Anti-Melee Challenge Leagues and melee discrimination

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grant_m wrote:

Maybe with the overload of 'stuff', it has just become too difficult to take older melee skills into consideration? As the game ages, PoE is becoming burdened under its own weight.

It's time to begin streamlining. Every time 1 something is added, 2 somethings become a bit ragged as a result. Improve the older things that are ragged or remove them. The wild imbalances within PoE are because of the constant adding, with no subtracting. This goes for skill gems and everything else.

I think it would probably be better to just start over (and design the skills more strictly under the guidelines I proposed earlier in this thread). Sequels exist for a reason, and expecting Path of Exile to continue into perpetuity as a single title (rather than as a franchise) seems really naive to me.

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grant_m wrote:

GGG has the numbers. They know what's where as far as skills go. They don't really want melee to be a part of the game. At least, not at this time.

Maybe with the overload of 'stuff', it has just become too difficult to take older melee skills into consideration? As the game ages, PoE is becoming burdened under its own weight.

It's time to begin streamlining. Every time 1 something is added, 2 somethings become a bit ragged as a result. Improve the older things that are ragged or remove them. The wild imbalances within PoE are because of the constant adding, with no subtracting. This goes for skill gems and everything else.

I don't think its that they don't want melee to be part of the game, they just don't want it to be the auto way to play just to naturally tank "everything". They put a lot of effort into fortify and other changes I'm sure they wouldn't of done such if they didn't care about the playstyle.

Poe has ALWAYS had a problem where new skill gems outshine older ones, instead of reworking older skills they simply introduce an upgraded version of a skill that behaves a little differently and call it "new" m problem is olders skills are very rarely revisted and redesigned. The latest one being what shock nova, which hasn't had a purpose since the removal of shock stacks (multiple stacks that is) long ago.

Look at the new physical damage spells, blade vertex is an aoe EK that does more damage level 1 then EK does, that is just considering the base damage, not counting the fact it last for a duration which means DPSing and moving which will increase your clear speed. The new spell has a better cast time and IMO better scaling abilities, EK has the projectile tag, but the new spell has AOE. Still a clear example of a very old skill forgotten and just directly replaced with a new one. Even the bladefall looks like an upgrade, especially because it looks like overlapping projectiles do additional damage.

Blast rain is just a fire converted better version of rain of arrows. Ice crash is just a better ice version of ground slam, ground slam should behave like ice crash, but it doesn't and because if that it feels like one of the worst attacks to use.


BUT, imo gems don't need to be removed, people need to understand there might be someone out there making a build with under utilized gems that make it fun to them, however adding new ones that are directly better\upgrades then old ones, maybe it is red apples to green apples, but they both are extremely similar.


I would be interested to hear about this everything else you mention.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I think it would probably be better to just start over (and design the skills more strictly under the guidelines I proposed earlier in this thread). Sequels exist for a reason, and expecting Path of Exile to continue into perpetuity as a single title (rather than as a franchise) seems really naive to me.

People said the same about starting over because of desync, it isn't absolutely necessary to start over, plus this game was funded and supported based on the information given, which was that PoE was designed to be 10 acts, not 2 different games just to try and cover up a gem design mistake.

They have guidelines they were suppose to follow, they did a writeup on gem design when they talked about the new lightning shot thing.

I dislike the idea of giving melee this huge aoe, while limiting the ability of ranged. I really dislike the idea of artificially limiting playstyles just to try and level the playing field. Again people neglect that melee have some advantages and while you can ultimately break it down to does melee clear faster then ranged, the answer will almost always be no, but if you put it in that scope you are setting the system and the comparison up for fail without any consideration on the multiple other aspects and advantages melee can have over ranged.

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goetzjam wrote:

Ice crash is just a better ice version of ground slam, ground slam should behave like ice crash, but it doesn't and because if that it feels like one of the worst attacks to use.

Agree with everything else in your post but THIS ^ isn't correct.
GS is my fav. melee skill and with red. stun tresh. it plays different than IC.
Another advantage is the lower mana cost... looks fairly little, but on a 5/6L it's a big deal.
... but if anyone just uses GS with a vanilla melee build, of course it sucks.
in this case: functionality > damage (<-

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kcstar wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

Ice crash is just a better ice version of ground slam, ground slam should behave like ice crash, but it doesn't and because if that it feels like one of the worst attacks to use.

