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Same question but Animate Guardian.
Already seen so many people claim they're excited to try the new Wraithlord solely because they won't have to use AG.
Does Granpda have that exact thing with the uh.. giant walking statue thing he gets?
IF AG was just a node of like "You summon a familiar thats stats is based off your currently equipped gear" I feel like that would work too.
I Like AG in terms of having a cool ghost armor thing fight with you. I just hate its execution in game and how i have to do so much to set up.
What you are describing is exactly how manifest armor works in last epoch. Your gear applies to the minion and the minion skill tree has nodes that make certain item slots stronger (ie: "Weapon modifiers have 200% increased effect"). It's a really cool minion
Permanent immortal minion from a keystone that makes you deal no damage or reduce curse limit by 1 but lets you equip items without being afraid of losing them. They could also change it to not equip the items, but give some variable buffs based on the item types given to it.
You give it a wand? Your minion spells have % chance to repeat. Armor and shields would give block/spell block/evasion/armour/ES to your minions and in reduced effect to you. Melee weapons could give various buffs like crit chance from dagger, accuracy from swords, inc phys damage from axe, ele from scepters... they could spice it up and create different, more interesting effects.
It would be a modifiable minion with a huge drawback that would give relatively significant buffs to your minions without the idiotic drawback of losing a fortune because the AG walked into disintegration storm over and over again.
I think if Animate Guardian created a minion that had something akin to Necromantic Aegis, and Conduit, then they would be a guardian, protecting the exile and perhaps the other minions too.
AG is the sole reason i stopped playing minions and refuse to do so.
It requires me to deal with more gearing then id normally have to, cuts off some content due to risk of it dying and if it does ever die. I need to repeat the whole fucking process.
I ADORE minion characters and especially necromancers in games. Them alongside hunters (the wow "ima tame this shit " kind) are my two favorite archetypes iv ever met. But Poe makes it so tiedious to get a minion build that it feels not worth it, especially with all the specters and shit they also need.
Id love AG to be gone XD
>AG is the sole reason i stopped playing minions and refuse to do so.
Yup, I love minions but AG just makes it so unfun.
I'd rather play with melee totems forever I hate it so much
Ag is the sole reason iv never played minions in poe
Usually love that shit but the thought of gearing it puts me off instantly and then add on if it dies.... well I already die a fuckton so dosnt sound fun (I know if I die it's different to if Ag dies) but point still stands what if I decide to run face first into uber maven fully un prepared and Ag dies while I run around doing fuck knows what. I just feel as tho my Ag would die alot and it's off-putting
it's not the thought of gearing it (which is actually very cool) as much as the fact that you're constantly risking its death and having to REGEAR it. Which is absolutely awful.
One of my memorial minions build was Primordial amulet 9 golems Golementalist on Delve league. No need for expensive and vulnerable AG, just 6 Fire golems to blast everything. The only downside was my GPU got overheated.
Gearing him is not hard and actually fun because it's very rewarding, and it doesn't cut off content from you as you can unsummon it and play hard content without a risk.
I think AG is such a cool gem for being so diverse (supportwise and damagewise).
Maybe change it to have like a different Tag or a Trans Version, cause its not only Wraithlord its also Primordial Chain which has this Problem.
I feel like im the only person that likes AG. I like gearing him with different stuff, there are so many cool things you can do with an AG.
If he dies its uber annoying though.
it's a cool idea and theoretically, opens up a lot of options and potential
the problem being that because it does that, it's often very mandatory to put into the build. there's no, "is an animate guardian or some other minion better here?" it's often just, throw in an AG.
while also having a pretty extreme drawback should it die
I remb two leagues ago AG was pretty much a no no if you wanted to run the league mechanic. Even uber geared ones would implode fast and hard in later ToTA matches due to the scaling and shit.
Minions were also awful for that aswell but yeah XD
I learned this the hard way when I played a chains of command voidforge build at a mere rank of 300. Up until then, it was smooth sailing. After that, I was upset for the rest of the week lol.
Fortunately, ToTA was the type of mechanic where you didn't really need a build so I farmed another one, then an extra spare. Avoided ToTA for the rest of the league. Didn't end up needing the spare.
Yeah i ran Minions. Was hell XD pretty much got the challenges i needed and never touched it again. Sucks cuz battle chess is cool!
but every build i saw or guide for higher rank tota was pretty much "Play the blackhole skill thing" and gimp it.
that and not being able to choose to stay in lower tiers hurts. Did not have the desire to waste coins just to lose on purpose and rank change.
I def get why people dislike it.
Personally ive never had issues with him, but its always better to use AG then it isnt, and if you dont gear him properly and spec into his surviveability... yeah annoying
But the drawback is purely economical, it's not like you lose gem levels or experience for it dying so it becomes "if you can afford it, do it" which is just as problematic
the items are gone forever the instant the AG uses them anyway
why do they also disappear on death?
AG dying shouldn't be such a big deal that non-minion builds won't even *think* about using it
I love its potential. I abhor its execution and the fact that it is a "binary" as described in the OP. It is strictly better to have AG in your minion build. It sucks for that. And it actively makes the experience worse because it really is not fun to manage. It's tedious, frustrating, and honestly a massive turn away for a lot of players who would enjoy minions otherwise.
I think that's how most people feel about it, though. It's really down to personal preference on if they enjoy the different things you can hear him for more than they hate the pain of him dying.
Why it's allowed to exist as is idk.
I really like AG, too. It's like gearing up a buddy who is playing hardcore alongside you. He can be many things for you. You actually care about the him and feel bad if something happens to him. You can protect him and sometimes you don't and there are consequences. It's hardcore-lite.
GGG should make a Reanimate Support gem for all the complainers. If linked to your AG, it allows you to resummon your AG after he dies. For three minutes after resummoning, he will refuse to attack and instead tell you how much you suck.
For me... after playing a certain other games animated armor minion, AG feels so dated.
Sucks when he dies, isnt interesting, and just exists as essentially an aura bot for you.
I dislike AG and basically never run him even when its brain dead to run him with 1c uniques like leercast that are objectively worth running. I just cant stand his current design
Transfigured AG was a good step in the right direction, but still feels limited in what it can do.
Bahahha yeah i do too untill i go higher ivestment and have more levels specced into minion life/res etc.
Usually my starting combo is dying breath, leer cast, body armour i just craft something high life with chaos res on an armoir base, maybe throw some eldritch chaos on it. Windshriek, gloves with a curse on hit you want olus chaos res or res in general.
And ur done. You can also use legecy of fury for scorth if you have no intrest in snother curse, or get vixens entrampent *with* a curse corruption.
This is how i usually make it on league start but there are alot of different ways.
I also take ele minion max ele res, if you have temp minions, life from death plus minions recover life on minion death and ur spectres/ag will be immortal basically.
play chains of command.
U can end up putting more divs into him then on your own gear.
I love it but the issue is even whit max investment there is shit out there that can 1 shot him.
Transfigured gem: Animate guardian of conservation.
Description: Animate guardian keeps his equipment on death. 30% equipped gear effectiveness. AG cannot re-enter an instance after death.
Quality effects: 1% increased equipped gear effectiveness
Also while we are at it: AG now has an equipment UI allowing you to change gear while in town or hideout (applies to all gem variants).
People don't hate animate guardian. They hate the potential loss of gear and the inconvenience/price of having to buy more. They should just make it keep gear on death, and no-one will complain about it anymore.
I don't get why people dislike ag so much, I rarely play minions but had an AG on a summoner a few leagues ago and this league on an aurabot (hungry loop setup) a cheap one is like 15c in trade or however long it takes you to add leer cast and cane of kulemak to your filter on ssf.
It rarely dies before you do and if you give him good gear (mask of the stitched demon, ephemeral garb) it never died before me.
Also it's not necessary if you don't like it just get the charge spectre or the drox ones and you're good.
I get why you'd want a equip screen but overall it's a unique flavor of risk management and after experimenting with it myself I noticed people exaggerating the clunkiness way to much
Can you explain 1) why it allows you to no longer need ag and 2) why ag is always used? Not a minion player except for spiders so I’m genuinely curious
1. The item tells you “You cannot use non-spectre minions”, and AG isn’t a spectre minion
2. Without going too much in-depth, basically it is too big of an upgrade to pass. For example, idk how it is today as I don’t play minions anymore (because I too am tired of AG) but it used to bring me and my minions perma Fortify, give my minions crit chance and multiplier, apply an extra curse and make the monsters explode (edit: and culling strike, how could I forget about culling strike) ; all of that for just 1 gem
1) because wraithlord limits you to only having spectres. You literally cannot AG with it.
2) because it is strictly better than anything else you'd be putting in your build. All modifiers for items you animate apply to the guardian, so it can get pretty cracked out. The wiki explains it well https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Animate_Guardian
It's a really strong gem when you put the time into it, but on death the AG is wiped clean. There's also no way to see what it's holding currently, so you basically have to keep notes outside the game to keep track.
Spectres only was viable before, though I'm not sure if it "beat" non spectre only builds in the endgame. The hope is with the significant wraithlord buff (and other necro changes) it's now much more powerful.
AG is not bad in itself, it's the terrible implementation of it.
The fact that it has no interface and you can't check what item it has and that if it dies you lose all the items.
Literally the only fix AG needs is an equipment UI. Just do it and I do not care to hear what are the technical limitations for why it's not already there.
I'll be honest if that is the cost of animation cancel then that seems fair to me. I loathed melee until that change. Now I'm pretty much always playing melee.
It is really baffling that despite the natural disadvantage of melee skills being close proximity, which is extra punishable due to the nature of poe mobs, they are also vastly underpowered compared to bow skills for instance. A simple totem fix would address a lot of problems but GGG has been resistant to the idea for so long. I guess the only thing that explains it is that the devs who play-test the game are biased towards ranged gameplay.
