech, regen, lower monster damage, and slower monsters. Both the barb and monk could wait till they were about to die, then use a couple moves that provided invincibility or momentary bounce back, like the palm, followed by a shield, and really make surviving a kind of beautifully played thing, making it seem like you were surviving forever by skill and timing. This was addictive and fun.

Realism can really hurt the moveset. For example leap slam. It should make you invincible during the majority of it, or simply come with some kind of shield by default.

The best part about Demon Souls, DS, and DS2, is that everything felt "underwater" as if dancing with the enemy. Things flowed, and everything was agreeable, so when you died, you knew it was your fault.

I have been criticized for critiquing Bloodborne and DS3 for this, but it's a real thing. Elden returned to slower gameplay and I appreciate that, but it has its own problems with enemy move sets being the same if not more crazy than BB and DS3.

As for the melee attacks themselves, I think they are almost all unfun. Stampede being the best way to play is a serious disappointment and feels jarring when it slams down.

I think I might suggest we look at movesets from the classics, including others in the genre like Marvel Heroes and Torchlight(?) to see what feels good, because this just feel too realistic, weighty, and awkward.

"

wesinhuman#4716 wrote:

For some reason melee was fun in Diablo 3.

(I dislike Diablo 3, but this always stood out to me.

I think the reason was partially invincibility frames, leech, regen, lower monster damage, and slower monsters. Both the barb and monk could wait till they were about to die, then use a couple moves that provided invincibility or momentary bounce back, like the palm, followed by a shield, and really make surviving a kind of beautifully played thing, making it seem like you were surviving forever by skill and timing. This was addictive and fun.

Realism can really hurt the moveset. For example leap slam. It should make you invincible during the majority of it, or simply come with some kind of shield by default.

The best part about Demon Souls, DS, and DS2, is that everything felt "underwater" as if dancing with the enemy. Things flowed, and everything was agreeable, so when you died, you knew it was your fault.

I have been criticized for critiquing Bloodborne and DS3, but I think it's a real thing. Elden seemed to return to slower gameplay and I appreciate that, but it has its own problems with enemy move sets being the same if not more crazy than BB and DS3.

I really like the insight about D3! I think the melee gameplay was awesome in D3.

Honestly I really enjoyed the early levels of Monk gameplay. The evasive, in and out style of gameplay felt supported by tools like backflipping with Icepillar that was also slow enemies. Then being able to come back in with a ThunderSlam always felt very satisfying to play with positioning.

"

Ripto#7716 wrote:

"

wesinhuman#4716 wrote:

For some reason melee was fun in Diablo 3.

(I dislike Diablo 3, but this always stood out to me.

I think the reason was partially invincibility frames, leech, regen, lower monster damage, and slower monsters. Both the barb and monk could wait till they were about to die, then use a couple moves that provided invincibility or momentary bounce back, like the palm, followed by a shield, and really make surviving a kind of beautifully played thing, making it seem like you were surviving forever by skill and timing. This was addictive and fun.

Realism can really hurt the moveset. For example leap slam. It should make you invincible during the majority of it, or simply come with some kind of shield by default.

The best part about Demon Souls, DS, and DS2, is that everything felt "underwater" as if dancing with the enemy. Things flowed, and everything was agreeable, so when you died, you knew it was your fault.

I have been criticized for critiquing Bloodborne and DS3, but I think it's a real thing. Elden seemed to return to slower gameplay and I appreciate that, but it has its own problems with enemy move sets being the same if not more crazy than BB and DS3.

I really like the insight about D3! I think the melee gameplay was awesome in D3.

Honestly I really enjoyed the early levels of Monk gameplay. The evasive, in and out style of gameplay felt supported by tools like backflipping with Icepillar that was also slow enemies. Then being able to come back in with a ThunderSlam always felt very satisfying to play with positioning.

Thank you!

I beat pre-nerf inferno and was doing very hard stuff with my crew early on. I remember us literally screaming hundreds of times because I or a barb was able to survive on certain elite packs for so long, barely winning by the skin of our teeth. Unfortunately in PoE2, and PoE1, this just isn't a thing. It feels more like all or nothing, you either can or can't beat them and you know this very quickly. This always made me pretty sad since PoE1 from the very beginning, because I love it in almost every other way.