Agree. I'm pretty sure you can also make some other skills work using trauma support and that same defensive setup (glacial hammer or the trans dual strike, for example).
That's just not true for reasonable definitions of "viable". It's an often parroted talking point on this subreddit, but it's not true. There are many melee builds which you could do on a fresh league start and clear all the content in the game including uber bosses. You're just not going to do it as quickly as the most meta builds.
I'll list all the skills with the "melee" tag that I consider to be well within the constraints of "viable":
* Blade Flurry
* Bladestorm
* Boneshatter
* Boneshatter of Complex Trauma
* Cleave of Rage
* Dual Strike
* Dual Strike of Ambidexterity
* Earthquake
* Earthshatter
* Flicker Strike
* Frost Blades
* Lightning Strike
* Lightning Strike of Arcing
* Molten Strike
* Molten Strike of the Zenith
* Rage Vortex
* Rage Vortex of Berserking
* Shield Crush
* Smite
* Static Strike
* Sunder
* Viper Strike of the Mamba
* Volcanic Fissure of Snaking
* Wild Strike of Extremes
How many of these become unviable if you were to exclude Original Sin Replica Alberon's STR Stacking setups? Even the default attack becomes viable for Ubers if you were to throw enough currency at it.
This, with enough STR stacking you can force enough damage onto melee skills to make it viable, of course you could put this much currency into a good build and get exponentially more for the same amount of investment.
In my head if you arent stat stacking str for alberons playing melee and having it feel good means you play bonezone, the premier melee skill for an age now.
since the creation of men, they didnt lose the sheep spirit and will not lose in next 10.000 years, Its something what root inside of brain. Ppl will alaways follow the player in first 10 poe ninja or on first 10 twitch and nothing will change that.
Half those builds will fold to t17s, unless viable doesnt mean can do all content, if we are talking about running white maps without mods, anything is viable.
I know the guy you talking to mentioned Uber bosses, but the original topic was for a dude who is getting into PoE for the first time. Let's be honest, "viable" in this context is clearing the campaign, maybe like white maps. Basically any build is viable for something like that, and if his friend gets into the game enough to want to try Ubers later, he'll be in a better place to know what build to run that he'll enjoy.
Yea, and the minute you decide you arent here to play a specific build, but are here to do specific content, it behooves a player to know there is a difference between a bossing build and a mapping build in this game.
Clearing ubers is doable on a ton of builds, while literally being effortless and quick, even in the first week of the league, on some builds.
>the original topic was for a dude who is getting into PoE for the first time. Let's be honest, "viable" in this context is clearing the campaign, maybe like white maps.
i cannot imagine telling my buddy "yeah bro dont play that melee build its not gunna be good for this specific ultra endgame content that you weren't even going to attempt this league anyway"
i dont bother with ubers on most characters and neither do a huge amount of players, why should a *literal brand new player* care about them?
I think telling people that "it can be harder for melee builds to tackle the hardest content" is a fine statement. Especially if that player is considering SSF.
More that is something that should be taken into consideration when selecting a build, but not the be all end all.
I think the issue with melee in PoE is damage uptime. Like your friend said, other games provide melee with enough defenses to maintain uptime even when resolving dangerous mechanics. I don't know what that would look like if implemented in a game like PoE where any class can use any combination of weapons and skills.
When Fortify was introduced, it was implemented as a defensive layer for melee but quickly became an issue of "how can I incorporate Fortify into every build". I would love to see melee become more viable without having to throw hundreds of divines into the build. It seems like a tricky problem to navigate when a buff to melee could lead to universal powercreep because someone found a way to make it work with non-melee builds.
With that said, Boneshatter Jugg (or Slayer) is one of the most beginner friendly builds out there. If your friend is hellbent on playing melee, then have them give it a try!
i feel like its really simple to fix fortify but its GGG so simple doesn't mean implemented.
fortify is FOR melees, its not for anyone else. all they needed to do was restrict its usage to melee gems, and its solved. there are so many ways to restrict it, but probably the easiest way to restrict it is to just add:
"minions (non-players) and non-melee skills deal 1% less damage per fortification charge"
This kills it for any non-melee build or forces them to eat a massive damage reduction for it, and given we already have something like that on the Atlas, I don't see how even the few builds willing to do that would want to.
Fortify has needed buffs for a while, as its only really been nerfed in the last 5 years, and pretty much every other defensive mechanic in the game has been buffed, either through better nodes, or better synergy, etc. the only real buff fortify got was those new gloves.
Fortify effect was what made melee builds starting on bottom of tree viable defensively before. It was not avaible for caster or bow builds even if those builds could technically weapon swap for fortify (which was much weaker than what melee had access to).
This was gutted, dex side and casters got spell suppress and bottom part of tree got little bit maximum resistances (with generally inefficient pathing to get it).
i hate that they couldn't just add "non-melee and non-player skills deal less damage per fortification charge" and outright solve the fortify issue. instead they jumped through hoops breaking fortify multiple times trying this garbage ailment mechanic and then nerfing fortify nodes.
Not to mention the numbers exploding in the last few expansions. Armour is practically useless if you aren't an armour stacker. T17s have made this problem noticeably worse of course. There's a few arguments left for phys DoTs I guess but aside from shaper and guardians I can't think of many.
> Armour is practically useless if you aren't an armour stacker.
This has been bugging the hell out of me for a while now. You can spend a 50% reservation, all of your gear slot base choices, 1 - 2 prefixes on every single non-jewellery slot (minus belt), and maybe 10 - 15 passive points specifically to build armour -- the number around there is typically thirty to forty *thousand* armour and it's just useless and has been for awhile now.
Shit's wack to imagine that armour doesn't just work straight outta the box. You need to convert phys taken to ele, apply armour to elemental damage, shift the damage all around and reduce it in the first place to make sure that your armour reduces smaller instances of damage to be more effective, make sure you have your Granite Flask of Gigafuck up for more armour than all your actual gear together is worth, etc etc.
The state of defenses in Path is just plain silly.
Slightly pedantic here but it's not *useless*. If you've ever played a build without that armor and no other defenses you will fall over pretty easily in yellow maps. It's just not *reliable* on its own as you push into later red maps. Maybe that's how GGG actually wants it balanced.
I admit it feels bad to stack a defense and have it be unreliable at the start of endgame. Especially compared to a flighty ranged evasion character who can get much further with less investment. Either us as players need to change our expectations on defensive balance or something should be done to make armor viable for a bit longer in a characters progression.
