why Path of Exile hates Melee class
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The issue with melee starts with placing totems to double your damage, as a non-totem build.
True, three ancestrals give you damage from the totems and then increased attack speed which can be buffed further by the skill tree. Yeah, it's only really for bosses, but almost every melee build is forced to spec into some form of hybridization. I'm sure it's clunky for new players!
@@pressfto only for bosses doesn't really apply anymore when rares can get triple tormented on an essence mob during an unskipable mob buff league. Melle feels like shit at most parts of the game.
they tried to promote melee ignite and it didn't need totems, but then they removed the best jewel it had. Divine inferno...
@@daardarkness4230crazy how ur crying about the mob buffs which are so minimal and doesn’t really change much except a few but loved affliction which could triple buff
@xcy7240 I hated affliction, so I'm not sure why you assumed I loved it. My point was that everything stacking makes melle even worse and that this mechanic is unskippable.
As an almost exclusive melee player for like 8k hours, yes, they do in fact hate melee.
my fav way to level is molten strike with faster attacks, greater multi projects, retunrning project with dual brightbeak if i can manage it
Yup its why i dont play poe anymore
What draws you to melee?
@@TheOne23_ ranged is boring unless its a fps
@@TheOne23_ weapon range XD
"Closer is safe". My guy, how many shotgun mechanics are you including in poe2, just wondering?
In POE2, mobs don't shotgun. They bazooka.
Chris Wilson / Jonathan Rogers / Erik Olofsson as of 2024.03.25 at 10:37 have ZERO shares in GGG. 5 seconds later they transferred all the stocks to Sixjoy a mobile gotcha game company. Look for "New Zealand Companies Office" and see the information yourself straight from the New Zealand governing body over companies. All docs are available.
Not to mention, that means all bosses have to have a roughly same-ish split of damage areas, causing another potential issue in the bosses feeling samey.
The ranged can go close without issues if the boss has more cone attacks, the melee however has to lose uptime when the opposite is the case. Thus if you mess up the ratio, Ranged has the edge. Ranged can choose the distance that is safest. Melee don't really have a choice there.
@@insentia8424 as soon as he said that i called bs. The Maven fight proves it. Those lasers aren't equally punishing for range or melee.
This game has too many idiotic floor is lava effects for melee to be competative
the melee vs range distance bit is not really true, as ranged can choose whether they want to hug the boss or not, melee do not have that luxury, and if there's any sort of ground covering mechanic that limits the arena AND the boss likes to sit in it? rip melee
Plus time to react because of that distance. Jon does not play this game as a melee character, and has zero idea what he’s actually talking about here aside from the dev pov. We dont need new animations we need the numbers tweaked just a bit damnit
That's the exact point Jonathon is making. He's not talking about melee vs ranged characters, he's talking about being in melee range or being further away from the boss. Part of the advantage of a ranged character in PoE is that there's usually no penalty for a ranged character to move into melee range for whatever reason (apart from them often being squishier, but that's a build choice, not something inherent to ranged), but if a melee character moves into range, they stop doing meaningful damage.
@@oneof13forestpeople97 Lol, Jonathan played a ton of melee. And "zero idea aside from dev pov"? That's like saying I have no physics knowledge except as a NASA engineer and a physics PhD.
No, numbers tweaked a bit won't fix it. What a joke.
@@NoName-mi8js Well his explanation is whack. HEs going off about animations for new skills? As if there's not plenty of literally dead mele skills that could be tweaked with numbers to be made viable. for 1, adding flat damage and removing horrific atk speed penalities as a start.
@@NoName-mi8js a ton of melee you say…
How can bows have quivers but two hand weapons just get an empty slot. Melee should be in general tankier and do way more damage than range classes.
His statement about melee being safer hugging the boss is just straight up wrong in Path of Exile 1. In the hypothetical world where every boss uses a large number of arc attacks sure, but that's not what we see. In practice, just about every boss or rare mob in the game can have some ground degen or harmful aura that makes standing too close a death sentence. I can't tell you how many times I've died on melee characters because I hit the boss too many times and 30 lightning clones or orbs or cold stacked me out in half a second. Then you have to worry about projectile shotgun, on death effects, etc.
On top of all that, it's not like ranged characters can't also hug the boss when it's convenient. For that to be relevant it would have to somehow be safer to stand near the boss as a melee character than a ranged character. In theory melee characters should have better mitigation and recovery, but again, that isn't how the game works in practice. At the absolute top end you have your immortal Transcendence builds and armor stackers sure, but for 99.9% of the player base, you're just as dead to a Pinnacle/Uber boss hit on lightning arrow as you are on a slam build.
WOW used parry chance to add a layer of mitigation. So you get dodge, armor, parry, block and resists. Skills associated with these things to boost them. In POE for the AVERAGE player they get 2.5k life and mediocre defenses then die over and over again to act10 kitava because of his 1h1k slams, aoe bleed shit and when his heart pops out you have all the adds that deal huge damage too. Kitava act10 might be intentionally really hard to make you realise your build sucks or you need better gear but saying he is melee friendly is just a pile of shit, bosses in POE have no consistency in difficulty.
There is that one reverse aura that killed me until I realised inside = safe.
@@Pekopekopethen what you saying is its only legit melee build if you can scale dmg with your defense? Then they should just remove all other melee skill gem that cant take advantage of this since they are bad anyway
@@Pekopekope Haven't played as much retail, but in classic there is also a health difference independent of gear.
In WoWC starting as a warrior is the same as starting as a marauder in POE1 - you get health every level and easily end up with twice the health of a caster with 0 investment.
Same applies to paladins and druids who shapeshift into bear. I assume shaman also has more health than other classes. Add to that the 5% parry mitigation and you're already a lot more defensive than ranged classes.
EDIT: You also gain armor. There is no caster equivalent, like ES or Evasion in POE.
You also have the advantage of physical damage being easy to scale compared to spells.
What's the equivalent in POE? Maybe you have more strength, but the difference isn't very big. You don't have an easier time scaling your damage - quite the opposite, since spells scale from levels. You have Fortification, but that requires investment to unlock, and it doesn't work well with every melee build.
I mean technically speaking, you have to dodge a much smaller distance to avoid a boss's attacks/spells etc if your proximity is closer. So that part is at least right. It doesn't really work out well in a lot of situations though because of various other reasons though.
i genuinely appreciate a dev talking about this, but cannot for the life of me understand the reasoning. Jonathan is only really talking about melee vs. ranged in a bossing environment, which already immediately loses a lot of credibility, as mapping as ranged is almost always vastly faster, safer, and easier on a ranged character. playing a bow character and offscreening half the dangerous mobs in a map will ALWAYS be safer than running into a pack of crit multi monsters, even with insane defences like endurance charages and fortify. he is also claiming that being in melee distance of a boss is sometimes better, which may be true, but things like exarch's ground degen stop you from even BEING there. on top of that, he doesn't talk about effective DPS. when exarch does the incinerate attack, ranged characters can dash away, then blast him for dps, while melee just has to run. ranged characters can go into melee range to be safe and continue damaging, while melee characters CAN'T go to a ranged distance and continue doing damage. no matter what the situation for being "safe" is, ranged will almost always have the advantage for damage up time due to the fact that they can do damage from any range, while melee literally can't
he also doesn't address any way to actually FIX the issues in PoE1, which saddens me as a melee enjoyer. if the future of PoE1 melee just to be shit forever? if that's truly the case, then the least they could do is indeed just remove totems and let us put them on our back. in their mind it's a "shitty solution", but it makes melee a much less frustrating experience and the change isn't going to make it worse in any way...
People were having fun playing Cleave of Rage, which literally does half the damage of Dual Strike of Ambidexterity in a proper set up. They nerfed it after 1 league 🤡
Exactly your last point that I also noticed, they don't really have any solution for melee, so as a melee enjoyer myself I guess we have nothing to hope for in the future...
John is not in charge of poe1 and has not been for some time. Mark/Neon is, and has statements on melee already. Its been stated his goal for next league is some melee fix's.
