Anti-Melee Challenge Leagues and melee discrimination

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Telzen wrote:

I swear melee builds could press a button and have everything on the level die and people would still make these threads.

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Morgoth2356 wrote:

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StrongWitchCraft wrote:

Or you are average hater melee, like GGG?

They hate melee so much and melee is in such a bad shape that the first level 100 in the last HC challenge league (Tempest, current meta) was a melee character.

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kcstar wrote:

That's exactly how my melee char plays except... you won't find a QQ thread made by me :>

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StrongWitchCraft wrote:

Why are SO much against buff melee and like to be a **** to defend NO balance when its clear for anyone.

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StrongWitchCraft wrote:

How many times did he killed Uber and 82 Core (absolutely any roll) per day?

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What are you trying to say? Why are SO much against buff melee and like to be a **** to defend NO balance when its clear for anyone.

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For you poe absolutely balanced and GGG should stop do any changes? Or only melee?

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Degent wrote:

BTW depth charge is currently pushing to be 1st to 100 spec is cyclone and vaal ground smash.

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Telzen wrote:

I swear melee builds could press a button and have everything on the level die and people would still make these threads.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Telzen wrote:

I swear melee builds could press a button and have everything on the level die and people would still make these threads.

Except they couldn't, because then they'd be ranged.

I don't think it's inherent to melee that it will always be weaker than ranged, but preventing this from happening requires the game designer to set a maximum power level for ranged skills and rigidly adhere to it, from the very start of game design, in order to prevent ranged from powercreeping past a point which melee could never achieve. For example, you could make it so melee has the only true area-of-effect in the game, while bow users must rely on a finite number of projectiles to deal damage (absolutely no true bow AoE skills); or, you could make it so melee deals all its AoE damage in a single hit, while spellcasters must rely on AoE damage over a duration (such as burning ground or Firestorm), where the spell's damage is tuned assuming monsters stay within the AoE for the vast majority of a significant duration, making it very difficult to get maximum damage out of the spell (unless the caster casts on self and tanks, at which point it's pretty much melee spellcasting; "damaging spell" would by its nature immediately imply "duration."). Additionally, "AoE" and "big damage all at once" would need to become fundamentals of pretty much any melee skill made, unless it has some other gigantic upside (for example, a melee version of Incinerate designed to evaporate single targets in an outrageously short timeframe), while using limited AoE radius and centered-on-self as balancing mechanisms.

This game does not use such deliberate balancing. There are skills which deliver the entire package - ranged, large AoE, massive damage - while other skills are hilariously noncompetitive - melee, no AoE, merely reasonable non-outrageous damage. Blue in PoE is overpowered like blue in MtG: ranged, AoE, and crit, why go anywhere else? (Answer: they made it easy to grab the best of everything without a firm attribute commitment, so everyone just uses any abilities they want at little cost and it becomes all about grabbing life and/or ES nodes. But if attributes did matter, Intelligence wins hands-down.)

Since melee is a deliberate weakness added to a skill to make its gameplay more interesting, melee skills simply cannot compete in an environment where skills without weaknesses define the power curve. So the "melee discrimination" has been a part of PoE since it was little more than ideas bouncing around in Chris Wilson's head, and I really don't see the challenge leagues as being particularly relevant to the issue, at best changing nothing and at worst just hammering in something deeply ingrained into the design.