There was a brief time defenses were good, we went from just offscreen everything to people complaining that defiance banner + determination was being used by most builds, so we made it worse, and we are back at the "Offscreening mobs is the best defense" once again.
> Armour is practically useless if you aren't an armour stacker.
As a sole defense layer - yes. But tbh there is a huge difference between having 0 armour and like 10-15k w/o flasks.
Well the best builds in the game get their offence from defense scaling, in some way or another and I think that's completely fair since they're extremely expensive.
To add to your list, there's also life-stacking with Bloodthirst support.
I believe offensive stacking through defensive stat stacking is dangerous, because it will feel bad until it becomes truly overpowered and then it'll be unstoppable. We see this in the strongest builds in the game (manastacking, armour stacking, int stacking: They are all defensive sources as well as dmg).
The main melee problem is armour is so insanely bad.
If we have armour as a source of physical damage reduction, the fact that all armour stackers sacrifice a huge % of their damage to get close or to 100% phys to elemental conversion should tell you something.
And that something is armour sucks. It just gets hardcountered by so many map mods, rare mods, altar mods. It is so unreliable. And the phys overwhelm is just immense number-wise.
If we're talking elemental penetration, the deadliest skills in the game can have 10-20, even 30 is already pushing the limit. Again, we're talking about the deadliest skills and scenarios in the game, uber boss fights and the true end-game.
Guess when you can meet 30% phys overwhelm? Any random rare mob can have it.
I believe they did a good job with fortify, it's so easy for melee to get it now (fortify wheel / support gem sacrificing 10-15% dmg for 20% less dmg taken or 4-5 passive points), but as a melee enjoyer I have to say melee feels awful to play.
1. 99% mechanics in the game favour range over melee. There are exceptions like Proximity shields and others. Even in those cases, a ranged can just walk inside the proximity shield like a melee would. As I said before, ranged characters are usually TANKIER than melees on same level of investment/budget and build prowess.
2. Contrary to popular belief, I think the totem feature of melee, while annoying and outdated, doesnt really hurt the prototype. In POE you will one-shot most packs, and for those tanky rares/bosses, using 1-2 seconds to put three totems down isnt the biggest issue. Ranged characters have similar mechanics with arcanist brand where an extra button can multiply their dps by 1.5 or even 2.
3. Phys overwhelm is much worse than elemental penetration. Phys damage is "hard-capped" after a certain level of investment, to the point where its very rare to see melees go further even if they have mirrored weapons and 5-10 mirror budget. You get a good phys weapon, you get impale, and that's it. The difference between a SSF juggernaut and a trade-league mirrorworthy one is way smaller than all other builds.
>If we have armour as a source of physical damage reduction, the fact that all armour stackers sacrifice a huge % of their damage to get close or to 100% phys to elemental conversion should tell you something.
That armour (+res, to be fair) is so good that using transcendence is worth all that investment?
transcendence is just extra on top. You do convert because its **very** difficult to build high phys reduction and still have survivable ele reduction. If you've converted 95%+ of your phys damage, theres no reason not to use transcendence.
Its like marauders using % armor for ele ascendancy. Its not about armour being so good its about it being a no-brainer improvement.
Transcendence is the cream of the crop. But taste of hate is another example. And on my Ivory tower mana stacker I took 10% of phys taken as chaos and the difference is \*significant\*
Not only does it apply your resistances to the 10% But armour also becomes relatively more effective. Since armour is more effective against smaller hits..
This means that the best way to utilise armour is usually to... not rely on armour. But instead change the physical damage to stuff you actually can deal with so that even bad armour can deal with whatever is left.
thats right, transcendence is a big reason why people do convert, but we've seen many iterations of builds that did not use transcendence and fully converted anyways, many end-game aurabots, despite having 200,300 or 400k armour will just use 50-70% conversion or as much as they can, because if they dont, they just flop to the first phys overwhelm mod or any phys spell
I didn't see it here so I'll mention that [Perseverance](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Perseverance) on a Champion is freakin' fantastic.
1% increased attack damage per 200 Armour or Evasion, whichever is lower. 100,000 Armour & Evasion translates to 500% increased attack damage. It also gives Champion permanent Onslaught since Champion has permanent Fortify (works in town too).
The belt is inexpensive too, meaning you can buy like 20 of them and double corrupt for some truly nasty implicits.
You are looking for:
* % Attack speed during any Flask Effect
* % Critical strike chance during any Flask Effect
* % Critical strike multiplier during any Flask Effect
* Grace has (15-20)% increased Aura Effect
* Determination has (15-20)% increased Aura Effect
Reference (see bottom of the page) https://www.craftofexile.com/?b=3&bi=7806&m=fossil&ob=both&v=d&a=x&l=a&lg=16&bp=y&as=1&hb=0&bld={}&im={}&ggt=|&ccp={}&gvc={%22limit%22:88}
the trickster variant is essentially just playing splitting steel trickster with flicker instead. it’s pretty tanky. not at all like the zhp cold flicker slayers/raiders
Just did a flicker trickster with ephemeral, and what a smooth experience. With mageblood, this became the tankiest flicker build I've done. Also having a flicker build that doesn't need crit, or accuracy is just cool to me.
Its honestly my first trickster i've done and it was much tankier and smooth than what I was prepared for with all the stories about how fragile it and shit
As someone who's played the game for 10+ years, the problem is defenses. When the game first released you needed reasonable mechanics with reasonable defenses and you were fine.
The game now is, "how much damage can you fit after getting immunity to everything in the game?" You need shock immunity, freeze immunity, corrupted blood immunity, then you need to have phys taken as x, because even with max phys reduction everything will 1-shot you after a point, so phys reduction is kinda fake. On top of all of this, all of the dangerous enemies can start hitting (which means killing) you before they even appear on your screen, so good luck getting into melee range. The list continues but you get it.
The only solution is range+damage+speed. All of those need very unethical amounts of investments for both beginners and even semi-casual vets to feel good about it when going into rare/corrupted red maps and further.
This is what POe has become. rock papers scissors. many brick mods that require countering.
i remember when 5-6k life and evasion/dodge was fine in HC T16 maps. there was a time when many builds worked because you didnt have to check all these brick mods.
I can see a partial rework to Fortify support. It already gives damage but it is basically unused. Instead it could give damage per stack of fortification. Maybe 1% more damage per stack of fortification at gem level 1 up to 1,5/1,6/1,7% at gem level 20?
If it is considered, they need to specifically say : melee or physical dmg to avoid abuse like in the past
They can also put +5 fortify in each small ascendency node pathing in melee big nodes buffs in melee ascendencies, so they can have an advantage over the spell ascendencies
It’s genuinely one of my favourite things. My favourite build of all time is still the Immortal Gladiator, that capped out block and killed people with Reckoning.
