If melee is so hard to design, why does Barbarian feel great in every single Diablo game?

D2, D3, D4 all got the Barbarian right. Maybe it's the only thing they got right. I know "D4 bad," but they know how to build a melee class that feels good.

Right now, outside of the quarterstaff, they only gave us the slowest melee weapon they had. I don't know why, but it would have been preferable IMO to have the Marauder/Axes first. It will probably be a faster paced melee combat than the slows hard hitting maces are.

Beyond the attack speed and combat efficiency, there’s the melee defensive layers that are in a bit of a pickle, unless you're a Monk.

In PoE, or any other game that uses a similar open approach when it comes to skill selection, it seems like it's hard to balance the game around melee without also affecting characters that wouldn't normally use that skill, but could to if it gives them a buff. At least, that's the reason I see mentionned here most of the time.

In Diablo 3/4, Blizzard gave (or used to give) a standard damage reduction and some close damage reduction tools to classes that have to go in close combat situations. It's still risky, but you rarely get one shotted with properly geared Barbarian or Werebear, for example unless you stay in a bunch of exploding poison thingies.

I wish GGG could come up with something similar when using true melee attacks/skills while wearing armour. Why not give us a stacking all damage reduction buff like Fortitude was (and something significant, not 10% DR) that is increased up to given cap depending on our armour physical damage reduction when we use a melee tag attack and is entirely removed as soon as we use a non buff non melee attack, maybe with a small cooldown. That would prevent casters/ranged characters from using it every 5-6 seconds, even if they're wearing armour.

Now, they would need to adjust the other DR buffs or tools (e.g. Invoker physical DR, which is probably too strong), but not feeling too squishy would make melee feel way better. Maybe we're getting more defensive tools out of the Marauder/Templar and Druid classes, who knows, but so far, it doesn’t feel very strong unless you're lucky enough to get a lot of very high + life stat on gear.

Also, they need to remove most of the Armour drawback of losing its physical damage reduction properties the higher the damage of the hit is. This is absurd that Strength based characters main layer of defense mostly works against white mobs hits, and almost not at all against bosses slams. It forces these classes/builds to work towards ES to add more effective HP, and full armour should be viable, way sooner and well into endgame.

I'm not sure if you've played D2 at a high level but Barb does NOT feel good in that game. It's also arguably the closest Diablo game to PoE1/2. Barb only feels good at the very end of endgame, once you have Enigma and Grief (two of the hardest / rarest runewords to put together in the game). And pretty much the sole reason to run barb is because of the extra loot roll from hoarking - and people only run that in one very specific area in Act1 that just so happens to drop good items but can't be farmed by Sorc / Zon because of immunities. So Barb being good in D2 is EXTREMELY situational. I can't speak for D4 but D3 is much closer to something like World of Warcraft than the ARPG system that PoE and D2 function under. It's much easier in that game to just turn up a number to the moon and suddenly you're exploding everything.

Warrior on D4 is just hold X to win, boring as hell.

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BesottedOrb#0064 wrote:

Warrior on D4 is just hold X to win, boring as hell.

There is no Warrior in D4 (or even D3 and D2), but I get that you referenced the Barbarian. ;)

Thing is, in D4, at low enough difficulty or by using a meta skill/meta build, everything come down to pushing one button to attack, poping Cooldowns and mowing the map down. Even without one of the few Overpowered skills, eventually your character is so strong that it mows down everything with ease in any difficulty level, again, with the push of a single button/click and maybe some cooldown mashing every now and then. The Barbarian in D4 isn't any different to any other class in the sense that they (Blizzard) made the game so easy that bosses are generally not a challenge anymore. This current season (Season 7), they even made a nice, relatively "challenging" first boss that hits hard and requires you to dodge while playing on Hard. Some people cried at how hard it was... I bet Blizzard won't repeat that experience again, sadly. Too bad it simply was a single boss too, with the rest of the boss fights being inconsequential.

The only challenging content in D4 isn't challenging at all : Blizzard simply cranks the damage up and pit you against HP sponges in a race against the clock. Get better gear, rise numbers, repeat.

Anyway, when it comes to pressing one button to win come Endgame, PoE isn't that much behind though with a lot of one skills builds stacking Overpowered mechanics to blast through maps and bosses swiftly, but I'll give you that early mapping in PoE2 requires you to stay away from corpses and thread more carefully compared to D4 "Endgame" Pits. It's a bit more technical, even if it isn't as slow and "methodical" as the early campaign was and a lot of builds use very few skills because most of the time, a combo isn't worth it, especially against trash mobs, and the way it currently works with support gems being very limited in number, you're almost better off boosting a single skill over the others.