@@rectifier7578 Yeah I think the takeaway from that is they WANT melee to be painful. That's the point of it to them. To be a "hardcore" difficulty toggle. That's why they strongly nerf any "melee" tagged skill that has lots of aoe and effectively functions as quasi-ranged (see blade flurry, mentioned cleave, etc).
@@zeriel9148From what he's saying is they unintentionally from the making of the game made a system that hates melee, not the devs themselves. At least in the beginning they seemed to think is would of been a big focus with all the different and unique things things done for it that later on bit them in the ass because of the amount of long and tedious work.
Don't you love building a badass slayer that can't kill a rare mob? I do it every league on hc.
Life regen on mobs should honestly just be deleted. It is NOT fun.
Your first issue is Slayer of Jugg. lol
@@bobbobb5759 jugg is for pussys.
@@MichaelPohoreski Frost Bomb exists iirc.
And there are few more ways to kill life regen.
@@MichaelPohoreski The checklist design is dumb, for sure. So if you just put in the "tech" for life regen, it stops being a thing that matters... but for everyone else it bricks them. So why have it exist at all? I think things like this are much, much better received when they are something you play around instead of just hitting a checkbox and then ignoring the mechanic. Like in a properly designed ARPG these things are time-based or specific areas on the ground you can move them out of. But no, over here life regen is just a mod that either asks you to devote a gem slot and passive to completely negating it, or tells you to give up and quit. It's binary stupidity.
Another issue with Melee is down time. When a boss is charging up a big AoE attack, melee has to run screaming where as ranged characters can still be doing damage throughout the animation.
other games have solved that in the past before. you could for example add a buff that you can charge out of combat. for example a buff that consumes your rage to grant you a lot of rage on hit for x seconds after you hit an enemy. or another buff that deals damage to you but makes it so you cant gain or loose trauma stacks for x seconds. there are honestly many ways one could expand on the melee downtime issue
That's why some people like two move skills on melee characters. Leap and frost
@@NeoFryBoy no thats not why. you take leap and frost ( or shield and frost) because you can animation cancel one into the other.
you also do this on casters
@@MrWilliGamingyou can cast frostblink while hitting an enemy. For example, you are hitting shaper and he is casting balls, you can teleport behind him without interrupting your attack
That's why ranged should NEVER do more damage than melee, in ANY genre. One game that balances that VERY well is Final Fantasy XIV.
Tldr: "We sure do, don't we lmao."
It's felt for ages that doing anything yourself in PoE rather than getting a trap, mine, or totem to do it has been a horrible mistake because most defensive options other than "don't be hit" were either terrible or took hilariously high invesment.
well there always is grace - spell sup - cloak of flame for right side builds if you are just looking for cheap sc tankyness. the real problem with damage is that you need to be immune to way to many things in the game right now. you need cb immunity you NEED frozen/chill immunity and you N E E D stun immunity alongside a plethora of other various ailments. the only real solution here is to just obliterate 2 screens at a time and go cast on death - portal for your defense
@@MrWilliGaming im not sure i agree. getting 30k armor is pretty simple with determination and a bit of buff effect, or half decently rolled gear. that and 75 max res alone will get you all the way to your first 2 voidstones rather easily.
freeze immunity is always easy to get now, since they added it into the pantheon and CB can easily be done on a life or mana flask. stun immunity is very much not something you need unless you are a channeling build.
i think defense is in a rather good place honestly. with very little investment and full SSF gear you can get through acts and the start of endgame
farming a lightning coil is very simple, and that is probably the single cheapest upgrade nearly any build can use to be more tanky. that will let you get your last 2 voidstones.
there are a lot of other pretty easy defensive techs you can put together.
@@Theos. yeah grace/determ 75/75/75/0 5k life lightning coil - taste of hate is one of the most common defensive setups and it will definitely do you well in most t16s. however league mechanics these past 2 leagues have been brutal in maps. if you want to do league content and t17 you are gonna need more than that.
also this setup doesn't really work for right side builds where you would rather opt for a more expensive fourth vow setup. here you also need 90/90/90 res since you dont have spell supp and you need a lot more regen and armor since you lack evasion rating and the shotgun protection it provides.
@@MrWilliGamingWA p
The other thing is as soon as a defensive layer IS good enough to let you survive direct hits over and over from a high-end boss, they will nerf it or create new one-shot mechanics on monsters. GGG's idea of "balance" is to simply randomly kill you with no way of stopping it every once in a while. Which incentivizes people to create max DPS builds that kill everything off screen, because if you're gonna die to a one shot after spending 75% of your character power and passives on survivability anyway, why bother?
There are some exceptions like progenesis, but I think those are an example of bad design too. You shouldn't put something in the game that staggers all damage to be 4 seconds later and then have stats that give you 100% recoup over those 4 seconds, it's just unconditional immunity to damage. It's gating a basic aspect of the gameplay behind 10 mirror builds or whatever. They badly need to reign in the top end stuff & make the average player experience less brutal, but they seem to like this design. Make random one-shots every other map how everyone normal experiences the game, then let a dozen people per league actually have survivability once they spend thousands of real life dollars worth of resources on it.
“Range is relatively unimportant” is a statement I will strongly disagree with. I’m not a gamedesigned (obviously) but I am seeing some stuff.
Nearly all melee skills that were “meta” had a way to attack enemy’s from range. Lacerate sends out a wave of sand/blood that can reach the edge of your screen. Most slam skills have a massive area of effect that allows them to hit enemies further away. Cyclone was meta for a long time when it had a large range, as soon as the range was massively nerfed the skill practically died. Nowadays its only really used to trigger other more usefull skills.
Flicker strike is the only skill that comes to mind not fitting that mold. And flicker strike still has a range attached to it within which you can teleport to enemies. And I can’t remember a time flicker strike was anything more than a novelty (which is fine, I love flicker strike. But it does showcase the point i’m trying to make here).
Tl;dr
Range matters, I aint smart enough to know why. But here’s a bundle of examples
Its all about damage uptime. Ranged characters can achieve near 100% damage uptime while melee has to do a whole dance routine just to get 3 seconds of dps on a boss. Maven being a prime example of this
@@Exodyrwhich is why... you simply buff melee damage massively for those 3 seconds of up time. But they won't because skilled players would navigate to those builds and popularize them while the average player wouldnt be able to execute as well as a good player leading to qq.
There are a LOT of fights that are just designed to punish your damage uptime and prevent you from doing said damage in melee.
It's no wonder that brand builds, ballista builds, mine, totems, and just spells are so popular.
I'm currently playing RF for the first time and Sirius last phase has been an immense pain because I can damage him in such small windows on top of my low dps, and Maven's last phase was even worse.
Everytime you have to play the mechanics and run away, there are builds that do as much if not more damages than you that can have an almost 100% uptime while you have like 20%.
That's an issue in a LOT of hack & slashes but that's gone rampant in PoE imo.
He's got a point though. Your distance to the target changes which skills are most difficult to dodge. In melee you're vulnerable to point blank AoE spells, but at range you have a harder time getting out of arcing room cleaves.
The biggest problem is just speed. Let's say you stand in the middle of the screen and there are 4 packs of ranged mobs in every corner of the screen. With ranged you just kill them and move on. With melee you have to run between each pack, which takes longer, let's the mobs hit you for free while you run and also feels like ass. This is the biggest reason melee sucks, and I honestly don't see anything they could do to change that fundamental problem, which means melee is still gonna suck in poe2.
Totem simply shouldn't be an "Additional power multiplier, we should take example from spell totems where usually they're the main skill, and Ancestral Bond solidifies that. Either make Ancestral totems a reservable "aura" like a banner on your back, or straight up revamp them into a standalone archtype, where they improve the behaviour of ancestral totems, to a level where they're viable as a standalone main skill, and somehow forcing them to be the main skill like Ancestral Bond.
Just add a passive keystone that makes your damage and survivability better, and makes you unable to have totems. Done, easiest way out of this without nerfing totem play
I think if the ancestral buffs only affected other ancestral totems, that would be cool. And of course buff the other skills to account for the power loss
Just give me skitterbots but it’s the ancestral totem version, “summon totemic spirits” or something
@@daniellastnaim1588 That's a cool idea too!