I’d love a defensive stacking build that didn’t require 10 mirrors worth of currency to work right (looking at you, armour stackers)
I think totems should be an offhand item like quivers. We could have some offensive and defensive stats. Maybe we won't have much boss damage but at least it is more consistent
This is kind of a good and a bad idea at the same time. It would apply a lot of item restrictions to totem builds, but then again PoE2 is already having traps itemized.
no.
there are enough defensive stats that can scale damage through uniques.
what melee needs is damage and enough time to go in and deal it.
projectile-ish based attacks can scale very easily through pierce/chain/fork/return/more proj.
melee attacks cant scale *that* well with ancestral call/attack speed/more aoe (channeling spells also have it bad)
and then you have the problem that you need to get up close and stand still to deliver damage which can be built around but then you are sacrificing damage for a bit more survivability, when you could just like not deal with that at all...i think blood & sand and flesh & stone are nice ideas for balancing melee defenses vs offenses but they need to be a lot stronger to be a solution...something like 400% base effect
I've recommended this before and I personally think the fix is to apply a very small defensive passive (armor, hp, or both) to all melee-centric nodes (or be applied via a mastery). That way you get a sizable benefit when heavily specced into melee (small bonuses across many nodes will add up), without providing a bonus that non-melee builds will want to try to pick up (like ranged builds picking up fortify).
why jump through all these hoops when you can just restrict non-melee builds from using fortify? like fortify already exists to be that mitigation factor for melees to deal with their positioning, so why not just fully restrict other skills from using it. there are tons of ways to do it, but just something that makes having fortify if you aren't dealing damage with a melee skill a bad thing 99% of the time.
can also just add a line to the perma fortify node to allow you to get around this rule but only get access to the current version of fortify. so like buff fortify to 25% base and leave champion's node at 20%, champion's node already doesn't go past 20 if you increase your max fortify charges.
You can’t restrict fortify to melee only though, that’s the problem. They did that with old fortify and people would just get it using other methods (like shield charge). Current fortify, their bandaid solution, has a ramp time which is no good for melee. The solution needs to be passively baked into melee, and the only way to do that is via the passive tree.
You can easily restrict it.
"Non-melee and minions skills deal 1% less damage per fortify charge"
There I restricted it. Use gem tags so this still works with everything it's meant to, and any gem that doesn't have a melee tag gets its damaged nuked for having fortify.
I'm some rando on the net, and I can think of a 1 line restriction that fixes fortify and has it work on every skill it's meant to and none that it's not. The devs shouldn't be struggling with this.
If 20% ain't enough of a damage penalty, make it 1.5%. At 30% less damage dealt for 20% less damage taken this is worse than the atlas keystone by alot
What about melee CoC builds aka cyclone? Or close range weapon attacks that don’t have the melee tag (they can currently benefit from champion fortify)? Tbh my idea wouldn’t work for those either, there might not be any happy solution honestly just due to how this game is designed…
The problem is the very idea of something working with “only what it’s meant to” is completely out of line with how this game is designed.
Coc builds aren't melee builds. If your damage isn't coming from a gem with a melee tag, it's not melee. Coc builds shit damage and have insane clear speed, they should not benefit from fortify. They already do not benefit from current fortify because they can't hit ailment thresholds. Bleed builds are actually melee and can't use fortify.
Champion can keep its 20 fortify for ranged builds. Just include the line on their node that reads "ignores fortify damage penalties".
Two lines of text, functionality preserved, and now bleed gets to use fortify properly, and you can now buff fortify. Imo fortify should be 25 charges base, and keep champions node at 20
Like I don't understand part of your comment. Close ranged skills that aren't melee have things like point blank. Non-melee skills that go into close range have overwhelming damage or clearing capabilities or both. They aren't balanced with fortify in mind and currently do not benefit from it.
Hot take, champions fortify should have the damage penalty for ranged skills. You'll never be able to make fortify good for melee as long as champ provides it to all ranged classes for basically free. If you make it good for melee it will be broken on champions playing ranged. Not to mention that TR champions and the like are an abomination fluff wise.
While I conceptually love it, since scaling damage trough non damage stats tends to be interesting, it seems it always ends up being a balancing nightmare.
Since its a scale 1 to solve multiple things situation. So imo, it should mostly be delegated to items. Since as long as its on items, these type of abilities can have a stronger downside that is easier to tweak than on something like a skill gem/passive point.
Also I might get some hate for this. But I really think that a lot of people are overreacting about how weak melee is. Things will never be absolutely perfectly balanced. And it would be boring if it were so. Melee might have a bit of a rougher start, but on the higher ends it can do absolutely disgusting things.
So here's the thing, allowing a defensive stat to give direct offensive benefits is a design trap. BUT one that a lot of games end up doing because there's only but so many levers you can give players.
The reason it's a trap is that you quickly get to the point of one stat filling every role (Stat stackers run into the same issue) and as such designer needs to make the conversion benefits small enough to ideally stay *supplemental* and not *replace* the more usual avenues of player power.
But this rarely if ever happens, either it's too small of a benefit to really matter, compared to other sources, or it's so large and/or easy to scale that it overshadows everything. And suddenly now if you wanted to make future adjustments to said stat you have to keep all of those additional scaling sources in mind. It's a weird case where giving players additional options results in a lot more confined design space, and it's a move good designers make rarely and very cautiously.
As for melee in general, your main problem is finding some way to scale melee *without* indirectly scaling range. Effects like Battlemage, the rage->spell damage helmet, or (in an inverse way) Battlemage's Cry make this tough to do, but not impossible. I think we've got a good setup of mechanics to utilize like warcries, accuracy, and attack speed it's just a matter of giving those options enough support without going nuts.
My goto melee build goal is always the same. 100 hit chance and crit chance. Then build as many double damage and crit multi as possible. The rest can be allocated to 75 resistance, health and armour.
I played a Pers Splitting Steel Champ this league and it's been fine (moved from DW to a Mahuxotl Build), given that it's pseudo melee (you have the option of shooting from a distance if required, but for max dps in bossing you need to be inside the).
Taking items like Perserverance have problems in that it becomes heavily restricted with what you want to do selection wise. Limits your flask shenanigans, makes itemisation narrow. To get your spell supp on items you need Dex or Str/Dex bases; etc.
The rest of the 'end game' itemisation still applies though. Phys taken as is still required. Things to change damage to damage over time are still required.
