Where are all the naysayers who were against Melee buffs?
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Pretty sure nobody was saying they shouldn't/couldn't buff numbers. As I recall, most people were saying that buffing numbers alone wouldn't do what TRU MELEE purists wanted, which was making it so that using Heavy Strike to bonk one monster per click at normal-person attack speeds without any supporting skills whatsoever was better at bossing than any other build and also just as good at clear as a fully juiced clear-focused mapping specialist.
The argument was "buffing numbers won't make bad builds good or change the fact that Path of Exile is too fast and zoomy now for bonking one enemy at a time to be effective." This remains largely true. Melee numbers are now such that you can clear pinnacle DPS marks with pretty much any three-alch bargain bin melee unique, but that ain't gonna solve the fact that Heavy Striking one monster once a second is an absolutely worthless way to play the game. If all you care about is numbers, sure - here's your numbers. If you care about feel, 'OOMPHF' as one guy put it, and the visceral impact of weighty melee strikes, this update won't do jack for you. If anyone was against buffing melee, it was a stance of opposition to what some of the more petty TRU MELEE purists were after, i.e. invalidating every other build in the game by overtuning melee numbers to the moon whilst simultaneously cutting off ninety percent of the scaling for any non-melee build, because what those guys wanted was to simply eliminate any build that wasn't bonking one enemy per second with Heavy Strike out of a misplaced and ugly sense of "vengeance" for melee. |
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" Which I translate as needing sizable defensive buffs that are there for the baseline ascendancy and/or gem in the first place, standing still, with no passive point investment or fancy gear or anything. Does GGG know how convoluted it is to stack endurance charges and how much you need to sacrifice? Why is fortify still sitting there in a joke state when the defensive buffs could go there AND now require a separate support gem for it? Where are the ailment defenses? Where is the spell suppression? 8% from defiance banner that has a range restriction and restricted uptime? A few more max res passive nodes are going to fix this dumpster fire when they simultaneously nerfed defensives on certain ascendancies and provided no compensation? |
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" Mm. It's almost like a single character isn'e expected to get every defensive layer the game has to offer? Requiring rock-solid, immune-to-everything defenses without a single point of investment or any sort of defensive gameplay seems kinda...outlandish, don't you think? You're supposed to be actively avoiding certain telegraphed spanks, and everybody needs to invest in defense or get popped by random white packs. If you honestly think melee builds deserve to be able to AFK for twenty minutes in the Uber Maven fight with zero defensive investment in passives or gearing...I have to ask why you think that's fair and justified? |
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I think there are too many changes atm to call it one way or the other. At initial glance all I will say is that buffing the base damage of weapons via quaility, base damage of skills by 1.5 to close to 2.5 it seems opens up more room for passives and gear to be spent on tankier options.
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At a glance melee melee doesn't appear to be any stronger than it was before. Banners will be doing some awfully heavy lifting. You will almost always have a 100% chance of a 10% phys explode. Ailment melee seems pretty interesting now.
Retaliation skills can get to 70% chance to not use a cooldown on gladiator so those might be good if the level 20 numbers are good. Hollow Palm + Crushing Fist sounds fun, but bad defenses. If somebody can cook something that doesn't die to a sneeze I might play glad. |
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A lot of melee skill gems lost added damage but gained like 300% effectiveness. This means jewelry needs to be rolled much better.
I think this makes face breaker worse, but don't want to math that out. |
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The problem with melee will always be mechanical, not numerical, when compared to non-melee builds.
This will help melee but it still suffers the same issues from my optic. |
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" My brother in Innocence, have you touched grass recently? |
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" That was largely resolved by removing melee totems. 1. Less downtime on encounter setups. 2. Less sockets being wasted on totems. 3. Less off screen death scenarios because now you're going to be involved all the time. Probably more positive outcomes from these changes that I'm not considering here. Also the big damage bonus will offset a lot of problems with passive nodes strained on so many defensive layers. Most understand of course the best defense in PoE is offense. We also get better offense so we're not going to be sitting ducks or pin cushions. |
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Offensively, the melee buffs are there...
However.... They nerfed determination, reworked the banners.... Reduced fortitication limit, reduced armour/evasion, attack speed, and removed stun immunity for Champion. Man, what did they have against Champion? |
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