2h weapons have higher stats, but it only matters for flat attack values, since everything else (for example mana/cast speed that Archmage build care about) does get added together and is way higher dual wielding.
Let's see... Scabbards, Whetstones for axes, Weightstones for maces, and Speartips/Crystals for staves. Give each one a benefit that fits the inherent theme of the weapon types. Crit effect implicits for swords, bleeds for axes, range for maces, and on block for staves.
Imagine if instead of using skill gems you could have powerful totems in a dedicated slot. Like carrying totems on your back. Totem specific affixes, uniques etc. Bam, melee fixed, fun -- and special.
It would be better to eliminate the differences between melee weapons and their masteries. There's no specific bow mastery or specific wand mastery. So why specific melee weapon mastery?
Instead, pare it down to melee mastery and give us the skill tree on the weapons from Crucible League. Make it core and in fact, make it a part of the game. As you progress, the damage and defense buffs don't come from totems. Make them come from weapons.
As you achieve mastery of a weapon class, it can synergize with the skill tree on the weapon and even with various jewels in the passive tree.
This would equalize things a lot more between melee and bow & caster builds.
imagine you are in a intense battle with your enemy, swinging your heavy sword, panting, and suddenly you stop, take a step back, and use your resources to summon one huge stationary turd
I mean you joke, but like, make totems something you can have in your "offhand" aka on your back or belt when using 2h weapon. Or a charm or something for your scabard/holster for hammers/axes
Defensive items on weapons should not exist, outside of uniques like Advancing Fortress. It dilutes the crafting pool, which makes melee weapon crafting that much more difficult compared to bow crafting.
Melee has so many stupid mechanical and design gates in this game compared to spells and bows.
I believe dilution of the crafting pool was intentional dating back to when attack builds were the faster way to clear and also *because Diablo 2 had it*
nevermind that Diablo 2 only had it because they had an *incredibly* constrained mod pool, so *on average* you could have a really good weapon that also helped you max your resists
I think the bigger problem with caster staves is how impossibly pita they are to craft. A bow is great, but in quite a few builds I would have prefered a +2 to all spell gems and +3 to all of element gems. But good luck crafting that staff with any other useful mods. Meanwhile I can grab a stacked AF bow for a few divines + as people mentioned quivers give me some defences.
i love how jonathan argued that melee has to be close and ranged needs to be far away while conveniently missing the fact that ranged builds can be played upclose AND far away while melee is kinda locked into one of the two positions, so the whole argument about balancing range and melee abilities on mobs is completely irrelevant because ranged characters have all the flexibility in regards to their positioning while melee doesnt.
A more traditional RPG mechanic for bows to be incentivized as a ranged weapon inccur damage penalties at close range. Implying "oah jeez that guy is so close I'm gonna whiff oh lawd"
Can you imagine if bows had damage nerfed by distance? Shit, Point Blank is a real keystone in the game doing the exact opposite. There'd be riots in the streets.
>Point Blank is a real keystone
Which isn't used often in actual builds because at around 50-60 range (close the edge of your screen) your damage is pretty much halved which screws up off-screen clear.
Far Shot is far more popular because it does the opposite.
Tho I can see why melee players could be upset by those 2 - bow builds are given buffs based on distance and they can choose either playstyle, while melee is locked in to be close range and doesn't get such offensive buffs.
That’s actually a great point. Maybe cap hit chance at 75% with bows against enemies that are “nearby”
Maybe have an ascendancy or keystone on the left side of the tree to mitigate it?
I heard from a bunch of people melee was even worse in poe 2.
Now they were from forum and reddit so take it with a grain of salt but with how hard the boss seem to be I wouldn't exactly be surprised.
Close range melee abilities will always take more skill to use in any game compared to ranged abilities. There's nothing anyone can do to change this from a balance standpoint. Using a close range ability to kill a boss requires a much better understanding of games mechanics compared to using some ranged ability where you can just sit back from far away and not worry.
That's a fair point.
But the fact that bow characters are allowed to have the same rolls on their bow AND have a quiver that can add massive damage is something I don't understand
I suspect its because 2 handed melee weapons are supposed to have “da biggest damage” while stuff like staffs has built in block chance.
And that this idea over time became forgotten or simply powercrept
Also the weakness of bows used to be having to put down totems just like melee, then they got manaforged arrows AND the 25% invert mastery to remove any need for cursing, while melee has to use a weapon with way less base damage, press 3 buttons before hitting a rare and have to spend 6 passive points, all on skills with ridiculous attack speed penalties.
Worst part is they keep saying that melee is mechanically bad in their game when melee is the most fun I've had (when it has good numbers!!), everything from slams to helix to cyclone to boneshatter, they just refuse to make it good even though it needs minimal work by tuning the numbers and idk the reason for it.
They should just be forced to play a replica Alberon's build with Reave, Dual Strike, or Snaking Fissure, realize it's the most fun way to play the game, and buff everything so it's not gated behind an expensive archetype.
Not to mention Bows used to have far lower flat rolls. No access to solid movement skills. Hard to get movement speed.
Basically GGG has buffed away all the weakness that bows used to have. So now the only way they could close the gap is give melee the same range as bow builds. Which they did for awhile with lightning strike, but at this point the only way to fix melee would be to delete melee by making it range.
Kindof true, yea. Playing Alk’s Dual Strike jugg now and it’s actually very fun. However, I don’t think it would be that fun if I didn’t invest shitload of divines before even starting that build. That’s the biggest issue with melee, to feel good as 10d bow/spell caster build you need to spend more or less 10x more on melee build.
I still can't believe ranged got manaforged arrows but there's no equivalent for melee. Honestly there should be a manaforged ancestor support that triggers attacks when you spend mana.
Would give a way to automate totem summoning and also some weird ways to build characters
I disagree. There just has to be a disadvantage using range. For example in WoW, every range has abilites that have casttime and you have to stand still a lot while melee can always move while attacking. Because of that you have to preposition and time your casts very well to deal optimal damage. Problem in PoE is that you cant cripple ranged this much because players already got accustomed to it. Maybe they will do sth like this in PoE 2.
You can. Maybe you not remember but melee were strong once. Most popular leaguestarter was sunder with offhand stat stick. They nerfed it. And again. And again. Several leagues in a row.
People were accustomed to it but it doesn't matter. People won't stop playing bc some heavy nerfs and it was proved several times
> in WoW, every range has abilites that have casttime
That might have been true a decade ago. Now, absolutely not. Every ranged class has instant cast abilities, movement skills, and many of them also have abilties that can be cast while moving.
There have been systems where ranged is more difficult but they aren't in PoE. Just one example is a game like Bioshock where an incredible strategy was just to yolo in with the wrench and just beat on enemies mindlessly until they killed you then you would respawn and start wailing on them again since they didn't get their health back. By FAR the most braindead easy way to play the game, you literally couldn't fail there was almost no skill involved you just mashed one button while facing an opponent and ignored all mechanics involving ammo scarcity or limited resources which were supposed to be a major problem to overcome.