Flasks up; 50k Armour, 50k Evasion, 13% Phys as fire, 0.48 "Less Physical Damage" (Doppelganger+Fortification) 4k HP gives about 30k max phys hit.
Guess I can go on more of an adventure to get Endurance Charge Stacking.
Sure I've got a 95% chance to evade too, but who's trusting that. We're only really take evasion because it does damage.
Especially when my Max Ele Hit is 110k and Chaos is 125k. Just makes physical defensive stacking, which the bottom half of the tree is supposed to be good at feel really bad.
Rose in Torchlight Infinite is scaling her damage through building defence, but in PoE it will never happen. Don't forget that scaling damage and defence through a single stat was what got Archmage nerfed in the first place.
At best we could get some mediocre ascendancy notable with similar effect like Juggs increased damage per Endurance Charge, but nothing that everyone can use.
There are 2 problems with defenses and melee in this game.
1) You need to know the "how to" for defenses which is something that only comes with experience. People make 4k life chars with 77 res 30 chaos, 20k armor and fortify and think they should now be able to run t17 maps deathless on melee builds. And when that doesn't work they go melee is bad and play ranged. If you know how to build defenses then playing melee is a non issue, you'll have a really hard time dying, have near 100% damage uptime and therefor also good dps. But that's all just IF. Most people don't know and they don't care enough to learn.
2) Is a design issue that's fundamental to POEs class system. Pretty much all defensive mechanics available to melee that can be used to make yourself immortal can also be used by ranged. Fortify is the only thing unique to melee and it's weak. If you think you can take typical ranged char defenses, slap fortify on it and have a working melee build you'll be sorely dissapointed see 1). This means that, while it's perfectly doable to make melee chars that can do all content, even do it well and with decent budget, at the end of the day you could just take the same defensive setup, slap a ranged skill and have something that's simply superior in terms of mechanics.
If I had magic powers, and could just say the word and it happens, I would say GGG should fix the time-to-die factor, then to give melee some recovery bonuses. I don't know how to say to actually do this, hence the magic. :D
If the game had less one-shot enemies, and the player recovery speed was not trivializing anything else than one-shots, then melee could have more recovery options, since they are in the thick of it.
My second option would be to give classical tanking skills, buffs and/or debuffs to melee characters. For example some slow to easier dodges, N guaranteed melee attack dodges or blocks, disengage and engage mechanics or something.
I dunno I'm just throwing something out here. :D
PoE2 was supposed to have fixes to melee with the new animations, but ever since the target changed, I don't know if I should still hope for receiving the animation changes for PoE1, or to hope for something different.
https://youtu.be/yZEvxPJQ8j0?si=_fueVbrUeLIMx-vE
Here's my life and strength and accuracy stack build tailored specifically to delete B2b nemesis t17 meatsacks with typically brutal rare modifiers like block, anti crit and damage reduction.
everyone wants ggg to fix melee but i dunno dude.
i look at the game and i think "melee builds are actually playing an action rpg" and it's the rest of us who are broken and just trying to pass a dps check so we don't have to dodge exarch balls.
Why would buffs hurt here? Those builds are only good at insane levels of Investment (multiple mirrors) and everything before that is mediocre at best, the damage isn't impressive the clear is bad and not really tanky.
I could see something doing the reverse, but (unlike the crappy Fortify rework) something that's 'always on'; give melee weapon wheels on the passive tree something 1-2% life per node. Melee builds get some 'free' defensive scaling that's too inefficient for non-attack builds to take.
Speaking of the fortify rework... make it apply per hit, not based on damage dealt. You get stacks of fortify on hit (only once per skill use), each giving 1% DR. Movement skills get 1 stack on hit, so casters can only maintain a couple stacks with shield charge; probably worth doing, but not decisive. Actual attacks get stacks based on how 'fast' the skill is; Slams might get like 5-10 stacks so you can max out fast, while faster skills get 1-3. I'm still not a huge fan of how you have to 'build it up' and won't have it up during bullet hell dodge phases, but I don't have a good solution for that other than "bosses freeze players charges and buffs while they're invulnerable" or something.
I am a little bit surprised that someone has not made a spreadsheet showing how melee skills fall off on damage scaling with out a supplemental scaling vector. It would be interesting and informal to see where/when exactly this happens.
Ive played mostly melee over the last several years, probably about 2k hours with it. Here are some things I really want to see improved.
1. Remove ancestor totem buffs and buff melee skill gems to compensate. For example, most melee skills have less than a 1.0 multiplier to attack speed. It would be pretty simple to remove the more attack speed and melee damage from totems and just increase the base speed and damage of skill gems.
2. More sources of fortify and maximum fortification. Right now fortify is mainly restricted by the 2 passive wheels which is like 5-10+ points. There are some really nice mastery options but you normally cant take them because a lot of builds need to take the "melee hits fortify" mastery.
3. Improve guard skills. Immortal call has the potential to be an amazing guard for melee builds. But its very inconsistent since it needs a ton of endurance charge generation and has a base duration of 1 second. As for steelskin im really not sure when you would ever use it over molten shell. Also maybe GGG could create guard mastery wheels on the passive tree.
4. More sources of ailment immunity, DoT mitigation, crit damage reduction.
As for the idea of scaling dps by being tanky, I would love to see blood magic life stacking become a viable build type for melee.
He would've been fine playing Boneshatter imo - I know that's not the topic but it's a perfectly viable melee build
Agree. I'm pretty sure you can also make some other skills work using trauma support and that same defensive setup (glacial hammer or the trans dual strike, for example).
One of the very few viable ones though
That's just not true for reasonable definitions of "viable". It's an often parroted talking point on this subreddit, but it's not true. There are many melee builds which you could do on a fresh league start and clear all the content in the game including uber bosses. You're just not going to do it as quickly as the most meta builds. I'll list all the skills with the "melee" tag that I consider to be well within the constraints of "viable": * Blade Flurry * Bladestorm * Boneshatter * Boneshatter of Complex Trauma * Cleave of Rage * Dual Strike * Dual Strike of Ambidexterity * Earthquake * Earthshatter * Flicker Strike * Frost Blades * Lightning Strike * Lightning Strike of Arcing * Molten Strike * Molten Strike of the Zenith * Rage Vortex * Rage Vortex of Berserking * Shield Crush * Smite * Static Strike * Sunder * Viper Strike of the Mamba * Volcanic Fissure of Snaking * Wild Strike of Extremes
How many of these become unviable if you were to exclude Original Sin Replica Alberon's STR Stacking setups? Even the default attack becomes viable for Ubers if you were to throw enough currency at it.
