Melee, other than Boneshatter, is just not viable.

There are dozens of melee skills in the game but with the exception of boneshatter they are all just not viable. Wanting a diversion from trap classes which I normally play and especially a diversion from the uber broken exploding totems build, I tried almost every melee skill in the game. Other than boneshatter they are all problematic. There is a list of reasons and feedback.

First of all most things in the game cant be tanked, they need to be avoided. If you are a caster, trap, totem, minion, or ranged build you can send out your remotes to do damage while you dodge darkness pools and great balls of ... death. Take for example, the second part Kitava fight. Avoiding darkness pools is easy for any non-melee. For melee its impossible. Sure you can dodge the pools but you aren't doing any damage.

The problem is that with Melee you must be point blank but you cant tank many things point blank. The melee skills that enhance your defense are not in the same areas and they are available to all classes. There are no bonuses to defense from being point blank. Lets say Infernal blow had a skill that gave the user 25% better armor and 10% resistance to all damage from enemies that are close, now the user can get close. Augmented with support gems that emphasize being point blank defense that makes things very different. For example imagine "Ground Zero" a gem that gives armor, evasion, es and resist bonuses from close range attacks.

Furthermore when many things in the game run away you have to chase them. The problem is that all blink skills are in based when you are trying to build strength and you cant chase the enemies and Leap Slam is underwhelming at best if you have played flame dash and frost blink. The solution to this is to also add some movement into melee skills. Take infernal blow for example. It should operate a bit like consecrated path. It should have a very short range teleport to the target so that you can stick to that target easier. Think of it like "jumping distance". Flicker is pretty random and uncontrollable at high speed but a teleport with 1/4 of the range of flicker and not randomly choosing an enemy if you don't click on one would make it easier to stick to the target.

It would be great if you would implement some of this next league. if not then you could probably remove every melee skill other than bone shatter and molten strike (which is really ranged projectile) and few would even notice.

Most of all melee skills are viable even for uber boss fights but okay lol

Some abilities just don't ramp up as fast as others and have a lower ceiling in damage, but you can make every skill viable for whatever content you want to play.

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Pashid wrote:

Most of all melee skills are viable even for uber boss fights but okay lol

Some abilities just don't ramp up as fast as others and have a lower ceiling in damage, but you can make every skill viable for whatever content you want to play.

The number of people actually playing these skills statistically says I am right.

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Kraythax wrote:

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Pashid wrote:

Most of all melee skills are viable even for uber boss fights but okay lol

Some abilities just don't ramp up as fast as others and have a lower ceiling in damage, but you can make every skill viable for whatever content you want to play.

The number of people actually playing these skills statistically says I am right.

If you really can't understand the difference between a GOOD build and a POPULAR build, you should stay off of poe.ninja because it's honestly going to hold you back as a player.

There are insanely overpowered builds every single league which see less than 1% use. I'm currently playing a self-cast discharge build which hits for almost 60 million damage per cast. As in, I press one button and the pinnacle boss disappears. But 0.2% ladder representation = the skill is bad, right?

My assertions are from experience, not surfing build sites. POE Ninja only has builds people submit. I wager that GGG has the actual stats of what people do. I am happy your build does so well, that does nothing to torpedo the points I have raised. Melee cant "dodge the hits" because if they do that they dont do damage. I am sure your spell build that does ranged damage doesnt have that limitation. In addition since melee cant dodge the hits they have to tank them but since there is no reason that a caster cant have the same tank as a melee there Melee will be underpowered relative to any ranged or remote build. Hence the reason I think that stats should be built into the gems specifically.

You tried almost every melee skill...to the same degree as your trap builds...all the way to the end....with the same investment as boneshatter or traps? I find that very hard to believe. Which means that your "experience" isn't exactly there. It isn't that the skills aren't viable: they simply don't match your playstyle or expectations.

I have also experienced building nearly every melee skill. There are in fact very few that are pseudo-nonviable (here's looking at you heavy strike). Melee skills can do just fine with all content, perhaps might cost more, perhaps might require more buttons and longer fights, but that doesn't mean they aren't viable.

If you consider non-viable to be defined as: underpowered compared to the meta skill of the day, then you are left with basically 5 builds to choose from each league. That isn't the definition of viability.


There are players, POPULAR players, that make the most ridiculous memeworthy STUPID builds with absurd low damage ceilings compared to the investment...and they are ALL still viable for nearly all content. It takes a LOT for a skill to be truly nonviable. The skill all by itself just doesn't hold that kind of power. Hell, even heavy strike is totally viable for most content. Would I ever choose to play it? Hell no because its not fun and the investment to make it work is absurd. But it CAN work.

lol I usually avoid this but I was curious...looked at your current characters. The "melee" builds you made are laughably terrible. You are damn right your versions are nonviable...they are a total mess. So much for experience

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Pashid wrote:

Most of all melee skills are viable even for uber boss fights but okay lol

Some abilities just don't ramp up as fast as others and have a lower ceiling in damage, but you can make every skill viable for whatever content you want to play.

Yeah if you throw enough divines at it everything can work.
It would be better to say: Boneshatter is the only viable starter melee.

well unhelpful. You may have 20 divines to use, I dont.

50-100 chaos is plenty to do pinnacle content with melee nowadays. You don't even need one divine for that, nevermind 20. With 20 divines you can start bashing ubers.

You talk about having experience but where exactly is that experience supposed to come from? You have a Champion and a Berserker in the low 70s. That's just barely out of the campaign. Trying out different gems for a few zones during the campaign doesn't really qualify as relevant experience with a skill. Not in this game anyway, it's way to complex.

The big differences between melee and ranged are clearspeed and difficulty. Ranged will pretty much always have better clearspeed, especially on open maps. Not to say melee can't get good clear using explosion effects and the like but it will never quite reach because ranged can use them even better.
Making melee builds is also more difficult and requires more knowledge than ranged. Ranged builds can compensate for shitty defenses or lack of damage due to flawed builds by just staying at a distance and kite shit around the map until it dies. That's something melee can't do. You need to have what it takes to face stuff head on and come out alive. That can be done, even without much investment, but the player needs to know his mettle. If he doesn't he will fail much harder than he would with a ranged build.