Why are only melee punished by weapon specific skill gems?

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Xaxyx написал:

Ranged weapons come with no intrinsic properties that assist ranged attacks, but can -- and in the case of bows, will -- possess magical characteristics that assist ranged attacks. While noting this, we simultaneously observe that ranged attack gems largely restrict their allowable weapons to -- wait for it -- ranged weapons. And then we still yet further observe that of the two ranged weapons, one, the bow, is purely a ranged attack weapon; whereas the other, the wand, is a hybrid weapon. Consequently, we might presume that of the ranged attacks, most if not all should be allowable to the bow; and far fewer should be allowable to the wand, thus establishing a pattern -- a pattern of proportional viability, where each individual weapon type has a comparable -- not equal necessarily, but at least comparable -- pool of available options.

What you are observing is 'limited dev time' and 'prioritization', not a general rule of "proportional viability".
Wands are interesing and have lots of use even with limited amount of availible skills. So it makes sense to put more focus on creating skills for the other weapons.


Stomping your foot and saying that the system is flawed because every melee weapon doesn't have the same amount of skills seems extremely narrowminded considering that the devs have said that they will try to release a new skill every week.


Also, removing the restrictions so that swords can use mace skills does not make it more consistent, it makes it less so.

Last I heard, there is still 60 something skills in the pipeline that have yet to be released.

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Xaxyx написал:

Okay. Bows are just another weapon:

Bow: 1 ranged skill disallowed
Sword: 3 melee skills disallowed
Mace: 5 melee skills disallowed
Scepter: 5 melee skills disallowed
Dagger: 7 melee skills disallowed
Claw: 7 melee skills disallowed
Wand: 7 ranged skills disallowed

And once again your counting disallowed skills from a grouping of skill that doesn't exist instead of counting the number of allowed skill for any given weapon type.

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Sickness написал:

It's not obvious to you since you are trying your damndest to defend your stance.

Of course I'm defending my stance. Whose stance should I be defending instead? Aquaman's?

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If you have two weapons, one that is desgned to be used only with weapon skills and one that is the spell casters primary weapon. GGG has limited dev time, so which of the two weapons do you think will have the most skills designed for it? It's obviously the first.

Egads, I forgot to check the dev schedule! Foiled again!

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If you do not get this then you are being deliberately obtuse because you have no other way of defending your point.

Okay, I'm being deliberately obtuse. I *refuse* to see how disallowing claws from using as many melee skills as daggers is somehow bizarrely related to available development time.

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Xaxyx написал:

Bows can use most ranged skills just as a consequence of being the only ranged weapon that is fully focused on attack skills: The ranged skills that exists was designed for bows.

Yet this same principle doesn't at all apply to the distribution of melee skills among the melee skills*. THIS is the inconsistency I'm bringing to light.

Let me elaborate: I openly acknowledge, recognize and accept the principle you've defined wherein bows deserve more ranged skill options than wands since bows are limited in scope to the use of ranged skills*, whereas wands are hybrids. Similarly, I hold in contempt the fact that this same principle fails when comparing claws to daggers, and hammers to scepters.

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Xaxyx написал:

Nope, not that. You don't answer questions, you twist answers and when you are shown wrong you give a snide remkark at best. What you are doing is pretty much trolling at this point, but you can't see it because in your eyes you are gods gift to mankind and can't be wrong about anything.

Only "pretty much" trolling? How would you suggest that I graduate to full-blown trolling? Does it involve constantly alternating between repeating the same old, tired arguments and accusing my opponent of snide obtuseness? (Or is that obtuse snideness? Hmm.)

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Xaxyx написал:

How does CYCLONE'S enabling of EVERY SINGLE MELEE WEAPON add a MEANINGFUL CHOICE to choosing a melee weapon?

It doesn't and it doesn't have to. It mixes things up when some skills function differently than others.

"Mixed up" sure about sums it all up, for certain.

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This game is all about setting it self apart from D3. Asking them to streamline one of the things that really do set them apart from D3 doesn't seem like the best idea.

Aaaand now we veer to the right. D3? Who what now? Who cares about D3? This game should be consistent for its own sake, inherently viable. Which it is, largely. Just not in some few, select venues. Such as the topic under discussion.

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In D3 the weapon type choice matters extremely little. It's not even a choice, only a calculation. If you were here a year ago you would know that people around here really hate that.