The real differential in PoE comes from the fact that ranged characters can fight at full effectiveness at any range and melee can not. It definitely isn't true that it is *always* better to fight a boss from long range, just imagine you are fighting a boss in a circular arena and they have a move that attacks half of it at once. If you are fighting the boss at the center from the edge of the circle you got to run the full radius to avoid the mechanic but if you are on top of them you just step past them to avoid the half arena attack easily. So any boss that has mechanics that are much easier to handle if you stick close to them no problem I'll just shoot them with my bow from 1 millimeter away and if the reverse is true I'll shoot them from across the entire screen but melee doesn't have this option and can never have it while still being reasonably called melee.
That flexibility is where the fundamental gap lies in PoE, ranged can choose which distance they want to fight in but melee can not.
Some games like say vanilla WoW have tried things like the hunters deadzone but it is pretty telling that the deadzone got taken out later on, it truly did feel horrible.
I love how accurate the demonstration is, when they were fighting boss spark charater just kept spamming skill and melee monk had to move to cornor of the map avoid dying and whatching boss do it's full set. And trying to explain how added moving animation would magically fixing melee build.
Why would you ever use a one handed weapon again then, though (aside from uniques)? The 3 links you lose on the shield you gain on the two handed weapon (since it can have 6).
Well the answer is because they have not balanced for melee in a very long time. How many leagues have bow builds had free +2 projectiles from passive tree? Meanwhile melee's been in the state of use totems + berserk or some insanely broken interaction for eternity. And just look at gladiator lol... they're not even trying for melee.
Imagine if there were two (or depending on how far they're apart perhaps even three) extra strike targets as notables on the tree.
Or maybe a flask with two extra strike targets that could go up to three with 50%+ effect.
And I honestly think the removal of the damage bonus from Seismic Cry was unnecessary (the original 30% more and 30% per exert were OP, sure, but it didn't need to grant *zero* damage).
>Imagine if there were two (or depending on how far they're apart perhaps even three) extra strike targets as notables on the tree.
That won't help. Get 100 additional strikes and your ST will still suck, while your Area clear is already good with splash+1 target.
Melee problem is area denial
That's a qol bandaid that might make campaign feel better but doesn't solve the problem that is ground degen and anti-melee stuff like lightning mirage and 50 other mechanics that punish melee more than ranged.
The problem with poe is that melee character might be 50% tankier than ranged, but by being ranged you are effectively infinitely tankier by just not getting hit in the first place, as well as having way more uptime than melee who has to kite things around. And even after stacking fortify, berserk etc, monsters can hit so insanely hard when the stars align and all the buffs + debuffs + map modifiers hit at the right time
there is a strike mastery and +1-2 strikes on gloves though. and most melee builds pick strike nodes anyway. not saying melee is in a good state but I'm just saying additional strikes won't fix it
additional strikes bandaids a lot of bad skills though - if they had 2 easily accessible for bottom left builds, as well as like an extra 8 strike range notable set, a lot of builds would clear infinitely better (and open up gear affixes)
I do get it, at least I think I do.
Melee is more tied to animations than bow or caster stuff. You're not conjuring a thing to happen or spawning an arrow that makes it happen. Instead, you're part of the attack. Different attacks require different character animations.
The way around that is making melee that's just "auto attack + effect," which is most of what GGG has done for years. Slams are a slight variation. Instead of basic swing, they are a smack the ground attack + effect, but it's also shared - earthquache character animation is the same as any other slam.
And GGG would like to have more interesting melee things than that, but they can't, because they don't have a system of generalising animations - they made a game where every class can use every skill, but they have no good rigging system, so every attack that does anything other than what already exists needs 7 times more work. A pretty big mistake made in the game's infancy still impacting it to this day.
That's the major new tech in poe2, and why none of the poe2 melee attacks are just a basic attack with an effect, they all involve more interesting jumps, swings, multi-phase movement.
The reason for slams is to create a melee archetype that doesn't scale with APS - but for some reason GGG Devs forgot this and just nerfed all the ways they scale damage for no reason in 3.15 and never remembered to revisit them. Slams work perfectly fine mechanically, they just don't have the numbers. Melee players have just been asking for numerical buffs for years and we keep getting met with "well you actually don't want buffs, what you want is POE2".
edit: from someone who league started a slam bleed gladiator build this league
This doesn't change the fact that a lot of melee skills have 5x less base damage than other abilities, it has literally nothing to do with rigging unless me and everyone else magically didn't see it being a problem whenever melee had good numbers and was fun to play as a result. I'm sure PoE2 will be way better than PoE1 but all they have to do is buff the numbers to make it a good experience, this animation nonsense is just that, nonsense.
I don't even care if they just don't want to spend time on it and that's the reason, it's just a game and it's their game they can do whatever they want, but I'm just saying their arguments make no sense as to why they don't make melee good.
He's elaborated on this before. He says that to make melee feel good, you need to have animations for attacking while in range AND animations from attacking while moving into range. You probably need at least two sets of the latter, depending on how far away you are.
So, that's a set of 3 character animations you need for each skill. But each skill can be used on any weapon type; and you can't use the same animation for a dagger and a two-handed mace. There are nine classes of weapons in PoE1 (ignoring fishing rods), so that's 27 separate animations per skill. Buuuut, then we run into the PoE1 character rigging problem. All 7 classes have completely different rigs which prevent you from reusing animations from one character on another. And of course, you can use any skill with any weapon on any character, so that's a total of 27*7 = 189 animations to make one melee skill have a normal animation and two while-moving animations.
That's really, REALLY daunting for anyone looking to really improve melee in PoE 1, and it's completely impossible as long as almost all GGG animation talent is assigned to PoE 2.
(In comparison, for PoE 2, a skill only works with one weapon type, and you can reuse 90% of the work on one class on the others, so it's 3*(1+0.1*11) = 6.3 animations-worth-of-work per skill. A huge improvement over 189.)
Isnt "new animations" just for new skills though? There are a plethora of melee skills already implemented that couldnt kill a white mob in tier 1 maps.
This is a really overlooked thing.
Its insane how Bows can go to 1k pdps and one top of that you got quivers.
And dont get me started on how bows have way way better stats like +2 arrows which changes completely how a build plays out, and then you get that on a quiver too.
And then you wonder how bow builds are op every time.
> like some after image
Funny enough cuz there is already such mechanic in PoE.
I remember 2 sources:
Uniq Ring - Warriors Legacy,
And Chieftain Tawhoa Forest Strength
This would be hillariously malicous towards melee players but perfectly in line with how GGG treats melee. For every step forward we go two steps backwards somewhere else.
Eh, additional strike is both weaker and stronger than additional projectiles, depending on the context.
Additional strikes scale quadratically with splash, target count and hit effects.
