The True Irony of Melee League

Does anyone else find it ironic its a melee league buff and new mechanics. Melee still sucks, the entire top dps is all spell hybrid. None of the melee classes are even coming close. This seems to come as a failure even though more people playing. I just think that is from TRADE. Let be honest any time people have to trade with others it takes to much damn life time(Video games are about quick gratification, If i want to waste time bargaining ill go to a auction or flea market). This is why every other game has had Auction houses for a while easy fix. They just started Hopefully more to come. However, back to my point shouldn't this just point out the fundamental issue still around melee IT under performs and its end game cap needs huge rework still sorry to say. Let me know your 2 cent. I am sure plenty will argue but then, I will point to the dps and say show me the top melee?

https://poe.ninja/builds/settlers?min-ehp=20000&sort=dps

Spells only have impressive DPS as long as you completely ignore defense. The moment you set a filter towards even remotely playable EHP values it balances out. And that's assuming that POE ninja DPS sorting has any sort of value towards build viability which frankly, it hasn't. It can be faked easily and there is much more to a good build than just DPS.

To reply to Baharoth

Spells only have impressive DPS as long as you completely ignore defense.

If this was true why do they still finish everything and are killing bosses? I don't think they neglect defense at all that is such a false statement. Set the filter to EHP false, yet again when a build 1 taps bosses 100 times easier then tanking for 30 minutes yet again its a hack and slash time is everything. The great adage The best defense is a good offense shows this yet again. If they even had a time fight in this game for a tank to matter would be interesting but will never see the day. Why because yet again time is everything and its a hack and slash.

2nd Point your point to skills that have been apex melee flicker since game came out. Please show me the buff to any of the 20 normal melee skills that shiny, Wheres cleave, maybe you will see sunder or earthquake but in the end still fail short.

To all your points I would say dps isn't end all be all but it is over 80 percent of the game. Because at the end if you could tank everything but never kill anything you would stop playing. Some dps cool let me know once you are on the same map boss for over 20 minutes game dies out and losses its luster.

That's the thing, those builds on POE ninja that you are heralding for their amazing dps, they don't finish everything. They didn't level up with that kind of setup and they aren't mapping with that kind of setup either. Maybe they are farming uber eater/exarch because those 2 can be oneshot but after that the amount of content you can realistically do with <5k ehp is quite low. Sure quin builds aren't amazing either but there is a healthy balance somewhere between those 2 extremes and that's the portion that i'd consider "good builds". 2 billion dps is worthless if you get blown away by a spider farting.

Regarding your second paragraph, i don't really disagree. The only "melee" skills that really got buffs are projectile based ones who didn't use warchief before, slams who got a crazy damage crutch in the form of overexert that allows even complete morons to get their 5 mio DPS without a single brain cell being used and bleed. The rest got a QOL improvement in the form of totem removal and that's it. As a result they are pretty much dumpster tier in terms of popularity, just as they were before. People only call this "melee league" because GGGs marketing department in the form of streamers said so and the average POE player is to stupid to think for themselves.

Once the streamer induced hype is gone it's pretty likely that the only "melee" left will be LS, FR and MS using str stacking, just as before.

Melee got more fun to play this league with the removal of totem spam but the dps totals for most melee builds is about the same. Just more damage on your main skill instead of on totems now. Some melee skills got a bit better though with the increased damage to main skill like slams and bleed. Overall though I don't think melee was meant to take the place of the more meta spell builds they are still very strong for bossing ect...

Really melee is a lot more fun to play this league then last it still could be buffed though so at least we shouldn't expect over correction nerfs next league.

It's also kind of sad that the best melee skills are still not really melee like lightning strike but I mean as long as clear speed is an issue this will probably always be the case.

poe.ninja dps means nothing for most builds. a build that seems to have 100k dps on poe.ninja can have 50 mil real dps

"

newbutnot wrote:

Melee got more fun to play this league with the removal of totem spam but the dps totals for most melee builds is about the same. Just more damage on your main skill instead of on totems now. Some melee skills got a bit better though with the increased damage to main skill like slams and bleed. Overall though I don't think melee was meant to take the place of the more meta spell builds they are still very strong for bossing ect...

