Sword/Melee skills that actually hit enemies not ground

I rewatched the ExileCon 2023 trailer, the duelist snippet shows a skill with sword going into the ground -_-

Since we already have maces with skills that mostly bonk the ground, it would be nice to have an alternative melee option in the future that isnt mace 2.0

I know old footage, maybe reworked, etc
But there seems to be a thing going on in poe2 design with overthinking/complicating skills, and missing some of the basic things the 'fantasy' want to achieve.
Like on sorc, where you dont have a regular fireball (no I dont want minifireball spam) - its the most go-to fantasy of being a sorc, just throwing huge fireballs, but its somehow not possible in poe2

So keep it simple, sword meant to hit enemies not ground ty

Melee is mechanically broken compared to casters. Casters move and shoot freely, while melee is stuck in long animations that lock you in place. GGG tries to fix this by giving every weapon unnatural AoE, but it ruins the class fantasy. A sword should be about precision and hitting the enemy, not the environment.

Many of the melee gems shown so far feel dull in how they are designed to work. There are much cooler ways to design melee-specific abilities that fit the weapon fantasy and would be far more useful and fun to play. The developers simply need to be more creative.

For melee to actually work, we need real identity:

1. Mechanical Balance: Melee takes 100% of the risk by standing in ground degens and being animation-locked next to bosses. Melee also faces movement penalties from heavy armor that casters ignore. The design needs to compensate for these inherent risks rather than just adding more AoE.

2. Viable Single-Target Content: The economy is a loot-per-hour trap. We need league mechanics and the ability to shape our maps through the Atlas for single-target builds where focusing on high-threat enemies is viable.

3. Pure Tank Viability: You can’t make a heavy warrior zoom without ruining the fantasy. Building a pure tank should be a legitimate, viable choice that has its own place in the game’s content.

Right now, every build feels the same because you’re forced into zoom-zoom AoE just to participate in the economy. If the only way to progress is to delete the whole screen instantly, the unique identity of different weapons and classes is completely dead.

They could make it work with current game engine and animations. But they only know how to make zoomzoom games. So forget about melee.

"

Burn4#0434 wrote:

Melee is mechanically broken compared to casters. Casters move and shoot freely, while melee is stuck in long animations that lock you in place. GGG tries to fix this by giving every weapon unnatural AoE, but it ruins the class fantasy. A sword should be about precision and hitting the enemy, not the environment.

Many of the melee gems shown so far feel dull in how they are designed to work. There are much cooler ways to design melee-specific abilities that fit the weapon fantasy and would be far more useful and fun to play. The developers simply need to be more creative.

For melee to actually work, we need real identity:

1. Mechanical Balance: Melee takes 100% of the risk by standing in ground degens and being animation-locked next to bosses. Melee also faces movement penalties from heavy armor that casters ignore. The design needs to compensate for these inherent risks rather than just adding more AoE.

2. Viable Single-Target Content: The economy is a loot-per-hour trap. We need league mechanics and the ability to shape our maps through the Atlas for single-target builds where focusing on high-threat enemies is viable.

3. Pure Tank Viability: You can’t make a heavy warrior zoom without ruining the fantasy. Building a pure tank should be a legitimate, viable choice that has its own place in the game’s content.

Right now, every build feels the same because you’re forced into zoom-zoom AoE just to participate in the economy. If the only way to progress is to delete the whole screen instantly, the unique identity of different weapons and classes is completely dead.

Exactly, spot on. They're repeating the exact same mistakes from PoE1. Making everything melee act the same way as any other spell or ranged screen clear-capable skill. Not even spells and ranged abilities themselves should be all about that either.

And it creates this homogenous bland gameplay where everything is all the same thing in a slightly different wrapper.

"

IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

Exactly, spot on. They're repeating the exact same mistakes from PoE1. Making everything melee act the same way as any other spell or ranged screen clear-capable skill. Not even spells and ranged abilities themselves should be all about that either.

And it creates this homogenous bland gameplay where everything is all the same thing in a slightly different wrapper.

The fact that they built the endgame before several melee classes is incredibly concerning. It suggests they are just trying to fit melee into an existing environment, rather than creating an endgame where every class has a unique scenario to thrive in.