In D3 pretty much every choice matters very little. Including buying the game. I was here a year ago. I hate everything about D3. I played the beta, and didn't waste my money on the retail. Who the hell cares?

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I ask again:
How does lots of skills restricions from many melee weapons not add meaningful choice to choosing a melee weapon?

All right, let's play it your way. Let's say we wanted to set up an architecture wherein we enforce variety among melee weapons not just with intrinsic attributes, but with which skills they're permitted to use.

First off, clearly, we'd want to acknowledge the distinction between pure melee weapons and hybrid weapons. Since hybrid weapons have the vast slew of magic weapons available to them, then they should be somewhat restricted in which melee weapons they can use, to counter-balance them, and to encourage players to make better use of the pure melee weapons. Yet -- oopsies! -- we observe that claws and daggers violate this behavior, since they have the *exact same allowable melee gem skill list*.

Next, we'd want to ensure a solid dissemination of melee gem skills among the pure melee weapons. Something diverse, but overlapping; an interesting, intriguing allocation, to make choices meaningful. An abstract model like this, more or less:

Weapon 1: Skills A, B, C, D
Weapon 2: Skills C, D, E, F
Weapon 3: Skills A, B, E, F

Nice and simple; even, and fair. It could even be off by a skill or two; who cares? Perfection isn't needed, just an establishment of a baseline principle.

Yet instead -- oopsies! -- we get something like this:

Weapon 1: Skills A, B, C, D
Weapon 2: Skills A, B, C, D, E, F

This is demonstrated by the comparison of one-handed axes to one-handed swords, wherein one weapon -- a pure melee weapon, WITH an intrinsic attribute to boot -- simply has, straight up, ALL of the available skill choices AND MORE as compared to another pure melee weapon, with NO intrinsic attribute. That is unfair; indeed, that is the very DEFINITION of unfair, the POSTER CHILD of imbalance.

Furthermore, when analyzing the skill matrix sideways, we see this:

Skill A: Weapon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Skill B: Weapon 1, 2, 3
Skill C: Weapon 1, 2, 3, 6
Skill D: Weapon 1, 2, 3
Skill E: Weapon 1, 2, 3, 4, 7

Curiously, despite our desire to design intersecting, overlapping skill availabilities, we end up with some skills -- oopsies! -- that are simply available to ALL melee weapons, all of the time, such as Cyclone. So much for interesting, intriguing, fair and balanced distributions.

Thus, the model that we would want to employ, the ideal model, fails six ways to Sunday when we observe how PoE is currently implemented.

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If I had, out of lucky coincidence or happenstance, picked Ice Shot as my main attack throughout my character's career, I MUST continue to use bows. If I want to use some nifty new sword I found -- I can't.

Well then, maybe you should. If that's what it takes to let people use swords with Ground Slam, then so be it. I mean, hell, you can already cast Fireballs with a sword. Why not Ice Shot?

If you're willing to mutually suspend hostilities for a brief moment, I'll ask in earnest: would you have a problem with allowing Ice Shot with a dagger, or with a staff?

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Xaxyx написал:

Conversely, if by fate I had picked Cyclone as my main attack throughout my character's career, and I find that same sword, I can slap it on, instantly and immediately, without any issues whatsoever.

Ah, variety. It's lovely isn't it?

If by "variety" you mean some players are lucky and others are flat-out screwed, then no, variety is not lovely. Variety sucks.

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Removing choice just to make it more fair for non casters seems stupid. There are a billion other ways of balancing it.

Name seven!

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Yeah, poor melee! So restricted.

If you think they're so unrestricted now, why cling so desperately to the last few ways in which they are restricted? What's the point? Why do you care so very deeply about disallowing sword users from Ground Slamming?

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There is your arbitrary categorization again. How many ranged skills that are disallowed is not a fundamental issue.

Well, you know something? I've made it a fundamental issue. You can discuss it with me, or you can hold your breath and pout about it. Either way, I'll be continuing to hold the issue as fundamental. Hell, I'm gonna put the FUN in fundamental.

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Objectively skills are skills. You can choose to categorize them like that to make it look a certain way, but at the end of the day all melee weapons can use more skills than bows, and THAT is what actually matters.

Then maybe you should be campaigning to REMOVE skill options from melee! Or -- wait, let me guess -- things are "perfect just the way they are now"?

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I have explained over and over again that the reason why so few ranged skills are disallowed for bows is because it's the only weapon that is both ranged and is intended to be strictly used with attack skills.