Summoned ancestral spirits grant:
- 20% Increased melee attack speed
- Enemies near totem spirits take 20% Increased physical melee attack damage
totems should be a play style, not a mandatory aspect of every build.
all melee skills grant fortify stacks based on distance on hit
melee totem bonuses are removed and granted to melee skills as baseline
boom melee saved
Not quite. U still have anti melee mechanics.
@@jedrusnowak3317 many of them can be outgeared given you dont need to invest 30 points into QoL stuff, but instead for damage and defense
Ah, as people said, people can find problems well, but can't think of a good solution for shit.
Everyone will feel forced to play melee because they deal double the dmg and are unkillable due to having so many spare points for defense.
@@VividFlash what do you mean by "so many spare points"? The changes mentioned in the main comment would at most save 5-10 points depending on your pathing. or 5 points and an annoint. good luck being "unkillable" for example to infinite duration dot pools with 5 spare points
Distance to the target doesn't matter? Really? Does this person know about a mechanic called shotgunning? Also degen zones and a million other reasons why having to stand close to a boss is way, way more dangerous than dancing around at medium to long range.
What I understand from this is melee will be just as fucked in POE 2 as it is now.
Chris Wilson / Jonathan Rogers / Erik Olofsson as of 2024.03.25 at 10:37 have ZERO shares in GGG. 5 seconds later they transferred all the stocks to Sixjoy a mobile gotcha game company. Look for "New Zealand Companies Office" and see the information yourself straight from the New Zealand governing body over companies. All docs are available.
Yeah, it's always one of two things with GGG: either they are very stupid, or they are lying to you and they actually like the design they have for other reasons. I tend to think #2, based on their actions.
@@zeriel9148 Actually I think they have no choice. They have designed themselves into a corner. Boss fights have become so complex I don't see a way to make POE melee friendly Just the simple fact that bosses move around and already ranged becomes much, much better. In all fairness they have given us a way to play melee. Just invest 15 mirrors in a transcendence armor stacker and you can just stand there and ignore everything. Oh, well then, problem solved I guess....
It's a cursed design problem. These games are effectively Shoot'em ups, and the core entire point of them is you shoot... and you DODGE. Without the dodge part, it's just a Mario Paint fly swatting game.
The solution is to give up on true point blank attacks, and just make melee a shorter ranged attack. Ground Slam was always a pretty great skill.
Shmup units always have trade-offs between damage, movement speed, and coverage (that's the size and reach their attacks can do). Path of Exile's skill system pretty much just sweeps the very idea of trade-offs into the trash bin.
Class-specific skills, like in Diablo 2, let those skills be like the color pie in Magic the Gathering. Tornado would be a jank lightning bolt to a Sorceress, and serve no purpose. But because it's the best attack spell the Druid has, it's relevant to him.
I guess this same-yness is one of the reasons I quit the game.
@@zeriel9148 Their obsession with trying to make dual-wielding this bastard in-between dual handers and shield users, that absolutely nobody wanted, is pretty illustrative. Everyone wanted to be a slice-slice ninja, but that wasn't "realistic" they said.
..>_>
I think ranger pets are another thing they resist for some reason. I think it'd be cool and very Titanquest if a pure pet build with Undead+Beasts were possible, but you know how it is. Everyone needs to use totems and an aura, instead...
The thing about being close vs far is patently false. When there's a rippy pack of 30 mobs. The safest place is far not close, especially when that pack is melee. Pretending that this isn't the case does not give me a lot of faith that melee will be fixed in PoE 2, especially after the showcases so far. Melee is still gonna be a second class citizen.
exactly, they said earlier that melee will feel good in PoE 2, so I trusted that they found a solution, but hearing that melee will have the same damage as ranged because according to them range is not really a factor than... what is that solution that would differentiate melee in PoE2 from PoE1 melee?
when i played boneshatter (before it got fucked with new gems), i just leaped into the crowd and pretty much oneshot it. if you are attacking fast enough, it shouldnt be much of a problem.
i feared eater snipers much more, beaming you with their lightning off screen into oblivion. i still despise these things, they are rippy as hell.
100% agree
It's true for every mechanic I can think of in the game. Projectiles? Further you are, the less of them will overlap and hit you. Leap slams? Still better to be further away, gives you more time to dash/blink and avoid all damage, etc. I can't think of a single mechanic that doesn't work this way and benefit from being further away. Even saying something like "well what about degens around the ring of an area?" is missing the point, because that's an arbitrary location thing, there are more degens close to the boss than far away in general.
did you not see the demo? they showed melee, and its EVEN WORSE to play than PoE1. because not only does it have THE EXACT SAME PROBLEMS, but you also need to piano every skill, like you know, DIABLO 3.
"Melee characters feel bad if they have too much damage because they overkill everything"
"Distance is least important thing for melee because it is easier to dodge when you're close"
I see, so that's why most people play ranged. Who have a choice to stand either far OR close and melee don't.
Being far simply negates all damage you'd get from autoattacks.
Since when overkilling anything in any game ever felt bad?
overkilling being bad is an interesting argument in the current league where apparently a notable hardcore streamer quit because the league was too hard. I'm sure he would've enjoyed having more overkill in his build.
Monsters can have 15 different health and damage multipliers, but "overkill feels bad" when the players want some.
@@Wyzai It feels bad to his ego that players are allowed to beat the content he designed. GGG have a really perverse vision of design. It's like they picture themselves as a DM who has failed if people finish his campaign.
@@zeriel9148 dont you know, PoE is basically Dark Souls!
0:00 Josh is so intense here.
"WHY!" (stares daggers)
5:56 I genuinely expected "I'm Josh, by the way"
They had leagues where melee was good? So why don't we just do that instead of nerfing it yet again
When? I only remember there's cyclone league. There's blade flurry league. But never a melee league where most melee are viable builds?
We had Slams beeing some of the best Build for like 3 Seasons in a roe before they got dumpstered too
Melee was good when in legion cyclone could hit the entire screen while moving, or Slams when they gave us one warcry for 80% more damage and one warcry for double damage and both could stack. Not a good solution.
@@blackomega34 very good solutions.
@@fierypandaofdoomBoring solutions
tf2 has a wonderful mechanic called damage fall-off, where the further you are from the enemy, the less damage you do. To start balancing melee, poe devs should really look at it first.
You lose 3 gem sockets at MINIMUM as melee , protector,chief, multiple totems.(4 if you're a physical build, then the totems require maim link) Simple solution, get rid of the totem nodes at the bottom of duelist, remove the damage buffs from the totems, add them baseline to every melee skill. It doesn't make sense to have these buff sticks that instantly die to everything on any big boss in the game, that double your damage, because you don't want to be attacking unless they are down. You also lose points on the skill tree as well, god forbid you play slayer and also invest in leech as melee, so your build is effectively 15 points in the dirt, for buff sticks and leech investment. This would probably make melee overpowered as hell, but the quality of life would be so nice. Think about this right, you just finish eaters intermission phase, he immediately auto attacks you then writhing mass, have to dodge both of those first, then you can place your totems, and then by the time you do that you have to readjust for his next auto attack, and if you mispositioned your totems they will just die to the tentacles from the attack. So it also inflates the amount of time you need to do things in general, not only are you having to avoid things, you're also wasting more time placing down these buff sticks so you can actually do damage, whereas ranged classes just.. dodge and attack. If you make what the totems do, baseline for every melee skill, all of a sudden you remove this step in the process, and melee can play much more like a ranged character can, dodging abilities and attacking.
Honestly a someone who has terrible face blindness and trouble keeping up with names, hearing Jonathan say he struggles with it as well is encouraging.
tldr: yes we hate melee, deal with it.
On an unrelated note, i have no idea who Josh Strife Says is or if he played poe at all, but i appreciate the fact that he, a totally random guy from outside of poe community, asked the questions that noone from 'poe content creators' ever asked. Thanks Josh.
We hate melee fuck u hahah but our suporter packs
He has and does play a tone of poe
@@EM-vw7im good
The thing is, melee needs a lot to work. While a explosive arrow ballista will do tons of damage, being mobile and tank, and have the mechanical advantage of being able to dodge everything while still doing damage (minions and traps to).