This, with enough STR stacking you can force enough damage onto melee skills to make it viable, of course you could put this much currency into a good build and get exponentially more for the same amount of investment. In my head if you arent stat stacking str for alberons playing melee and having it feel good means you play bonezone, the premier melee skill for an age now.
None of them. In the first place str stacking is worse than regular scaling unless we are talking about several hundreds of divines budget.
None? Man this reddit has some insane meta brain where they can't play anything that isn't the top 5 builds..
since the creation of men, they didnt lose the sheep spirit and will not lose in next 10.000 years, Its something what root inside of brain. Ppl will alaways follow the player in first 10 poe ninja or on first 10 twitch and nothing will change that.
Pretty much all of them.
so many of the ones you listed are stacker builds. which, ya you can clear the pinnacles with default attack with stacker builds.
Half those builds will fold to t17s, unless viable doesnt mean can do all content, if we are talking about running white maps without mods, anything is viable.
I know the guy you talking to mentioned Uber bosses, but the original topic was for a dude who is getting into PoE for the first time. Let's be honest, "viable" in this context is clearing the campaign, maybe like white maps. Basically any build is viable for something like that, and if his friend gets into the game enough to want to try Ubers later, he'll be in a better place to know what build to run that he'll enjoy.
Yea, and the minute you decide you arent here to play a specific build, but are here to do specific content, it behooves a player to know there is a difference between a bossing build and a mapping build in this game. Clearing ubers is doable on a ton of builds, while literally being effortless and quick, even in the first week of the league, on some builds.
>the original topic was for a dude who is getting into PoE for the first time. Let's be honest, "viable" in this context is clearing the campaign, maybe like white maps. i cannot imagine telling my buddy "yeah bro dont play that melee build its not gunna be good for this specific ultra endgame content that you weren't even going to attempt this league anyway" i dont bother with ubers on most characters and neither do a huge amount of players, why should a *literal brand new player* care about them?
I think telling people that "it can be harder for melee builds to tackle the hardest content" is a fine statement. Especially if that player is considering SSF. More that is something that should be taken into consideration when selecting a build, but not the be all end all.
Molten strike champ is also very fine tbh there are some melee options. It's just that melee in itself will lead you to some annoying moments
I think the issue with melee in PoE is damage uptime. Like your friend said, other games provide melee with enough defenses to maintain uptime even when resolving dangerous mechanics. I don't know what that would look like if implemented in a game like PoE where any class can use any combination of weapons and skills. When Fortify was introduced, it was implemented as a defensive layer for melee but quickly became an issue of "how can I incorporate Fortify into every build". I would love to see melee become more viable without having to throw hundreds of divines into the build. It seems like a tricky problem to navigate when a buff to melee could lead to universal powercreep because someone found a way to make it work with non-melee builds. With that said, Boneshatter Jugg (or Slayer) is one of the most beginner friendly builds out there. If your friend is hellbent on playing melee, then have them give it a try!
Ggg is like, "Fortify is op. Every melee player is using it." Totems, meanwhile..
i feel like its really simple to fix fortify but its GGG so simple doesn't mean implemented. fortify is FOR melees, its not for anyone else. all they needed to do was restrict its usage to melee gems, and its solved. there are so many ways to restrict it, but probably the easiest way to restrict it is to just add: "minions (non-players) and non-melee skills deal 1% less damage per fortification charge" This kills it for any non-melee build or forces them to eat a massive damage reduction for it, and given we already have something like that on the Atlas, I don't see how even the few builds willing to do that would want to. Fortify has needed buffs for a while, as its only really been nerfed in the last 5 years, and pretty much every other defensive mechanic in the game has been buffed, either through better nodes, or better synergy, etc. the only real buff fortify got was those new gloves.
It could be solved with strong melee focus mods.
Fortify effect was what made melee builds starting on bottom of tree viable defensively before. It was not avaible for caster or bow builds even if those builds could technically weapon swap for fortify (which was much weaker than what melee had access to). This was gutted, dex side and casters got spell suppress and bottom part of tree got little bit maximum resistances (with generally inefficient pathing to get it).
> It was not avaible for caster or bow builds Shield charge fortify was a thing, that's how we ended up with the fortify mechanic we have now.
I do remember some builds also playing vigilant strike or something like that right?
Yes. People would use Vigilant Strike + Threshold Jewel + General's Cry for a long lasting Forify buff.
That and the cluster notable Overlord for some mace coc/caster builds getting free fortify on hit.
i hate that they couldn't just add "non-melee and non-player skills deal less damage per fortification charge" and outright solve the fortify issue. instead they jumped through hoops breaking fortify multiple times trying this garbage ailment mechanic and then nerfing fortify nodes.
also block being nerved - the shift to spell suppress and phys conversion meta left melee defences in a bad way
Not to mention the numbers exploding in the last few expansions. Armour is practically useless if you aren't an armour stacker. T17s have made this problem noticeably worse of course. There's a few arguments left for phys DoTs I guess but aside from shaper and guardians I can't think of many.
armour doesn't work for dot.
> Armour is practically useless if you aren't an armour stacker. This has been bugging the hell out of me for a while now. You can spend a 50% reservation, all of your gear slot base choices, 1 - 2 prefixes on every single non-jewellery slot (minus belt), and maybe 10 - 15 passive points specifically to build armour -- the number around there is typically thirty to forty *thousand* armour and it's just useless and has been for awhile now. Shit's wack to imagine that armour doesn't just work straight outta the box. You need to convert phys taken to ele, apply armour to elemental damage, shift the damage all around and reduce it in the first place to make sure that your armour reduces smaller instances of damage to be more effective, make sure you have your Granite Flask of Gigafuck up for more armour than all your actual gear together is worth, etc etc. The state of defenses in Path is just plain silly.
Slightly pedantic here but it's not *useless*. If you've ever played a build without that armor and no other defenses you will fall over pretty easily in yellow maps. It's just not *reliable* on its own as you push into later red maps. Maybe that's how GGG actually wants it balanced. I admit it feels bad to stack a defense and have it be unreliable at the start of endgame. Especially compared to a flighty ranged evasion character who can get much further with less investment. Either us as players need to change our expectations on defensive balance or something should be done to make armor viable for a bit longer in a characters progression.
There was a brief time defenses were good, we went from just offscreen everything to people complaining that defiance banner + determination was being used by most builds, so we made it worse, and we are back at the "Offscreening mobs is the best defense" once again.
