You can circumvent something like that by design of the melee skill buffs, I guess.
Vengeance can give 25% damage reduction. For 2 seconds. Enough time to throw in a couple of other melee attacks, but you need living targets nearby to hit. 2 seconds isn’t exactly long.
Or it could be dependent on the condition ‘nearby enemies’, which the game already has.
“You have +X dodge/armour against nearby targets you hit with warpath recently”.
Or: If you have not dealt damage with a directly used throwing attack or spell recently, you get XYZ.
Perhaps LE just needs more enemies to punish ranged glass cannons, so they can’t afford to skip defences. As long as ranged glass cannon is a viable strategy, they will always dominate the meta.
It’s plenty to hit, use a traversal skill and get 1-2 hits. Also, there’s the issue that there are some skills that can be melee or ranged depending on your spec. Especially with Rogue.
The biggest problem for melee is dealing with ranged mobs, not really the melee range ones. So this doesn’t really help them.
This is confusing. We should find a better way to phrase this. Also, some buff stuff also does some damage. Or you might be using spell/throw stuff for buffs and not damage, even though there is some irrelevant damage.
Perhaps it should depend on dealing damage to distant targets, then. Not with afflictions, but directly used skills. You lose the ability if you go ranged - independent of the skill type.
Some melee attacks have such long ranges that they should be considered ranged for that purpose, while some spells (untargeted ele nova comes to my mind) are “melee spells”.
Not sure how I used the appeal to authority and I was not attempting to shame you… but yes I’m skeptical about your socalled vast experience (if not expertise) when, as Scipo said, you write things like “Paladin and forgemaster take forever to kill stuff, forced to go super regen”. The point remains (and got ignored, of course) : on which basis are you comparing sorc with paladin and forgeguard ? Can you please import your characters so we can see what led you to that opinion (that melee is oh so not viable) ?
I still think you’re making an unfair comparison, with characters vastly overgeared compared to the others. Especially if you “play offline specifically so you can test different specs, effects, gear interactions”, which sounds like editing files (but correct me if i’m wrong, and no lol i’m not trying to shame you…). If that’s the case, not acquiring gear by grinding, crafting and playing the game seems like a serious bias in your tests. If you pop a 3LP wrongwarp for your sorc and 3LP palarus for you paladin, they already have serious disparities.
By the way, Melee is pretty good in Poe right now! The last update helped a lot with that. I had a blast playing a slam build and I saw some pretty cool strikers. Boat league was a great league, imo!
This is actually a good example on what I say how PoE managed to “fix” melee: melee skills are huge AoEs that clear screens.
To me, personally, that isn’t melee. Much like I don’t consider upheaval a melee skill. It’s just another ranged skill, except it’s tagged as melee.
This is definitely a difficult line to draw. Upheaval requiring a melee weapon and drawing a line (or multiple lines) from the point of impact makes me call it a “Melee Line AoE”, but it can also be converted into a PBAoE (Point Blank Area of Effect) like Earthquake. But that definition can also apply to spells, after all the shorthand comes from when I played DAoC and lots of the spellcaster classes had these PBAoEs. The closest in LE for caster would be Chthonic Fissure for a Ranged Line AoE and Elemental Nova for a Spell PBAoE (even if it can be converted to cast at cursor)
You might have enjoyed it but the fact remains for most top players its always archer, generally most start with the chaos damage or poison because they can easily clear everything with it, then after they get a dumb amount of currency and buy stuff thats 30 - 300x the price to make something else work and generally even then its not melee or in the old days it was HH to make melee not garbo.
I can agree with HorusKBZ for the idea on based on distance of ability.
P3H4, the comparison is not unfair in the least, and the reason i do it is because that way i can directly compare with different items,. It would be nice to have damage and stuff listed like PoB does it but as of now thats the best way to see how looking for a 2-3 lp item would be with maybe a single different affix instead of farming for 2 weeks hoping to get the item and hoping its almost same for stats, then hoping its got the same amount of LP then praying you get what you want with the copy over from the item that you also had to pray you got with the same stats. Personally I have neither the time or patience to farm up say 10-15 of the same exact item with slight deviations just to see the differences, just like for some reason quite a few players do not know the difference in flat vs % increases or what affixes you should get on what gear to bring out the best in your character.
When i compare i don’t just mean sitting in one spot knowing exactly where a single mob so you can setup and use absolutely everything to blow it up. Also did the person have any defense at all? Are they a complete glass cannon build? not sure as its only 430c and mob never attacked, it looked stunlocked.
I am just wanting them to be on par, if a range character can do a certain amount of damage, while ignoring bad ground, positioning, massive investment into defenses then why should a melee not expect to do more considering they must worry about even more including when a mob makes it completely impossible to get close as they dropped stuff all over the ground that will kill you, now the melee must wait, suffer through the enemy range and hopefully lure the mob back. range can just ignore all that and still kill the boss laughing all the way.
My points, exactly. The distance you keep to your target decides about melee or ranged from a gameplay perspective.
I had a ground slam stun build in PoE (many years ago) that had about 1.5 screens of range (IIRC, no ultra-wide screen back then), using Maruhi Erqi two-handed hammer.
Before the rework I used to love flicker, get a HH and high maps with stupid density… and then you have a seizure because the entire map was cleared. worked really well on very linear maps. could even crash games.