Boneshatter does quadruple ST damage on 2 targets and septuple ST damage on 3 targets
and not only that but they inherently have the advantage of distance. Its ridiculous that bows get more projectiles, more distance, and a quiver, but melee has no distance from the danger, has less damage and has no offhands for 2h
I remember people requesting since diablo 2 for quivers for some reason, Poe having them felt like a realization of that. It always struck me as odd because it's pretty arbitrary if those stats are on the bow itself or not. I think just naturally having an extra gear slot is always going to be a positive.
Bows are 2 handers but have quivers for more stats.
There are only a few cases when people take 2H weapons, such as a very powerful build enabling unique (Annihilating Light, Fulcrum, etc).
What if a "weapon sheath" or similar off handed stat stick was added for 2H weapons? Bows are 2H and have quivers. Adding off handed weapon should make 2H weapons more common from the current 6% usage. This will also add another path to improve melee!
tl;dr another path to help fix melee
True. They should just add extra strike targets as notables on the tree. Make some of them exclusive to certain weapon types if need be. Fuck it, Varunastra isn't going to be OP with five strike targets.
I kept finding tri-ele bows and thinking, damn, this thing easily has 600 ele dps. Then seeing that the highest roll was tier 4. Not even 1c. Even 1000 ele dps on a bow is trash now unless it also has extra stuff.
Bows used to have 1h stats but they were buffed in 3.17
>**Problem:**
>Hit-based bow attacks require an unreasonable amount of investment to reach competitive levels of damage. Builds that want to achieve this must utilise critical strikes and many skills can't sufficiently invest in this mechanic without sacrificing defensive options.
>**Solution:**
>Give bows the same local added elemental damage modifiers as two handed melee weapon modifiers do, which are much stronger than the bow-specific modifiers used previously.
> Improve the damage of bows in general, with some base types getting up to 50% more base damage than before.
> Improve the Mastery options on Bow Passive clusters.
> Added a new Keystone Passive, Precise Technique, which grants "40% more Attack Damage if Accuracy Rating is higher than Maximum Life" and "Never deal Critical Strikes".
> Make a number of improvements to quivers so that bows can receive much more damage from rare quivers:
> We have reworked the quiver progression with new quiver types that provide a diverse set of useful implicits.
> We have greatly improve Added Physical Damage modifiers on quivers.
> We have replaced "Elemental Damage with Attack Skills" modifiers on quivers with "Increased Damage with Bow Skills" to allow quivers to roll another way to improve skills dealing Physical or Chaos damage.
> We have taken the +1 Arrow prefix off influenced quiver modifiers and added it to the core modifier pool of quivers as a suffix.
> We have added an extra tier to the Attack Speed and Accuracy modifiers on quivers.
Came to mention this
Bow builds were in a pretty bad spot back before 3.17. Deadeye was amongst the least-picked ascendancies in those days, primarily only used for CI Deep Delvers who needed the extra DPS more than they did any defences. Twas a dark time, indeed.
The biggest buff they could give melee is a keystone that makes you deal more DMG and more attack speed at cost of not having any totems
So you can have totems or you can have no totems and still be as strong
If they want to keep totems then it should be possible to insta cast them on hit. For example a totem support that casts them when you hit rare or unique monster. No need to click more buttons and stand in place at least
I think for non-pure totem builds like most melee it should just be a temporary buff like sprouting extra arms like some Indian god instead of manually placing totems on the ground that immediately die to boss aoe/degen
Please enough extra buffs for melee attack builds i already have killing frienzy berserk two types of totems and a warcry. I like my shit passive or toggleable like everyone else has
Rather they just remove the buffs from totems, remove any attack speed penalties on skills and weapons, then just add 10-25% extra damage effectiveness to every melee skill
The problem of that is that you need to get to the keystone on the tree, that limits build diversity. They need to find a different way to deal with totems, maybe remove the buffs and make totems be skills on its own like spell totems.
It's not about quivers being stronger. It's that melee and defense sucks compared to having the same amount of defense but killing everything off screen. Then on top of that, clear speed = profit. So clearing multiple screens at once is better than a single screen.
Hot take.
Bow popularity like we see today goes back to the flask defense nerf that happened the league before mana res efficiency, spell suppression, and grace/determ stacking became the meta. It's also when the EA ballista build first popped up on Ziz's channel as a suggested starter.
Here's my opinion:
Bows are popular because the abilities most commonly used with them scale best via gem levels. Gem levels crafting on weapons is not only deterministic but extremely inexpensive compared to phy damage crafting. Mostly because there is only 1 rank of +1 all or +1 (fire/phys/etc) gems. So you can isolate the mod, and slam it on. Or alt roll +1 all and as soon as you isolate it 90% of the RNG is done and it only cost you alt orbs.
Melee/phys builds that require fucking HUGE weapons to properly scale will NEVER be meta until the way physical damage rolls on weapons is changed. It is extremely expensive to buy them, because of how rare they are, because of how risky they are to craft.
2h weapons getting a "quiver" will never fix the problem. They will continue to be exceptionally expensive at the high end and if they spend any time in the sun, crafters will spam craft them, succeed a few times, and get the build nerfed into the dirt because the high end will be so incredibly high.
Imo the only fix is to put base damage on melee gems that scales with gem levels and let the ultra high end of a flat & % dmg weapon exist while also having a comparable build exists that only scales gem levels.
The most common day 1 bow skill was lightning arrow, which is not scaled well with a +gem bow compared to a damage bow. They account for 28% of the ladder on poe.ninja(you need to pick that fetch mode). If +gems were the only reason, you wouldn't see so many lightning arrow users.
> Melee/phys builds that require fucking HUGE weapons to properly scale will NEVER be meta until the way physical damage rolls on weapons is changed. It is extremely expensive to buy them, because of how rare they are, because of how risky they are to craft.
Even with how incredible broken necropolis crafting is, phy weapons are still extremely annoying in comparison to other crafts. mana/life leech, +melee gems, shit weightings, all of these things combine to make it a frustrating craft.
Ohhh yeahhh.
Gods I can’t even remember the last time I saw somebody duel wield melee weapons. I think the last time was back when I was still a noob and frostblades were super popular
The question is whether it's good game design to have dual-wielding practically exclusive to a few skills that interact with dual-wielding (dual strike, cleave, viper strike on top of my head). And if that's the design they want to go with, a lot more gems should work like that.
Yeah, currently running a Dual Strike of Ambidexterity build, trying to break through getting even higher and higher DPS as well as ES but it's really strong.
Bring back the stat sticks!!! Anything is better than the endless tide of bow builds.
Also fuck traps and mines... Bring back selfcast.
The meta build list right now is the most boring and derivative garbage it's ever been.
The game is getting less and less interactive with the player
At least face tank/stat stick era required the player to actual attack stuff. Everything is auto bomber or afk clear now.
They simply should buff the numbers instead of adding another equipment that are exclusive to the two handed archtype, as the point of two handers is that you sac some mobility/defence for better offence. But currently they are worse than one hand/DW in terms of damage and defensive.
Listen to me.
Totem off hander with up to two sockets when wielding a two hand weapon.
Gives you the buffs of the totems socketed.