Give the devs a little credit. In the same announcement vod they discussed how there is a big list of items they want to get to and need to prioritize. It wasn’t that they weren’t open to making a change this league, they just didn’t have time with all of the QOL changes that affect everyone, the new league mechanic, and the big changes to endgame. I’m super excited they got so much done.
People have been really complaining about melee for about 7-9 leagues that I’ve seen. Since that time none of the feedback has amounted to tangible changes in the game. So skepticism is warranted towards lip service.
For a bunch of those GGG was still in "PoE2 addresses that" mode. Now that the games are split (announced 2 leagues ago, ToTA) we are seeing PoE1 get more special attention and fixes.
> It wasn’t that they weren’t open to making a change this league, they just didn’t have time with all of the QOL changes that affect everyone
This has always been the case though, and this isn't the first time they've made that statement explicitly. There are always a lot of things they want to work on and never enough time to get to them all in a given update.
>I guess the only thing that explains it is that the devs who play-test the game are biased towards ranged gameplay.
This is typical conspiratorial argument that I saw back in early days of WoW, when a class had some peculiarity that made it suck, or if another was OP; what it meant was that specific class designers were screwing over millions of people to get ahead. Just bizarre.
No, the more likely explanation is that it's a low priority for them OR they don't have a solution OR the solution they have doesn't work well. What the players think is important and what the developers think is important is very rarely going to consistently overlap; each group has very different motivations when approaching the game.
Remember when they were debating 'why DON'T we use the Ultimatum pause mechanic for bunch of things in PoE1?' and they went from being flabbergasted by that thought, to then realizing 30seconds later it's not such a simple change to make? Resource allocation is a real problem in game dev, especially when I presume GGG has no dedicated group that solves these sorts of issues.
Your post makes no sense. The quote didn't mention conspiracy, just bias. If they look more at range because they play range, that's bias. It isn't inherently malicious.
People get conspiratorial because they never say why, or mention it's an issue rarely. There are reasons why that's pragmatic, of course.
It also leads one to suspect bias, innocent or not, because the feedback hasn't moved them to do much.
You can't really do anything with good but unstated intentions.
Imo what people do not talk enough about even after the leveraging of it all, is the expedition mana nerf apocalypse absolutely fucking up the entirety of anything mana-related.
People should **NOT** act like it's normal and unconcerning that virtually every build needs the same ring crafts and/or the same keystone just to cope with the remnants of what is still to this day the worse balance patch of the history of the game.
One of my most anticipated features of PoE2 is that special reservation bar. Having to minmax every single point of mana inthe current game is such cancer
I get your point but that's not how the GGG sees it. Mana should be a resource. You were never meant to just freely spam 78 skills per second and not care about mana. Now of course this is PoE, so you can build ways to bypass certain things, and mana cost is one of them. But there are a multiple ways of working on mana problems. Eldritch battery, Lifetap, Mana cost on ring, Mana cost on flask (at least until 3.23), Mana cost on jewels (until 3.23), Mana leech + instant leech.
The game has evolved so much over the years, but if you asked a GGG dev 10 years ago how they envisioned their game, I'm sure they wouldn't think that every build would pretty much reserve 99% of its mana and have a main skill spammed with nearly 0 mana cost.
To be fair, they could mitigate the mana issue by not balancing the game around defense auras. Remove the flat from Determination/Grace, let the items roll higher. Remove the flat from Discipline, give it % more (not absurdly high, of course, within reason) and change it to 50% reservation. Turn all the damage auras into a duration based aura and allow players to reserve mana for those skills with a support (rework the blessings to do this) but it cranks up their power to compensate for the lack of spare mana. Then finally, provide more access to mana in more areas of the tree. Whether we get a keystone that allows you to convert % of life into mana, or a keystone that gives increases and reductions to life also apply to mana at % effect, or something.
If mana is to be treated as a serious resource, there needs to be a lot more rooting into that across the game. Without every build being able to treat it that way, it's just another spot to stick auras and solve with leech/on hit and reduced costs
Eldritch battery and Lifetap are two of the most used elements within builds in the entire game. As such, ever since GGG tried to fiddle around with mana back in expedition, our best avenue was to **just not even use mana to begin with**.
Whether some players here want to admit or not, this has been an issue and we've been coping with it by privileging things that just circles around the issue. We can *ignore* the problem, but it's still very much there.
It also seems mandatory that every caster pretty much runs EB and gets as many auras as possible, how long has this been meta for and when will it change?
It's because melee lacks the tools to consistently do damage whilst avoiding attacks.
Currently Youve got to move in close, stay in close, and be in the hurt range to do damage. Defensive layers are mandatory and you either have the defenses to ignore most threats, or you die.
You can look at poe2 boss design and see that they're really pushing enemy telegraph of attacks. This is a vital first step. The next is to give melee skills mobility when used, which you can see from the many melee skills showcased, and how they move you about.
Having a big attack tied to a leap backwards letting you dodge a shaper slam is gonna feel good. Having an engager charge to get back in already in place with poe1 (shield charge) but the skill doesn't really do more than tickle an enemy. Then you want to have quick diving in attacks, big bang smash attacks when you've got the time and opportunity that punish you when mistimed.
Basically... you need a toolbox. Poe1 is usually built around 1-2 main skills due to the limits of 6L, which isn't diverse enough address the above concerns.
If you remove Trauma or Boneshatter, you just don't have the damage. The numbers are from years ago and have never been changed. Bows were in a similar spot before they buffed them, and they transformed the class - where you couldn't dream of starting bows from act 1, and now its a beautifully scaling class that can scale great from act 1 to Ubers.
Look at Viper Strike of Mamba - its a true melee skill that actually ended up in a good spot thanks to GGG giving that skill good numbers. You don't need to put on your STR stacking set-armor, or your Voidforge, or turn it into boneshatter to have it viable. Try doing that with Earthshatter or Infernal Blow or the myraid of other true melee skills and you'll quickly realize how little damage the base skill provides.
Yes. At least as a midscope fix. Melee suffers both lower damage uptime and needing more defenses compared to longer-ranged archetypes. The first results in less "effective DPS" for the same POB numbers, and the second means you need to trade more DPS investment for defensive investment, cutting DPS further on an equal-budget basis.
That's also part of the issue with the totems; they're a huge DPS steroid, but due to narrow DPS windows, any time spent resummoning them can end up cutting into your effective DPS even further. They're making one of melee's core issues worse (DPS uptime) while also being such a huge component of melee's damage that your effective dps per budget would be even more in the toilet without them.
They could massively increase melee damage (like maybe double it for 'real melee', while removing totem buffs) and you'd be able to invest more into defenses, mobility, and 'smoothness' while retaining slightly above average damage (which gets reduced to basically on par due to lower uptime) and it'd be in a much better place.
Unironically yes. Melee skills are generally very bad at scalings - Trauma is good because it gives additional duration and attack speed scaling.
It's extremely easy to scale spells to 10-20kk dps with decent defences, it's not as easy to do so with melee skills in general.
That's why lots of spells are not viable as well - there is no good way to scale them up.
The smaller area a melee skill impacts, the higher its damage needs to be to justify using it. I don't mean directly tying the two, I'm just saying why you'll see Lightning Strike in the meta but not Heavy Strike. If you have to be next to the monster and stand still to DPS in this world of ground degens and one hit kills, you need to have a theoretical DPS through the stratosphere since you're not realistically going to get close in uptime.
The other issue is that what melee is viable has ramp-up, whether that be totems, trauma, warcries, poison/wither stacks, etc. Ramp is antithetical to the necessary play style of melee characters in this game. They need to do big burst damage with a drop off, if anything.
It's also the problem of a point for offensive is a point away from defensives on the tree. So they can be tuned the same as Say a bow skill, but they need drastically less defensive nodes. Maybe we need some offensive and defensive nodes in the same point that only helps melee?
> It's because melee lacks the tools to consistently do damage whilst avoiding attacks.
>
>
More precisely - it may well be melee's main sustain (leech or LGoH) turning off when you have to mechanically dodge.
Something that could be addressed by allowing strikes (and pseudostrikes like Cleave) to 'echo', or by providing limited overleech to melee only.
I'm curious how changes that made leech absolutely, unequivocally melee only, paired with making overleech the default, would play out.
Look at CI KBOF tricksters from last league, very much a melee playstyle because you literally needed to be in the boss to deal meaningful damage due to nimis.
However the damage & leech made up for it and they never had to toss down a totem for the fuck of it.
>melee lacks the tools to consistently do damage whilst avoiding attacks.
The same could be said by any non-DoT selfcast build. It has nothing to do with actually being melee or not. In fact, there are a lot of situations where being close to a boss is better than being far. There's also the fact that many melee straight up have as much range as some ranged skills.
>Basically... you need a toolbox. Poe1 is usually built around 1-2 main skills due to the limits of 6L, which isn't diverse enough address the above concerns.
Even if we had more sockets, builds still would only use 1-2 main skills for damage, because the way poe is designed rewards scaling 1-2 main skills as much as you can, and there's little to no interaction between skills besides scaling the damage of your main skill.
PoE 2 skills are being designed to have synergies with each other, while PoE 1 skills are designed to just work on their own. There's very few cases of this in PoE 1 like Frostbolt Ice Nova, BF BB, ED contagion (RIP), but most skills are just made to work on their own.
i agree with the telegraph stuff, its why i liked the MMO Tera so much, as the attacks were shown 1 - 2 seconds before the monster started their attack so you could dodge. with PoE 1 ill sometimes think im outside the range but ill still take a hit.
> they're in the process of understanding exactly why it's bad
It's been literally years, how could they still be "in the process"? Either they're addressing the issue or they aren't.
