The Litany of reasons that Melee sucks

Well said Scrotie, many people don't see to realize the huge tasks that GGG's developers are doing, and all the implications of their work on the game and how it should not be taken lightly.


About BV, they reduced the interaction with pathfinder already, but it's not enough.
Could they have tested specifically the new pathfinder to see how it would perform in endgame ? Maybe, but then why not do that for most things ? Because it's not realistic, there is no time for this.
So yeah, maybe we can somewhat blame them for not enough testing on the BV Pathfinder interaction, but at the same time the basic interaction, the existance of the skill itself and the surgeon's pathfinder mod is the problem, and reworking those from scratch isn't something that they will do within 2 minutes.

And the majority of their content feels overtuned to you ... But how do you explain the first shaper kill in EHC then ?

Maybe they do not want that people run the highest maps with crazy mods like they were doing before ? I cannot speak for them, but we just cannot just assume that they do.

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ScrotieMcB написал:

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allbusiness написал:

How about they test their content first before actually releasing it, because it's clear since Invasion that they don't. No one is saying that their balancing should be spot on, but it literally takes all but like 2-3 seconds to realize that the vast majority of their content is way overtuned.

There is a special ring in Hell for users of the phrase "literally all but like."

So here's a more realistic view on testing:
1. Because keeping new players is so important to the playerbase, I highly doubt that any level cheating is used, except by the highest-level GGG staff, during testing. So virtually no one is testing endgame until they level first, manually, the old-fashioned way, and the few who can bypass this barely test at all.
2. They're not just going to test your one skill. They're not just going to test melee skills. So take that leveling experience and multiply by at least 4. More likely 10.
3. There's probably no trade during testing.
4. Even if they encounter what seems like severe difficulty, it's unlikely that they'll immediately blame that on the game. Unless the tester experience is so completely beyond the pale that they think "even with trade enabled this would be nonsense," they're unlikely to identify it as a balance problem.
5. Finally, even if the tester identifies it as a potential problem to themselves, they need to go past thinking it and onto saying it. If it's not reported, it won't get fixed.

So in conclusion, it is utterly bonkers to think GGG can prevent all of these issues with simple testing. It takes the community hundreds if not thousands of hours of collective playtime to identify these problems. That's not man-hours, that's man-months or man-years. (man-hours probably isn't PC anymore) Paying someone to perform testing beyond the leveling experience and basic bug fixes is horrendously resource-intensive and particularly difficult for endgame.

I don't think the answer is testing. At all. You cannot expect a developer to play their game with the same time commitment, or even skill level, as their community. Instead, GGG needs a better theoretical framework to predict the effects of design choices. If you haven't noticed yet, we're all testers, we do it for free, and that's a hell of a lot cheaper. GGG just needs to get better at getting things "close enough" before we get to work.

This all sounds like a whole load of shit of someone who's actually never tested or balanced a game before. If you're a game dev, you have total access to all content at any given time, and if your whole entire 'expansion' is revolved around endgame, you should be testing your bosses to make sure they work at least, and while you're doing that, it should be pretty obvious that the game is way overtuned. I used to regularly test for IceFrog in DotA 1 until I got a job. You want to know what we used to do? We literally took any new content and played it out in anyway shape or form from a theoretical standpoint, tested it with cheats, etc. and then released it for general public play. We caught tons of things that were utterly broken before being released. And yeah we still missed a few things and rare interactions, but never something like Invasion league, Order of the Frozen Sky, the new rogue exiles which would essentially one shot people (particularly the KB Rogue Exile), among the many various dozens of things that should have been tested, but was clearly not at all.


Two, GGG Neon is one of the primary testers and he would shit on like 99.9% of the population in races. It's not an excuse to say that they don't have the skillsets necessary to analyze their own balance, because they hired one specific guy (Neon who used to regularly take top 20 spots in races and take top spots in HC ladder before he was hired) to do that particular job. And yet even still after that, they fail to properly balance things within a reasonable amount. No one is asking for SC:BW perfect level of balancing, but it's clear as daylights that there is not a very thorough amount of testing of new content (such as 100% race course reflect boss without any signs of him having reflect), or that the development team is not talking to the balance team or vice versa.

Literally it would take all but 2 seconds to level up spawn a Kaoms Heart built character (any RT character) and then take him to challenge any of the new bosses and you would easily see they do too much damage. And if a Kaom's character in Neons hands is struggling, it is reasonable to assume most of the rest of your population is going to have serious issues with the bosses.

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Fruz написал:

Well said Scrotie, many people don't see to realize the huge tasks that GGG's developers are doing, and all the implications of their work on the game and how it should not be taken lightly.