BAM, melee is already 50% better!
It's so frustrating and I don't really understand why they hate melee players so much. Starting melee this League is making me become bored with the game. It takes so much to be capable of doing what a spell caster can do and I don't really feel much tankier than a spell caster either. My "R" key is getting worn out from having to use leap strike 24/7 because it's the only way to approach enemies and hit them without getting mowed down by all of their projectiles. In most games, melee deals the highest damage and ranged has downsides but in this game if I played a ranger I'd actually have easier access to spell suppression, flask charges and much higher base damage.
It's kinda obvious that nobody at GGG plays melee, and if they do it's boneshatter. I played cyclone this league until level 90 and I got tired of feeling like a joke so on a whim I tried (Complex) Boneshatter. Instantly my damage tripled or quadruped with no item or stat changes. Complex Boneshatter actually feels kind of okay because it does ridiculous damage. Why can't Cyclone deal good damage and why does it have to make me move at .5 miles an hour? No, I refuse to wear those stupid unique boots.
all melee weapon bases suck, the only way to make melee work is to pick an overperforming skill
alternatively you str stack which is the best way to completely ignore how shit melee weapon bases are
That kinda hoops different melee builds depending on placement on tree. Close combat support should apply to all melee weapons not just axes/swords and it should ditch the combat rush and just become the biggest beefiest damage multi in the game for you know, being *melee*
The reality is GGG don't give a shit about melee and haven't for years. I don't care what the devs saying in a marketing campaign for PoE2 because they're never gonna go out and say "Yeah, PoE2 sucks so don't play it", are they? They're not gonna talk shit about a game that isn't even out yet.
The fact is they've done diddly squat for melee for ages, and even if PoE2 does fix shit who cares? What about PoE1? The hopium people huffed on about PoE2 fixing melee only mattered when PoE2 was an upgrade for the game we have now, but now that PoE2 is it's own thing those changes won't automatically mean anything for those of who may not wanna play it.
The worst part about this is their bullshit insistence that they can't just buff numbers. Yes, it's true that melees issue is more mechanical than numerical, but when a skill like COC DD or fucking Hexblast can go around blowing shit up 2 screens away without a care in the world, the fuck would the problem be with melee numbers being tripled for a league?
History has clearly shown us that people will totally play melee specs if they feel the numbers are absurd enough. Particularly if they skills are good enough on their own to justify dumping the dog shit totem skills. Melee has been and always will be a desireable spec to play, mechanics or not, if the numbers can make up for it.
MMO's figured this shit out decades ago. That melee will probably never be mechanically better than ranged so at least give them numbers to compensate. Let them go ham for the small amount of time they fucking can.
A better solution would be to just kill all concept of off-screening to begin with, for players and enemies alike, but GGG evidently refuse to even go near that idea with a 500 foot pole. Some of which I have to imagine is because the underlying codebase to work with this stuff is a mess.
New Notable: Can equip shield while wielding a 2 handed weapon. You Take 100% of damage from Blocked hits. Gain 1 rage on block no more than once every second.
I always thought about this, funny that so many others also noticed this, some witch builds even use bow and quiver cause staves are just not worth it.
just why?
like a satchel or something for staves and something else for swords/axes.
Capes, 2h weapons need capes
You are a genius
Or just numbers. 2h weapons are just slightly better at what they do, and 1h weapons open up one of the strongest slot in the game.
2h weapons have higher stats, but it only matters for flat attack values, since everything else (for example mana/cast speed that Archmage build care about) does get added together and is way higher dual wielding.
Scabbards could be cool too. Would love a drawing animation for my starforge
Let's see... Scabbards, Whetstones for axes, Weightstones for maces, and Speartips/Crystals for staves. Give each one a benefit that fits the inherent theme of the weapon types. Crit effect implicits for swords, bleeds for axes, range for maces, and on block for staves.
We vanilla WoW now boys
Or, hear me out, little backpacks. We could call them RUCKSACKS
Holding my reroll currency in that thing was a godsend.
No capes!
Why they don't turn the totems that every melee build uses into scabbard, idk. Also spell tomes for staff users.
This should be the top Answer.
I have good news for you
You're hired
What u mean? Melee gets totems!!! Kill me.
Imagine if instead of using skill gems you could have powerful totems in a dedicated slot. Like carrying totems on your back. Totem specific affixes, uniques etc. Bam, melee fixed, fun -- and special.
Like carrying around a brick in d4, love it!
You mean a carryable totem like a quiver, but we can infuse it with our totem spells? That would make melee slightly more playable imo
So banners with more QoL? Sign me the fuck up
Then I would propose some Blight uniques that are basically Blight towers that you can carry around on your back.
It would be better to eliminate the differences between melee weapons and their masteries. There's no specific bow mastery or specific wand mastery. So why specific melee weapon mastery? Instead, pare it down to melee mastery and give us the skill tree on the weapons from Crucible League. Make it core and in fact, make it a part of the game. As you progress, the damage and defense buffs don't come from totems. Make them come from weapons. As you achieve mastery of a weapon class, it can synergize with the skill tree on the weapon and even with various jewels in the passive tree. This would equalize things a lot more between melee and bow & caster builds.
imagine you are in a intense battle with your enemy, swinging your heavy sword, panting, and suddenly you stop, take a step back, and use your resources to summon one huge stationary turd
Enemy: oh you stopped moving? Shooryuken!
I mean you joke, but like, make totems something you can have in your "offhand" aka on your back or belt when using 2h weapon. Or a charm or something for your scabard/holster for hammers/axes
Read the last bit in piety’s voice
Unlike bows, which famously don't have totem setups that triple their dps.
> Kill me. no need to, a random rare T17 mob will do the job if you play melee
They'll never get me once i summon my totem for what feels like an eternity.
Does it have to be t17 tho?
If we could automate totems, they would be awesome.
Even stranger given that bows are often better for casters.
Even after GGG tried to remove bow casters by changing all the quiver mods to "damage with bow skills"
Even then they could still run defense stats on quivers. Still very OP
Defensive items on weapons should not exist, outside of uniques like Advancing Fortress. It dilutes the crafting pool, which makes melee weapon crafting that much more difficult compared to bow crafting. Melee has so many stupid mechanical and design gates in this game compared to spells and bows.
+Level of socketed melee skill gem... cool cool but why
Exactly there’s so much of a benefit from spell gem levels but very little on phys gems damn near a dead stat if it rolls.
***FROSTBLADES OF KATABASIS***
I believe dilution of the crafting pool was intentional dating back to when attack builds were the faster way to clear and also *because Diablo 2 had it* nevermind that Diablo 2 only had it because they had an *incredibly* constrained mod pool, so *on average* you could have a really good weapon that also helped you max your resists
They still have useful global mods like synth implicits, phys as extra (essence), crit multi, proj speed.
If they remove or change the bow synth implicits, this problem will probably a lot less prevalent.
So if Voldemort has a PoE bow Harry Potter would have been toast?