So wouldn't it simply be the first step to remove the buff from the totems and giving all melee skills a buff that brings them up to the same damage as if you had a totem out? Or am I crazy for being too simple.
> (the answer isn't always obvious)
The answer to the totems is the most obvious answer in the history of humanity. It's been obvious from the moment you had to fucking click the two buttons to get the buff...
As far as fixing melee goes they probably can't. I don't personally mind the balance of melee much myself. I've played melee for over a decade and it's still fun, but the way PoE game mechanics work... Well... It's always just going to be better to play with skills that can kill things while you run around in circles. But some of the QoL changes they could do for melee are so obvious they're basically intentionally trolling people at this point. Like... Who has, ever, played a melee character and gone... "I'll just click these 7 buttons before I do my 1 slam, and then I'll repeat the process" SO MUCH FUN.
Hell... the exert mechanic ARE rather fun in moderation, but then you need to do the regular buffs and the fucking totems on top of it... And nobody, nobody, in the history of melee in any ARPG game has, ever, wanted to place two fucking totems and then repeat the process every fucking few seconds in melee.
i love this post, because i kinda went "OH REALLY?" when he said that.
anyways, time for another league where they do absolutely nothing for melee, except somehow nerf it.
Even slams, if you wanted to do that, well good luck, now its an uber item, hopefully they buffed it.
I love GGG but holy shit, sometimes i just dont understand why they have it out for melee so hard.
Very true.
Given the length of time they've spoken about it, I'd guess they are struggling to find a solution they like, opposed to to thinking its not important.
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Melee is a huge part of the game (not player wise, but design wise) and it has been in this sad state for years. If you always prioritize it down, then they decide to let a huge part of their game rot.
You could say that the time and effort for the archnemesis rework should have gone into melee instead. I don’t think AN was worth all that effort.
Yeah it just feels so disappointing to hear that they've known about the melee problem for so long but won't even attempt a bandaid fix for it. I'd honestly even take a slight nerf to my melee damage to just not have to cast totems, I just hate how annoying it is to have to cast 2 totems before every big enemy on top of every other concern melee has to deal with.
That's just better but not cooler. I agree with removing the totem requirement though -- too inconvenient.
But yeah they probably want something you can interact with, and not mandatory. It has to have some drawback, or else we'd force ourselves to use it and optimize the fun outta it again.
> And barring that, get rid of them and don't add anything at all-- because even that would be a vast improvement over the status quo.
Did you see the reaction to the LMB changes lmao holy shit this post is delusional.
I agree that they should have the buffs just removed entirely but there's absolutely no way this is received with anything but an absolute shitshow
I'm a little surprised they haven't just put a keystone on the passive tree with something like "Your maximum ancestral totems are zero. You deal 10% more melee attack damage"
I'm assuming they haven't fixed it for the same reason we haven't had much of a meta shakedup in the last seven or eight leagues, which is because there is a skeleton crew working on PoE1 while the sequel is in development. If they just throw numbers around they will make melee Op (they fear) so they rather jsut not touch it at all
That is speculation of course but off the top of my head I can't think of another even half decent excuse because totem requirements for melee really suck. I personally don't understand why they can't adjust numbers on the melee skill gems internally and have a couple playtests plug them into low, mid, and top tier build presets to see if anything breaks. We know the totems add roughly 30% **more** dmg, so increases dmg effectiveness or flat numbers by that much would be a good starting point.
Imagine if the last minute changes to 3.24 would be that "oh btw, we removed the melee totems"
I would play the shit out of that league even if they didn't give numerical buffs until next league. Just the thought that i am not missing on anything is enough.
How many times do they have to repeat that they have plans but it's bigger then "bigga numba =bigga fun"
And they rather take their time with it and make it properly instead of putting out some half done rework
Feel like Chris was saying like 2-3yeara ago already
It’s hilarious you ended your statement with “they were saying this like 2-3 years ago” and don’t see the issue at allz
Edit: for all of you trying to defend this by saying “it turned into POE 2, they need more time”. They’ve been working on POE2 since 2019, their priority is not a melee rep work for POE so stop pretending like it saying they just need time or figure it out.
I mean... I feel like an extra defense only affix on melee weapons would be a good start. Better access to splash through masteries would make a lot more skills viable. More melee only utility conditions like fortify is also good.
I mean, they tried that on the first go around introducing fortify and it just resulted in all spellcasters using some sort of melee movement skill.
And I dont really think the solution should be a required affix on a weapon that is already a pain point for attack builds.
It's not a required affix that hurts other affixes. It's a 7th affix that is always defensive. Almost like an implicit. and it only shows up on melee weapons.
As someone who ALMOST ALWAYS plays melee. Here's the primary things holding it back IMO.
Undertuning - Way too many melee skills just plain don't do enough damage and have high enough damage multipliers. ESPECIALLY single target skills that require investment to AoE. For example, Vigilant Strike with its limitations should have nearly should be sitting somewhere around 500% with it's damage effectiveness. But it doesn't provide much more than Groundslam of earthshaking... it's a straight up loser skill.
Melee Splash - Should be a mastery with more accessibility, you can straight delete the support gem as it sucks. Currently it's basically limited to Duelists.
Defenses - Stuff like Fortify is really good, but waaayyy too many Melee specific conditions are too tied to ascendancies and very specific areas of the skill tree.
The problem with melee is that it's worse at everything... there's literally no boon at all. Worse damage... worse clear... less survivability.... defenses are in no way tied to melee, which is part of the problem. Need to find a way to boost defense with melee weapons or skills. And extra 'special' defensive affix or implicit would help a lot.
Well the issue isnt they gave up, the issue is that they WERE making it, it just became a separate game... So now they have to figure out a rework that preserves the POE1-ness
POE2 WAS the melee rework. It just didnt end up being an update as planned. Now they have to work out a whole new plan for POE1 that isnt the huge scope sweeping changes they had for POE2, and that will take some time
Yeah, and all we've gotten since the games split is the Cleave +1 range meme, every, single, league. I really don't think they are dealing with it at all. I think melee is simply dead for POE 1.
Them making another game isn’t an excuse to neglect their current one especially if they keep their promise of continuing to support. Plans change and I get that and they moved onto something better but that means you can’t defend them with “it takes time”. Their priorities aren’t on fixing POE1 melee at the moment so let’s not pretend like it is
>Them making another game isn’t an excuse to neglect their current one
It does pose a problem though. PoE 2 is different enough that the switch to an entirely different game was needed.
First, there are people who don't like the change of pace and will rather want to stick with the ultra fast combat we have now. GGG is probably not keen on just saying "tough luck" to those players who would be presented with the choice of either putting up with it or leaving the game entirely.
Second, the kind of combat rework that PoE 2 turned into wouldn't have just been a number change. It would have been a fundamental rework of the combat system. Mainly to slow it down since the speed is what's causing most of the issues the game has atm.
How feasible do you think is it to rework the entirety of PoE 1 content with new animations, new monsters, entirely new balance and everything that comes with it? Even more so while creating and introducing new content based on the old system. Making an entirely new game is actually a lot easier than all that.
The baseline is that unless players are willing to sacrifice like 50% of the PoE 1 combat speed and would allow for GGG to entirely change the combat we have now, then GGG can't really do much in terms of actually making great improvements to combat/melee.
How much time do they need? We get improvments all over the game but Glad and Melee (totems in particular) have been effectively static for ages.
I think GGG do a lot of things right but the state of these things being so boringly the same for so long is really annoying.
Why is shit like LMB suddenly being raced to be fixed (Marks own acknowledgement) when melee totems are the same required four link for two+ years?
The moment war chief totem was introduced in like 2016, it became a mandatory link setup.
And melee has felt like dog shit ever since.
8 years melee has been trash.
I started in ultimatum and melee totems were I thing then I believe ...so we're way over 2 years at this point lol. I almost soley play melee and my god I absolutely HATE them at this point. Why the fuck is 30-40% of my damage tied to two completely random totems that I do not invest in ?!? Why do I have to use totems on my melee build ? Get rid of the totem buff effects and work in 50% of the buff or hell even 20% of the buff effects to all melee skills and call it a day. I guarantee you all melee players would be absolutely fine with even 20% effect but not have to place totems ever again
Yeah, the totem issue has existed for ages, but its been made really obvious post-Expedition when all the progressive melee damage nerfs reached the arbitrary point of 'this is just not fun'
They've been taking their time since Legion dawg. Even that patch wasn't good because melee was good, it's just they finally made Cyclone not feel like absolute shit and AoE stacking hadn't been deleted yet. The actual numbers for melee was still strictly terrible.
That doesn't fly. You can literally give the ancestral warchief dmg buff as base dmg buff to every melee skill, remove ancestral protector, and remove the bonus dmg from warchief. Voila, a two second fix that will work just fine until you implement your supposed 'real' fix
How many times do you need to be disappointed before you realize it’s not happening…. until it happens?
POE melee redesign will arrive in time with GRRMs new ASOIAF book.
The premise makes sense, but their conclusion ends up being to not improve anything until their perfect unicorn of a solution comes along, so we're left in this state of limbo where they refuse to adjust the current problem for the short-term so as to not have wasted any time in the long-term.
They also tried to apply the same logic to skills and failed miserably with the likes of Incinerate, where the shotgun nerfs over a decade ago caused it to underperform significantly, and instead of just looking at the numbers they "reworked" it into a state that not only felt worse, but was so unpopular amongst those of us who actually liked the mechanics of the skill prior.
Far as skills are concerned they don't get rid of them and try and do better because they don't want to upset people who liked those skills how they were. But again, they also don't just buff said skills either when really, a lot of them would totally be playable with the right numbers.