While melee have terrible lock in mechanical animations, do less damage, needs to be in range, fortify/endurance charge is a must, needs tons of attack speed, base damage, defense, just to feel less clunky.
So yeah, they hate melee. They could add 50% more attack speed/damage to every melee (except cyclone and few other ones) and would still feel bad.
dont forget how melee also need mandatory totem use.
I think it's fair to say that Chadathan never did Maven with a melee character. That last phase is nasty for melee.
Sirius too because of the degen zones. Same for Shaper; you can't really hit the boss when managing balls.
The truth about bossing in POE is that no one actually goes into boss fights unless they can trivialize them. And because of that, GGG raised the difficulty by a whole lot. And now most builds simply can't do bosses unless it's Ben playing.
Another issue with that is every second you aren't DPSing is a second your fortify is getting closer to dropping off. So even your melee-only damage mitigation "perks" have a habit of falling off and take lots of effort to maintain that goes against the combat flow. It's absurd how backwards their philosophy feels at times. If fortify is just a counterbalancing for melee deficiencies, why isn't it just an always on 15-20%, like in D3?
@@zeriel9148 that's before we talk how, you gotta get that fortify from somewhere. which means half a dozen points invested in the tree, or a support gem slot taken, if not a high end equipment "crafting"(lets be honest, there's no crafting in PoE, its literal gambling).
I don't know, he still did not convince me in that they don't hate melee. Why talk about technical limitations in making new melee skills, when we already have 40 or something melee skills, and they are all garbage, except maybe one (Boneshatter). For starters why not just double the damage of the existing melee skills, it shouldn't be that hard and probably won't take more than one day for one person: take current damage number of a skill, open windows calculator, increase currrent number times two, and here you go - yes, it still won't be meta, and would not have as much damage as meta skills, but hey at least we will be a bit closer to the balance. At least it will take us half the current time to beat a rare or boss, or maybe we will be able to afford more points on defence nodes. If it will not help much, well, just double the damage again in the subsequent patch and so on, until finally they will feel more or less balanced.
The problem with melee in current POE is that the balance for different melee skills is so wildly off that only a handful are playable without insane levels of investment, Strike skills (and specifically skills like Boneshatter and Dual Strike of Ambidexterity) out perform every other variant of melee by orders of magnitude, and totems are always the best option for how to increase your damage if you are using a Strike skill
If you could play Slams you would not automatically use totems because you would instead use a setup with multiple warcrys but they completely gutted slams when they took the damage multiplier off of seismic cry so you cant play slams
Non-strike, non-slam melee skills like Reave or Sweep haven't been viable since like 2015 because there just isn't enough support in the game for them to do enough damage without gimping the rest of your character and in modern POE you need a certain level of tankiness to play the game even in a softcore environment
In short, whilst Strike skills remain the only viable option for a melee build, the "drop a totem for double damage" playstyle will always be the best option for damage
Reave is pretty much always front page dps on ninja, they stack str and poison with original sin, spend 15 mirrors and almost get as much dps as a 1 mirror ice trapper.
@@michaelwoods3141i hate fking str stacking replica alberon saying "this melee viable because you can str stacking alberon" like every comment are like this its fcking stupid since this is all because of alberon not because of the melee skill,heck ranged can do this too but they wont since they can have better stuff other than str stacking
i would argue that the issue is that, boneshatter is the only true melee build in the game, as the other melee builds like frost blade and lightning strike are more ranged than melee.
@@itsallinthepast2944 str stacking is also more viable by using one of the ballista bows(cant remember which) that gives you more ballistas based for every few str you have.
Templar is not just "left handed". His left hand is a mirror image of a normal person's right hand. With flipped chirality of all joints in the chain. He's the only character with negative determinant of all transformations. The number of bugs we have to deal with just because of that is mind boggling.
which is why i haveto ask, "WHY NOT JUST HAVE CHAR CREATION?" they keep talking about PoE "skill based" like its freaking dark souls, butthey will still have this nonsense in PoE2 that they are complaining about.
The trade-off for melee to ranged in most games is that melee is much better at dealing damage to make up for the downsides of having to get close and having to solve the issue of hitting multiple targets. Just give the skills better scaling. Give them more damage. There is no reason that melee needs to have obtuse scaling mechanics like trauma or level 35 ice bite on a helmet to feel good.
in the vast majority of action games, melee is better because it not only has better damage, but also better survivability due to tankness. the only modern exception is probably the souls series, but that's because magic is very strong(in most of the games), and you can still get the defensive layers like block and heavy armor with either. and its often cheaper(level wise) to do so with magic, because most melee need to invest in both str and dex.
even then, melee is the prefered way to play those games for the majority of players. and it still offers great survivability based on your skill level.
@marcosdheleno I think survivability is covered well in poe, but the lack of damage for no real reason doesn't make much sense. When they said that melee changes weren't being made since poe 2 would be offering vast changes, it made sense. But now that poe 2 is completely separate from poe.. there's no reason I can see as to why they can't just increase melee skill damage for underperforming skills. It's so silly that there are an amazing amount of skills and such a small amount of them scale well. I hope they make them better, melee is my favorite way to play most games.
@@w4zz_yt i disagree. for most melee builds, you are forced to use more defensive layers.
and that's before we talk about how range itself IS a defensive layer, since it gives time to react to whatever spell is cast by the mob/boss. something that isnt possible if you are hugging the enemy.
@marcosdheleno I do agree that range needs less defensive layers, but that's also in part due to the fact that it simply does much more damage than melee. If the enemies die before they touch you, you don't need a lot of defenses. If melee was able to kill enemies faster, it would need less defensive options as well. You can see examples of this in the melee builds that are currently strong, like cyclone coc and flickerstrike. No amount of defense is going to make heavy strike, sunder, chain hook, etc. feel any better.
@@w4zz_yt ranged doesnt need less defensive layers, melee needs more.
htey already tried taking away defensive layers from ranged, like fortify, which is the main reason why champion is one of the best ranged classes right now, even though it was designed to be a close ranged fighter.
I just want one node on the tree, you cant use totems but you deal 80% more melee damage.
80% more damage means nothing. because of the way PoE builds damage. they could literaly give you 400% extra damage, and you would still be worse by a long shot. because totems not only give damage, but also attack speed, as well as hit stuff as well(when they are alive, which for melee totems, is not very long either).
A yes let me change my angle quickly from this Sirus degen pool to this other Sirus degen pool.
His last point about melee having an advantage for bosses is so wrong. Ranged has an advantage because they can attack from BOTH ranged and melee, which means they can be far away from the boss when it's advantageous, AND near the boss while it's advantageous, with no downside. For melee, if they have to move away from the boss for whatever reason, then you have the downside of downtime. There is no "balance of skills" that fixes this, unless you make a boss where you never need to step away from the boss during the entire encounter.
Yes there is, range skills could have less damage multipliers based on distance, or just give melee double whatever numbers they decide is fair for ranged spells/attacks. It's not as complicated as he makes it sound. Even if ranged characters did 10% of their total DPS point blank (not the keystone), that's still 10% more DPS than melee when they have to be at range to avoid an attack
@@rectifier7578 issue with melee is that PoE is a game that punishes players for getting close to enemies. and melee are, outside of a couple of skills, the same survivability as ranged. meaning, you will die no matter what if you get hit, and you will get hit more in melee range,
Yeah bossing in melee and ranged are exactly the same, perfectly balance, just dont mention all the degen and dozens other kinds of crap in the ground or flying everywhere, maybe someone will believe it. Not to mention dps uptime, man really knows his game.
Melee skills also get nerfed faster than other skills.
It's rather telling of their design vision. They have in their head the idea that melee can't be allowed to be as easy as ranged or casters. So if it ever flourishes, that means they messed up and need to nerf it. It's like the Dark Souls philosophy of "casters are easy mode, real men play melee", like they get some ego boost out of making melee suck and then barely finishing content with it still.