About BV, they reduced the interaction with pathfinder already, but it's not enough.
Could they have tested specifically the new pathfinder to see how it would perform in endgame ? Maybe, but then why not do that for most things ? Because it's not realistic, there is no time for this.
So yeah, maybe we can somewhat blame them for not enough testing on the BV Pathfinder interaction, but at the same time the basic interaction, the existance of the skill itself and the surgeon's pathfinder mod is the problem, and reworking those from scratch isn't something that they will do within 2 minutes.

And the majority of their content feels overtuned to you ... But how do you explain the first shaper kill in EHC then ?

Maybe they do not want that people run the highest maps with crazy mods like they were doing before ? I cannot speak for them, but we just cannot just assume that they do.

First shaper kill was done on a literal glass cannon totem character with a support keeping him alive too on top of that. Zizaran is also like one of the best players in the game who regularly places in races and is mega wealthy every league. Using him as an example of 'life being ok' is silly. Look at how much harder his kill was with a support versus RaizQT's solo kill and tell me that life vs ES is ok.

And I'm not talking about BV interactions, I'm talking about how BV actually does more realistic damage now then it does before. Which again, would have taken like 2 seconds to figure out 'oh this probably is way too good.'

I never said that life was okay, that's really interpreting my previous post the wrong way.
I was implying that people are exaggerating things, and that it is possible, he did not cheese the content with a crazy high ES pool and a BV Pathfinder, he could have.
Yet he chose not to.

Also you do not know all that has been filtered before release, so you do not know to what extent the game has been tested already.

As I pointed out earlier you also do not know if GGG intends to have the highest tier actually kill people if the mods are strong ( because if you could survive all the hits with your tanky build .... then the white map would not be strong enough for GGG's liking maybe ?? ).

And they do not intend to have those bosses accessible and doable for most of the population, sorry for pointing the obvious.

Life is not in a great shape compared to ES maybe, but some of the things that you are calling untested could be ( at least partly ) design choices.

Another thing is that they might be rushing things too much, we don't know how much time they can afford to spend on testing and still fit in the 3 months per league schedule.

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Fruz написал:

I never said that life was okay, that's really interpreting my previous post the wrong way.
I was implying that people are exaggerating things, and that it is possible, he did not cheese the content with a crazy high ES pool and a BV Pathfinder, he could have.
Yet he chose not to.

Also you do not know all that has been filtered before release, so you do not know to what extent the game has been tested already.

As I pointed out earlier you also do not know if GGG intends to have the highest tier actually kill people if the mods are strong ( because if you could survive all the hits with your tanky build .... then the white map would not be strong enough for GGG's liking maybe ?? ).

And they do not intend to have those bosses accessible and doable for most of the population, sorry for pointing the obvious.

Life is not in a great shape compared to ES maybe, but some of the things that you are calling untested could be ( at least partly ) design choices.

Another thing is that they might be rushing things too much, we don't know how much time they can afford to spend on testing and still fit in the 3 months per league schedule.

They hired someone specifically to test the content.


There's no excuse at that point. Half of the shit could have been prevented from a simple run through with a high level high geared character. If someone like Neon struggles with a Kaom's (which is BiS for many life builds particularly bow and 2h builds), it's probably likely that the rest of the population will have severe issues with it.

Seriously, GGG's inability to test new content and balance is basically indefensible. I used to do serious balancing work in DotA 1, and I'm telling you right now, the shit that is going on would have never got past me. There's no way I would have ever said it would be ok to release the 100% reflect boss, or the instant detonate dead boss, etc.


Zizaran went facebreaker AW totems which is cheapest as a life based character. He pretty much cheesed the shit out of Shaper in the only way life can really cheese Shaper, and even then the fight nearly killed him.

One person to test all the content ?
That will solve all the balance problems, surely, they will spot on everything in time of course.


And you one more time ignore the point that maybe GGG wants people to struggle in high maps, especially with crazy mods ?????

:

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Fruz написал:

As I pointed out earlier you also do not know if GGG intends to have the highest tier actually kill people if the mods are strong ( because if you could survive all the hits with your tanky build .... then the white map would not be strong enough for GGG's liking maybe ?? ).

He did it so other builds cannot but this one obviously cheesed it ?
wtf ....
He would have done that with a bow char, I bet that you would have said that bow was OP and that he cheesed it with a bow.

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ScrotieMcB написал:

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allbusiness написал:

How about they test their content first before actually releasing it, because it's clear since Invasion that they don't. No one is saying that their balancing should be spot on, but it literally takes all but like 2-3 seconds to realize that the vast majority of their content is way overtuned.