Why does the fact that it's the only non-hybrid ranged weapon matter? What is so special about being the only such example in its category? Why is comparing bow to wand different from comparing claw to dagger as a result of claw having so many brethren, and bow having none? What underlying principle drives this dichotomy?

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If your list looked any other way that would be weird because then the melee weapons would have access to far more skills than bows, how is that more fair?

Should we restrict melee weapons because bows have so few skills? Would that be more fair? Should we then relax those restrictions once more bow skills come out? What does one have to do with the other? Where's the link?

*EDIT: I keep swapping my terms. Picked a bad week to quit sniffing glue, I guess...

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Sickness написал:

What you are observing is 'limited dev time' and 'prioritization', not a general rule of "proportional viability".

Clearly so, since proportional viability fails so spectacularly as a model when compared to PoE as it currently stands.

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Wands are interesing and have lots of use even with limited amount of availible skills. So it makes sense to put more focus on creating skills for the other weapons.

What "makes sense" to work on is up to the devs, not you or me.

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Stomping your foot and saying that the system is flawed because every melee weapon doesn't have the same amount of skills seems extremely narrowminded considering that the devs have said that they will try to release a new skill every week.

I'm not in the habit of taking devs at their word when it comes to game features, particularly when I disagree with that word. So I'll be here, in this thread, stomping my foot and making my opinions known to any devs who might wander by. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

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Also, removing the restrictions so that swords can use mace skills does not make it more consistent, it makes it less so.

True. But removing the restrictions so that swords can use all of the skills available to maces, AND removing the restrictions so that maces can use all of the skills available to swords, would be consistent. And if there's one thing you've learned about me, it's that I'm all about consistency.

I really don't mind that I can't use, say, Whirling Blades with an axe. Still, I am bothered by the fact that an axe or mace doesn't have some very important things other weapons have: an escape mechanism. Swords, daggers and claws have Whirling Blades which is an amazing skill for escaping. It has no "lag" like teleport or leap slam does and it's much faster than shield charge, and with the game's current problems (eg melee survivability and desync) I really feel that if I want to go melee, I must have Whirling blades because it's the only thing that's fast enough to save my life in a sticky situation.

I wish other weapons would also have an escape skill, maybe not as good, but still better than what's currently on offer.

The number of skills the different weapons can use (just straight from the wiki, so the melee numbers might be slightly lower than they should be because of old info):
1h Axe: 12
2h axe: 13
1h Sword: 14
2h swords: 12
1h maces: 12
2h maces: 11
Staff: 12
Daggers: 12
Claws:12
Bow: 10

If you look at that list and say that it's unfair because melee is so restricted then I don't really know what more to say. What colour is the sky? It might just not be the same as for everyone else.

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Sickness написал:

If you look at that list and say that it's unfair because melee is so restricted then I don't really know what more to say.

It's unfair, because melee is so restricted. I doubt you've nothing more to say, though. In fact, I'm sure you can think of something.

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What colour is the sky? It might just not be the same as for everyone else.

Blue, on a clear day. Grey, when overcast. Black, at night. Orange, during a brilliant sunset. It's a matter of perspective, you see. Perspective. A crucial concept in this discussion.

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Sickness написал:

The number of skills the different weapons can use (just straight from the wiki, so the melee numbers numbers might be slightly lower than they should be because of old info):
1h Axe: 12
2h axe: 13
1h Sword: 14
2h swords: 12
1h maces: 12
2h maces: 11
Staff: 12
Daggers: 12
Claws:12
Bow: 10

If you look at that list and say that it's unfair because melee is so restricted then I don't really know what more to say. What colour is the sky? It might just not be the same as for everyone else.

I have been waiting for someone else to do this, because I am far too lazy. This proves the entire argument invalid, melee has just as much choice of skills as any other character, no matter what weapon they use! As a matter of fact as a bow user I am feeling a bit shafted( get it, arrows have shafts! I am funny tonight!). Time to make my own thread whining about bow users not being able to use ground slam, I mean c'mon I should be able to smash my prized bow into the ground, amiright?

After reading through all 19 pages of this thread, I have decided to forward the entire contents of said thread to the NSA.

The only possible way to explain this crazed and insane situation would be several individuals exchanging messages in the most safe and secure way they possibly could. Innuendo within a niche video game.

Reported.

edit: This is a joke.