Agree with everything else in your post but THIS ^ isn't correct.
GS is my fav. melee skill and with red. stun tresh. it plays different than IC.
Another advantage is the lower mana cost... looks fairly little, but on a 5/6L it's a big deal.
... but if anyone just uses GS with a vanilla melee build, of course it sucks.
in this case: functionality > damage (<-

It is correct, ice crash isn't some clunky ability that forces you to shift click to attack, it isn't a small aoe in front of the user, that discourages the melee playstyle in general, its an aoe melee ability that encourages smashing.

While GS does have the reduced stun threshold that is just an element of the ability, it you look at the differences between GS and Ice Crash and would move the stun threashold to ice crash its instantly better then GS, especially if you move the conversion rate to ground slam too. Essentially if GS was an ice converted ability and ice crash was a reduced stun threashold, there would NEVER be a reason to use groundslam.

It may play differently just because of a function the skill gem has, but if ground slam was an aoe ability, identical to ice crash, except no ice, but stun threashold everyone can agree ground slam builds would be MUCH more popular and actually feel good to use.

Mana cost don't mean shit for melee skills, if you aren't bloodmagic your ability you lose out on more damage then you would have gained because you didn't reserve the mana. Even if you want to go mana based, you can get enough mana on hit to sustain regardless of 5-6 link.


Functionality? Really you are talking about the cheesy endurance charge on melee stun build, which is just bad and feels bad, you could just as easily waste a 4 link on leap slam, faster attacks, endurance charge on melee stun and either bloodmagic or another skill gem to gain the same benefit without neutering your main skill dps. Show me this endgame groundslam build, I doubt its doing level 75 maps at a reasonable pace, let alone anything higher.

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goetzjam wrote:

I dislike the idea of giving melee this huge aoe, while limiting the ability of ranged. I really dislike the idea of artificially limiting playstyles just to try and level the playing field. Again people neglect that melee have some advantages and while you can ultimately break it down to does melee clear faster then ranged, the answer will almost always be no, but if you put it in that scope you are setting the system and the comparison up for fail without any consideration on the multiple other aspects and advantages melee can have over ranged.

I'm not anti-glasscannon or anything, I actually think it should be viable. However, it should involve huge survivability sacrifices. If you go back to my first post in this thread, I basically described a system where all skills have one of the three following weaknesses:

• short range (essentially melee)
• no Area of Effect component
• damage dealt over a duration, rather than all at once, with damage balanced assuming enemies suffer the entire duration

Now you could make a ranged AoE character under such a system, it's just that you'd basically be using skills like Firestorm or Poison Arrow. As Poison Arrow demonstrates, if you stack damage high enough on a DoT ability you can definitely make viable glasscnnon build out of it. The only difference is that I think making such a build should require huge investment into offensive passives in order to make what is normally a damage-over-time skill feel more like a one-shot skill (Poison Arrow is currently bad design because its base damage is set too high due to relative lack of scaling options on the passive tree).

I'm generally against giving melee huge defensive bonuses over ranged. The reason is that I think the A in ARPG stands for action and if you make monsters nonthreatening to players then the action goes away, you just hold down right-click and kill everything. Granted, this is exactly what some players want, but in general I'm antagonistic towards making facetanking truly viable, although I'm okay with it if the clearspeed sacrifices are so huge that it's mostly for niche people who really get off on the whole facetanking concept.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'm not anti-glasscannon or anything, I actually think it should be viable. However, it should involve huge survivability sacrifices. If you go back to my first post in this thread, I basically described a system where all skills have one of the three following weaknesses:

• short range (essentially melee)
• no Area of Effect component
• damage dealt over a duration, rather than all at once, with damage balanced assuming enemies suffer the entire duration

Now you could make a ranged AoE character under such a system, it's just that you'd basically be using skills like Firestorm or Poison Arrow. As Poison Arrow demonstrates, if you stack damage high enough on a DoT ability you can definitely make viable glasscnnon build out of it. The only difference is that I think making such a build should require huge investment into offensive passives in order to make what is normally a damage-over-time skill feel more like a one-shot skill (Poison Arrow is currently bad design because its base damage is set too high due to relative lack of scaling options on the passive tree).

I'm generally against giving melee huge defensive bonuses over ranged. The reason is that I think the A in ARPG stands for action and if you make monsters nonthreatening to players then the action goes away, you just hold down right-click and kill everything. Granted, this is exactly what some players want, but in general I'm antagonistic towards making facetanking truly viable, although I'm okay with it if the clearspeed sacrifices are so huge that it's mostly for niche people who really get off on the whole facetanking concept.