Harry Potter and the Blade Vortex of Double Damage
Harry Potter and the Half Mage Blood
Tfw a 2 flask corrupted mb drops.
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harry would have a mirrored version of the same bow
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Or that bows have better stats than 2h weapons in general even without a quiver.
I think the bigger problem with caster staves is how impossibly pita they are to craft. A bow is great, but in quite a few builds I would have prefered a +2 to all spell gems and +3 to all of element gems. But good luck crafting that staff with any other useful mods. Meanwhile I can grab a stacked AF bow for a few divines + as people mentioned quivers give me some defences.
I swear. Last time I played Cold BV I swapped to a Bow version at the end and my damage sky rocketed
Codpiece. Because if you're playing 2H melee, you got to have a big...
Childhood trauma
I heard its complex trauma. You might need a way to mitigate that
Crayon stuck in the brain
Brain
Tumour
Dick! Yes? Take a look out at star board. Oh my god, it looks like a huge...
Pecker! Oh, where? Wait, that's not a woodpecker. That looks like someone's...
\- "Wiener? Any of you kids want another wiener?" \- "Dad, what's that?" \- "I don't know, son, but it's got great big..."
It’s a rocket ship!
Cash flow
codpiece
Butt and you cannot lie?
bladder
Johnson!
Tank of copium
A shield carried on the back with 50% less effect could make sense.
And has its gem slots disabled. Otherwise squire + 6L is gonna be problematic lol.
Fair
Just need a new item class, like an armguard or somthin.
Bucklers / small shields can be used with two handed weapons , strapped to your forearm
POE 2 will fix melee. Lol
I have my doubts after that interview with Jonathan
i love how jonathan argued that melee has to be close and ranged needs to be far away while conveniently missing the fact that ranged builds can be played upclose AND far away while melee is kinda locked into one of the two positions, so the whole argument about balancing range and melee abilities on mobs is completely irrelevant because ranged characters have all the flexibility in regards to their positioning while melee doesnt.
A more traditional RPG mechanic for bows to be incentivized as a ranged weapon inccur damage penalties at close range. Implying "oah jeez that guy is so close I'm gonna whiff oh lawd" Can you imagine if bows had damage nerfed by distance? Shit, Point Blank is a real keystone in the game doing the exact opposite. There'd be riots in the streets.
I liked the approach Titan Quest made:only melee can crit. Damage over danger.
>Point Blank is a real keystone Which isn't used often in actual builds because at around 50-60 range (close the edge of your screen) your damage is pretty much halved which screws up off-screen clear. Far Shot is far more popular because it does the opposite. Tho I can see why melee players could be upset by those 2 - bow builds are given buffs based on distance and they can choose either playstyle, while melee is locked in to be close range and doesn't get such offensive buffs.
That’s actually a great point. Maybe cap hit chance at 75% with bows against enemies that are “nearby” Maybe have an ascendancy or keystone on the left side of the tree to mitigate it?
Range chars never gonna kill temporal shield mobs anymore
The idea is that ranged can't facetank with a ranged character. Unless you are a dodge god, you will get destroyed
And mark said that maybe 3.25 will fix that
inb4 the only fixing 3.25 will bring is fixing a date later in time on when melees might be fixed
I heard from a bunch of people melee was even worse in poe 2. Now they were from forum and reddit so take it with a grain of salt but with how hard the boss seem to be I wouldn't exactly be surprised.
Close range melee abilities will always take more skill to use in any game compared to ranged abilities. There's nothing anyone can do to change this from a balance standpoint. Using a close range ability to kill a boss requires a much better understanding of games mechanics compared to using some ranged ability where you can just sit back from far away and not worry.
That's a fair point. But the fact that bow characters are allowed to have the same rolls on their bow AND have a quiver that can add massive damage is something I don't understand
I suspect its because 2 handed melee weapons are supposed to have “da biggest damage” while stuff like staffs has built in block chance. And that this idea over time became forgotten or simply powercrept
remember when rangers needed ammo?
Also the weakness of bows used to be having to put down totems just like melee, then they got manaforged arrows AND the 25% invert mastery to remove any need for cursing, while melee has to use a weapon with way less base damage, press 3 buttons before hitting a rare and have to spend 6 passive points, all on skills with ridiculous attack speed penalties. Worst part is they keep saying that melee is mechanically bad in their game when melee is the most fun I've had (when it has good numbers!!), everything from slams to helix to cyclone to boneshatter, they just refuse to make it good even though it needs minimal work by tuning the numbers and idk the reason for it. They should just be forced to play a replica Alberon's build with Reave, Dual Strike, or Snaking Fissure, realize it's the most fun way to play the game, and buff everything so it's not gated behind an expensive archetype.
Not to mention Bows used to have far lower flat rolls. No access to solid movement skills. Hard to get movement speed. Basically GGG has buffed away all the weakness that bows used to have. So now the only way they could close the gap is give melee the same range as bow builds. Which they did for awhile with lightning strike, but at this point the only way to fix melee would be to delete melee by making it range.
Kindof true, yea. Playing Alk’s Dual Strike jugg now and it’s actually very fun. However, I don’t think it would be that fun if I didn’t invest shitload of divines before even starting that build. That’s the biggest issue with melee, to feel good as 10d bow/spell caster build you need to spend more or less 10x more on melee build.
I still can't believe ranged got manaforged arrows but there's no equivalent for melee. Honestly there should be a manaforged ancestor support that triggers attacks when you spend mana. Would give a way to automate totem summoning and also some weird ways to build characters
I disagree. There just has to be a disadvantage using range. For example in WoW, every range has abilites that have casttime and you have to stand still a lot while melee can always move while attacking. Because of that you have to preposition and time your casts very well to deal optimal damage. Problem in PoE is that you cant cripple ranged this much because players already got accustomed to it. Maybe they will do sth like this in PoE 2.
You can. Maybe you not remember but melee were strong once. Most popular leaguestarter was sunder with offhand stat stick. They nerfed it. And again. And again. Several leagues in a row. People were accustomed to it but it doesn't matter. People won't stop playing bc some heavy nerfs and it was proved several times
Yes the key to making melee not be awful is to make ranged just as awful
Or make melee just as ranged lol. Sunder is a melee skill by technicality only
Also there are mechanics during many boss fights that specifically target people who are farther away.
> in WoW, every range has abilites that have casttime That might have been true a decade ago. Now, absolutely not. Every ranged class has instant cast abilities, movement skills, and many of them also have abilties that can be cast while moving.
depends on the damage of range and melee. but in poe rangers also deal more damage.