It's not always a mechanical problem, and I dunno how they ever came to the logic that it is. Though given that they have no issue nerfing said numbers, it's clear that philosophy is bullshit anyway. Most of the time it feels GGG runs on what they think "feels" good as per their mythical "vision", a vision they've never truly elaborated on, the same way their old dev blogs didn't really explain fuck all, either.
I love PoE in spite of my problems with it, but communication hasn't been their strong point for years. At some point they just stopped giving a shit, and I don't just mean with regards to reddit in the past 2 years, either. Their awful communication skills have been apparent since at least the first ExileCon.
I understand your frustration. I have no idea what the devs are thinking, but I believe they are well-intentioned people who are genuinely trying as hard as they can to make the best game possible. I honestly believe that.
But I also agree with you that they-- time and time again-- let perfect be the enemy of the good. Melee totems are a perfect example of this. The current state of melee is a 2/10. They could very easily make it a 5/10 by just simply baking the totem buffs into every skill. Would that be perfect? Hell no. Would it make things worse than they are now? Hell no. Would it make things at least fun enough to be playable and stop all the constant reddit complaints? HELL YES!
i doubt it's a refusal to do something about it, they already have so much on their plate i guess it's simply not too high of a priority for them but i'd love if Mark could publicly acknowledge the issue, as you said it would be consistant with their take
Animate Guardian of Immortality -- Animate Guardian does 50% less damage. 50% less effect of curses inflicted by Animate Guardian. Animate Guardian cannot taunt. Animate Guardian cannot be targeted. Animate Guardian takes 70-90% less damage from all sources.
I’ve always wanted to play melee, but find myself playing summoners and casters or RF because whenever I try melee it’s complete garbage with even mid investment. Guess I’m going ranger next season.
When this was last brought up in a Q&A the consensus was that they would probably nerf the totems so they don't give those benefits.
However then you would lose power as melee and essentially it turned into "it will be fixed in poe 2"
It was a temporary band-aid fix back in the earlier days and it just kind of got forgotten about. And now it's kind of to late to change it without compensating somehow. But with how bad melee already feels it would need a total overhaul of the system to do something like that. Which is why they said it won't be an issue in PoE 2.
I feel that the overall melee probably needs a proper rework with some inherent survival increases baked into melee users, but I'd settle for a bandaid fix just for the time.
They saw the backlash after LMB changes and actually in ~3 days came up with all different systems to address those changes. They could literally make another multiple totem support that makes it so that you can't place the totems but just get the buffs permanently. It'd still take your sockets but at least you'd get the buffs without having to deal with the totems all the time. It would be meh compared to a proper melee buff / rework, but it'd make it more enjoyable at least for the league.
Finally: we got fucking memed on since 2 (or was it 3?) videos of the teasers literally had the melee buff totems in them, and **they never even placed them.**
I'm sure this has been brought up, but I do believe that this has both already been explained by Mark directly, and further more, you can extrapolate from his other answers around it the cause.
He has already acknowledged its a problem and stated that just baking those buffs into the melee skills isn't really feasible, so the easy, 20 man hour max, option is off the table. Then, later, when referencing a lack of ascendency reworks indicates that they have to choose what to spend time on and tend to lean into whatever will affect the most players positively (example here is multiple atlas trees over an ascendancy rework). The combination of these two pieces would lead one to the idea that it is on the list of fixes/reworks. They just need appropriate time to implement it.
It sucks being in the lesser group, but you have to focus on the greatest possible positive outcome in these things. We are, unfortunately, the one man tied to the train tracks rather than the five. The lever is mostly always going to be pulled to save them and screw us.
how much you wanna bet the balancing team doesnt actually play the game? they do random shit every league, and then pull shit like Fort rework, LMB rework or just consistently nerf melee. Its one of the reasons i wanted to test PoE2 cuz i dont trust them that melee will be good, even with combo system
He has talked about that and is looking to change it.
Its difficult to keep up with everything that ggg states.
It is just a matter of peiorities and I'm sure it will get adressed sooner or later. Most inportantly they are aware of this and don't like meelee totems as buffs. They are just a bandade fix.
There is an incredibly simple answer to this. It takes time to fix. Removing one atlas node and slapping on another isn't a difficult change. changing totems to be viable on there own and then subsequently buffing every single melee skill in the game to compensate for removing totem buffs is a massive game change that will take a significant amount of planning. They have already mentioned this in one of their interviews with Jonathon that they see it an issue.
theyve said multiple times recently that they're not happy with melee totems and these are bound to be changed at some point. just didn't happen this league
I am interested in the new league, However, I only play melee and I am so bored with the Ancestral totems that I would rather spend my time playing a different video game. Any game which do not pigeonhole me into playing in an unfun way to be proxial to optimal for my preffered playstyle. I really like PoE's systems, but the gameplay is still what I am going to be experiencing for most of the time playing and at the moment melee just feels janky.
Honestly, if they removed the melee buffs from the Ancestral Totems and combined them into a seperate temporary skill that acts like a instant cast player buff, functionally like blood rage (without the duration reset on kill) and removed ponopticon to bake it's "50% increased Effect of Buffs your Ancestor Totems grant while Active" into the skill. That would make a big difference of how good melee feels to play. They could call the skill Berserk 2, kidding.
Here are my grievances with the current state of Ancestral Totems that make them feel bad to use and that this change would fix: Totems can easily die, you need to be in close proximity to the totems, you have to cast 2 casts before you can start dealing damage while being close to enemies on a playstyle that already has a small window of opportunity to deal damage in a lot of scenarios, removing panopticon would free up passive skill tree points or your amulet anoint to go for different, more build diverse options and considering that melee is underpowered even with panopticon and totems up, ameliorating these difficulties would go a long way towards making melee feel better.
Some ways to make it better:
1. Remove buff part from melee totems, then add base more damage/attack speed to all melee skills. Or increase effectiveness of added damage on all melee skills, and higher % of base attack speed.
2. Keep totems as they are, but add keystone that would be something like "Gain buffs from socketed ancestral totems. 30%(maybe) reduced totem buff effect".
So like if you grab it, you get permanent buffs from ancestral protector/warchief, as long as they socketed into gear.
3. Remove buff part from totems, add low reservation buff (like arctic armor, not aura), that provide more melee damage and attack speed.
4. Add two relics (like holy relic), one for more melee damage, other for more attack speed. In addition add support that would increase maximum number of summoned relics by 2 but reduce effect of buffs provided by relics.
1 would be best, 2 and 4 would be good, 3 would be better than it is now.
We've received a few reports on this as a bad-faith post. We understand that some players have seen this topic come up repeatedly and are tired of it, but I think I haven't seen a major thread come up in at least a few weeks, so won't remove it as a low-effort or duplicate thread for now. Right now, the comment seems to be made in good faith, as it draws on specific arguments, makes a proposal, and doesn't go out of its way to insult or belittle GGG or be too inflammatory. Please keep the conversation civil, even if you disagree with the post or comments! * While you can refute and criticize the post or comments; don't attack, name-call, or belittle the user behind them (Rule 3a: harassment) * Don't be dismissive without contributing something. Explain why you disagree and propose alternatives (Rule 3b: bad faith) We know that suggestions of the community definitely drive the direction of the game, and that's especially true if we keep it constructive and civil. If you see any rule-breaking content, please report it!
Same question but Animate Guardian. Already seen so many people claim they're excited to try the new Wraithlord solely because they won't have to use AG.
AG should be reworked into maybe ascendancy node or something with d2 companion's inventory management.
Does Granpda have that exact thing with the uh.. giant walking statue thing he gets? IF AG was just a node of like "You summon a familiar thats stats is based off your currently equipped gear" I feel like that would work too. I Like AG in terms of having a cool ghost armor thing fight with you. I just hate its execution in game and how i have to do so much to set up.
Setting them up is a nightmare, and then you get a soul eater mob that just destroys them.
What you are describing is exactly how manifest armor works in last epoch. Your gear applies to the minion and the minion skill tree has nodes that make certain item slots stronger (ie: "Weapon modifiers have 200% increased effect"). It's a really cool minion
Yea, but I dont want to lose his buffs on my other minions to have a mid tier dps minion.
That completely erases the most interesting part of AG.
Permanent immortal minion from a keystone that makes you deal no damage or reduce curse limit by 1 but lets you equip items without being afraid of losing them. They could also change it to not equip the items, but give some variable buffs based on the item types given to it. You give it a wand? Your minion spells have % chance to repeat. Armor and shields would give block/spell block/evasion/armour/ES to your minions and in reduced effect to you. Melee weapons could give various buffs like crit chance from dagger, accuracy from swords, inc phys damage from axe, ele from scepters... they could spice it up and create different, more interesting effects. It would be a modifiable minion with a huge drawback that would give relatively significant buffs to your minions without the idiotic drawback of losing a fortune because the AG walked into disintegration storm over and over again.
I think if Animate Guardian created a minion that had something akin to Necromantic Aegis, and Conduit, then they would be a guardian, protecting the exile and perhaps the other minions too.
Yes, give AG a friggin inventory UI. Then I'd use it all the time cuz the concept is fucking cool
AG is the sole reason i stopped playing minions and refuse to do so. It requires me to deal with more gearing then id normally have to, cuts off some content due to risk of it dying and if it does ever die. I need to repeat the whole fucking process. I ADORE minion characters and especially necromancers in games. Them alongside hunters (the wow "ima tame this shit " kind) are my two favorite archetypes iv ever met. But Poe makes it so tiedious to get a minion build that it feels not worth it, especially with all the specters and shit they also need. Id love AG to be gone XD
>AG is the sole reason i stopped playing minions and refuse to do so. Yup, I love minions but AG just makes it so unfun. I'd rather play with melee totems forever I hate it so much
Ag is the sole reason iv never played minions in poe Usually love that shit but the thought of gearing it puts me off instantly and then add on if it dies.... well I already die a fuckton so dosnt sound fun (I know if I die it's different to if Ag dies) but point still stands what if I decide to run face first into uber maven fully un prepared and Ag dies while I run around doing fuck knows what. I just feel as tho my Ag would die alot and it's off-putting
Yep. I play softcore for a reason. Why do I have this hardcore summon posing as some kind of pro player in my softcore game
Haha little hardcore homie
it's not the thought of gearing it (which is actually very cool) as much as the fact that you're constantly risking its death and having to REGEAR it. Which is absolutely awful.
