The Litany of reasons that Melee sucks

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Phrazz написал:

While there are MANY fixes that can be made, I can't help focusing on fortify. The introduction of Fortify was a step in the right direction, but it's not quite enough. And there are may buffs/fixes they can do with fortify:

- Add fortify to every melee skill in the game
- Make fortify stronger for every hit made on the same target
- Add an elemental damage reduction in addition to the physical reduction
- Add movement speed to fortify

Want to point out fortify works on damage from hits - all damage from hits including elemental and chaos.
I do like the idea of fortify giving movement speed.

Main problem is that the game doesn't have "Melee Classes" and "Ranged Classes". When you do crap design (like they did in D3) but you got a distinction between Melee and Ranged chars, you can just buff numbers to make Melee tankier if needed. In PoE you can't do that because the Marauder can be real melee (Heavy Strike), fake melee (Earth Quake) or even a Ranged class like Wander, Bow & Arrow, Caster or even Summoner (totems or undeads, all welcomed).

One of the things I often suggested, was to just remove the Fortify Gem (which gimps your damage) and include Fortify to all the real melee skills that "deserve" it.
I kinda liked Phrazz's idea of not only including them in the gems but also making consecutive hits to increase the Fortify effect, making it even less desirable for builds not using that skill as their main skill, but it should be something like 3-5 stacks maximum (preferably 3) in order to not punish slow-hitting builds...

Another solution I'm not completely against that has been mentioned previously is adding some kind of defenses (Armor, Evasion, Resistances, Life) to the Melee Only nodes in the tree (like 16% Increased Melee Damage could become 16% IMD and 2 HP, or 16% IMD and 3% Evasion). The "problem" with this method is that the "Fake Melee Skills" (like Earth Quake) that avoid melee all together would still be getting the same buff as those skills that really need it.

Anyway... I'm all up for removing Fortify and add it to the Melee Gems that need it, also removing the ability of casters to abuse a buff that was supposed to help melees when they Whirlind Blades or Leap Slam.

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GeorgAnatoly написал:

Want to point out fortify works on damage from hits - all damage from hits including elemental and chaos.
I do like the idea of fortify giving movement speed.

Yeah, I was thinking about ground effects and degen effects, as those can be very dangerous end game. But this may also be done by removing the "hit" tag on fortify.

....But we know HUGE changes aren't coming. Why? Well, Chris was talking (in a podcast) about how it STILL(!!!) is an internal discussion in the GGG office about what is strongest; Life or ES. And IF GGG can view those two as equal, they can certainly view melee and ranged as equal too.

But yeah, like the guy above me is touching on, adding more hybrid nodes on the tree may go a long way. Life + melee damage + global defenses.

There's just SO MANY DIFFERENT things they CAN do. Not TRYING out any of them, tells us a lot.

FIVE WHOLE PERCENT!!!

So much hating on armor in this post.

Have any of the guys hating on armor actually played a build with high armor (like 35k+ unflasked)?

I thought not.

Although there are diminishing returns based on the size of the incoming hit, a high armor value still provides a great deal of mitigation.

Empowered (non ele) windslashes/slams from Uber Izaro barely touch high armor characters.

And anyone who thinks ES melee is actually good is quite wrong, except in a few specific cases. Usually as a melee character (and BV is not melee, btw) who is ES, there's a variety of issues. The first is that you have no natural form of recovery in combat besides leech. So you can either go for a lot of leech or spend a whole bunch of inefficient points to go and get Zealot's Oath for some regen, but wait! All the life regen nodes are on the other side of the tree and not next to ES nodes that you can use to scale your HP. If you go ZO as ES melee you will basically do no DPS. So that is out. So you're going to go for leech. And it needs to come back quickly, cause otherwise you have no way to stay in range of anything with a lot of HP that takes time to kill. So you need Vaal Pact. And since you need all the HP you can get from your gear, you have no room for other defenses (like armor) on it, so any hits you do take will chunk you, and may stun or freeze you. So you've got to deal with those status issues, as if you're frozen or stunned and not attacking and thereby leeching, you're dead. So you're forced into playing a 'sponge' build as ES melee, and/or playing pseudo-melee.

TL;DR -> There's a difference between hitpoints and effective hitpoints. And life melee builds usually have more effective hitpoints even though their hitpoint pool appears to be smaller.

The main notable exceptions to this are pseudo melee builds like Reave, EQ, etc that can attack enemies from outside their range or ones like Cyclone that can attack while moving and thereby dodge attacks through positioning while still doing damage.

I dont play a high armor build, only 20k. But, my EHP is higher as I use cyclone and quicksilvers with double movement speed to maximize damage and survivability through movement. I think I only have 6K life on my 89 juggernaut cycloner.

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Gary_GGG написал:

Actually, the Developers read every thread in the the Feedback and Suggestions forum, it's the best place to post if you want developers to read your feedback.

Additionally, the Support team reads every post that is made on the forum.

That being said then what's the delay in buffing up most of the melee skills to be more in line with ranged to re-kindle the desire to play them? What are you waiting for? Your 3rd anniversary is coming up soon on October 23rd. That would be the perfect time to announce that you're making sweeping changes to improve the very sad and neglected state of melee skills.

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Arrowneous написал:

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Gary_GGG написал:

Actually, the Developers read every thread in the the Feedback and Suggestions forum, it's the best place to post if you want developers to read your feedback.

Additionally, the Support team reads every post that is made on the forum.

That being said then what's the delay in buffing up most of the melee skills to be more in line with ranged to re-kindle the desire to play them? What are you waiting for? Your 3rd anniversary is coming up soon on October 23rd. That would be the perfect time to announce that you're making sweeping changes to improve the very sad and neglected state of melee skills.

They said that ( I dont remember if it was in a podcast or on the forum ) they do not want to rush such balance changes as the impact is going to be pretty big, and that they have already plans for fixing the single target click required system or something like that, and it should come with other melees improvements I think.

I don't remember how it was worded really, but it's in the pipe, and they cannot just throw some stuff and see what happens for very serious matters I think.

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Fruz написал:

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Arrowneous написал:

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Gary_GGG написал:

Actually, the Developers read every thread in the the Feedback and Suggestions forum, it's the best place to post if you want developers to read your feedback.

Additionally, the Support team reads every post that is made on the forum.

That being said then what's the delay in buffing up most of the melee skills to be more in line with ranged to re-kindle the desire to play them? What are you waiting for? Your 3rd anniversary is coming up soon on October 23rd. That would be the perfect time to announce that you're making sweeping changes to improve the very sad and neglected state of melee skills.

They said that ( I dont remember if it was in a podcast or on the forum ) they do not want to rush such balance changes as the impact is going to be pretty big, and that they have already plans for fixing the single target click required system or something like that, and it should come with other melees improvements I think.

I don't remember how it was worded really, but it's in the pipe, and they cannot just throw some stuff and see what happens for very serious matters I think.

That's funny because that's exactly what GGG's balancing is like for years now. Just throw shit at the wall and hope it works. Do you not remember what they did years ago when there was legacy Kaoms and path of life nodes? They proceeded to literally nerf every life node on the tree and reduce Kaoms to +500. Guess what happened then? Everyone went CI.


It's like they didn't know what would happen if they upped the mob damage by astronomical amounts (which they have). I love some aspects of this game, but their balance team has absolutely no clue what they are doing at all.