Is Melee Physical Competitive?

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

100m dps seems like a fairly meaningless benchmark tbh. 1/4 of that is enough to trivialise the hardest uber bosses in the game. its just purely number porn it doesnt actually have any relevance to gameplay imo.

Gotta kill those bosses in 1 second rather than 4. That's SUUUPER important.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

100m dps seems like a fairly meaningless benchmark tbh. 1/4 of that is enough to trivialise the hardest uber bosses in the game. its just purely number porn it doesnt actually have any relevance to gameplay imo.

Gotta kill those bosses in 1 second rather than 4. That's SUUUPER important.

No one needs 100 mill. But when "some builds" can reach those numbers pretty easily, while others struggle to reach 1/10 of that, the balance is off - and it's time for some nerfs and some buffs.

I'm not advocating for all skills/builds to reach some sort of equilibrium here, but it would be nice that different archetypes were in the same ballpark when it comes to balance. Easier said than done in a game like PoE, with so many moving parts and multipliers, but I do feel that the will/effort to try is too low, especially from an "overall" perspective.

That said, I feel like there has been two leagues where melee has somewhat shined; Legion and Affliction. In Leagion they went overboard with AoE buffs, making melee skills hit the whole screen. The league also had some damage buffs. Same with Affliction; they went overboard with currency (and some charm scaling), as well as Ralakesh + Maven belt(s), making melee compete on several areas.

I think it's sad that "crazy" is needed to make melee feel great for 'most people', and I feel that melee certain needs a more reliable way of scaling when it comes to mid-budget.

Do you have concrete examples in mind when saying that or is that "10 times the damage" just a made up number? I've tried a bunch of meta builds throughout the years and the only one i'd consider as a case of "easy dmg for no budget" got nerfed to oblivion in 3.15 alongside slams.

Be it tornado shot, CoC ice spear/nova, rf, detonate dead or what have you. None of those super popular builds excels at damage scaling. What they do have is damage projection for good mapping and/or low gear floor for league starts.

I am not saying that all skills scale the same but 10 times the damage at the same budget/level of defense? I'd say that's quite the rarity. Like pbrand of dissipation vs bleed bow might be that bad. But archetype wide? I am open for examples but i am skeptical.

There is also the matter of real dps and POB dps. Boneshatter is heralded all over the world for it's amazing damage and high on POE ninja leader boards but it's mostly fake. Those builds will rarely, if ever, get all the trauma stacks required for the damage shown. A vast majority of them will commit suicide long before even getting there.
My GC BF zerker shows 120+ mio dps in POB while my MS build has 2,5 mio but in actual game play the MS build wins by a mile in single target.

Again, i am not denying that there are discrepancies and i agree that GGG could at least pretend to make an effort on balance rather than shifting shit around without a care. But i just as much believe that those differences are way lower than what is perceived/proclaimed.

Boneshatters heralded because it has a built in extra scaler and melee splash which is what most melee skills require to be decent, it isn't numerically the strongest but mechanically its the best strike skill. Even hitting yourself as the downside has a fairly amusing number of gameplay advantages and very rarely any penalties.

real DPS and PoB DPS isn't really a thing either, you have people who know how to use PoB as a piece of simulation software and people who don't :p, there are a frankly incredible number of people who don't and they just go around dumping numbers like they matter.

Meanwhile If i see 10mil damage on a none bullshit PoB with good defences i'm already rubbing my hands together cause its gonna be busted.

Not really disagreeing with you here Baharoth just running some side commentary about some points you raised. There aren't many skills that do 10x damage but there have been some and there is usually one each league. I will say Pbrand is probably the worst since ele hit with full fire conversion prior to the rework for me like its astonishingly busted.

Really what it comes down to is GGG are bad at doing the numbers for builds without a gimmick (or they are bad for ones with a gimmick) it isn't even a melee problem galvanic arrow has been garbage since they added it, plenty of the spells are too. You can still kill everything on them so i guess it doesn't matter but Its something they could improve for sure.

Well not necessarily 10x per say, but there are skills/archetypes that will deal way less damage than others when considering real poe scenarios. It will mainly be skills/archetypes that rely on conditional damage boosts against strong skills that have good uptime on buffs. Melee in general has kinda bad dps uptime on bosses.

I am strong believer that basic tectonic slam is just way worse version of sunder especially on low investment(before massive -res or phys as extra scalling). I don't think ELEMENTAL slams were that busted. It seemed like the nerf hammer fell on slams mainly due to earthshatter and EQ builds at that time. Imho they should have targeted those instead of nuking the entire archetype from orbit.

I don't think the balance is absolutely terrible at the moment. I think the issue is mainly in having to spec into too many QoL stuff to counter poor design decisions when playing melee - accuracy, mana, strike range, splash, war cry speed, war cry cooldown, strike count... Some of these need to go/change.

Boneshatter is in the league of its own, because ->
1/ has base dmg via trauma stacks
2/ is basically generic strike skill with baked in support gem
3/ scales, while you spec into defense
4/ has very nice clear

However I dont like it as much personally, since you have to ramp up your damage. I prefer playing molten strike/glacial hammer/slams(tho annoying to play nowadays)

and please REMOVE GOD DAMN TOTEM BUFFS.

i think the return of shotgunning projectiles is an area where builds are able to just pile on absolutely ridiculous damage that escapes the norms. what im also seeing on my travels is attribute stackers and energy shield stackers using energy blades getting just stupid levels of damage scaling.


attribute scaling has been out of whack for a long time now it feels? you look through versions of builds and theres some league starter versions and theyre getting about 3 mill with a projected 7 mil if they get great gear and all the 21/20 and woke gems, you get some hardcore versions made by real heavy gear capable people and theyve got 7-10 mil, you got some softcore blaster versions that are getting 30-40 mill, some random noob trying it is probably getting 700k with his home brew mess and then you see someone whos saying they have the same skill and its doing 370 million damage. when you open that pob 9 out of 10 times its like int stacking with a vaal regs or att stacking ivory tower energy blades and the pob doesnt even look that inflated its just absolutely stupid how out of hand attr stacking gets.

almost any broken bow build have a look at their shit and its omni, triple attribute rings, black sun yada yada.







it doesnt rly appeal to me. im not rly a power gamer, i could afford all that gear and go make those builds but if u can just 1 shot everything the game loses all meaning for me. personally im more interested in ideas, it doesnt rly matter if its a good or a bad one just an idea will interest me for whatever reason and then i might throw a char together to quickly see what its like or actually dedicate a league build to it if its something i feel invested in. ill minmax a build but only within the boundaries of the initial idea, and that idea is never 'lets make the most broken character possible'.

maybe that partly comes from playing standard mostly? 1 shotting the entire game in standard? ok... we could do that in 2014, its 2024, if there was a time when doing that meant anything it came and went a decade ago. if someones sffhardcore league ladder race go hard or go home big ego gaming then ok, i get it, you want to find THE most powerful thing and be THAT GUY who world firsts everything in the league. power to them. i feel like thats where it kind of means something and actually you do see some 2h melee going on there, darkee, alk etc.

100mil pob deeps and /deaths 627 in softcore, is anyone really impressed by that at this point? I saw a vid on youtube not too long ago of alk killing all the ubers with 2 million dps slam melee self found in hardcore, the guys a fking beast, thats where its at right? thats big guy gaming.







im not rly too bothered what the high end are doing but the amount of times "broken as fuck" and "attribute stacking" seem to be at the same party feels to me like someone in the balance team needs to have a look at it.