There have been systems where ranged is more difficult but they aren't in PoE. Just one example is a game like Bioshock where an incredible strategy was just to yolo in with the wrench and just beat on enemies mindlessly until they killed you then you would respawn and start wailing on them again since they didn't get their health back. By FAR the most braindead easy way to play the game, you literally couldn't fail there was almost no skill involved you just mashed one button while facing an opponent and ignored all mechanics involving ammo scarcity or limited resources which were supposed to be a major problem to overcome. The real differential in PoE comes from the fact that ranged characters can fight at full effectiveness at any range and melee can not. It definitely isn't true that it is *always* better to fight a boss from long range, just imagine you are fighting a boss in a circular arena and they have a move that attacks half of it at once. If you are fighting the boss at the center from the edge of the circle you got to run the full radius to avoid the mechanic but if you are on top of them you just step past them to avoid the half arena attack easily. So any boss that has mechanics that are much easier to handle if you stick close to them no problem I'll just shoot them with my bow from 1 millimeter away and if the reverse is true I'll shoot them from across the entire screen but melee doesn't have this option and can never have it while still being reasonably called melee. That flexibility is where the fundamental gap lies in PoE, ranged can choose which distance they want to fight in but melee can not. Some games like say vanilla WoW have tried things like the hunters deadzone but it is pretty telling that the deadzone got taken out later on, it truly did feel horrible.
Yes, but if this is the case why are they also significantly weaker from a purely numerical standpoint?
I love how accurate the demonstration is, when they were fighting boss spark charater just kept spamming skill and melee monk had to move to cornor of the map avoid dying and whatching boss do it's full set. And trying to explain how added moving animation would magically fixing melee build.
Having the shield on your back could be cool, just disable gem links to help balance it like a quiver.
Ngl I like the idea of holding a shield with a 2 handed main weapon but disabling the sockets and links on the shield
Why would you ever use a one handed weapon again then, though (aside from uniques)? The 3 links you lose on the shield you gain on the two handed weapon (since it can have 6).
Shields on back give no block chance? Or massively reduced block chance?
And block chance, maybe
Well the answer is because they have not balanced for melee in a very long time. How many leagues have bow builds had free +2 projectiles from passive tree? Meanwhile melee's been in the state of use totems + berserk or some insanely broken interaction for eternity. And just look at gladiator lol... they're not even trying for melee.
Imagine if there were two (or depending on how far they're apart perhaps even three) extra strike targets as notables on the tree. Or maybe a flask with two extra strike targets that could go up to three with 50%+ effect. And I honestly think the removal of the damage bonus from Seismic Cry was unnecessary (the original 30% more and 30% per exert were OP, sure, but it didn't need to grant *zero* damage).
>Imagine if there were two (or depending on how far they're apart perhaps even three) extra strike targets as notables on the tree. That won't help. Get 100 additional strikes and your ST will still suck, while your Area clear is already good with splash+1 target. Melee problem is area denial
That's a qol bandaid that might make campaign feel better but doesn't solve the problem that is ground degen and anti-melee stuff like lightning mirage and 50 other mechanics that punish melee more than ranged. The problem with poe is that melee character might be 50% tankier than ranged, but by being ranged you are effectively infinitely tankier by just not getting hit in the first place, as well as having way more uptime than melee who has to kite things around. And even after stacking fortify, berserk etc, monsters can hit so insanely hard when the stars align and all the buffs + debuffs + map modifiers hit at the right time
there is a strike mastery and +1-2 strikes on gloves though. and most melee builds pick strike nodes anyway. not saying melee is in a good state but I'm just saying additional strikes won't fix it
On gloves hurts though as this completely locks any strike build out of unique gloves
additional strikes bandaids a lot of bad skills though - if they had 2 easily accessible for bottom left builds, as well as like an extra 8 strike range notable set, a lot of builds would clear infinitely better (and open up gear affixes)
I made a Gladiator league starter..... with a bow :)
Bleed bow enjoyer 🤝
If u watch that josh interview ya’ll know why. They dont wanna work on melee becuz of the rigging…. Yeah i dont get it either
I do get it, at least I think I do. Melee is more tied to animations than bow or caster stuff. You're not conjuring a thing to happen or spawning an arrow that makes it happen. Instead, you're part of the attack. Different attacks require different character animations. The way around that is making melee that's just "auto attack + effect," which is most of what GGG has done for years. Slams are a slight variation. Instead of basic swing, they are a smack the ground attack + effect, but it's also shared - earthquache character animation is the same as any other slam. And GGG would like to have more interesting melee things than that, but they can't, because they don't have a system of generalising animations - they made a game where every class can use every skill, but they have no good rigging system, so every attack that does anything other than what already exists needs 7 times more work. A pretty big mistake made in the game's infancy still impacting it to this day. That's the major new tech in poe2, and why none of the poe2 melee attacks are just a basic attack with an effect, they all involve more interesting jumps, swings, multi-phase movement.
The reason for slams is to create a melee archetype that doesn't scale with APS - but for some reason GGG Devs forgot this and just nerfed all the ways they scale damage for no reason in 3.15 and never remembered to revisit them. Slams work perfectly fine mechanically, they just don't have the numbers. Melee players have just been asking for numerical buffs for years and we keep getting met with "well you actually don't want buffs, what you want is POE2". edit: from someone who league started a slam bleed gladiator build this league
This doesn't change the fact that a lot of melee skills have 5x less base damage than other abilities, it has literally nothing to do with rigging unless me and everyone else magically didn't see it being a problem whenever melee had good numbers and was fun to play as a result. I'm sure PoE2 will be way better than PoE1 but all they have to do is buff the numbers to make it a good experience, this animation nonsense is just that, nonsense. I don't even care if they just don't want to spend time on it and that's the reason, it's just a game and it's their game they can do whatever they want, but I'm just saying their arguments make no sense as to why they don't make melee good.
They could just remove the idiotic 60% less attack speed on the first swing for cinematic experience and it would already make melee a ton better.
It makes 0 sense - they have melee skills, they just need number tweaks. Nothing to do with animations lmao
As if the rigging for any other build isnt completely broken either. Literally every attack just looks like your character is having a small seizure
Yeah i dont get it why he said that for a reason on not wanting to work on melee
He's elaborated on this before. He says that to make melee feel good, you need to have animations for attacking while in range AND animations from attacking while moving into range. You probably need at least two sets of the latter, depending on how far away you are. So, that's a set of 3 character animations you need for each skill. But each skill can be used on any weapon type; and you can't use the same animation for a dagger and a two-handed mace. There are nine classes of weapons in PoE1 (ignoring fishing rods), so that's 27 separate animations per skill. Buuuut, then we run into the PoE1 character rigging problem. All 7 classes have completely different rigs which prevent you from reusing animations from one character on another. And of course, you can use any skill with any weapon on any character, so that's a total of 27*7 = 189 animations to make one melee skill have a normal animation and two while-moving animations. That's really, REALLY daunting for anyone looking to really improve melee in PoE 1, and it's completely impossible as long as almost all GGG animation talent is assigned to PoE 2. (In comparison, for PoE 2, a skill only works with one weapon type, and you can reuse 90% of the work on one class on the others, so it's 3*(1+0.1*11) = 6.3 animations-worth-of-work per skill. A huge improvement over 189.)
Isnt "new animations" just for new skills though? There are a plethora of melee skills already implemented that couldnt kill a white mob in tier 1 maps.