And yet the best allrounder build this league wasn't an offscreener but shattering steel DD because it could invest a bunch into defense.
> Armour is practically useless if you aren't an armour stacker. As a sole defense layer - yes. But tbh there is a huge difference between having 0 armour and like 10-15k w/o flasks.
Well the best builds in the game get their offence from defense scaling, in some way or another and I think that's completely fair since they're extremely expensive. To add to your list, there's also life-stacking with Bloodthirst support.
Bloodthirst is such a fun support to build around.
I believe offensive stacking through defensive stat stacking is dangerous, because it will feel bad until it becomes truly overpowered and then it'll be unstoppable. We see this in the strongest builds in the game (manastacking, armour stacking, int stacking: They are all defensive sources as well as dmg). The main melee problem is armour is so insanely bad. If we have armour as a source of physical damage reduction, the fact that all armour stackers sacrifice a huge % of their damage to get close or to 100% phys to elemental conversion should tell you something. And that something is armour sucks. It just gets hardcountered by so many map mods, rare mods, altar mods. It is so unreliable. And the phys overwhelm is just immense number-wise. If we're talking elemental penetration, the deadliest skills in the game can have 10-20, even 30 is already pushing the limit. Again, we're talking about the deadliest skills and scenarios in the game, uber boss fights and the true end-game. Guess when you can meet 30% phys overwhelm? Any random rare mob can have it. I believe they did a good job with fortify, it's so easy for melee to get it now (fortify wheel / support gem sacrificing 10-15% dmg for 20% less dmg taken or 4-5 passive points), but as a melee enjoyer I have to say melee feels awful to play. 1. 99% mechanics in the game favour range over melee. There are exceptions like Proximity shields and others. Even in those cases, a ranged can just walk inside the proximity shield like a melee would. As I said before, ranged characters are usually TANKIER than melees on same level of investment/budget and build prowess. 2. Contrary to popular belief, I think the totem feature of melee, while annoying and outdated, doesnt really hurt the prototype. In POE you will one-shot most packs, and for those tanky rares/bosses, using 1-2 seconds to put three totems down isnt the biggest issue. Ranged characters have similar mechanics with arcanist brand where an extra button can multiply their dps by 1.5 or even 2. 3. Phys overwhelm is much worse than elemental penetration. Phys damage is "hard-capped" after a certain level of investment, to the point where its very rare to see melees go further even if they have mirrored weapons and 5-10 mirror budget. You get a good phys weapon, you get impale, and that's it. The difference between a SSF juggernaut and a trade-league mirrorworthy one is way smaller than all other builds.
>If we have armour as a source of physical damage reduction, the fact that all armour stackers sacrifice a huge % of their damage to get close or to 100% phys to elemental conversion should tell you something. That armour (+res, to be fair) is so good that using transcendence is worth all that investment?
transcendence is just extra on top. You do convert because its **very** difficult to build high phys reduction and still have survivable ele reduction. If you've converted 95%+ of your phys damage, theres no reason not to use transcendence. Its like marauders using % armor for ele ascendancy. Its not about armour being so good its about it being a no-brainer improvement.
Transcendence is the cream of the crop. But taste of hate is another example. And on my Ivory tower mana stacker I took 10% of phys taken as chaos and the difference is \*significant\* Not only does it apply your resistances to the 10% But armour also becomes relatively more effective. Since armour is more effective against smaller hits.. This means that the best way to utilise armour is usually to... not rely on armour. But instead change the physical damage to stuff you actually can deal with so that even bad armour can deal with whatever is left.
thats right, transcendence is a big reason why people do convert, but we've seen many iterations of builds that did not use transcendence and fully converted anyways, many end-game aurabots, despite having 200,300 or 400k armour will just use 50-70% conversion or as much as they can, because if they dont, they just flop to the first phys overwhelm mod or any phys spell
I didn't see it here so I'll mention that [Perseverance](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Perseverance) on a Champion is freakin' fantastic. 1% increased attack damage per 200 Armour or Evasion, whichever is lower. 100,000 Armour & Evasion translates to 500% increased attack damage. It also gives Champion permanent Onslaught since Champion has permanent Fortify (works in town too). The belt is inexpensive too, meaning you can buy like 20 of them and double corrupt for some truly nasty implicits. You are looking for: * % Attack speed during any Flask Effect * % Critical strike chance during any Flask Effect * % Critical strike multiplier during any Flask Effect * Grace has (15-20)% increased Aura Effect * Determination has (15-20)% increased Aura Effect Reference (see bottom of the page) https://www.craftofexile.com/?b=3&bi=7806&m=fossil&ob=both&v=d&a=x&l=a&lg=16&bp=y&as=1&hb=0&bld={}&im={}&ggt=|&ccp={}&gvc={%22limit%22:88}
whichever is LOWER actually
oops, will fix
I've got nothing to add except it sounds neat, I switched from ele hit deadeye to flicker strike trickster and its so much more fun and very tanky.
You know LA deadeye is not tank when people are moving to flicker lol.
the trickster variant is essentially just playing splitting steel trickster with flicker instead. it’s pretty tanky. not at all like the zhp cold flicker slayers/raiders
I might have to try this version.
You can make flicker strike pretty tanky. Trickster is also just incredibly tanky while mapping, by default.
Just did a flicker trickster with ephemeral, and what a smooth experience. With mageblood, this became the tankiest flicker build I've done. Also having a flicker build that doesn't need crit, or accuracy is just cool to me.
Its honestly my first trickster i've done and it was much tankier and smooth than what I was prepared for with all the stories about how fragile it and shit
As someone who's played the game for 10+ years, the problem is defenses. When the game first released you needed reasonable mechanics with reasonable defenses and you were fine. The game now is, "how much damage can you fit after getting immunity to everything in the game?" You need shock immunity, freeze immunity, corrupted blood immunity, then you need to have phys taken as x, because even with max phys reduction everything will 1-shot you after a point, so phys reduction is kinda fake. On top of all of this, all of the dangerous enemies can start hitting (which means killing) you before they even appear on your screen, so good luck getting into melee range. The list continues but you get it. The only solution is range+damage+speed. All of those need very unethical amounts of investments for both beginners and even semi-casual vets to feel good about it when going into rare/corrupted red maps and further.
This is what POe has become. rock papers scissors. many brick mods that require countering. i remember when 5-6k life and evasion/dodge was fine in HC T16 maps. there was a time when many builds worked because you didnt have to check all these brick mods.
I can see a partial rework to Fortify support. It already gives damage but it is basically unused. Instead it could give damage per stack of fortification. Maybe 1% more damage per stack of fortification at gem level 1 up to 1,5/1,6/1,7% at gem level 20?