The problem is in PoE survivability sacrifices makes the game unfun, as a hardcore player I understand I have to build more defensively, but SC players walk around with sub 4k HP and turn around and complain on these same forums about the XP penalty. Its very difficult to balance.

You can't just use those 3 weaknesses to encompass the vastness that is PoE. That may have been the original design of skill gems in PoE or the true direction they should have taken it, but once you offer something slightly better or a little off the path it opens the floodgates.

Short range builds are probably the most fun I've had in PoE. Cleave, cyclone, incinerate. Because of the range disadvantage, you naturally have to build more tanky and are more aware of what is around you, so less likely to die from that one off thing as you try to look out for it.

No aoe, sorry but that boat has long sailed, absolutely no one wants to single target mobs down. It isn't efficient and it isn't fun. That is a relic of the past where doing boss fights\runs where the endgame not "maps" Where single target mattered more then aoe, at least to a point. Most melee gems are dumpster because splash is dumpster, again this is being improved this further shows my point, which is no aoe can't be a downside anymore.

DOT, this is an interesting one, especially with the development of the new chaos damage spells in 2.1. I think you are misguided on the damage this ability does without various things. Without the drillneck, without the 3-4 property damage jewels, without utilizing things like leveled empower or hypothermia. Without pierce and without increased AOE. This skill is essentially a spell that is shot from a bow, unlike those skills this one is a degen that firing multiple arrows does nothing but increase the aoe. It must have enough damage that when leveled basically degens mobs so fast so it can scale into endgame maps. I'll admit I don't know all the ins\outs of this build as someone like Havoc would, but it doesn't seem "broken by design" just slightly too powerful because the +3 meta mods are cheaper and jewels have increased its potential.


Theres a difference between "tank" characters and building tanky. I wish there was a way to build a life based aura bot that did party buffs, the warcrys are nice, but the fact that they all share a cooldown is silly, at least from my perspective. Almost everyone wants enduring cry, but not everyone needs to use the others, but because they share a cooldown the others are underused. Again I wish that enduring cry still had a spell tag and they removed immortal call from being classified as a spell. But thats another story.

Block got a buff this patch and people already want nerfs on it QQ, to me the only block build that would even be needing of a nerf is incinerete, which I suspect will be neutered into the dark age just like prolif is now.

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goetzjam wrote:

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kcstar wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

Ice crash is just a better ice version of ground slam, ground slam should behave like ice crash, but it doesn't and because if that it feels like one of the worst attacks to use.

Agree with everything else in your post but THIS ^ isn't correct.
GS is my fav. melee skill and with red. stun tresh. it plays different than IC.
Another advantage is the lower mana cost... looks fairly little, but on a 5/6L it's a big deal.
... but if anyone just uses GS with a vanilla melee build, of course it sucks.
in this case: functionality > damage (<-

It is correct, ice crash isn't some clunky ability that forces you to shift click to attack, it isn't a small aoe in front of the user, that discourages the melee playstyle in general, its an aoe melee ability that encourages smashing.

While GS does have the reduced stun threshold that is just an element of the ability, it you look at the differences between GS and Ice Crash and would move the stun threashold to ice crash its instantly better then GS, especially if you move the conversion rate to ground slam too. Essentially if GS was an ice converted ability and ice crash was a reduced stun threashold, there would NEVER be a reason to use groundslam.

It may play differently just because of a function the skill gem has, but if ground slam was an aoe ability, identical to ice crash, except no ice, but stun threashold everyone can agree ground slam builds would be MUCH more popular and actually feel good to use.

Mana cost don't mean shit for melee skills, if you aren't bloodmagic your ability you lose out on more damage then you would have gained because you didn't reserve the mana. Even if you want to go mana based, you can get enough mana on hit to sustain regardless of 5-6 link.


Functionality? Really you are talking about the cheesy endurance charge on melee stun build, which is just bad and feels bad, you could just as easily waste a 4 link on leap slam, faster attacks, endurance charge on melee stun and either bloodmagic or another skill gem to gain the same benefit without neutering your main skill dps. Show me this endgame groundslam build, I doubt its doing level 75 maps at a reasonable pace, let alone anything higher.