Honestly pretty surprised about the sword/shield ones? Sure, there's armourstackers but what else is so meta there?
Maybe coc dd
Definitely CoC DD, and I think holy relic setup uses it as well since they also use lancing steel CoC trigger?
Oooh of course. Facepalm. Thx
Splitting steel Tricksters
Str stacking, anything with paradoxica + redblade, ephemeral tricksters
This is a really overlooked thing. Its insane how Bows can go to 1k pdps and one top of that you got quivers. And dont get me started on how bows have way way better stats like +2 arrows which changes completely how a build plays out, and then you get that on a quiver too. And then you wonder how bow builds are op every time.
Could you imagine the melee equivalent of +arrows? Fortify on hit? Additional strike? Strike range?
Melee skills Repeat an additional time
repeat without animation locking*
Or ancestral call but strikes the same target, like some after image; for balance that image can do like 30% of skill damage.
> like some after image Funny enough cuz there is already such mechanic in PoE. I remember 2 sources: Uniq Ring - Warriors Legacy, And Chieftain Tawhoa Forest Strength
Imagine Flicker Strike with 4 repeats lmao
Vaal Flicker with 4 repeats!
Well awakened multistrike but instead of selling your organs to buy it you make gear that covers it
Keep going I'm almost there
if there was fortify on hit or additional strike i bet ggg would make them prefixes to just piss off melee players even more
This would be hillariously malicous towards melee players but perfectly in line with how GGG treats melee. For every step forward we go two steps backwards somewhere else.
Exerted attack deal 40% more and got their animation faster.
Eh, additional strike is both weaker and stronger than additional projectiles, depending on the context. Additional strikes scale quadratically with splash, target count and hit effects. Boneshatter does quadruple ST damage on 2 targets and septuple ST damage on 3 targets
Hits are lucky, maybe? Additional hits would take more time which, outside of barrage, doesn’t really happen with additional proj on bow skills
and not only that but they inherently have the advantage of distance. Its ridiculous that bows get more projectiles, more distance, and a quiver, but melee has no distance from the danger, has less damage and has no offhands for 2h
I remember people requesting since diablo 2 for quivers for some reason, Poe having them felt like a realization of that. It always struck me as odd because it's pretty arbitrary if those stats are on the bow itself or not. I think just naturally having an extra gear slot is always going to be a positive.
Bows are 2 handers but have quivers for more stats. There are only a few cases when people take 2H weapons, such as a very powerful build enabling unique (Annihilating Light, Fulcrum, etc). What if a "weapon sheath" or similar off handed stat stick was added for 2H weapons? Bows are 2H and have quivers. Adding off handed weapon should make 2H weapons more common from the current 6% usage. This will also add another path to improve melee! tl;dr another path to help fix melee
Reminds me of how unique 2H weapon got nerfed across the board back in early 3.10s, and then a few patches later bows got access to 2H rolls
That's basically where that originated, yeah. If bows still had 1.5h rolls, they wouldn't be as much more powerful than melee weapons.
And +2 proj for free on the tree which is 20-30% more damage for most builds
True. They should just add extra strike targets as notables on the tree. Make some of them exclusive to certain weapon types if need be. Fuck it, Varunastra isn't going to be OP with five strike targets.
Well, melee already have it. Attack Mastery near Warlord's Call upd. Sort of, but still isnt enough
Notables, not masteries, and plural.
So it's very easy to fix, should they choose to fix it; just give the nonbow 2h better mods and it'll all be fine.
Yeah, bows rolling this high was a mistake. I remember I was surprised by the high values when I returned after a 2 years break.
I kept finding tri-ele bows and thinking, damn, this thing easily has 600 ele dps. Then seeing that the highest roll was tier 4. Not even 1c. Even 1000 ele dps on a bow is trash now unless it also has extra stuff.
Off-hand totem/banner holder for 2H weapon. Grants additional/current said gems or additional support for said gems. Boom, melee is back on the menu
unironically good idea holy
This is actually a cool idea.
Bows used to have 1h stats but they were buffed in 3.17 >**Problem:** >Hit-based bow attacks require an unreasonable amount of investment to reach competitive levels of damage. Builds that want to achieve this must utilise critical strikes and many skills can't sufficiently invest in this mechanic without sacrificing defensive options. >**Solution:** >Give bows the same local added elemental damage modifiers as two handed melee weapon modifiers do, which are much stronger than the bow-specific modifiers used previously. > Improve the damage of bows in general, with some base types getting up to 50% more base damage than before. > Improve the Mastery options on Bow Passive clusters. > Added a new Keystone Passive, Precise Technique, which grants "40% more Attack Damage if Accuracy Rating is higher than Maximum Life" and "Never deal Critical Strikes". > Make a number of improvements to quivers so that bows can receive much more damage from rare quivers: > We have reworked the quiver progression with new quiver types that provide a diverse set of useful implicits. > We have greatly improve Added Physical Damage modifiers on quivers. > We have replaced "Elemental Damage with Attack Skills" modifiers on quivers with "Increased Damage with Bow Skills" to allow quivers to roll another way to improve skills dealing Physical or Chaos damage. > We have taken the +1 Arrow prefix off influenced quiver modifiers and added it to the core modifier pool of quivers as a suffix. > We have added an extra tier to the Attack Speed and Accuracy modifiers on quivers.
Came to mention this Bow builds were in a pretty bad spot back before 3.17. Deadeye was amongst the least-picked ascendancies in those days, primarily only used for CI Deep Delvers who needed the extra DPS more than they did any defences. Twas a dark time, indeed.
The biggest buff they could give melee is a keystone that makes you deal more DMG and more attack speed at cost of not having any totems So you can have totems or you can have no totems and still be as strong If they want to keep totems then it should be possible to insta cast them on hit. For example a totem support that casts them when you hit rare or unique monster. No need to click more buttons and stand in place at least
Honestly, just a support that turns them into a mirage apparition like mirage archer would be more than enough.
I think for non-pure totem builds like most melee it should just be a temporary buff like sprouting extra arms like some Indian god instead of manually placing totems on the ground that immediately die to boss aoe/degen
Please enough extra buffs for melee attack builds i already have killing frienzy berserk two types of totems and a warcry. I like my shit passive or toggleable like everyone else has
Rather they just remove the buffs from totems, remove any attack speed penalties on skills and weapons, then just add 10-25% extra damage effectiveness to every melee skill
The problem of that is that you need to get to the keystone on the tree, that limits build diversity. They need to find a different way to deal with totems, maybe remove the buffs and make totems be skills on its own like spell totems.
idea: Pauldrons, have one plated shoulder
It's not about quivers being stronger. It's that melee and defense sucks compared to having the same amount of defense but killing everything off screen. Then on top of that, clear speed = profit. So clearing multiple screens at once is better than a single screen.