10:20 Sorry Johnathan , Koebeblackmamba did a full video over a year ago called, **"[PoE 3.19] Why True Melee is Awful for Bossing - From 10M to 1M DPS"**, and it took him more than twice as long to kill the Searing Exarch with melee than a caster and his DPS was relatively the same. Main reason is how long it take to rebuild and re-stack your buffs you lost from having to move. Rage stacks, summoning totems, Pride stacks ETC. All of them have to be maintained and melee loses it every time we have to move out of range.
If Melee had lets some some form of a DOT perhaps, some kind of attack that would do damage over time.... OH like a Bleed Buff (which we have been screaming for over a year now), this would not be nearly as much an issue.
I love how he says giving ranged chars less damage makes them feel bad yet melee is by far and away, by orders of magnitude weaker than ranged chars with bow or spells and are forced to take totems yet no effort is being made to bring those melee skills up to par because they genuinely feel being closer is an advantage in a spammy, low visibility game like PoE.
I finally understand why they do nothing, their whole perception of what players experience en masse is warped.
PoE2 is looking better and better right?
I wonder how crazy it would be to create a mechanic where to fulfill the fantasy of a speedy melee character, instead of modifiers that "increase action speed" just means every action your character does it moves faster over time in real life, it slows down the game instead, including projectile speed, cast time and such. This way it makes the idea of dodging actually much more viable in a screen loaded with monsters, corpses, projectiles and environment. And at least it's how I interpret a speedy character in fantasy where they are known to be very quick compare to other characters.
There is just one major problem with slowing down the gameworld to show increased speed :
PoE has Multiplayer. So either it's a partywide effect or the other players get slowed down too, impacting their gameplay negatively.
Red Faction 2 Botmatch actually had that in form of a Powerup that slowed down the whole world besides the player and whenever a bot picked it up the game felt like you're playing in slowmotion (which actually made aiming easier as long as you did not encounter the bot who picked up the powerup and therefore moved at normal speed)
@@TheAzureGhost Yeah I know I thought of that too. It's the only issue. So prehaps some sort of compromise can be had which is slow down the game by half of the "increased speed" modifier effects or something similar to that. Then the rest of the people who got faster "increased speed" modifiers will have their characters sped up as per normal.
His answer doesn't really answer why they hate melee except its more work to design the skill lol and why I need to use totems at all? Why totems need to be with melee? His answers show he has no clue
His answers did clearly answer why..? They all hate the base animations, but making 7 new animations, then multiplying that by the different weapon types that can use it is more work than the skill itself would be worth and it feels awful making a cool skill just to have to use a crappy animation for it. And why do you need totems? You'd have to be a complete idiot to not know why, especially when he clearly stated it. They're a multiplier to your damage. Even without the buff, they scale off your weapon damage and your melee modifiers, so it does a lot of damage even when not spec'd into totems. It could be changed to need heavier investment like how minions scale off only minion modifiers, but then the tree would need to be expanded or many node sections removed to make room for those totem nodes, which would suck for really everyone since it's a melee only issue, but would have to apply to spell and ballista totems due to them having to rework totems as a whole to fix the issue, not to mention then reworking the entire tree in every singular corner and balancing the nodes so we don't have every totem build looking like EA Ballista where you go all the way across the tree for the nodes you need, not to mention having to balance them for the cases that do go that far.
This isn't an issue for spells and ranged because both have better gems to use than totems like curses, buffs, debuffing skills, or they already use two damage skills to begin with like LA+Barrage or withering spell totems or mana arrows or arcanist brand and the likes that melee doesn't have or can't scale as well as the base totems.
@@ZairUmbras You are clueless XD I'm asking why we need totems to buff the dmg where we could not have totems at all with increased dmg like spells and you are tellin me we need totems cos they buff the damage. You are 80 IQ bro worse than a monkey
@@ZairUmbras ", but making 7 new animations, then multiplying that by the different weapon types that can use it is more work" then let me ask you, WHY do they have multiple rigs? and not have 2 one male, one female, and allow players to custom the char?
the game is far enough away that minimal animation errors from extreme bodies would be completely ignored by 99% of players
@@marcosdheleno They explained quite clearly that they started with 0 experience and made each rig individually, not realizing what that would cause later on, which is understandable given they never expected PoE to take off like it did either to ever even need all the extra animations. Their attempts to remake the rigs ended up giving us PoE2 as well since unlike D4 devs, they stay busy making more and more without realizing they achieved the initial goal about a hundred projects earlier.
@@ZairUmbras you say this, as if the same exact problem of having to do animation for each body wont be an issue in poe2...
higher quality models, and unique designs for each body means ALOT of busy work on every shared animation.
The solution for melee in POE 1 is simplistic, just add a defensive element into the skills. The reasons ranged, minion, and mines are meta deals with simply being mobile the entire time you're playing. This is the reason cyclone was a fan favorite for so long, it's not rocket science to just add things like spell suppress while slamming, or % reduced damage taken while attacking. It's not new player friendly to hide some of these things behind unique cluster jewels, random unique jewels, veiled crafts, and uber items. (also randomly nerfing these elements in between each league sure doesn't help either)
technically they have, they made fortify melee only for anyone NOT a champion. thing is, like i said, champions can use fortify regardless of gem used, AND, fortify will drop fast if you dont hit anything after a while, which means, its borderline useless against bosses where you have to dodge 1-hit kills for a long time just to get a couple of hits in before start dancing again.
We dont need new animations damnit. Change the numbers. Increase base attack speed or damage! Easy fix and the excuses are wild. Some i understand, but really just buff the numbers.
Killing it man :) best series of ruthless so far!
being safe closer to the boss would be true if all boss abilities would be skill shots. but when you have uber searing one shot you with a melee attack it does not matter. melee needs better defences than ranged and more damage to account for the downtime. This is for the usual true melee skills, not meta outliers
"the templar is lefthanded" sold, I love playing southpaw characters. Going to make and play a templar now.
REMOVE THE FUCKING TOTEM.
1 quick fix to PoE melee is to build Ancestral Call additional strikes into strike gem levels. That opens up 1 gem slot to be used on damage boosting or utility support gems.
As for slams... having stun avoidance also built into gem level
they tried doing that for chieftain. they gave an upgraded ancestral call gem to strike gems, and barely anyone picks that one up due to how useless ancestral call is. even though chieftain doesnt really have much to choose from nowadays anyway.
I always liked the idea of bosses having two sets of abilities: one for range and one for melee.
When the player goes in melee, for example, they will only use the melee kit, meaning they use abilities that can be balanced around the fact that you are right next to it.
And, where you want a certain mechanic to affect everyone, balance the other abilities around it (for example) via frequency. For example, when melees have to jump around avoiding stuff and cant do any more damage to the boss during that (but ranges can theoretically), the melee kit of the boss should just have fewer abilities that make you jump around so it can be balanced with that.
Of course, that brings in other potential issues and options of abuse of mechanics, but I'd argue that is true for every solution.
Tldr: we dont wanna do our job on developing melee
Have you seen the MTX they release? That's where the resources are going, imagine spending resources on melee animations KEKW
I guarantee if they remove the "free damage" you get from ancestor totems they will not bake the lost damage into the skills. IF they do, it will only be a fraction what it used to be.
Yeah, the automation thing is an example of how they "buff" QoL. They'll get rid of totem buffs and give you like 5% damage and 5% AS, and call it a big melee buff that means they don't need to do anything for melee for another 5 years.
Love how Josh just randomly inserts jokes to keep the subject upbeat and relaxed, it's a pleasure to watch.
That was a bullshit bunch of excuses. Doesn't matter if you have 7 rigs. You did all the current animations for the 7 classes before, 3.0 expansion released with what I assume was much less budget and staff. You can't do 1 more animation every few months?
You have money, and you'll make more if you spend it doing anim's and improving the core of the game.
Just because inhouse people don't wanna do the work doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Fire those people and hire people who will do the work? Plenty of animators out there.
I'm actually shocked this is their answer on it as a company, the solution is to let their product rot and this is good marketing for the next one how? GGG could easily outsource this animation work to cheap indian animators who would get it done in no time. Better than having 0 new animations.