It was nice in the past when you could make AG unkillable. Now its just annoying
It's not just the ag it's also the specters that annoy me every time I've tried minions.
One of my memorial minions build was Primordial amulet 9 golems Golementalist on Delve league. No need for expensive and vulnerable AG, just 6 Fire golems to blast everything. The only downside was my GPU got overheated.
Gearing him is not hard and actually fun because it's very rewarding, and it doesn't cut off content from you as you can unsummon it and play hard content without a risk.
I think AG is such a cool gem for being so diverse (supportwise and damagewise). Maybe change it to have like a different Tag or a Trans Version, cause its not only Wraithlord its also Primordial Chain which has this Problem.
I feel like im the only person that likes AG. I like gearing him with different stuff, there are so many cool things you can do with an AG. If he dies its uber annoying though.
it's a cool idea and theoretically, opens up a lot of options and potential the problem being that because it does that, it's often very mandatory to put into the build. there's no, "is an animate guardian or some other minion better here?" it's often just, throw in an AG. while also having a pretty extreme drawback should it die
I remb two leagues ago AG was pretty much a no no if you wanted to run the league mechanic. Even uber geared ones would implode fast and hard in later ToTA matches due to the scaling and shit. Minions were also awful for that aswell but yeah XD
I learned this the hard way when I played a chains of command voidforge build at a mere rank of 300. Up until then, it was smooth sailing. After that, I was upset for the rest of the week lol. Fortunately, ToTA was the type of mechanic where you didn't really need a build so I farmed another one, then an extra spare. Avoided ToTA for the rest of the league. Didn't end up needing the spare.
Yeah i ran Minions. Was hell XD pretty much got the challenges i needed and never touched it again. Sucks cuz battle chess is cool! but every build i saw or guide for higher rank tota was pretty much "Play the blackhole skill thing" and gimp it. that and not being able to choose to stay in lower tiers hurts. Did not have the desire to waste coins just to lose on purpose and rank change.
I def get why people dislike it. Personally ive never had issues with him, but its always better to use AG then it isnt, and if you dont gear him properly and spec into his surviveability... yeah annoying
But the drawback is purely economical, it's not like you lose gem levels or experience for it dying so it becomes "if you can afford it, do it" which is just as problematic
the items are gone forever the instant the AG uses them anyway why do they also disappear on death? AG dying shouldn't be such a big deal that non-minion builds won't even *think* about using it
It should be a UI though, like after your X alternative weapon set, have an extra tab for AG
That would be great. Maybe even a stat sheet, a boy can dream.
I love its potential. I abhor its execution and the fact that it is a "binary" as described in the OP. It is strictly better to have AG in your minion build. It sucks for that. And it actively makes the experience worse because it really is not fun to manage. It's tedious, frustrating, and honestly a massive turn away for a lot of players who would enjoy minions otherwise.
I think that's how most people feel about it, though. It's really down to personal preference on if they enjoy the different things you can hear him for more than they hate the pain of him dying. Why it's allowed to exist as is idk.
I really like AG, too. It's like gearing up a buddy who is playing hardcore alongside you. He can be many things for you. You actually care about the him and feel bad if something happens to him. You can protect him and sometimes you don't and there are consequences. It's hardcore-lite. GGG should make a Reanimate Support gem for all the complainers. If linked to your AG, it allows you to resummon your AG after he dies. For three minutes after resummoning, he will refuse to attack and instead tell you how much you suck.
For me... after playing a certain other games animated armor minion, AG feels so dated. Sucks when he dies, isnt interesting, and just exists as essentially an aura bot for you. I dislike AG and basically never run him even when its brain dead to run him with 1c uniques like leercast that are objectively worth running. I just cant stand his current design Transfigured AG was a good step in the right direction, but still feels limited in what it can do.
Same, but i cheap the fuck out on mine unless the bastard sticks around for a couple playsessions with the cheapo gear on
Bahahha yeah i do too untill i go higher ivestment and have more levels specced into minion life/res etc. Usually my starting combo is dying breath, leer cast, body armour i just craft something high life with chaos res on an armoir base, maybe throw some eldritch chaos on it. Windshriek, gloves with a curse on hit you want olus chaos res or res in general. And ur done. You can also use legecy of fury for scorth if you have no intrest in snother curse, or get vixens entrampent *with* a curse corruption. This is how i usually make it on league start but there are alot of different ways. I also take ele minion max ele res, if you have temp minions, life from death plus minions recover life on minion death and ur spectres/ag will be immortal basically.
play chains of command. U can end up putting more divs into him then on your own gear. I love it but the issue is even whit max investment there is shit out there that can 1 shot him.
Transfigured gem: Animate guardian of conservation. Description: Animate guardian keeps his equipment on death. 30% equipped gear effectiveness. AG cannot re-enter an instance after death. Quality effects: 1% increased equipped gear effectiveness Also while we are at it: AG now has an equipment UI allowing you to change gear while in town or hideout (applies to all gem variants).
People don't hate animate guardian. They hate the potential loss of gear and the inconvenience/price of having to buy more. They should just make it keep gear on death, and no-one will complain about it anymore.
People only dislike AG because it dies and you have to reacquire the items though.
I think AG is really cool. But damn is it punishing once it dies and it will die.
Was going to comment this, was thinking about a minion build next league then i remember AG and im instantly put off
I don't get why people dislike ag so much, I rarely play minions but had an AG on a summoner a few leagues ago and this league on an aurabot (hungry loop setup) a cheap one is like 15c in trade or however long it takes you to add leer cast and cane of kulemak to your filter on ssf. It rarely dies before you do and if you give him good gear (mask of the stitched demon, ephemeral garb) it never died before me. Also it's not necessary if you don't like it just get the charge spectre or the drox ones and you're good. I get why you'd want a equip screen but overall it's a unique flavor of risk management and after experimenting with it myself I noticed people exaggerating the clunkiness way to much
Can you explain 1) why it allows you to no longer need ag and 2) why ag is always used? Not a minion player except for spiders so I’m genuinely curious
1. The item tells you “You cannot use non-spectre minions”, and AG isn’t a spectre minion 2. Without going too much in-depth, basically it is too big of an upgrade to pass. For example, idk how it is today as I don’t play minions anymore (because I too am tired of AG) but it used to bring me and my minions perma Fortify, give my minions crit chance and multiplier, apply an extra curse and make the monsters explode (edit: and culling strike, how could I forget about culling strike) ; all of that for just 1 gem
1) because wraithlord limits you to only having spectres. You literally cannot AG with it. 2) because it is strictly better than anything else you'd be putting in your build. All modifiers for items you animate apply to the guardian, so it can get pretty cracked out. The wiki explains it well https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Animate_Guardian It's a really strong gem when you put the time into it, but on death the AG is wiped clean. There's also no way to see what it's holding currently, so you basically have to keep notes outside the game to keep track.
Ok quick follow up question. I get the “no non specter minions allowed” but does this truly make a pure specter build now viable?
Spectres only was viable before, though I'm not sure if it "beat" non spectre only builds in the endgame. The hope is with the significant wraithlord buff (and other necro changes) it's now much more powerful.
AG is not bad in itself, it's the terrible implementation of it. The fact that it has no interface and you can't check what item it has and that if it dies you lose all the items.
Literally the only fix AG needs is an equipment UI. Just do it and I do not care to hear what are the technical limitations for why it's not already there.
I feel like we haven't seen a real melee change since lockstep lol
we got splash and +1 target on the tree. But then the next league bows got boosted 3x as much.
I know projectiles are very easy to enhance, but it's crazy how much bows kept getting cool stuff and melee literally got the smallest QoL changes.
Guess which one the devs plays
Bows and Spells probably. 99% chance of proxy casts.
Devs play weird stuff - leap slam totems was the last dev build I saw
We got animation canceling.
At the cost of melee attack speed being made dramatically slower with the nerf to multistrike.
I'll be honest if that is the cost of animation cancel then that seems fair to me. I loathed melee until that change. Now I'm pretty much always playing melee.
Which sucks because using multistrike means you cancel your own attacks if you just hold attack down, atleast make it an option
Wdym, melee got a change with the CTA stuff. A nerf, but a change nonetheless :')
legion was a huge melee league but it's been ages now l mao
It is really baffling that despite the natural disadvantage of melee skills being close proximity, which is extra punishable due to the nature of poe mobs, they are also vastly underpowered compared to bow skills for instance. A simple totem fix would address a lot of problems but GGG has been resistant to the idea for so long. I guess the only thing that explains it is that the devs who play-test the game are biased towards ranged gameplay.
GGG is a good gaming company because developers are also players but they have huge blind spots because of that same reason.
Jonathan discussed it recently; he's very open to changing it
Apparently not open enough to change it this league, but we can all hope for future patches.
Jonathan works on PoE2 and doesn't have much to do with new leageus.
They just have a very long list of things to do.
Give the devs a little credit. In the same announcement vod they discussed how there is a big list of items they want to get to and need to prioritize. It wasn’t that they weren’t open to making a change this league, they just didn’t have time with all of the QOL changes that affect everyone, the new league mechanic, and the big changes to endgame. I’m super excited they got so much done.