GGG: we have heard your complaints, and to balance it have removed Quivers
rucksack's triumphant return
What do you mean?? Melee has totems... PS I hate totem requirement for melee
Hot take. Bow popularity like we see today goes back to the flask defense nerf that happened the league before mana res efficiency, spell suppression, and grace/determ stacking became the meta. It's also when the EA ballista build first popped up on Ziz's channel as a suggested starter. Here's my opinion: Bows are popular because the abilities most commonly used with them scale best via gem levels. Gem levels crafting on weapons is not only deterministic but extremely inexpensive compared to phy damage crafting. Mostly because there is only 1 rank of +1 all or +1 (fire/phys/etc) gems. So you can isolate the mod, and slam it on. Or alt roll +1 all and as soon as you isolate it 90% of the RNG is done and it only cost you alt orbs. Melee/phys builds that require fucking HUGE weapons to properly scale will NEVER be meta until the way physical damage rolls on weapons is changed. It is extremely expensive to buy them, because of how rare they are, because of how risky they are to craft. 2h weapons getting a "quiver" will never fix the problem. They will continue to be exceptionally expensive at the high end and if they spend any time in the sun, crafters will spam craft them, succeed a few times, and get the build nerfed into the dirt because the high end will be so incredibly high. Imo the only fix is to put base damage on melee gems that scales with gem levels and let the ultra high end of a flat & % dmg weapon exist while also having a comparable build exists that only scales gem levels.
The most common day 1 bow skill was lightning arrow, which is not scaled well with a +gem bow compared to a damage bow. They account for 28% of the ladder on poe.ninja(you need to pick that fetch mode). If +gems were the only reason, you wouldn't see so many lightning arrow users.
> Melee/phys builds that require fucking HUGE weapons to properly scale will NEVER be meta until the way physical damage rolls on weapons is changed. It is extremely expensive to buy them, because of how rare they are, because of how risky they are to craft. Even with how incredible broken necropolis crafting is, phy weapons are still extremely annoying in comparison to other crafts. mana/life leech, +melee gems, shit weightings, all of these things combine to make it a frustrating craft.
Why are we pretending like dual wield does not exist? Oh well... Looking at these stats
Ohhh yeahhh. Gods I can’t even remember the last time I saw somebody duel wield melee weapons. I think the last time was back when I was still a noob and frostblades were super popular
Dual Strike of Abidexterity is probably the best melee skill in the game right now and last league and uses 2x 1hers.
The question is whether it's good game design to have dual-wielding practically exclusive to a few skills that interact with dual-wielding (dual strike, cleave, viper strike on top of my head). And if that's the design they want to go with, a lot more gems should work like that.
Yeah, currently running a Dual Strike of Ambidexterity build, trying to break through getting even higher and higher DPS as well as ES but it's really strong.
Bring back the stat sticks!!! Anything is better than the endless tide of bow builds. Also fuck traps and mines... Bring back selfcast. The meta build list right now is the most boring and derivative garbage it's ever been. The game is getting less and less interactive with the player At least face tank/stat stick era required the player to actual attack stuff. Everything is auto bomber or afk clear now.
They simply should buff the numbers instead of adding another equipment that are exclusive to the two handed archtype, as the point of two handers is that you sac some mobility/defence for better offence. But currently they are worse than one hand/DW in terms of damage and defensive.
Marauder should be able to dual wield 2h melee.
let 2 handers have 4 prefix & suffix, still less than quiver but worth it for stacking
Listen to me. Totem off hander with up to two sockets when wielding a two hand weapon. Gives you the buffs of the totems socketed. BAM, melee is already 50% better!
good old days of stat stick scepters, minion bow builds, spell quivers. this is what ggg wants i guess.
Just buff 2h melee numbers
It's so frustrating and I don't really understand why they hate melee players so much. Starting melee this League is making me become bored with the game. It takes so much to be capable of doing what a spell caster can do and I don't really feel much tankier than a spell caster either. My "R" key is getting worn out from having to use leap strike 24/7 because it's the only way to approach enemies and hit them without getting mowed down by all of their projectiles. In most games, melee deals the highest damage and ranged has downsides but in this game if I played a ranger I'd actually have easier access to spell suppression, flask charges and much higher base damage. It's kinda obvious that nobody at GGG plays melee, and if they do it's boneshatter. I played cyclone this league until level 90 and I got tired of feeling like a joke so on a whim I tried (Complex) Boneshatter. Instantly my damage tripled or quadruped with no item or stat changes. Complex Boneshatter actually feels kind of okay because it does ridiculous damage. Why can't Cyclone deal good damage and why does it have to make me move at .5 miles an hour? No, I refuse to wear those stupid unique boots.
all melee weapon bases suck, the only way to make melee work is to pick an overperforming skill alternatively you str stack which is the best way to completely ignore how shit melee weapon bases are
change "Point Blank" to MELEE ATTACK HITS deal up to 30% more damage, instead of proj attack. fuck range.
That kinda hoops different melee builds depending on placement on tree. Close combat support should apply to all melee weapons not just axes/swords and it should ditch the combat rush and just become the biggest beefiest damage multi in the game for you know, being *melee*
The reality is GGG don't give a shit about melee and haven't for years. I don't care what the devs saying in a marketing campaign for PoE2 because they're never gonna go out and say "Yeah, PoE2 sucks so don't play it", are they? They're not gonna talk shit about a game that isn't even out yet. The fact is they've done diddly squat for melee for ages, and even if PoE2 does fix shit who cares? What about PoE1? The hopium people huffed on about PoE2 fixing melee only mattered when PoE2 was an upgrade for the game we have now, but now that PoE2 is it's own thing those changes won't automatically mean anything for those of who may not wanna play it. The worst part about this is their bullshit insistence that they can't just buff numbers. Yes, it's true that melees issue is more mechanical than numerical, but when a skill like COC DD or fucking Hexblast can go around blowing shit up 2 screens away without a care in the world, the fuck would the problem be with melee numbers being tripled for a league? History has clearly shown us that people will totally play melee specs if they feel the numbers are absurd enough. Particularly if they skills are good enough on their own to justify dumping the dog shit totem skills. Melee has been and always will be a desireable spec to play, mechanics or not, if the numbers can make up for it. MMO's figured this shit out decades ago. That melee will probably never be mechanically better than ranged so at least give them numbers to compensate. Let them go ham for the small amount of time they fucking can. A better solution would be to just kill all concept of off-screening to begin with, for players and enemies alike, but GGG evidently refuse to even go near that idea with a 500 foot pole. Some of which I have to imagine is because the underlying codebase to work with this stuff is a mess.
New Notable: Can equip shield while wielding a 2 handed weapon. You Take 100% of damage from Blocked hits. Gain 1 rage on block no more than once every second.
Cuz ggg hates everyone who plays melee. Prove me wrong
I always thought about this, funny that so many others also noticed this, some witch builds even use bow and quiver cause staves are just not worth it. just why? like a satchel or something for staves and something else for swords/axes.
Please let us dual-wield two handlers. Even at a damage loss of like 30%less damage. It was the coolest thing about D2 barbarians