What GGG is essentially saying is:
"Our game is shit for like, 90% of people who play action games. But wait for our next game! We have no current record of excelling at melee, but trust us, it's coming! Here's a third time look at Ranger for PoE2!"
it really is such a weird argument. I work in the game animation industry. Theres another technique we in the industry leverage when working with games that fell into the multiple rigs pitfall... and that is one-to-many mapping, where we set up the relative differences between rigs and work off of a 'unified' rig that has these relative mappings set up, so when they make one animation, it can be 'translated' onto the many disparates.
but that just seems way too hard to accomplish with these cashew brains.
that argument makes no sense since they literaly are doing that exact same design for PoE2. which will be even more animation heavy due to the higher quality models.
if that was such an absurd issue to the point they literaly loathe working with it, then WHY not just give character creation for PoE2? keep the classes, but make 2 rigs, male/female, and let players custom them.
Melee should be a lot tankier. It's already hard to get enough dps, but doable. Boost melee bleed, Give more damage mitigation for melee (more phys convertion would be great), more aoe, better block nodes and some spell block nodes at the bottom of the tree. Any melee is overshadowed by any character with spell suppression. Blocking needs too much investment for what it brings.
Simplest way is to give any melee gem tag a defensive boost (block, conversion, suppression, etc) that wears off the further you are from an enemy and should stack per enemy. Add a support gem that does the exact opposite for bossing.
Buffing fortify to 40% would help a lot.
@@roccoheat8662 whenever a minion build has better innate defenses against damage than a player designed for melee, the base numbers are off, and they are off on purpose.
@@targetthetank exactly. its not hard to fix melee. but they dont want, because they have this misguided idea that PoE is Dark souls, makes absolutely no sense, and anyone with a working brain can figure out why, but they keep insisting that PoE is a skill based game.
I think having one set of animations for all characters is a huge step back for what makes Poe 1 feel like a polished game
Multiple totems needs to pop both totems with a single button instead of two
10:56 I learned that the hard way in DS2 with the spider lady boss)
you mean the scorpion lady, or the giant spider? because they are 2 diferent bosses.
@@marcosdheleno The one with a laser, spider I'm pretty sure, there was a lot of spiders in that location too
@@Oler-yx7xj that's the giant spider yes.
its because you said spider lady, but that's the description of the boss from DS1, in DS2 there's a scorpion lady.
so i had to make sure which one you were talking about.
I remember Legion cyclone and how much fun that was. Then everyone complained and they nerfed cyclone radius and damage.
But us meolee players aren't smart enough to understand nerfs, so we spin anyways.
For me, it's that I still enjoy a nerfed, awful melee skill whose gameplay I like more than playing a busted ranged/caster skill just because it's meta. So doesn't matter how much they nerf it, I'll still play it until I quit the game. I guess from GGG's perspective that means it's fine. Buuuut... most people just mindlessly copy the top build, so not really.
i think an awesome solution would be to give a bunch of melee weapon types some cool unique implicits, it might not fix many problems, but if it made melee seem more fun and exciting, i dont think people would be as fixated on the damage.
Some examples could be a mace with "trigger level 20 shockwave on melee hit" or a sceptre with "trigger level 25 elemental burst on hit" or maybe a two-handed sword with "1% of damage dealt is leeched as ward, + 200 to maximum ward". Just some crazy stuff that would get people hyped.
i still defend that, melee need a buff to weapon base damage, something between 25-50% would probably be enough to make it not feel pitfull. melee also having access to ward by default would be another great choice for defense. since one of the biggest problems is how POE demands multiple defensive layers from the player regardless of build.
Yeah the amount of dots that bosses is I guess isn't an issue. I'd like to see Johnathan take on Sirius with no totem.
RPG games are inherently based on on the traditional melee archetype hero. Just sucks that POE doesn't have solid melee builds that can stand up to other builds.
This is partially true. They are "supposed" to be based on the archetype, but if you remove a component of the type, it isn't anymore.
Hephetus is the West tank type casting, but all games try to remove the ability to take damage without dying from the equation.
One of the stories is being tossed off Olympus as a baby and landing in some islands far away which is what broke his ankles. This is the basis for tanks being slow movers, but Hephetus had a chariot and wheels that is why most tanks have a "gap closer".
The problem is that no one wants to give the ability to take "god level" damage to tanks, as it was Zeus that threw him off Olympus as a child and he survived.
Fun fact: a *lot* of heroes in Dota 2 are left-handed. They must have had a very busy left-handed animator. And they probably copied some of the models and animations to make others.
Also, Half-Life was originally left-handed by default.
Considering basically all of the heroes in a MOBA have unique skills, making many of them left-handed wouldn't really be a huge issue. You'd still have to make separate animations for each characters, regardless of handedness. There are also a LOT of characters that don't conform to a standard humanoid model, so those would generally need separate rigs anyway.
As well, it's very possible that Dota 2 used better rigs to begin with, or updated their rigs over the years so anything that did actually use a shared animation was easier to change.
Additionally, from one of the previous questions, it's not simply about left/right-handed characters making things difficult, but that different weapons also required different animations for the same skill. AFAIK, items in Dota 2 don't really change animations for attacks. Skins might (been a long, long time since I played, so I don't remember offhand), but even then you'd only need to be tweaking a few skills for one character per skin, instead of making something like 7x10 animations for each character/weapon combo in PoE.
@@AeriFyrein I noticed there are some themes. For example, the archers on foot are all right handed, but Mirana, who is an archer on a mount, is left handed. Probably required different animations. And most of the mages are left handed (Crystal Maiden, Dazzle, Warlock, Rubick, Witch Doctor -- though Witch Doctor holds his staff in the other hand but appears to have the same left hand attack animation). I'm sure some of this is reuse, but some of it might be the same animator working on similar characters.
Only fun melee thing I found in that game was "Destroy my eyes flicker build".
11:30 That's the one thing we can agree on. Melee needs a gap closer - it should not be tied to movement skills.
melee already have gap closers, from shield charge, to leap slam to pretty much every single movement skill that is melee based. leap slam is 1 gem, and its not hard to slot it regardless of your build, to the point even casters used it if they were using staves(before they made leap slam so bad to use that is).
giving natural gap closers wont change anything.
10:39 Jonathan is vey wrong on this point because he does not understand where the diffuclty in being a melee player is, the problem isnt dodging bosses attacks, it has never been, the problem is having to position yourself under the boss which often countains dot pools/ground effects (that most end game bosses have), which either kills you or debuff you heavily, so you are force to wait around which in turn makes you have a ton of downtime where you are unable to attack the boss until they decide to move (hence decreasing your dps and making the experience miserable). i wished you pushed him more on this.
@CajunGatorthing is, GGG is now hitting the numerical limits on some things. Health is 32 bit signed int, so it's impossible for mobs to get over 2.147 billion hp. Ubers are in hundreds of millions territory, before zone mods and party scaling. At least the only other place it matters is, for now, deep delve (and 2000 rank TotA)
It is a lot better than D3, where they are at limits of 64bit ints, but it's still numerical limit. And GGG likely won't use 64bit ints or floats, because it will at least double server load, and server load is already a problem.
@@wumi2419 That sort of thing always seems silly to me. It's arbitrary. If idle games can superficially list numbers in the googolplex range, I don't think it's a legitimate problem for an ARPG of PoE's complexity. It's just laziness or an excuse.
@@zeriel9148if it seems arbitrary, you should read how numbers in computers work relative to performance. There is a reason decimals are inexact despite ability to represent rational numbers exactly as a bignum fraction.
Also idle games usually have under 20 operations per frame, while PoE can easily reach 100s and 1000s are not uncommon.
@@wumi2419 The numbers are just a method to arrive at a destination. There are ways to do it that would not appreciably impact performance. The fact that the numbers are not shown to players though kind of makes the whole thing pointless to argue about. You could just use tooltip black magic to change the numbers internally to be much lower and still show things as being unchanged for player tooltips, which anyway people consider inaccurate. Unlike in, say, WoW, you don't have a widespread addon that is telling you the exact HP of monsters at all times. Again, it being an issue is really just devs not wanting to spend any time on it, which is fair enough, but let's not pretend it is some huge technical obstacle.