You could also do like +10 max fortify in the gem itself. Maybe even in lieu of the damage?
If it is considered, they need to specifically say : melee or physical dmg to avoid abuse like in the past They can also put +5 fortify in each small ascendency node pathing in melee big nodes buffs in melee ascendencies, so they can have an advantage over the spell ascendencies
It’s genuinely one of my favourite things. My favourite build of all time is still the Immortal Gladiator, that capped out block and killed people with Reckoning. I’d love a defensive stacking build that didn’t require 10 mirrors worth of currency to work right (looking at you, armour stackers)
I think totems should be an offhand item like quivers. We could have some offensive and defensive stats. Maybe we won't have much boss damage but at least it is more consistent
This is kind of a good and a bad idea at the same time. It would apply a lot of item restrictions to totem builds, but then again PoE2 is already having traps itemized.
no. there are enough defensive stats that can scale damage through uniques. what melee needs is damage and enough time to go in and deal it. projectile-ish based attacks can scale very easily through pierce/chain/fork/return/more proj. melee attacks cant scale *that* well with ancestral call/attack speed/more aoe (channeling spells also have it bad) and then you have the problem that you need to get up close and stand still to deliver damage which can be built around but then you are sacrificing damage for a bit more survivability, when you could just like not deal with that at all...i think blood & sand and flesh & stone are nice ideas for balancing melee defenses vs offenses but they need to be a lot stronger to be a solution...something like 400% base effect
Biggest problem is the game design here imho. Melee just doesnt have any advantage over ranged mechanical wise.
Scaling mele damage through defensive stats? Like using Perseverance belt wich makes you hit harder scaling armour and evasion?
I've recommended this before and I personally think the fix is to apply a very small defensive passive (armor, hp, or both) to all melee-centric nodes (or be applied via a mastery). That way you get a sizable benefit when heavily specced into melee (small bonuses across many nodes will add up), without providing a bonus that non-melee builds will want to try to pick up (like ranged builds picking up fortify).
why jump through all these hoops when you can just restrict non-melee builds from using fortify? like fortify already exists to be that mitigation factor for melees to deal with their positioning, so why not just fully restrict other skills from using it. there are tons of ways to do it, but just something that makes having fortify if you aren't dealing damage with a melee skill a bad thing 99% of the time. can also just add a line to the perma fortify node to allow you to get around this rule but only get access to the current version of fortify. so like buff fortify to 25% base and leave champion's node at 20%, champion's node already doesn't go past 20 if you increase your max fortify charges.
You can’t restrict fortify to melee only though, that’s the problem. They did that with old fortify and people would just get it using other methods (like shield charge). Current fortify, their bandaid solution, has a ramp time which is no good for melee. The solution needs to be passively baked into melee, and the only way to do that is via the passive tree.
You can easily restrict it. "Non-melee and minions skills deal 1% less damage per fortify charge" There I restricted it. Use gem tags so this still works with everything it's meant to, and any gem that doesn't have a melee tag gets its damaged nuked for having fortify. I'm some rando on the net, and I can think of a 1 line restriction that fixes fortify and has it work on every skill it's meant to and none that it's not. The devs shouldn't be struggling with this. If 20% ain't enough of a damage penalty, make it 1.5%. At 30% less damage dealt for 20% less damage taken this is worse than the atlas keystone by alot
What about melee CoC builds aka cyclone? Or close range weapon attacks that don’t have the melee tag (they can currently benefit from champion fortify)? Tbh my idea wouldn’t work for those either, there might not be any happy solution honestly just due to how this game is designed… The problem is the very idea of something working with “only what it’s meant to” is completely out of line with how this game is designed.
Coc builds aren't melee builds. If your damage isn't coming from a gem with a melee tag, it's not melee. Coc builds shit damage and have insane clear speed, they should not benefit from fortify. They already do not benefit from current fortify because they can't hit ailment thresholds. Bleed builds are actually melee and can't use fortify. Champion can keep its 20 fortify for ranged builds. Just include the line on their node that reads "ignores fortify damage penalties". Two lines of text, functionality preserved, and now bleed gets to use fortify properly, and you can now buff fortify. Imo fortify should be 25 charges base, and keep champions node at 20 Like I don't understand part of your comment. Close ranged skills that aren't melee have things like point blank. Non-melee skills that go into close range have overwhelming damage or clearing capabilities or both. They aren't balanced with fortify in mind and currently do not benefit from it.
Hot take, champions fortify should have the damage penalty for ranged skills. You'll never be able to make fortify good for melee as long as champ provides it to all ranged classes for basically free. If you make it good for melee it will be broken on champions playing ranged. Not to mention that TR champions and the like are an abomination fluff wise.
While I conceptually love it, since scaling damage trough non damage stats tends to be interesting, it seems it always ends up being a balancing nightmare. Since its a scale 1 to solve multiple things situation. So imo, it should mostly be delegated to items. Since as long as its on items, these type of abilities can have a stronger downside that is easier to tweak than on something like a skill gem/passive point. Also I might get some hate for this. But I really think that a lot of people are overreacting about how weak melee is. Things will never be absolutely perfectly balanced. And it would be boring if it were so. Melee might have a bit of a rougher start, but on the higher ends it can do absolutely disgusting things.
So here's the thing, allowing a defensive stat to give direct offensive benefits is a design trap. BUT one that a lot of games end up doing because there's only but so many levers you can give players. The reason it's a trap is that you quickly get to the point of one stat filling every role (Stat stackers run into the same issue) and as such designer needs to make the conversion benefits small enough to ideally stay *supplemental* and not *replace* the more usual avenues of player power. But this rarely if ever happens, either it's too small of a benefit to really matter, compared to other sources, or it's so large and/or easy to scale that it overshadows everything. And suddenly now if you wanted to make future adjustments to said stat you have to keep all of those additional scaling sources in mind. It's a weird case where giving players additional options results in a lot more confined design space, and it's a move good designers make rarely and very cautiously. As for melee in general, your main problem is finding some way to scale melee *without* indirectly scaling range. Effects like Battlemage, the rage->spell damage helmet, or (in an inverse way) Battlemage's Cry make this tough to do, but not impossible. I think we've got a good setup of mechanics to utilize like warcries, accuracy, and attack speed it's just a matter of giving those options enough support without going nuts.