When the entire structure of the Atlas, league mechanics, and boss encounters is already locked into a specific pace, the developers are forced to design every skill to meet those clear-speed requirements. This is a shortcut that kills variety, instead of unique playstyles, we get different animations that all perform the same function.

It feels like they’ve sacrificed depth to meet a release date, and it will take years to fix these fundamentals, if they even have the desire to. Whether it's burnout or just the weight of their own success, the fire they once had to make something truly special seems to have faded. They seem content to skip the hard work of evolving the genre and are just taking the easy way out.

Seems to me that melee players search for Gladiator game rather than fast paste killing that poe series provide. This is not the appropriate game for you guys and never will be despite the ton of improvements made so far. Magic and melee can't be existing together in RPGs.

"

Burn4#0434 wrote:

The fact that they built the endgame before several melee classes is incredibly concerning. It suggests they are just trying to fit melee into an existing environment, rather than creating an endgame where every class has a unique scenario to thrive in.

When the entire structure of the Atlas, league mechanics, and boss encounters is already locked into a specific pace, the developers are forced to design every skill to meet those clear-speed requirements. This is a shortcut that kills variety, instead of unique playstyles, we get different animations that all perform the same function.

It feels like they’ve sacrificed depth to meet a release date, and it will take years to fix these fundamentals, if they even have the desire to. Whether it's burnout or just the weight of their own success, the fire they once had to make something truly special seems to have faded. They seem content to skip the hard work of evolving the genre and are just taking the easy way out.

I was talking yesterday with a friend of mine and told him how they are planning to go from 0.5 to 1.0 likely this year and he was baffled with the jump. I then told him there are a lot of weapons they haven't even released yet and most likely won't have enough time to do so.

His immediate reaction: those are all melee weapons, aren't they?

Me checking through the list and then answering with a straight face... Yes

I'm curious what every person here means when they speak about "melee" because melee mace warrior is by FAR my #1 played class in this game and almost every single comment I read about maces/warrior/melee skills in general feels opposite about how I experience melee builds to the point where I start to wonder if people are just holding down the attack button in front of a boss, dying, and then blaming "melee".

I don't even play in a trade league and I can build warriors that deal with Uber Arbiter in a minute or two while still being able to AFK juiced t16s. I'm talking meme-certified "vision" builds that people would laugh out of the room - but they still clear a fully juiced t16 with all the atlas boss difficulty nodes allocated in ~7 minutes which doesn't feel slow to me, and they're all hc builds that don't fall over to damage.

I guess if you want to complain about being vulnerable to unlucky boss slams there is a point in regards to being AR/EV/Life based but that also applies to ranged builds because the slam radii are large and also usually conical so they're harder to dodge the farther you are from the boss.

I can envision it now - the swords are gonna come with a literal built-in "sword slash" skill or whatever they call it and too many people with PoE1-brain conditioning are going to just immediately disregard it for no reason other than "default skills lol" then come here and complain about how there's no "true melee" or how since it's built-in it doesn't count as fun to use because they can't conceptualize using more than 1 skill on a character so their whole argument is from a standpoint of you either use the default skill OR another skill.

The swords are going to have both strike and AoE slash skills and probably some slams just like how maces have a variety. You're going to be able to go up and slash a monster with a built-in skill and there'll be other strike skills, so don't worry too much about that. But you know, when the boss winds up their big circle-aoe slam around their feet, it might be better to back off and use your ranged sword-slam or whatever they give us. You can go back to RPing as a monster-hugging sword-slasher after that.

The point was that true melee skills don't have a real use case when the game demands screen clear from you all the time, and as such they will focus on those.

A comment I saw in another thread just now so you get the picture "I can kill 4 screens of mobs with lightning spear before a mace warrior finishes his first swing to clear 1/4 of a screen."

Mace does fine

I see people saying “true” as if mace strike or rolling slam don’t work. And those are the closest hitting melee skills in the game.

And I make them work just fine. You don’t need screen clear at all.



Someone above also says you’re animation locked as well. Which you aren’t, I guess they don’t know dodge roll exists.