What is a melee character in LE, though (or in PoE, for that matter)?
Will you give that to the Sentinel base passive tree? That way every build gets access to it, even if they’re ranged.
The only way to effectively give that to only melee would be to place that in the melee skill tree. Which means you have to spend skill points in an offensive skill to get defensive bonuses, which doesn’t feel great.
And even then it wouldn’t work all the time because some skills can be transformed into ranged/melee.
Give me 10 minutes and I could make all melee classes feel a lot better. Solving the problems are really easy. To your issue, just make those trees require fewer points in other areas, I mean, LE would be WAY better off if they make the game easier and provide ways for gear progression to trivialize the game than the current system.
The real issue is the devs are too focused on Dark Souls style boss systems. Increasing corruption seems to be decent for most classes to a point. (Minus the classes that do 3000c) A lot of builds can get to 400-600c with some dedication, hell many builds hit 1000c, but all these builds still struggle with boss fights.
Then consider that the end game has close to zero content. So, they chose to slow us all down with the boss fights rather than promote creating new class builds and experimenting. The reason people love D2 is because there’s so many class builds that work. They take a lot of dedication but they work. This game needs that approach yesterday.
FYI: D2R has 50,000 active users right now (There’s a reason people love and play that game even to this day). That’s close to D4 numbers. LE is shedding users at the fastest rate amongst all common aRPGs right now. It’s because boss battles are ridiculous over tuned and class balance is bad. The devs could bring people back with just a week of serious rebalancing.
I say all this, and spend time on this forum because I think this game has potential. However, I have no intention of continuing to play if they stay on the same path they are on. I’d advise them to stop developing their bad story and focus on end game content, class balance, and making bosses easier. Story means fuck all in these games. Most people don’t care. Literally, the gameplay is building cool characters that are powerful when you get them the gear they need. LE fails at doing this across the board.
Edit: I have more fun playing Chronicon and have significantly more hours in that aRPG than this one, and it’s not even a service game like this one. It has it’s own issues, but it was made by 1 person. It’s significantly better than this game by a mile because the dev understood the concept of aRPG like Diablo.
How does that help melee, though? If you make gear progression better, ranged also has access to the same gear. So that doesn’t actually address the disparity between ranged and melee.
The fact that you can’t point to a single mastery and say that it’s either melee or ranged makes it so you can’t make any improvements melee specific. So any improvement you make to the tankiness will affect all masteries and builds equally, so you’ll still have ranged builds that are as tanky as a melee one.
The only way I see to actually solve that is to do what PoE did: turn melee skills into screen clearing AoEs.
Yes, because clearly any boss that has mechanics is a Souls-like. Because if you can’t just spam a button while watching a video in another screen, it’s souls-hard.
Just fyi, I don’t like souls-games. Not even Elden Ring which is clearly more casual (in their niche). And yet I have no issue with any of the bosses.
Yes, the game has little endgame content for now. It’s a new game after all. It still has more content than PoE did when it released. Or D3. Or D2. Or D4. It will get there.
As for encouraging new builds, I totally disagree with you. I think most systems in LE actually encourage you to make alts. It’s actually the most altoholic-friendly ARPG out there.
You actually have no way of knowing that because Blizzard doesn’t release their numbers. Unless you’re trying to base that on click-bait sites that have made up numbers.
You also don’t know their numbers, but from all estimates D4 has over 1 million players at season start, so those numbers are nowhere close.
You are a fanboi. There’s zero reason to talk to you about this. You will never get it. You enjoy the loading screens.
Many sites use bandwidth to determine active users. Literally, they can see the amount of data coming out of Blizz servers for said game and extrapolate the numbers from that. It’s common practice. D2 has WAY more users than this game, So does D4 (which shocks me because its a horrid game).
Yes, I disagree with you and actually like this game, so in your mind there’s no reason to engage in discussion. What you want is an echo box that agrees with you, not an actual discussion.
Yes, and many sites get their numbers factually wrong. Even for LE many sites have numbers totally wrong (some even saying that LE has millions of players) and LE is actually easy to check real numbers.
I have no idea what the numbers for D2 are, and neither do you. Only Blizzard knows and they only release numbers when it’s convenient for them.
Agree. EHG is taking a look at it, I trust them to decide if any adjustment needs to be made… because they are the sole entity in this conversation that has a financial incentive to do so.
I agree, the thing is in LE you will never see any effort to make melee on par with ranged.
Melee vs ranged always has been an issue in ARPGS, is hard to balance.
While melee usually has advantage on directional attacks (IE a breath-cone attack), as they can move out of danger faster, but nothing stops a ranged player to play at a closer distance for a better reaction to such attacks.
Ranged has clear advantage on any move that implies boss repositioning and wide AoE attacks, specially those cast with the enemy in the center.
Melee has less DPS uptime, because melee need to close the gap after a strong mechanic or enemy repositioning, and even when it can face-tank the boss, there’s still a small loss of DPS due to repositioning.
This is usually mitigated with a mix of some extra defense (or sustain) for melee only, so they can face-tank a bit more than ranged (very hard to balance), and a bit of an edge in DPS, so they can make up for the less DPS uptime. You will find none of those in LE, in fact, the best performant skills are often ranged spells.
TL DR: Melee is just a harder playstyle, still viable for the fun of it (I love melee combat in ARPGs), but if you’re struggling, better stick to ranged or fire and forget playstyles.