Really melee is a lot more fun to play this league then last it still could be buffed though so at least we shouldn't expect over correction nerfs next league.

It's also kind of sad that the best melee skills are still not really melee like lightning strike but I mean as long as clear speed is an issue this will probably always be the case.

The problem is, even without totem, Melee now have

-Tincture
-Retaliate
-Banner
-Warcry

It's still a f PIANO.

The worst part is they have short window or tight condition to fulfill. Banner now is outright bad.

Even with investment, Banner is awful. It doesn't even go that well with Champ. Perfidy is a dead armor due to poor defense.

Mana change is horrible all around too.

The only real winner is OVEREXERT. It is also works really well as free rage generator.

Also, at least totem can allow to attack from far away and block exarch ball

I'm trying a Cyclone Slayer again this league and it is really bad. I have literally min-maxed the tree for a combination of offense and defense while running impale/phys. I have utilized one of the top overall lethal pride jewels I could find for the duelist node, I have an optimal large cluster jewel, I have a watcher's eye, and some pretty solid gear. For all of that you'd think I'd have good dps and defense but I end up with only 3.65m dps, 100k ehp (on normal config), I do manage 90% pdr with 52% evade, but I only have 4,115 life on top of that. I can't even manage to cap my chaos res because I would have to sacrifice too much dps which isn't viable since anything under maybe 5m dps feels bad in end game content. Maybe it'd be ok if I was a tank but I get off-screened by random projectile spells since I have no viable way of grabbing spell suppress on a reasonable budget. It is too unreasonable to get decent results with melee as it is right now. There are ways but the cost for those things is continuing to rise. I re-worked my str stacking replica alberon's chaos jug cyclone I designed from ancestor that was successful at farming ubers on a 30 div budget but now to just get the boots you need 60 div so gg. If I had that kind of currency the build plan is doing like 27m cyclone dps without a golem or banner (100% sustained mapping dps) and 32m with. Using vaal cyclone that numbers is 44m. It also has 200k uber ehp, a 100k phys max hit, max block, max spell block, 5,600 life, 1,200 es, and inf normal ehp all with realistic gear other than the boots. Too bad the budget for that isn't exactly viable anymore since the boots are twice the price of the old build's entire setup. Basically, I've been banging my head against a wall trying to scale an impale cyclone duelist on a realistic budget and everything is mediocre. I literally can't find a better per-point investment in the tree for dps than what I have and my dps is kind of bad as well as my defense. Meanwhile, I know several people that are playing the meta proj spam build for the league with max spell suppress, twice my ehp, max evade, max pdr, 20m+ dps, more movement speed, the same life basically, max block, etc. That is broken and it is a joke to consider that remotely balanced compared to melee. The budget on something like that is similar to my investment on my build so far and everything is better including the armor (because proj spam builds should be universally better than melee builds even defensively in the attributes typical of melee builds). I saw one cyclone build on poe.ninja that had good dps with over 100k ehp and not only was it unreasonable, but it also fluffed up the actual dps a lot. It really only does about 17m dps with unrealistic items If we just tick off cyclone at the same time as vaal cyclone. With normal cyclone it was a lot less but I forgot the actual dps number (maybe like 9m dps, idk). There's the pinnacle of cyclone on poe.ninja atm at least. How hard is it to honestly test something and see that it isn't balanced? If anyone at GGG tested any true melee build they'd have seen that it was horribly under-tuned. I had a significantly less optimized impale cyclone in ancestor that did 3.8m dps and was tankier with average gear and a focus on AoE/clear speed. My current build has garbage AoE and everything else is worse as well.

I'm playing a cyclone slayer using a staff. Plays great.

"

ChanBalam wrote:

I'm playing a cyclone slayer using a staff. Plays great.

What dps, what defensive stats, and what budget? The entire point is that it is possible but not on a reasonable budget relative to other classes. My build plays great if I do low difficulty content as well so what do you run where it plays great? Budget is especially a concern for me because I've been playing since 2019 and have never gotten a mirror, a mageblood, or a head hunter on my own. My best drop ever was this league with a hinekora's lock in a t8 magic map for an atlas completion... (31 div sale), at least because of that I was able to get my league starter to an ok point.