A lot of "if" in your text. I have sacrificed AA for having a bit mana left, therefore no damage is lost. And i prefer to have "end charge on melee stun" on my main attack instead of Blood Magic, it has additional stun tresh. red. while again no dmg is lost - I am sorry, I plan my builds to stay alive even in the hardest content, maybe I don't have the fastest clearspeed of all (melee-)builds but I can do all mapmods (except BM in higher maps) while nothing touchs me. Don't know which build you have seen or played but I don't follow any guids on the forumz. Maybe you have more SC background than me ôO

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kcstar wrote:

A lot of "if" in your text. I have sacrificed AA for having a bit mana left, therefore no damage is lost. And i prefer to have "end charge on melee stun" on my main attack instead of Blood Magic, it has additional stun tresh. red. while again no dmg is lost - I am sorry, I plan my builds to stay alive even in the hardest content, maybe I don't have the fastest clearspeed of all (melee-)builds but I can do all mapmods (except BM in higher maps) while nothing touchs me. Don't know which build you have seen or played but I don't follow any guids on the forumz. Maybe you have more SC background than me ôO

The 'ifs' are there to show situations.


Again you can do what you want you are arguing on the wrong points I wanted you to address. Your niche playstyle isn't the "norn" and it doesn't change the fact that a crash skill would be better the a groundslam like skill. Its already clear the ice crash is better then groundslam by its popularity.

I have more SC background and probably more HC background then you too, but its too hard to tell because your character list is private.

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goetzjam wrote:

Spoiler

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'm not anti-glasscannon or anything, I actually think it should be viable. However, it should involve huge survivability sacrifices. If you go back to my first post in this thread, I basically described a system where all skills have one of the three following weaknesses:

• short range (essentially melee)
• no Area of Effect component
• damage dealt over a duration, rather than all at once, with damage balanced assuming enemies suffer the entire duration

Now you could make a ranged AoE character under such a system, it's just that you'd basically be using skills like Firestorm or Poison Arrow. As Poison Arrow demonstrates, if you stack damage high enough on a DoT ability you can definitely make viable glasscnnon build out of it. The only difference is that I think making such a build should require huge investment into offensive passives in order to make what is normally a damage-over-time skill feel more like a one-shot skill (Poison Arrow is currently bad design because its base damage is set too high due to relative lack of scaling options on the passive tree).

I'm generally against giving melee huge defensive bonuses over ranged. The reason is that I think the A in ARPG stands for action and if you make monsters nonthreatening to players then the action goes away, you just hold down right-click and kill everything. Granted, this is exactly what some players want, but in general I'm antagonistic towards making facetanking truly viable, although I'm okay with it if the clearspeed sacrifices are so huge that it's mostly for niche people who really get off on the whole facetanking concept.

The problem is in PoE survivability sacrifices makes the game unfun, as a hardcore player I understand I have to build more defensively, but SC players walk around with sub 4k HP and turn around and complain on these same forums about the XP penalty. Its very difficult to balance.

You can't just use those 3 weaknesses to encompass the vastness that is PoE. That may have been the original design of skill gems in PoE or the true direction they should have taken it, but once you offer something slightly better or a little off the path it opens the floodgates.

Short range builds are probably the most fun I've had in PoE. Cleave, cyclone, incinerate. Because of the range disadvantage, you naturally have to build more tanky and are more aware of what is around you, so less likely to die from that one off thing as you try to look out for it.

No aoe, sorry but that boat has long sailed, absolutely no one wants to single target mobs down. It isn't efficient and it isn't fun. That is a relic of the past where doing boss fights\runs where the endgame not "maps" Where single target mattered more then aoe, at least to a point. Most melee gems are dumpster because splash is dumpster, again this is being improved this further shows my point, which is no aoe can't be a downside anymore.

Sorry if I wasn't being clear, but by non-AoE I meant finite-target, not single-target. For example, Split Arrow does not have an AoE component, because "increased Area of Effect" modifiers have no effect on it, as opposed to Rain of Arrows, which does have an AoE component, etc.

I don't think it's a balance problem for archers to be gunning down 3 to 5 enemies per shot, I actually think the multiple projectiles mechanic is very cool for allowing skilled players to hit multiple enemies in situations where other players might hit only one or two, but I do think having one use of Split Arrow hit full screens of enemies is ridiculous and would need to be toned down. Thus, I don't think LMP or GMP are inherently a problem, but 100% pierce chances and Chain (especially the autotargeting on Chain) are on the OP radar for me - not saying they are, just that they're close. An archer should be able to wipe out a chunk of enemies in a single attack, not a full screen.