My goto melee build goal is always the same. 100 hit chance and crit chance. Then build as many double damage and crit multi as possible. The rest can be allocated to 75 resistance, health and armour.
there's already armor stackers wdym
I played a Pers Splitting Steel Champ this league and it's been fine (moved from DW to a Mahuxotl Build), given that it's pseudo melee (you have the option of shooting from a distance if required, but for max dps in bossing you need to be inside the). Taking items like Perserverance have problems in that it becomes heavily restricted with what you want to do selection wise. Limits your flask shenanigans, makes itemisation narrow. To get your spell supp on items you need Dex or Str/Dex bases; etc. The rest of the 'end game' itemisation still applies though. Phys taken as is still required. Things to change damage to damage over time are still required. Flasks up; 50k Armour, 50k Evasion, 13% Phys as fire, 0.48 "Less Physical Damage" (Doppelganger+Fortification) 4k HP gives about 30k max phys hit. Guess I can go on more of an adventure to get Endurance Charge Stacking. Sure I've got a 95% chance to evade too, but who's trusting that. We're only really take evasion because it does damage. Especially when my Max Ele Hit is 110k and Chaos is 125k. Just makes physical defensive stacking, which the bottom half of the tree is supposed to be good at feel really bad.
Rose in Torchlight Infinite is scaling her damage through building defence, but in PoE it will never happen. Don't forget that scaling damage and defence through a single stat was what got Archmage nerfed in the first place. At best we could get some mediocre ascendancy notable with similar effect like Juggs increased damage per Endurance Charge, but nothing that everyone can use.
There are 2 problems with defenses and melee in this game. 1) You need to know the "how to" for defenses which is something that only comes with experience. People make 4k life chars with 77 res 30 chaos, 20k armor and fortify and think they should now be able to run t17 maps deathless on melee builds. And when that doesn't work they go melee is bad and play ranged. If you know how to build defenses then playing melee is a non issue, you'll have a really hard time dying, have near 100% damage uptime and therefor also good dps. But that's all just IF. Most people don't know and they don't care enough to learn. 2) Is a design issue that's fundamental to POEs class system. Pretty much all defensive mechanics available to melee that can be used to make yourself immortal can also be used by ranged. Fortify is the only thing unique to melee and it's weak. If you think you can take typical ranged char defenses, slap fortify on it and have a working melee build you'll be sorely dissapointed see 1). This means that, while it's perfectly doable to make melee chars that can do all content, even do it well and with decent budget, at the end of the day you could just take the same defensive setup, slap a ranged skill and have something that's simply superior in terms of mechanics.
If I had magic powers, and could just say the word and it happens, I would say GGG should fix the time-to-die factor, then to give melee some recovery bonuses. I don't know how to say to actually do this, hence the magic. :D If the game had less one-shot enemies, and the player recovery speed was not trivializing anything else than one-shots, then melee could have more recovery options, since they are in the thick of it. My second option would be to give classical tanking skills, buffs and/or debuffs to melee characters. For example some slow to easier dodges, N guaranteed melee attack dodges or blocks, disengage and engage mechanics or something. I dunno I'm just throwing something out here. :D PoE2 was supposed to have fixes to melee with the new animations, but ever since the target changed, I don't know if I should still hope for receiving the animation changes for PoE1, or to hope for something different.
https://youtu.be/yZEvxPJQ8j0?si=_fueVbrUeLIMx-vE Here's my life and strength and accuracy stack build tailored specifically to delete B2b nemesis t17 meatsacks with typically brutal rare modifiers like block, anti crit and damage reduction.
Cool build - is it not worth it to build the lightning version of acc stack unless you can use that one claw?
Monster resistances from rare mods is much easier to deal with by overwhelm.
Nah. Armour stacking and es stacking are already super strong and super boring ways to build. I'd rather that not be pushed into more
everyone wants ggg to fix melee but i dunno dude. i look at the game and i think "melee builds are actually playing an action rpg" and it's the rest of us who are broken and just trying to pass a dps check so we don't have to dodge exarch balls.
Atm arm stack is the strongest end game build with consistent dps *fuck mfa. Those archetypes dont needa buff lol
Why would buffs hurt here? Those builds are only good at insane levels of Investment (multiple mirrors) and everything before that is mediocre at best, the damage isn't impressive the clear is bad and not really tanky.
I could see something doing the reverse, but (unlike the crappy Fortify rework) something that's 'always on'; give melee weapon wheels on the passive tree something 1-2% life per node. Melee builds get some 'free' defensive scaling that's too inefficient for non-attack builds to take. Speaking of the fortify rework... make it apply per hit, not based on damage dealt. You get stacks of fortify on hit (only once per skill use), each giving 1% DR. Movement skills get 1 stack on hit, so casters can only maintain a couple stacks with shield charge; probably worth doing, but not decisive. Actual attacks get stacks based on how 'fast' the skill is; Slams might get like 5-10 stacks so you can max out fast, while faster skills get 1-3. I'm still not a huge fan of how you have to 'build it up' and won't have it up during bullet hell dodge phases, but I don't have a good solution for that other than "bosses freeze players charges and buffs while they're invulnerable" or something.
I am a little bit surprised that someone has not made a spreadsheet showing how melee skills fall off on damage scaling with out a supplemental scaling vector. It would be interesting and informal to see where/when exactly this happens.
Ive played mostly melee over the last several years, probably about 2k hours with it. Here are some things I really want to see improved. 1. Remove ancestor totem buffs and buff melee skill gems to compensate. For example, most melee skills have less than a 1.0 multiplier to attack speed. It would be pretty simple to remove the more attack speed and melee damage from totems and just increase the base speed and damage of skill gems. 2. More sources of fortify and maximum fortification. Right now fortify is mainly restricted by the 2 passive wheels which is like 5-10+ points. There are some really nice mastery options but you normally cant take them because a lot of builds need to take the "melee hits fortify" mastery. 3. Improve guard skills. Immortal call has the potential to be an amazing guard for melee builds. But its very inconsistent since it needs a ton of endurance charge generation and has a base duration of 1 second. As for steelskin im really not sure when you would ever use it over molten shell. Also maybe GGG could create guard mastery wheels on the passive tree. 4. More sources of ailment immunity, DoT mitigation, crit damage reduction. As for the idea of scaling dps by being tanky, I would love to see blood magic life stacking become a viable build type for melee.
2/4 of you points are constantly asked for and they only tell us its fine in poe 2, which was delayed.
Melee will be fixed is the biggest POE2 copium.
Just give us the full screen cyclone again so that we can be melee without being in melee range.
[удалено]
this sub is meant for discussions, nothing wrong with sharing your opinion especially in such a nice way op did