@@zeriel9148 I guess you need me to say a third time that adding numbers of different times takes different amount of time. There is no way to do it that would not impact performance, or people would not be using shorter types at all. Showing numbers doesn't even matter as it's a load for client GPU, not server CPU.
Operations with 64bit ints take about 2 times more time than 32bit, floats are even slower. So if GGG is using a wider type, their servers will be able to handle 2 times less players. So they will either need to double their server expences or every leaguestart will be like D3 launch.
I guess it's me not expecting ignorance on how integer numbers work from someone, but if you divide an integer number by some higher number to "just use tooltip black magic to change the numbers internally to be much lower", you don't get a fraction, you get 0. Because fraction is not an integer, but 0 is. But integer limit on a value you are dividing isn't gone, and all you just did is make a shorter integer by using whatever divisor you were using as 1 instead of 1. Trying to divide by 100 so bigger numbers are representable? Congratulations, now there is nothing but 0 below 100 and there is still nothing above 2 billion.
While yes, on bosses you can usually get to a point where ranged and melee feel relatively equal, the issue with melee imo is the clear. If you aren't thanos one shotting everything you breathe on you are going to eat 10000x more random auto attacks (which do an obscene amount of damage when undergeared which is also why you aren't one shotting things) by being in the vicinity of monsters compared to something like LA taking multiple casts to kill something.
It's why even when some melee builds are "okay" I would never reccomend doing one as a league starter because it is infinitely harder to clear on no items as melee than ranged. Ranged can perma kite the whole map if need be, melee does not get that luxury.
I love playing melee (sometimes) and i think the biggest issue except for maybe totems is the damage down time. The fact that a lot of bosses tp to random locations forcing you to make your way to them again is just soo frustrating.
there are too many massive issues, from low damage for most skill gems, to mandatory weapon specific gems, like glacial hammer or leap slam, all the way to lower survivability due to terrible synergy between fortify timer and boss dance time along side, mandatory dance time, against bosses with invulnerability phases/1-shot damage outside of outrageously expensive defensive gear. finally, the fact that melee cant dodge shotgun from attacks that come from the bosses models, because they were literaly designed to be dodged from distance.
so excited to play flickerstrike monk. i even prefer it being at like 80mp/h, instead of 5000mp/h in PoE1
i wanna feel somewhat nimble on monk, but not have 0 control and receive eye strain from flickering too fast
then you gonna love it, specially how the game is basically diablo 3, in how you gotta piano ALL your skill gems, all the time. you really gonna feel like a monk then.
Take away totems giving you 50% damage (since literally all melee calculate this into their builds) Buff all melee skills by 50%. problem solved. Pay me.
Yeah, it's weird they balance around totems and then say melee can't be made more powerful because it "feels bad". Like they realize a LOT of people don't use totems even though they can right? So removing totems and giving all of their power not just a tiny fraction to the melee characters would make no real change in the overall balance for their design purposes, but would make everyone way happier.
@@zeriel9148 Yeah every melee build I've ever tried just about for end game "requires" totems to scale the damage to close to the same damage as non-melee builds. It is a huge multiplier with the attack speed and %more damage. I would even take a downgrade of "You can't use totems but you gain 35% more damage/attack speed" or something. Or a unique or passive that gave % more melee damage per Keystone but you can't summon totems.
agreed, they completely swapped how totems were supposed to work. totems should've been a build style, not a mandatory tool that breaks after 2 seconds because they are made of paper.
"The Templar is left-handed. What an annoying decision." Been playing this for like a decade and never noticed this. Everyone memes about his tall neck or lack of pants though.
I was literally thinking this same question when I went to make my Necropolis build! I’m a mage/magic type of guy BUT I always like to make a big beefy two handed sword type of character after my mage but I realized that wasn’t really viable in PoE 1. I hope they can figure out a way to make melee more viable in PoE 2 cause I really don’t want to use a bow or “X Arrow” skill lol.
I absolutely strongly disagree about the distance and the totems. I respect the argument and I assume that in PoE 2 the boss design and skill design makes the difference so that I would agree with Jonathan, but that is not the case right now.
At the moment totems are absolutely necessary for melee because of their buffs. If the Ancestral Protector and Warchief totems did not increase your damage and attack speed, but just dealt their own damage - unless it was incredibly high, people wouldn't bother with them. You pick them because it gives you a hell of a lot of damage due to the buffs. And the buffs are why the Vaal version of the totems are used as well - since you can have multiple separate instances of said buff.
On the other hand for range - I do not agree that a Sirus or Maven or Shaper fight is just as easy, or takes just as long time to do as a melee fighter, say like Boneshatter, compared to a ranged, totem or brand character, given the same DPS across the board. All non-melee characters have higher uptime on their damage, immediately increasing their total damage output due to that fact. And that is because as melee, if the boss is next to something on the ground, or a laser, or an explosion, or just teleports away from you - you are forced to move and potentially not be able to attack. As a ranged character that matters way less for you, and as a brand or totem character you can almost ignore that as your positioning mostly is used to avoid damage effects. That is why totem and brand skills are popular. This is why totems and brands are the best at farming Sanctum as well - since you barely get hit when using them, this is a huge and glaring example of the case I'm trying to make.
Last, but not least, I remember when Melee was good and popular - it was when stat stick offhand existed. That was because melee had more damage output to compensate for the fact that it had less damage uptime. Damage output X damage uptime = damage dealt.
Bring back stat sticks and you will see double strike of ambidexterity shoot up in popularity even more - it is popular right now as it simulates how things used to be before. Now that spells and bows have seen quite a few buffs, you can boost melee via stat sticks with "gain %physical damage as extra elemental damage" and I bet that in the current boss design, melee will go up quite significantly.
I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt. They used to outright defend the melee experience in PoE 1. "It's better in 2 honest, just trust us" is most likely a cop-out because they realized it looks bad blatantly telling the playerbase they are wrong when 99% of them disagree with GGG. I would predict, with an almost certainty of success, that PoE 2 will have glaring issues with melee once people play it in endgame. And once again GGG will play a game of circular reasoning for why you just have to trust them.
the thing about the boss moves being easier to dodge is true, but it also punishes you HARD for not knowing the bosses moves or just not being used to melee, my first real build was a cyclone build, and i got so incredibly frustated from simple bosses, just because of how impossible it was to dodge an ability you dont know what is yet. this problem ofc does exist for range, but for a lot of these boss skills, a pretty good solution is to just move away, which is insanely unrewarding
tl;dr melee is better for bosses, but terrible if you arent used to the boss
I agree, this is a problem PoE has- i think intended that you have to 'learn' the boss through smashing your face rather than quick thinking. I wouldn't mind forewarning on most bosses, a bit of intel. Let the tl;dr types smash their faces, or give some build up/ slowly speed up from easy to dodge etc.
More than that, it's so hard to tell what you HAVE to dodge. I don't mind range having that skirmish advantage, it does make sense.
I think the bigger difference isn't bosses, but trash. A group with the wrong combination of whatever they're called those bonuses and you're done far more often in melee.
Bosses are individualistic, you can easily weight melee vs ranged. You can have different attacks, bounce back ranged attacks, have melee interrupt some of the boss' abilities etc.
But generic enemies, its easy to lose the balance of being surrounded in my view. Maybe i'm wrong, I haven't done much melee in poe
@@mandowarrior123 if that's the case why are gates in maps limited? you telling me not only do i need to learn the boss, i only get a few shots to do so? that's terrible design decision no matter how one slices it.
I've never noticed the templar is left handed. Now I feel represented...
just kidding I don't care at all. But it's a cool detail.
2:50 i dont understand his answer can anyone elaborate? the skills in poe1 dont need animations to be honest just better numbers to make them viable and remove totem buffs for melee and put them into melee skills?(not fully though)
it means they don't want to create new skills, which does fall under the umbrella of "hating melee".
Melee should have a crazy amount of DPS to compensate for damage uptime.
downtime
I will just echo others say the worst thing about melee are the totems. I would be even ok if there is only one good melee (strike) skill as long as you dont have to deal with them.