That fact that you genuinely believe that “trivializing bosses” is what makes people enjoy ARPGs is surely one of the hottest takes I’ve seen in ARPG discussions. Not once have I ever met someone who said “man, PoE is fantastic! I can just click on a boss and it dies!” or “D2 is the peak of ARPGs because I can ignore boss mechanics”
ARPGs aren’t “typically” focused on big epic boss fights, which is something that sets LE apart, but people don’t play ARPGs BECAUSE the boss fights are trivial and conversely people aren’t “fleeing” LE just because it wants players to actually fight their bosses.
I disagree with this. Aberoth was designed with melee in mind as well. Whether they managed to do so or not is a different story, but they did listen to community feedback and took that into account when designing Aby.
That is also debatable. For example, Shade has attacks that he never uses unless you’re at ranged distance. So melee never has to deal with those.
Honestly, I think that’s pretty much the only way to balance them. Mobs and especially bosses having different skill sets depending on your distance to them.
I think is still harder with melee, so many instances you need to get out and engage again, I can agree are worse boss encounters than Aberroth for a melee playstyle.
Yeah one mechanic, while half a dozen F up melee more than ranged.
If you think there’s no disadvantage in melee combat, yeah (but sadly there is). I agree boss battles should be designed with melee in mind, but will be still more downtime, because ranged and melee have the exact same defenses, and ranged has more DPS, only because less reposition requirements.
In PoE 2 they did a great job with melee, because you have melee skills that also reposition yourself, melee has a higher damage scaling (present in latest PoE 1 update), and they are perfectly aware of the melee issue, you have fortification and all PoE 2 bosses are designed with melee also in mind.
In LE ranged has the same if no more damage, plus more DPS uptime, plus exact same defenses for melee and ranged.
“Nearby” effects are not generic, and while melee playstyle take a slight advantage over it due to more chances to be at nearby range, by no means is considered a melee-only skill. Proof is old bastion of honor, was so good it was used on ANY playstyle if you could fit in a shield, with a strong nearby DR on hit effect. If you take a look of PoE endurance charges, you’ll see is clearly designed for melee.
I don’t need to prove it. Just play the game, try things out and you will notice there’s no indicator melee is better in any way, and the best skills mostly have been ranged spells, since EA.
I agree with Ninakoru that the defenses are the same. Every class can use every defense in the game to varying degrees of success. The defenses ARE the same, but I agree with you that the efficacy of the defense is not equal though.
Regarding ranged being “more powerful” than melee, it’s part of my argument from earlier. Ranged IS more powerful, but it’s not that Ranged deals more damage. It’s that ranged has an easier time and more opportunities to deal damage than melee due to the nature of the two playstyles.
If you had one melee build and one ranged build with equally skilled players at each build. These two builds have comparable testing dummy/sheet dps and on paper/in a vacuum deal roughly the same dps, the ranged build will deal more damage in an actual boss fight because the melee has to disengage more often to deal with mechanics or even chase the boss down to continue attacking. If the ranged can roughly have 98% uptime, the melee will likely have 95%. It’s not a massive difference, which is why I think that anyone who says melee isn’t viable because ranged exists needs to play something else because that’s just ranged vs melee
Edits: formatting and the quote dropped for some reason.
A 98% vs 95% is quite generous for the melee side, but I can see this happening in some boss fights (others where the boss has self-centered AoE skills is just not possible), and the skill ceiling and the boss knowledge for melee achieving that percentage would be quite high.
Again, there’s nothing melee does that ranged cannot do if he opts to. Close distance to target is an option for ranged and a requirement to melee. And melee doesn’t have anything to make up to that issue alone.
But that’s the crux of the issue. Melee doesn’t NEED anything to make up for that difference. It is impossible to balance the game in such a way that they’re on perfectly equal footing. The only way to reliably keep ranged and melee close in damage is to nerf ranged damage skills, and apply a damage reduction if you convert to ranged or damage increase if you convert to melee (the skill specifically). Which isn’t a great idea in a game with such a large build variety.
Melee is perfectly viable and can clear any and all content that ranged can at an equal skill level and build completion. Ranged just has a lower skill floor so it’s less punishing to learn and get started on. There’s no content in this game that melee just cannot do. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t know how to play melee
This right here. This also bolsters a lot of these builds huge Ward making it even better which also Sentinel gets very little of. So it’s compounded.
Not only that many DR items like Red ring fit better into these classes that have huge DR baked in making them super tanks. Sentinels can’t use these items because their Class design doesn’t allow it.
Sentinel just needs a rework it’s really outdated for the current game. It needs a new shiny passive tree which I think Sentinel has one of the worst base tree. Then most of their skill and talent trees are ancient. Sentinel is propped up offensively by 1 ability Volatile reversal which feels bad, you have to take it. Yet people say somehow Sentinels are fine? It’s wild.
Yeah, doesn’t need, but should have “something” (IMO), nobody is asking for perfect balance, specially when RN the balance in both classes and monsters is all over the place, and the game has still too many bugs.
I think nobody said melee is not viable, the only comparison I did in that regard is that melee is somewhat a “hard(er) mode”.
Maybe you’re pivoting the discussion to much into the extremes.
because they are the sole entity in this conversation that has a financial incentive to do so.