Yeah, I see your point here and I agree for some situations (when AoEs are really huge and you can smash anywhere to hit everything) BUT in most cases, you still need to get close and personal. Most strikes skills (double strike, lightning strike, etc.) requires you to hit mobs with your melee weapon to trigger the chain reaction that clear the screen. My slam build needed (up to level 95, where I opt out) to leap in the middle of the crowd and slam the ground beneath them; the AOE started under my weapon, which feels quite different than a fireball or whatever ranged aoe spell.
Also, GGG “fixed” (partially) melee by doing important changes to endurance charges and by frontloading tankyness in many “marauder” (bottom left) nodes in the passive tree. All I can say is : they worked on it, it’s not perfect but it was easy for me to build an hulking-barbarian-archetype and crush skulls with my big maul; it felt like melee.
Is it, though? Over 50% of the players are using either Trickster, Slayer or Hierophant, with Trickster being in most used. Hexblast, Lightning mines and Ice Nova are the most used skills.
What seems subjective is your choice of sources. Anyone can crap out a tier list just to get engagement, which is what most sites do, without any basis in reality. But for PoE you do have sources that actually use actual data from the game.
But the passive tree is available to you whether you play ranged or melee. Nothing stops you from taking the tanky nodes and still going ranged.
So melee isn’t tankier than ranged. It’s just tanky. Meaning ranged is as tanky and can still keep a distance.
Which was my whole point. Both LE and PoE don’t really have a distinction of melee/ranged other than for the skills you choose. Any class can be either of them.
And honestly, what you describe isn’t so much PoE fixing melee but the simple power creep where every single class these days is super tanky and can fully regen health in 0.1s.
It is. Because even if those 3, with Trickster being most used, are used by 50% of players. Within those 50% are subjective opinions on which class is the best. Even if 100% of players only used Trickster, it’d still be subjective that it’s the best class as at least on person would probably prefer to play something else but Trickster is too overtuned. It also comes down to what “best” means to that player. Is “best” the strongest class? Or is it the most fun class? Is it the flashiest? Coolest? Most interesting? By my opinion, Bard is the best class in FFXIV, but it’s next to the worst in terms of DPS contributions.
Absolutely, by design tier lists are subjective. But when I don’t actually play the game and I couldn’t find any official usage stats, the most recent tier lists and comparing between them is the best I could do in the 5 minutes I cared to look. Even if my sources were subjective, if I found enough of them (let’s say I went the extra mile and found 10), you could extrapolate some general opinions from that. I stopped at two, which is enough for me to say that these two disagree with each other as to what’s S-Tier for all but Necromancer, and Necromancer isn’t even in your top 3 most used. So clearly their definition of “best” is different
They weren’t saying that a bow build is top tier or that most people consider it to be the best, just that most people use it. Which is usually supported by the facts. The league has been going on too long now for leveling builds to still appear on poe.ninja, but usually in the first couple days it’s true that you see a lot of bow builds with poison/chaos because they tend to be overtuned for that point in the game.
So it’s not a matter of subjectively considering a build good or bad, but a matter of objectively seeing most top players using one.
Well then that’s my fault for assuming that Vaynie was still making the case that “melee sucks because ranged is better.” which is what 90% of this discussion has been saying. If he or she is now saying that “ranged is easier to play”, which is what everyone is saying, then there’s no need to continue this discussion because that’s just the nature of ranged vs melee.
I am saying that because range is easier to play and benefits simply for being range then why not give melee stuff range doesnt have to make up for it. Melee is forved to be in the middle of stuff so they should (without additional points being wasted to provide it) receive extra bonuses. add mitigation to the damage nodes, add a bonus ward or bonus lifesteal to stuff in addition… not just a simple node like range gets of +x% damage… make it the same or higher +x% damage AND +x% damage reductions.
I disagree on that. Since each class starts at a different position on the passive tree, it costs greatly to travel to the bottom left for the classes that are not Strength-related (Marauder, Inquisitor and Duelist). It’s an opportunity cost thing; if you spend 35 points (on the 120’ish that you have) you’ll have to sacrifice something else.
Of course, a marauder could pick a range skill himself… but he will have to get out of his way to get dexterity/intel because skills have a stat requirement based on the color of the gem… and those stats will probably be less useful to him than to another class.
I don’t say it’s impossible to get to those tanky-nodes, but it’s not worth it in many cases and the people that really want them needs to know what they are doing, and sacrifice other things to.
You know there are red gems that don’t require melee range, right? Like Flame Totem, which is a build. Or a few are minions.
You also know that there are lots of green gems that are melee and lots that are ranged, right? So any green class has easy access to both playstyles.
You’re thinking of a specific case of a specifc case of a Strength based class and even then you have easy access to ranged skills.
Welcome to “balancing melee and ranged is physically impossible”
As I’ve said earlier in this thread, the only viable option is to add a damage “tax” to ranged skills and conversions to lower their damage due to their ability to have a higher “uptime” by virtue of being ranged. This could work by any melee skills converted to ranged having a damage reduction applied and and ranged skills converted to melee having a damage buff applied (negating their inherent damage reduction).
This doesn’t feel good though. It works in games where ranged classes only have ranged skills, but not so much in games like this where we can convert skills around.
You’re playing a melee class with the understanding that it’s going to be a bit tougher on your than a ranged character but the damage potential and survivability potential is still the same as all playstyles have access to the same defensive tools. Melee just requires more skill.