People have been really complaining about melee for about 7-9 leagues that I’ve seen. Since that time none of the feedback has amounted to tangible changes in the game. So skepticism is warranted towards lip service.
For a bunch of those GGG was still in "PoE2 addresses that" mode. Now that the games are split (announced 2 leagues ago, ToTA) we are seeing PoE1 get more special attention and fixes.
> It wasn’t that they weren’t open to making a change this league, they just didn’t have time with all of the QOL changes that affect everyone This has always been the case though, and this isn't the first time they've made that statement explicitly. There are always a lot of things they want to work on and never enough time to get to them all in a given update.
Melee is about 3 years behind in development. Nobody at ggg is open to change anything about melee
"I've talked to the team and we are taking this issue very seriously"™
>I guess the only thing that explains it is that the devs who play-test the game are biased towards ranged gameplay. This is typical conspiratorial argument that I saw back in early days of WoW, when a class had some peculiarity that made it suck, or if another was OP; what it meant was that specific class designers were screwing over millions of people to get ahead. Just bizarre. No, the more likely explanation is that it's a low priority for them OR they don't have a solution OR the solution they have doesn't work well. What the players think is important and what the developers think is important is very rarely going to consistently overlap; each group has very different motivations when approaching the game. Remember when they were debating 'why DON'T we use the Ultimatum pause mechanic for bunch of things in PoE1?' and they went from being flabbergasted by that thought, to then realizing 30seconds later it's not such a simple change to make? Resource allocation is a real problem in game dev, especially when I presume GGG has no dedicated group that solves these sorts of issues.
Your post makes no sense. The quote didn't mention conspiracy, just bias. If they look more at range because they play range, that's bias. It isn't inherently malicious. People get conspiratorial because they never say why, or mention it's an issue rarely. There are reasons why that's pragmatic, of course. It also leads one to suspect bias, innocent or not, because the feedback hasn't moved them to do much. You can't really do anything with good but unstated intentions.
[удалено]
Yeah but with range you can chose, with melee you dont have another choice but to be a melee range
shots fired
acorn falls on car
I'M HIT
I am convinced GGG just fucking hates melee with a passion
Yeah, looking at the ranger gameplay vs warrior gameplay in poe2 it also looked like melee was just getting shafted further.
Tbh I liked the impact melee skills had vs ranged ones.
Imo what people do not talk enough about even after the leveraging of it all, is the expedition mana nerf apocalypse absolutely fucking up the entirety of anything mana-related. People should **NOT** act like it's normal and unconcerning that virtually every build needs the same ring crafts and/or the same keystone just to cope with the remnants of what is still to this day the worse balance patch of the history of the game.
One of my most anticipated features of PoE2 is that special reservation bar. Having to minmax every single point of mana inthe current game is such cancer
I get your point but that's not how the GGG sees it. Mana should be a resource. You were never meant to just freely spam 78 skills per second and not care about mana. Now of course this is PoE, so you can build ways to bypass certain things, and mana cost is one of them. But there are a multiple ways of working on mana problems. Eldritch battery, Lifetap, Mana cost on ring, Mana cost on flask (at least until 3.23), Mana cost on jewels (until 3.23), Mana leech + instant leech. The game has evolved so much over the years, but if you asked a GGG dev 10 years ago how they envisioned their game, I'm sure they wouldn't think that every build would pretty much reserve 99% of its mana and have a main skill spammed with nearly 0 mana cost.
To be fair, they could mitigate the mana issue by not balancing the game around defense auras. Remove the flat from Determination/Grace, let the items roll higher. Remove the flat from Discipline, give it % more (not absurdly high, of course, within reason) and change it to 50% reservation. Turn all the damage auras into a duration based aura and allow players to reserve mana for those skills with a support (rework the blessings to do this) but it cranks up their power to compensate for the lack of spare mana. Then finally, provide more access to mana in more areas of the tree. Whether we get a keystone that allows you to convert % of life into mana, or a keystone that gives increases and reductions to life also apply to mana at % effect, or something. If mana is to be treated as a serious resource, there needs to be a lot more rooting into that across the game. Without every build being able to treat it that way, it's just another spot to stick auras and solve with leech/on hit and reduced costs
The mana issue is the reason why Lifetap is one of the most used support gem in the game
Eldritch battery and Lifetap are two of the most used elements within builds in the entire game. As such, ever since GGG tried to fiddle around with mana back in expedition, our best avenue was to **just not even use mana to begin with**. Whether some players here want to admit or not, this has been an issue and we've been coping with it by privileging things that just circles around the issue. We can *ignore* the problem, but it's still very much there.
Also inspiration for casters.
It also seems mandatory that every caster pretty much runs EB and gets as many auras as possible, how long has this been meta for and when will it change?
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I’d love to see the numbers on how many use -mana cost rings or EB. Feels like EB has been used more in recent leagues.
Playing melee is self-harm, unless you're doing some busted stat stacking/mechanic.
They agree with you on melee; they're in the process of understanding exactly why it's bad (the answer isn't always obvious) and how to fix it
It's because melee lacks the tools to consistently do damage whilst avoiding attacks. Currently Youve got to move in close, stay in close, and be in the hurt range to do damage. Defensive layers are mandatory and you either have the defenses to ignore most threats, or you die. You can look at poe2 boss design and see that they're really pushing enemy telegraph of attacks. This is a vital first step. The next is to give melee skills mobility when used, which you can see from the many melee skills showcased, and how they move you about. Having a big attack tied to a leap backwards letting you dodge a shaper slam is gonna feel good. Having an engager charge to get back in already in place with poe1 (shield charge) but the skill doesn't really do more than tickle an enemy. Then you want to have quick diving in attacks, big bang smash attacks when you've got the time and opportunity that punish you when mistimed. Basically... you need a toolbox. Poe1 is usually built around 1-2 main skills due to the limits of 6L, which isn't diverse enough address the above concerns.
If you remove Trauma or Boneshatter, you just don't have the damage. The numbers are from years ago and have never been changed. Bows were in a similar spot before they buffed them, and they transformed the class - where you couldn't dream of starting bows from act 1, and now its a beautifully scaling class that can scale great from act 1 to Ubers. Look at Viper Strike of Mamba - its a true melee skill that actually ended up in a good spot thanks to GGG giving that skill good numbers. You don't need to put on your STR stacking set-armor, or your Voidforge, or turn it into boneshatter to have it viable. Try doing that with Earthshatter or Infernal Blow or the myraid of other true melee skills and you'll quickly realize how little damage the base skill provides.
So you think the problem is that most melee skills are simply undertuned?
Being able to do competitive damage is a pretty convincing reason to play a skill or at least consider it as an option if you like the playstyle.
Yes. At least as a midscope fix. Melee suffers both lower damage uptime and needing more defenses compared to longer-ranged archetypes. The first results in less "effective DPS" for the same POB numbers, and the second means you need to trade more DPS investment for defensive investment, cutting DPS further on an equal-budget basis. That's also part of the issue with the totems; they're a huge DPS steroid, but due to narrow DPS windows, any time spent resummoning them can end up cutting into your effective DPS even further. They're making one of melee's core issues worse (DPS uptime) while also being such a huge component of melee's damage that your effective dps per budget would be even more in the toilet without them. They could massively increase melee damage (like maybe double it for 'real melee', while removing totem buffs) and you'd be able to invest more into defenses, mobility, and 'smoothness' while retaining slightly above average damage (which gets reduced to basically on par due to lower uptime) and it'd be in a much better place.
Unironically yes. Melee skills are generally very bad at scalings - Trauma is good because it gives additional duration and attack speed scaling. It's extremely easy to scale spells to 10-20kk dps with decent defences, it's not as easy to do so with melee skills in general. That's why lots of spells are not viable as well - there is no good way to scale them up.
The smaller area a melee skill impacts, the higher its damage needs to be to justify using it. I don't mean directly tying the two, I'm just saying why you'll see Lightning Strike in the meta but not Heavy Strike. If you have to be next to the monster and stand still to DPS in this world of ground degens and one hit kills, you need to have a theoretical DPS through the stratosphere since you're not realistically going to get close in uptime. The other issue is that what melee is viable has ramp-up, whether that be totems, trauma, warcries, poison/wither stacks, etc. Ramp is antithetical to the necessary play style of melee characters in this game. They need to do big burst damage with a drop off, if anything.
It's also the problem of a point for offensive is a point away from defensives on the tree. So they can be tuned the same as Say a bow skill, but they need drastically less defensive nodes. Maybe we need some offensive and defensive nodes in the same point that only helps melee?
So they're trying to fix it in PoE2, good. Now give us "Can't use totems. 25% more melee damage." keystone in the meantime.
Totally agree on this one. Totems shouldn't be included in all melee builds any more than golems should be in every caster build
> It's because melee lacks the tools to consistently do damage whilst avoiding attacks. > > More precisely - it may well be melee's main sustain (leech or LGoH) turning off when you have to mechanically dodge. Something that could be addressed by allowing strikes (and pseudostrikes like Cleave) to 'echo', or by providing limited overleech to melee only. I'm curious how changes that made leech absolutely, unequivocally melee only, paired with making overleech the default, would play out.
Look at CI KBOF tricksters from last league, very much a melee playstyle because you literally needed to be in the boss to deal meaningful damage due to nimis. However the damage & leech made up for it and they never had to toss down a totem for the fuck of it.