There is a special ring in Hell for users of the phrase "literally all but like."

So here's a more realistic view on testing:
1. Because keeping new players is so important to the playerbase, I highly doubt that any level cheating is used, except by the highest-level GGG staff, during testing. So virtually no one is testing endgame until they level first, manually, the old-fashioned way, and the few who can bypass this barely test at all.
2. They're not just going to test your one skill. They're not just going to test melee skills. So take that leveling experience and multiply by at least 4. More likely 10.
3. There's probably no trade during testing.
4. Even if they encounter what seems like severe difficulty, it's unlikely that they'll immediately blame that on the game. Unless the tester experience is so completely beyond the pale that they think "even with trade enabled this would be nonsense," they're unlikely to identify it as a balance problem.
5. Finally, even if the tester identifies it as a potential problem to themselves, they need to go past thinking it and onto saying it. If it's not reported, it won't get fixed.

So in conclusion, it is utterly bonkers to think GGG can prevent all of these issues with simple testing. It takes the community hundreds if not thousands of hours of collective playtime to identify these problems. That's not man-hours, that's man-months or man-years. (man-hours probably isn't PC anymore) Paying someone to perform testing beyond the leveling experience and basic bug fixes is horrendously resource-intensive and particularly difficult for endgame.

I don't think the answer is testing. At all. You cannot expect a developer to play their game with the same time commitment, or even skill level, as their community. Instead, GGG needs a better theoretical framework to predict the effects of design choices. If you haven't noticed yet, we're all testers, we do it for free, and that's a hell of a lot cheaper. GGG just needs to get better at getting things "close enough" before we get to work.

The reason the map system is gated behind RNG is because before Atlas of Worlds tgere was no end game goals. Sustaining maps was end game. That was the goal and rng map drops was the only mechanic for it to slow down leveling progression. Changes to maps, their tiers, and density are all to facilitate slower leveling progression.

Atlas of Worlds was intended to provide an end game goal, ie Shaper. Unfortunately the map system has not changed. The only difference is now you have more control over map drops by choosing not to run trash maps or low tier maps.

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Fruz написал:

One person to test all the content ?
That will solve all the balance problems, surely, they will spot on everything in time of course.


And you one more time ignore the point that maybe GGG wants people to struggle in high maps, especially with crazy mods ?????

:

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Fruz написал:

As I pointed out earlier you also do not know if GGG intends to have the highest tier actually kill people if the mods are strong ( because if you could survive all the hits with your tanky build .... then the white map would not be strong enough for GGG's liking maybe ?? ).

He did it so other builds cannot but this one obviously cheesed it ?
wtf ....
He would have done that with a bow char, I bet that you would have said that bow was OP and that he cheesed it with a bow.

LOL


If you don't call AW totems with FB cheesy I don't know what the fuck to tell you. It's about as cheesy as you can get as a life build character.


Struggle?


ES isn't struggling, ES just literally face tanks everything you throw at it outside of Volatile/DD. The only people who are struggling are life builds without BiS Jewels/Kaoms.


And yes, when your full time job is literally to be the person responsible for testing and balancing new content, I'd expect a much better job then Neons track record so far. He was the one actually responsible for the cluster fuck disaster that was Invasion. Gave him a pass since he was new then, but at this point, there's no excuses.

OP's post is great, and there points that me personally and many others have made 100 times. Also i want to clarify that the main problem lies on Single Target melee skills. The clasic melee, like double strike, heavy strike, frenzy, dual strike etc.

Thing is, ranged builds cannot be hit as much, and they do have access to most defenses as melee does. That's OK. Melee should be the most dangerous playstyle. It is melee, you are expected to get hit alot. BUT there should be a reward for choosing to use this dangerous playstyle, and as of now there is none. Why? Because Ranged Builds, besides having all the defense advantages in the world(not getting hit), they also have at least 10 times higher EFFECTIVE DPS(screw the tooltip) and clear speed, EVEN against bosses, due to the fact that melee, as it is right now, even with a rediculous tooltip like 500K or more, still needs to hit and run on all endgame tier 15-16 bosses(yeah their HP is THAT high, and they will most likely one or two shot you).

The answer is not buff the defenses of melee through the roof. What do you have then? A very slow clear speed playstyle that dies really hard. We have had that. Immortal Aegis builds were a thing back in 0.9 - 1.2. GGG did not like it, so they nerfed it. Also ranged build die really hard but with 10 times higher clear speed.

So yeah, the answer IS damage. Look at Blade Vortex. It is effectively melee. Yeah, you do not need taarget, and it does have some AoE aspect, but you stay pretty much on melee-ish range all the time. So what REALLY makes Blade Vortex that good? It's ABSURD damage and the rediculous synergy with flasks(mainly Vinktar's).