Still waiting for ancestral totems to be changed or fixed
never played POE in my life but idea
make totems a summon/projectile buff.
you the player sacrifice your ability to benefit from the buff by "concentrating" on the totem. this concentration ends while attacking but resumes when not attacking effectively locking totem out of viable melee builds but this is made up for with a melee system that ups melee damage for each kill for a minute (or maybe a % decay per second system) giving different amounts of boost depending on the strength of the kill so a tiny swarm mook gives like 1/4 of 1% but a big beefy murder boi gives like 5%. this mixed with hp restoring effects would make melee builds play more like a doomslayer kind of deal without a need to spec into totems. this will also encourage spell blade play. another thing to consider would be a spell discharge mechanic so when you use a magic skill you get the benefit of your melee skill damage boost but some of it is spent after like "if you cast [spell] you lost [number] % of your melee damage boost based on the spell's base damage allowing for investment builds that run in and slash about on the mooks then blast the big boys with the built up damage bonus
Is it going to be the same in POE2? We're about to find out.
pretty sure it will be worse in every single way, since they clearly showed poe 2 will be much more "pianoing" to almost diablo 3 level.
Would be nice to also have Scythes thank you. Give us this hyper fantasy weapon.
congrats to the 200k subscribers.
11:30 but when you melee you get attacked by default attacks and when you are ranged you don't
So I am hearing that PoE 2 wants melee to be closer to dynasty warriors or god of war where you have a consistent predictable moveset that you then move and aim into the hurtbox of enemies.
Yo, as a lefty, I always appreciated the representation and thought it was thematically cool that the templar would be left handed, because it sorta symbolizes his fall from grace, with the root of the word "sinister" coming from the latin word for "left." Totally understand the added work that comes with that, though I'd imagine more modern rigging tech would allow for more intelligent mirroring that could ease the burden, so I hope he is again!
i dont think anyone really cares about it. as a left handed person, the only time i was angry that they changed it, was for zelda twilight princess and skyward sword, because the reason they changed it, is because it feels horrendous to play the game with wrong main hand.
but for poe? who cares? i played as templar the most, and i never even noticed it, until it was mentioned here.
genuine waste of time and effort.
i rather, they simply made character customization if they want representation that much.
09:36 Jonathan forgot about Glacial Hammer 💀
Why not just add more damage nodes/multipliers around “strike” skills and rebalance strike skills. Slams had a whole few leagues and a targeted rebalance
why? it would be better to just double if not triple melee weapon damage instead.
John is not in charge of poe1 and has not been for some time. Mark/Neon is, and has statements on melee already. Its been stated his goal for next league is some melee fix's.
cant wait for them to fix it by making them WORSE, you know, how they fixed chieftain?
Fuck it, I'm making a dual strike jugg right now.
Melee totems makes me cry at night
Thheres no tradeoff of proximity for damage vs safety--melee gets nothing but added difficulty for existing close to the enemy, and requiring additional movement to both dodge and get back in, actually needing to invest in defensive stats at the expense of damage, and on and on compared to ranged and casters
Will be curious how they keep ranged builds from just playing in melee range.
Would be easy to do if they let you zoom out to actually make use of the "range" in the first place. One screen away is close enough to melee considering how fast you can get yourself moving
ammo
Well previously they've pushed you to distance or close as a choice, multiplier based on distance. I'd expect to see that again.
He says the animations from back in the day hurt melee, but melee skill yet to have animations updated (frost blades and reave) feel the best to play.
This is a cop out. All they need to do is buff melee dps but they wont.
I don't care about animations when we all play 5aps+
@@jprec5174 Bruh melee builds are more than capable of reaching Ubers without an unreachable budget. Damage isnt the issue necessarily
@@loopygordo few of them....and in specific way with specific item,its not melee build at that point,its that specific stuff that carry melee skill
Imagine bow players have a stupid broken assendancy to pick, 10 stupid broken gems to use, and ontop of that, you can have an additional item in form of a quiver with your 6link bow. Fair.
In trade off, i die like a real men with my 2handed sword.
Lol try dual wielding, it's fantastically worse. You trade an extra 6 gem slots (and potentially a lot more, since you can get absurd 2Hers with extra free support explicits that function as 12 gem weapons) for 10% attack speed and... that's it. Or like -50% block/slew of stats compared to 1H + shield.
@@zeriel9148 why would you even use 2 weapons in PoE? the game forces you to deal damage with both, forcing you to make 2 perfect weapons, or you are literaly downgrading your own damage. and at that point, might as well get the squire for the extra 3 links on the weapon, the block and focus on a single perfect weapon or unique.
@@marcosdheleno Because I like it? It's like saying, "Why do you play melee in PoE?" Well, that's the issue that we're discussing. Artificial penalties to features they put in the game and clearly expected you to use are dumb. There is a whole slew of passives and supports for dual wielding; maybe you can argue this is a legacy feature, but I think that's just an argument in favor of it being buffed.
@@zeriel9148 that was not a literal question, more like a pointing out how the game punishes you for doing something that is core to the game.
@@marcosdheleno Ahhh okay my bad, I get you now. It's funny because so many people WILL take that tack literally. "Well despite hundreds of items and all these passives and entire classes devoted thematically to this mechanic they put in the game, you're actually not supposed to do it and it's fine, just ignore it and play a bow user."
If somehow I am forced to press any totem for a melee class in POE2, I will straight garbage it
It'd be nice if melee got some kind of bonus for not actively attacking, to cover those times where they CAN'T actively attack.
TECHNICALLY, you could make a build that revolves around single damage every few seconds. it feels HORRENDOUS to play, but hey, its an option for slams i guess...
WASD for movement and Mouse for aiming and attacking, now that will be a HEWDJ improvement to the game.
I do want to know from the devs if they were thinking of Boxhead when they created the Mercenary 😂
Path of Exile is literally the game where every top end build just consists of walking onto the same screen as the enemies and they all die. It doesn't just hate melee classes, it hates gameplay.
Dude looks like somones grandma with a beard drawn on
If I am understanding Jonathan correctly, I think he's mentioned a brilliant method to fixing melee in PoE2. Creating abilities that function differently depending on range. This would mean you could have both strong clear and single target simply from manipulating where you stand, I would think.
I currently struggle to see how you address melee problems without just making long-range melee abilities (as someone mentioned before, large AoE earthquake, large AoE Cyclone, etc.) which fundamentally, imo, do not really count as melee. Ranged, mechanically, is going to cut out dealing with melee-range monsters for the most part where melee often has to engage.
Totems are also problematic in that they are virtually a requirement. Part of me just wants to remove those totems from the game and simply add their stats to melee when in range of unique enemies: there's likely a way to break this that I'm unaware of, but it seems within the realm of a doable implement within this version of the game.
I'm curious what games that are in the same vein as PoE but have solved the melee problem, because I feel like the answer is consistently that the character wields a melee weapon, but they are effectively a ranged character.
something to ponder: I'm pretty sure dark souls has ranged projectiles hit a single enemy while many melee weapons are AOE.
POE is the reverse. Ranged is AOE and melee is single-target.
@Wyzai I would never compare dark souls to PoE. Imo, these are two amazing but totally different games. Dark Souls does not deal in monster modifiers nor monster density like top-down arpgs.
Second point, I also disagree - most melee skills have some way to scale AoE, similar to projectiles. Whether that's through multi-strike, aoe or explosions. Single-target projectiles do get access to multiple target damage application through things like chain, fork, pierce, or more projectile mods.
It all comes down to Damage uptime.
Melees just can't.
Unless you can tank n spank, it just won't work.
Can't clear as fast and easily with a melee build either.
sadly, now u can't even tank anything unless u spend a fortune on gear in this game. and nowadays u barely do damage with most skills too. it's not even just melee, but most builds feel useless if u actually wanna play beyond ur yellow maps. used to enjoy just coming back to the game trying like 5 builds each league, however this league i only played one then farmed currency for like 2 weeks to play another one with "mageblood/nimis... etc" and the build still feels like shit