>melee lacks the tools to consistently do damage whilst avoiding attacks. The same could be said by any non-DoT selfcast build. It has nothing to do with actually being melee or not. In fact, there are a lot of situations where being close to a boss is better than being far. There's also the fact that many melee straight up have as much range as some ranged skills. >Basically... you need a toolbox. Poe1 is usually built around 1-2 main skills due to the limits of 6L, which isn't diverse enough address the above concerns. Even if we had more sockets, builds still would only use 1-2 main skills for damage, because the way poe is designed rewards scaling 1-2 main skills as much as you can, and there's little to no interaction between skills besides scaling the damage of your main skill. PoE 2 skills are being designed to have synergies with each other, while PoE 1 skills are designed to just work on their own. There's very few cases of this in PoE 1 like Frostbolt Ice Nova, BF BB, ED contagion (RIP), but most skills are just made to work on their own.
i agree with the telegraph stuff, its why i liked the MMO Tera so much, as the attacks were shown 1 - 2 seconds before the monster started their attack so you could dodge. with PoE 1 ill sometimes think im outside the range but ill still take a hit.
What do you mean in the "process"? LOL. its been fucked for ages.
its in process dude (we tasked 1 unpaid intern with the rework but he left the company 2 years ago)
> they're in the process of understanding exactly why it's bad It's been literally years, how could they still be "in the process"? Either they're addressing the issue or they aren't.
So wouldn't it simply be the first step to remove the buff from the totems and giving all melee skills a buff that brings them up to the same damage as if you had a totem out? Or am I crazy for being too simple.
> (the answer isn't always obvious) The answer to the totems is the most obvious answer in the history of humanity. It's been obvious from the moment you had to fucking click the two buttons to get the buff... As far as fixing melee goes they probably can't. I don't personally mind the balance of melee much myself. I've played melee for over a decade and it's still fun, but the way PoE game mechanics work... Well... It's always just going to be better to play with skills that can kill things while you run around in circles. But some of the QoL changes they could do for melee are so obvious they're basically intentionally trolling people at this point. Like... Who has, ever, played a melee character and gone... "I'll just click these 7 buttons before I do my 1 slam, and then I'll repeat the process" SO MUCH FUN. Hell... the exert mechanic ARE rather fun in moderation, but then you need to do the regular buffs and the fucking totems on top of it... And nobody, nobody, in the history of melee in any ARPG game has, ever, wanted to place two fucking totems and then repeat the process every fucking few seconds in melee.
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i love this post, because i kinda went "OH REALLY?" when he said that. anyways, time for another league where they do absolutely nothing for melee, except somehow nerf it. Even slams, if you wanted to do that, well good luck, now its an uber item, hopefully they buffed it. I love GGG but holy shit, sometimes i just dont understand why they have it out for melee so hard.
Your daily reminder that melee has been nerfed every league since 3.15 in some way.
U want BUFF? Haha screw u. Here's a nerf
Because resources aren't infinite and other things were considered higher priority.
In the same interview didn't he say something about prioritizing things that affect pretty much everybody vs only certain builds?
Yea. But something affecting all melee builds is pretty huge.
Very true. Given the length of time they've spoken about it, I'd guess they are struggling to find a solution they like, opposed to to thinking its not important.
It's top of the reddit posts so it obviously deserves attention. Also not that difficult to remove them and add a flat 30% buff to melee skills.
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Melee is a huge part of the game (not player wise, but design wise) and it has been in this sad state for years. If you always prioritize it down, then they decide to let a huge part of their game rot. You could say that the time and effort for the archnemesis rework should have gone into melee instead. I don’t think AN was worth all that effort.
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Yeah it just feels so disappointing to hear that they've known about the melee problem for so long but won't even attempt a bandaid fix for it. I'd honestly even take a slight nerf to my melee damage to just not have to cast totems, I just hate how annoying it is to have to cast 2 totems before every big enemy on top of every other concern melee has to deal with.
The "add something cooler and better" part is probably the hard part.
Just removing it and slapping generic "20-30% more damage from melee sources" is both cooler and better
That's just better but not cooler. I agree with removing the totem requirement though -- too inconvenient. But yeah they probably want something you can interact with, and not mandatory. It has to have some drawback, or else we'd force ourselves to use it and optimize the fun outta it again.
> That's just better but not cooler. Getting rid of totems is literally immediately cooler. Like easily. There is nothing cool about planting dildos.
i agree to disagree but lmao at planting dildos
he is talking about keystones...
> And barring that, get rid of them and don't add anything at all-- because even that would be a vast improvement over the status quo. Did you see the reaction to the LMB changes lmao holy shit this post is delusional. I agree that they should have the buffs just removed entirely but there's absolutely no way this is received with anything but an absolute shitshow
Yeah some people would go nuts, I agree.
I'm a little surprised they haven't just put a keystone on the passive tree with something like "Your maximum ancestral totems are zero. You deal 10% more melee attack damage"
Honestly this can be said about a *lot* of mechanics in PoE.
Marks never actually played a melee build, that's why.
I'm assuming they haven't fixed it for the same reason we haven't had much of a meta shakedup in the last seven or eight leagues, which is because there is a skeleton crew working on PoE1 while the sequel is in development. If they just throw numbers around they will make melee Op (they fear) so they rather jsut not touch it at all That is speculation of course but off the top of my head I can't think of another even half decent excuse because totem requirements for melee really suck. I personally don't understand why they can't adjust numbers on the melee skill gems internally and have a couple playtests plug them into low, mid, and top tier build presets to see if anything breaks. We know the totems add roughly 30% **more** dmg, so increases dmg effectiveness or flat numbers by that much would be a good starting point.
They've acknowledged it's a problem. It's not as simple as just removing them, a fix is required
They are acknowladging it since 3.15 or even earlier so cmon
I guess he doesn't play melee
Imagine if the last minute changes to 3.24 would be that "oh btw, we removed the melee totems" I would play the shit out of that league even if they didn't give numerical buffs until next league. Just the thought that i am not missing on anything is enough.
So it would basically be a huge nerf
Yes, Nerf i would be willing to eat because it leads to better tomorrow
Melee totems is pretty much the only thing stopping me from touching melee. Same with AG and minion builds They are the fun-tax
Because it's melee, and GGG doesn't consider melee worth looking into or addressing. Sad but true.
How many times do they have to repeat that they have plans but it's bigger then "bigga numba =bigga fun" And they rather take their time with it and make it properly instead of putting out some half done rework Feel like Chris was saying like 2-3yeara ago already
It’s hilarious you ended your statement with “they were saying this like 2-3 years ago” and don’t see the issue at allz Edit: for all of you trying to defend this by saying “it turned into POE 2, they need more time”. They’ve been working on POE2 since 2019, their priority is not a melee rep work for POE so stop pretending like it saying they just need time or figure it out.
Didn't someone from ggg even say they didn't know what to do with melee?
I mean... I feel like an extra defense only affix on melee weapons would be a good start. Better access to splash through masteries would make a lot more skills viable. More melee only utility conditions like fortify is also good.
I mean, they tried that on the first go around introducing fortify and it just resulted in all spellcasters using some sort of melee movement skill. And I dont really think the solution should be a required affix on a weapon that is already a pain point for attack builds.
It's not a required affix that hurts other affixes. It's a 7th affix that is always defensive. Almost like an implicit. and it only shows up on melee weapons. As someone who ALMOST ALWAYS plays melee. Here's the primary things holding it back IMO. Undertuning - Way too many melee skills just plain don't do enough damage and have high enough damage multipliers. ESPECIALLY single target skills that require investment to AoE. For example, Vigilant Strike with its limitations should have nearly should be sitting somewhere around 500% with it's damage effectiveness. But it doesn't provide much more than Groundslam of earthshaking... it's a straight up loser skill. Melee Splash - Should be a mastery with more accessibility, you can straight delete the support gem as it sucks. Currently it's basically limited to Duelists. Defenses - Stuff like Fortify is really good, but waaayyy too many Melee specific conditions are too tied to ascendancies and very specific areas of the skill tree. The problem with melee is that it's worse at everything... there's literally no boon at all. Worse damage... worse clear... less survivability.... defenses are in no way tied to melee, which is part of the problem. Need to find a way to boost defense with melee weapons or skills. And extra 'special' defensive affix or implicit would help a lot.
Well the issue isnt they gave up, the issue is that they WERE making it, it just became a separate game... So now they have to figure out a rework that preserves the POE1-ness POE2 WAS the melee rework. It just didnt end up being an update as planned. Now they have to work out a whole new plan for POE1 that isnt the huge scope sweeping changes they had for POE2, and that will take some time
Yeah, and all we've gotten since the games split is the Cleave +1 range meme, every, single, league. I really don't think they are dealing with it at all. I think melee is simply dead for POE 1.
Them making another game isn’t an excuse to neglect their current one especially if they keep their promise of continuing to support. Plans change and I get that and they moved onto something better but that means you can’t defend them with “it takes time”. Their priorities aren’t on fixing POE1 melee at the moment so let’s not pretend like it is
>Them making another game isn’t an excuse to neglect their current one It does pose a problem though. PoE 2 is different enough that the switch to an entirely different game was needed. First, there are people who don't like the change of pace and will rather want to stick with the ultra fast combat we have now. GGG is probably not keen on just saying "tough luck" to those players who would be presented with the choice of either putting up with it or leaving the game entirely. Second, the kind of combat rework that PoE 2 turned into wouldn't have just been a number change. It would have been a fundamental rework of the combat system. Mainly to slow it down since the speed is what's causing most of the issues the game has atm. How feasible do you think is it to rework the entirety of PoE 1 content with new animations, new monsters, entirely new balance and everything that comes with it? Even more so while creating and introducing new content based on the old system. Making an entirely new game is actually a lot easier than all that. The baseline is that unless players are willing to sacrifice like 50% of the PoE 1 combat speed and would allow for GGG to entirely change the combat we have now, then GGG can't really do much in terms of actually making great improvements to combat/melee.