As of now for me, i think that they should change melee splash gem to something like 1000% MORE damage(yeah ONE THOUSAND)-cannot take reflect damage, so that single target melee skills will be the absolute boss killers(of course there should be some rework with Slayer's AoE ascedancy). This is the simplest solution i can find for not screwing and reworking everything in this game from scratch. I am willing to accept, that as a melee player, i will die by volatile blood, by trash mobs on tier 15 maps with dangerous mobs, that i will clear a map 20 times slower than ranged builds, that i will be one shoted by melee only telegraphed moves, i will get 100 hundred times less XP per hour, IF i will be able to walk on the minotaur and give him shit in 5 seconds with my single target double strike, while all other ranged, semi ranged, spell builds which have it easy on EVERYTHING else, struggle there.

It will also be mice thematically if you parties finally have a use for a single target melee player. The one who, despite being carried through 99% of the map, will be the one who will walk in the boss room and destroy the boss.

GIVE US (clasic) MELEE LOVERS A ROLE. As of now we have none.

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allbusiness написал:

LOL


If you don't call AW totems with FB cheesy I don't know what the fuck to tell you. It's about as cheesy as you can get as a life build character.


Struggle?


ES isn't struggling, ES just literally face tanks everything you throw at it outside of Volatile/DD. The only people who are struggling are life builds without BiS Jewels/Kaoms.


And yes, when your full time job is literally to be the person responsible for testing and balancing new content, I'd expect a much better job then Neons track record so far. He was the one actually responsible for the cluster fuck disaster that was Invasion. Gave him a pass since he was new then, but at this point, there's no excuses.

Because ES has gone out of the balance with the recent powercreep, including items that remove its downside + damage boost and instant leech.
That is what is being said already everyday on this section.
ES + BV Pathfinder is broken, using it to start balance discussion about the content will lead nowhere.

What is cheesy in using something exactly the way GGG intended it to be used ? AW is one of the skills that works with FB, so what ? It makes gearing easier, so cheesy you know ...

The last part is also ... out of the previous points.
You know, because Path of Exile is such a small game with such a small cutomization system and no depth, testing it is child play for only one person.
And another thing that you have no idea off, is when the testers receive the new content to test and how much time they have to do so.


Basically so many information and parameters that you have absolutely no knowledge of but you just allow yourself to judge and bash people.

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Fruz написал:

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allbusiness написал:

LOL


If you don't call AW totems with FB cheesy I don't know what the fuck to tell you. It's about as cheesy as you can get as a life build character.


Struggle?


ES isn't struggling, ES just literally face tanks everything you throw at it outside of Volatile/DD. The only people who are struggling are life builds without BiS Jewels/Kaoms.


And yes, when your full time job is literally to be the person responsible for testing and balancing new content, I'd expect a much better job then Neons track record so far. He was the one actually responsible for the cluster fuck disaster that was Invasion. Gave him a pass since he was new then, but at this point, there's no excuses.

Because ES has gone out of the balance with the recent powercreep, including items that remove its downside + damage boost and instant leech.
That is what is being said already everyday on this section.
ES + BV Pathfinder is broken, using it to start balance discussion about the content will lead nowhere.

What is cheesy in using something exactly the way GGG intended it to be used ? AW is one of the skills that works with FB, so what ? It makes gearing easier, so cheesy you know ...

The last part is also ... out of the previous points.
You know, because Path of Exile is such a small game with such a small cutomization system and no depth, testing it is child play for only one person.
And another thing that you have no idea off, is when the testers receive the new content to test and how much time they have to do so.


Basically so many information and parameters that you have absolutely no knowledge of but you just allow yourself to judge and bash people.

Except no one is complaining about a theorycraft build that was overpowered as shit suddenly out of nowhere. No one would ever fault GGG for that.


It doesn't take but literally 5 seconds to command spawn a level 90 character with a Kaoms Heart and spec his tree to a bout 8k to 10k life and see that they can instantly die to any of the tier 15/tier 16 bosses. That's not 'unforseen consequences' or some shit, that's just GGG being lazy as fuck.


GGG's inability to even do basic balancing procedures is just mind boggling, especially when they have years now to correct it since the cluster fuck disaster that Invasion league was. Everyone said that none of the shit was tested, and Chris Wilson even admitted it, and yet years down the road they are still making the same dumbass mistakes.


And AW totems with taunt were cheesy as shit. Please, just stop. Zizaran did it on an AW fb taunt setup and only pulled it off because taunt basically was cheesy beyond belief.