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Puz#1322 wrote:

D2, D3, D4 all got the Barbarian right. Maybe it's the only thing they got right. I know "D4 bad," but they know how to build a melee class that feels good.

I suspect it’s because D3-4 are significantly easier than PoE so you don’t have to balance too much, you can just focus on improving animations and making the combos feel really fluid. Fact is, as long as you’re not actively trying to do something stupid, everything will just die in D3-4 as long as you push your buttons. That creates a completely different dynamic.

Arguably, in PoE2 Warrior wouldn’t feel so bad if we weren’t comparing it to the other classes. In my solo play through testing it was definitely harder to progress, but also really fun (I didn’t t map, only campaign). And I also leveled one-hand and shield in a group of 3, taking on a more frontline tank role and it felt really good.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you’re not comparing apples to apples here. And that Warriorms gameplay can feel really rewarding when you pull it off.

The Warrior to me is too much sacrifice for too little reward.

Taking a -move speed & -attack speed for more damage is just a bridge too far for me. I hate moving slow and attacking slow. If I am doing that, i wanna be damn near unkillable.

I've never slogged Warrior out nearly long enough to feel tanky.

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antoniopandrade#6482 wrote:

I'm not sure if you've played D2 at a high level but Barb does NOT feel good in that game. It's also arguably the closest Diablo game to PoE1/2. Barb only feels good at the very end of endgame, once you have Enigma and Grief (two of the hardest / rarest runewords to put together in the game). And pretty much the sole reason to run barb is because of the extra loot roll from hoarking - and people only run that in one very specific area in Act1 that just so happens to drop good items but can't be farmed by Sorc / Zon because of immunities. So Barb being good in D2 is EXTREMELY situational. I can't speak for D4 but D3 is much closer to something like World of Warcraft than the ARPG system that PoE and D2 function under. It's much easier in that game to just turn up a number to the moon and suddenly you're exploding everything.

this is not true. barb feels great it just doesn't perform well. i enjoyed all active barb flavours in d2 even tho they sucked when compared to others in clear. but they are very fun, in fact so much fun it offsets the slow clear. in poe tho....

D2 does melee right by making it have a use case.

Tanky bossing, Frenzy barbs and Smite Paladins at least last I played were in the top Uber farmers and with the right runewords they can even become decent at farming (maybe not as much Barb but Auradins are strong)

I've lobbied for melee to have this use case in POE but GGG never managed it. Melee in POE is the "try hard" or "extra challenge mode" Uber bosser (see Alk killing Ubers with 250k boneshatter DPS, 80k armour and 9k life and spending literally 20 to 30 minutes doing it, because in his own words: I'm probably doing 50k actual DPS due to Sirus fucking off into the clouds and shit, and needing to refresh buffs and warcries)

You can't have ES, EV, CI, damage shifting etc. be the strongest layers (as they have been in POE1 and 2) and melee be the tankiest class. It has to be the opposite of this.

You especially can't then remove life scaling and make Armour 12x worse in POE2 than it was in POE1.

just simple and really obvious mistakes being made that someone at GGG refuses to recognize as mistakes.

I am not allowed to "call out devs" even when they constantly talk about their mistakes in interviews and still fail to recognize them. And he does A LOT OF INTERVIEWS.

That GGG dev has publicly acknowledged these decisions as his:

* negative attack speed multiplier (in the "melee revamp league" 4+ years ago)
* super slow motion animations
* spells being able to move while cast, while melee root in place
* life no longer on tree
* ES being made stronger due to it being primary caster defense
* Melee having lots of uncontrolled "step into the swing" animations that take player agency away.

Those are all disastrous choices that dramatically handicap Melee in a mechanical way that is hard to overcome. Until they understand these mechanical disadvantages they've baked in; the most we can hope for is that Neon comes along and boosts all the bad melee skills by 400% to compensate like he did in 3.25 league.

Those absurd buffs are just an indication of how much mechanical disadvantage and overbearing opportunity cost melee had in POE1. In other words: how embarrassingly far from hitting the target they were for 12 years.

It's frustrating that GGG can't just drop the parts of D2 that don't work for melee.

Having melee use mana in 2025 is the dumbest thing ever. Something like Rage or Fury or whatever GGG want to call it is infinitely better.