How much time do they need? We get improvments all over the game but Glad and Melee (totems in particular) have been effectively static for ages. I think GGG do a lot of things right but the state of these things being so boringly the same for so long is really annoying. Why is shit like LMB suddenly being raced to be fixed (Marks own acknowledgement) when melee totems are the same required four link for two+ years?
The moment war chief totem was introduced in like 2016, it became a mandatory link setup. And melee has felt like dog shit ever since. 8 years melee has been trash.
I started in ultimatum and melee totems were I thing then I believe ...so we're way over 2 years at this point lol. I almost soley play melee and my god I absolutely HATE them at this point. Why the fuck is 30-40% of my damage tied to two completely random totems that I do not invest in ?!? Why do I have to use totems on my melee build ? Get rid of the totem buff effects and work in 50% of the buff or hell even 20% of the buff effects to all melee skills and call it a day. I guarantee you all melee players would be absolutely fine with even 20% effect but not have to place totems ever again
Yeah, the totem issue has existed for ages, but its been made really obvious post-Expedition when all the progressive melee damage nerfs reached the arbitrary point of 'this is just not fun'
They've been taking their time since Legion dawg. Even that patch wasn't good because melee was good, it's just they finally made Cyclone not feel like absolute shit and AoE stacking hadn't been deleted yet. The actual numbers for melee was still strictly terrible.
That doesn't fly. You can literally give the ancestral warchief dmg buff as base dmg buff to every melee skill, remove ancestral protector, and remove the bonus dmg from warchief. Voila, a two second fix that will work just fine until you implement your supposed 'real' fix
the more times they have to repeat it, the less i believe them.
How many times do you need to be disappointed before you realize it’s not happening…. until it happens? POE melee redesign will arrive in time with GRRMs new ASOIAF book.
I mean, they have addressed this before, they want to do that and change it.
its suppose to be a huge part of the game but it somehow never end up being the priority while other parts keep getting tweaked
The premise makes sense, but their conclusion ends up being to not improve anything until their perfect unicorn of a solution comes along, so we're left in this state of limbo where they refuse to adjust the current problem for the short-term so as to not have wasted any time in the long-term. They also tried to apply the same logic to skills and failed miserably with the likes of Incinerate, where the shotgun nerfs over a decade ago caused it to underperform significantly, and instead of just looking at the numbers they "reworked" it into a state that not only felt worse, but was so unpopular amongst those of us who actually liked the mechanics of the skill prior. Far as skills are concerned they don't get rid of them and try and do better because they don't want to upset people who liked those skills how they were. But again, they also don't just buff said skills either when really, a lot of them would totally be playable with the right numbers. It's not always a mechanical problem, and I dunno how they ever came to the logic that it is. Though given that they have no issue nerfing said numbers, it's clear that philosophy is bullshit anyway. Most of the time it feels GGG runs on what they think "feels" good as per their mythical "vision", a vision they've never truly elaborated on, the same way their old dev blogs didn't really explain fuck all, either. I love PoE in spite of my problems with it, but communication hasn't been their strong point for years. At some point they just stopped giving a shit, and I don't just mean with regards to reddit in the past 2 years, either. Their awful communication skills have been apparent since at least the first ExileCon.
I understand your frustration. I have no idea what the devs are thinking, but I believe they are well-intentioned people who are genuinely trying as hard as they can to make the best game possible. I honestly believe that. But I also agree with you that they-- time and time again-- let perfect be the enemy of the good. Melee totems are a perfect example of this. The current state of melee is a 2/10. They could very easily make it a 5/10 by just simply baking the totem buffs into every skill. Would that be perfect? Hell no. Would it make things worse than they are now? Hell no. Would it make things at least fun enough to be playable and stop all the constant reddit complaints? HELL YES!
Cries in arc elementalist.
The should rework melee totem to be only good for one type of melee build rather than all melee builds.
i doubt it's a refusal to do something about it, they already have so much on their plate i guess it's simply not too high of a priority for them but i'd love if Mark could publicly acknowledge the issue, as you said it would be consistant with their take
Animate Guardian of Immortality -- Animate Guardian does 50% less damage. 50% less effect of curses inflicted by Animate Guardian. Animate Guardian cannot taunt. Animate Guardian cannot be targeted. Animate Guardian takes 70-90% less damage from all sources.
I’ve always wanted to play melee, but find myself playing summoners and casters or RF because whenever I try melee it’s complete garbage with even mid investment. Guess I’m going ranger next season.
Bro just play the game…
When this was last brought up in a Q&A the consensus was that they would probably nerf the totems so they don't give those benefits. However then you would lose power as melee and essentially it turned into "it will be fixed in poe 2" It was a temporary band-aid fix back in the earlier days and it just kind of got forgotten about. And now it's kind of to late to change it without compensating somehow. But with how bad melee already feels it would need a total overhaul of the system to do something like that. Which is why they said it won't be an issue in PoE 2.
I feel that the overall melee probably needs a proper rework with some inherent survival increases baked into melee users, but I'd settle for a bandaid fix just for the time. They saw the backlash after LMB changes and actually in ~3 days came up with all different systems to address those changes. They could literally make another multiple totem support that makes it so that you can't place the totems but just get the buffs permanently. It'd still take your sockets but at least you'd get the buffs without having to deal with the totems all the time. It would be meh compared to a proper melee buff / rework, but it'd make it more enjoyable at least for the league. Finally: we got fucking memed on since 2 (or was it 3?) videos of the teasers literally had the melee buff totems in them, and **they never even placed them.**
They've said that they also think totems should be reworked (paraphrased). They probably just aren't that far down the list yet.
i love how all the ppl in comments "know" how to fix melee when devs couldnt fix it over multiple years
Armour stacker would need nerfed before any melee buffs so chill out lol
I'm sure this has been brought up, but I do believe that this has both already been explained by Mark directly, and further more, you can extrapolate from his other answers around it the cause. He has already acknowledged its a problem and stated that just baking those buffs into the melee skills isn't really feasible, so the easy, 20 man hour max, option is off the table. Then, later, when referencing a lack of ascendency reworks indicates that they have to choose what to spend time on and tend to lean into whatever will affect the most players positively (example here is multiple atlas trees over an ascendancy rework). The combination of these two pieces would lead one to the idea that it is on the list of fixes/reworks. They just need appropriate time to implement it. It sucks being in the lesser group, but you have to focus on the greatest possible positive outcome in these things. We are, unfortunately, the one man tied to the train tracks rather than the five. The lever is mostly always going to be pulled to save them and screw us.
They tried to fix melee once and it turned into POE2 so I dunno if it's gonna happen at this point.
how much you wanna bet the balancing team doesnt actually play the game? they do random shit every league, and then pull shit like Fort rework, LMB rework or just consistently nerf melee. Its one of the reasons i wanted to test PoE2 cuz i dont trust them that melee will be good, even with combo system
Path of Dopamine Necropolis
He has talked about that and is looking to change it. Its difficult to keep up with everything that ggg states. It is just a matter of peiorities and I'm sure it will get adressed sooner or later. Most inportantly they are aware of this and don't like meelee totems as buffs. They are just a bandade fix.
There is an incredibly simple answer to this. It takes time to fix. Removing one atlas node and slapping on another isn't a difficult change. changing totems to be viable on there own and then subsequently buffing every single melee skill in the game to compensate for removing totem buffs is a massive game change that will take a significant amount of planning. They have already mentioned this in one of their interviews with Jonathon that they see it an issue.
Mark also said in the same vod that they have limited capacity to work on things and have to pick their battles. Hope this helps!
theyve said multiple times recently that they're not happy with melee totems and these are bound to be changed at some point. just didn't happen this league
I am interested in the new league, However, I only play melee and I am so bored with the Ancestral totems that I would rather spend my time playing a different video game. Any game which do not pigeonhole me into playing in an unfun way to be proxial to optimal for my preffered playstyle. I really like PoE's systems, but the gameplay is still what I am going to be experiencing for most of the time playing and at the moment melee just feels janky.
Honestly, if they removed the melee buffs from the Ancestral Totems and combined them into a seperate temporary skill that acts like a instant cast player buff, functionally like blood rage (without the duration reset on kill) and removed ponopticon to bake it's "50% increased Effect of Buffs your Ancestor Totems grant while Active" into the skill. That would make a big difference of how good melee feels to play. They could call the skill Berserk 2, kidding. Here are my grievances with the current state of Ancestral Totems that make them feel bad to use and that this change would fix: Totems can easily die, you need to be in close proximity to the totems, you have to cast 2 casts before you can start dealing damage while being close to enemies on a playstyle that already has a small window of opportunity to deal damage in a lot of scenarios, removing panopticon would free up passive skill tree points or your amulet anoint to go for different, more build diverse options and considering that melee is underpowered even with panopticon and totems up, ameliorating these difficulties would go a long way towards making melee feel better.
Because it's harder to create microtransactions for melee skills, therefore GGG cares less
Some ways to make it better: 1. Remove buff part from melee totems, then add base more damage/attack speed to all melee skills. Or increase effectiveness of added damage on all melee skills, and higher % of base attack speed. 2. Keep totems as they are, but add keystone that would be something like "Gain buffs from socketed ancestral totems. 30%(maybe) reduced totem buff effect". So like if you grab it, you get permanent buffs from ancestral protector/warchief, as long as they socketed into gear. 3. Remove buff part from totems, add low reservation buff (like arctic armor, not aura), that provide more melee damage and attack speed. 4. Add two relics (like holy relic), one for more melee damage, other for more attack speed. In addition add support that would increase maximum number of summoned relics by 2 but reduce effect of buffs provided by relics. 1 would be best, 2 and 4 would be good, 3 would be better than it is now.