3.25. short list of melee nerfs (and few buffs) teaser and announcement didnt want you to know
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so, the 220% -> 550% announcement hit hard, made people excited
let me throw a wrench into the enthusiasm. in my opinion melees strength relative to competition remains unchanged, the QoL is slightly better (still bad, but you now baby sit a banner not a totem(s)) and the biggest issues plaguing the archetype are still here, untouched so, in no particular order 1) all melee players lost A LOT of attack speed. some builds less, most of them more. attack speed from rage, attack speed from things like Challenger Charges, attack speed from totem(s). hard to measure it in general, all builds are different, but the change is serious and will affect DPS and fluidity of combat. it is one of these 'build feels like shit' changes 2) mana cost increase. previously all melee skills were shit but GGG balanced it out by making them 'cheap on mana'. well, they are no longer cheap. most melee skills had a base cost of 5 or 6. now it is ~12. it is HUGE deal. total cost goes from ~20 to ~50. 20 can be limited with -7mana rings, 50 - no way 3) the life mastery 'pay 30% mana cost with life' is now 15% and to get to current value you need attack mastery that you might have not planned to take. ~4+ passives down the drain 4) these two combined mean you WILL have to do one of: Lifetap support (19% more instead of ~30% more. direct nerf) or speccing heavily into otherwise garbage 'attack cost reduction' nodes (5+ passives - direct nerf) 5) one less aura for you. melee aura cluster had been cut in two and made worse in the process. you either get 8%rmr less, or pay several passives to get more. congrats, you are one aura shorter 6) all flat damage (except boneshatter) is gone. that means that you either level as boneshatter or dont level melee at all. unless you actually are enjoying being disappointed IDing 17th weapon from the ground. bigger % and stuff for skills is ok, but that helps only if the base is there to be multiplied. 7) retaliation skills are DOA. they have attack time (garbage attack time to be precise). they cost A LOT of mana. they have incredibly clunky activation logic. and you have to constantly be on a lookout if that shit is ready to go and play FOMO minigames to squeeze that into your combat rythm. it might have worked on a bow build, but it wont on melee. even if it does bonkers damage. 8) retaliation, banners and warcries are presented as a 'solution' to melee - problem is, there is no option to get all 3 into the build. each costs ~8 passives in mandatory nodes to just f.. work. bare banners are rags, bare warcries are 2s shrieks nobody cares about. GGG released them pre-nerfed. 9) warcry massacre. warcries were bad already, now the stats are so unbelievably undesirable that i seriously wonder if the plan is to make a mid-league buff. 10) no Armour formula change. get rekt with phys damage without phys-as-ele. casters will just outrange this, melee - no chance. have fun, your auras will be up after respawn :) 11) Rage.. rage will drop off mid-fight unless you stack (see 8) rage loss rate reduction and increased delay. yet another 8+ passives. if you dont, all your rage is gone while you dodge shaper's beam or do the ball phase. it seems to be made to be completely unusable UNLESS you spend the passive tax. without it you get a nice mapping buff, worthless vs anything remotely dangerous (this one im not sure of, the wording in patch notes and on the skill tree is confusing) 12) no change to spell suppression means one thing: you STILL have to cap it as the game is balanced accordingly. do not even try to replace it with max res. it wont work. capped suppression equals ~87 max res. you wont get that much, get suppression. good things: 1) overwhelm is gone. it seems to be realistic to get 100% chance to ignore phys reduction. phys wheel + mastery gives that outright but you could shop around. 2) overwhelm for impales can be solved with one mastery. most people underestimate power of this change. impales by default did not 'overwhelm', there was a separate stat for that, and it was limited - not enough to beat special mobs with 80%+ PDR. this makes impale builds MUCH more reliable damage wise 3) there is - finally - block mastery in Marauder's area. this was sorely missed 4) solid buffs to 'increased defences from shield' - 150% near unwavering stance with a 2000 AR shield is actually something. not gamebreaking but something. 5) Flesh and Stone change is actually nice numerical buff. sadly still not an aura so not %aura effect but - no longer needs maim support. less mana, less sockets - seems fine to me. all that combined means GGG did a great PR stunt but I highly doubt we will see more than 5% melee players end of week 1. these changes are mostly net neutral, with some positive outliers that are still crap compared to things like mana casters or minions (that got all the broken corpses to play with) Last bumped on Jul 20, 2024, 6:15:37 AM
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Yeah that was my thought, the totems alone gave around 100% more dps with some investment on the tree (about 6 points). So their removal alone eats up all the numerical buffs on all melee skills. Those 6 points saved will have to be invested to counter the increased mana costs. Then we lost all flat damage from skills and, as you said, all the qol that fast attack speed granted. Against bosses that barely stays at the same spot like maven or sirus, those slow ass attacks will be a huge pain to land.
Many other sneaky nerfs too such as the removal of divine blessing. And good luck going crits while investing into mana reduction, warcry, banner and retribution nodes. Oh and they wanted to add qol by not having all fights started by dropping 2 totems. Now we will just have to drop 1 banner and 2 warcrys :P I hope they add an obvious visual effect when a retribution skill meets its requirements else i'tll be "path of looking at the skill bar". Last edited by Krayken on Jul 19, 2024, 4:37:58 PM
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not disagreeing with most of your points but spell suppression is = to 82.5% base not 87 with the offset of one works vs degens and attacks whereas the other works irrespective of penetration.
In most cases max res is superior but more expensive, both is ideal. I'm fairly middle of the road about the rest of the changes I can see where you are coming from but I like to practice a bit before I give feedback, I could see it being worse but just not having to deal with totems and the melee swing time bug being fixed already improves my outlook drastically. Nobody is going to invest in mana reduction I can't see why they went down that particular route, Lifetap is a damage penalty sure but I'm confident it will vastly outstrip dropping any passives/gearing on mana reduction/leech instead. If I was doing a tldr summary of concern its primarily that the new values for skills roughly = the old flat damage + totem modifiers and the new systems still require too many passives to function. Its going to be hard to justify dropping 10 points on warcries for example. However that would leave us in a similar boat to before but without the need for totems which is an improvement in itself. Last edited by Draegnarrr on Jul 19, 2024, 5:14:12 PM
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Alkaiser
Ben imexile Says other wise and there record are lets say more then yourself so I trust them to say melee is fine and back. Dys an sohm
Rohs an kyn Sahl djahs afah Mah morn narr |
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" Ziz, Steelmage, Empyrian and EVERYONE on his team, Subtractem, Carn Mathil as well and he is already talking about glacial hammer build. Mash the clean Last edited by Mashgesture on Jul 19, 2024, 5:34:36 PM
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" careful parroting streamers gonna get Pash in here. Anyway I don't often agree with you two, but when I do its (appearently) backed by Streamers. Speaking of which anyone see Alk's positively cooked takes on bleed? I just don't know what the fuck he's looking at he called it "still dogshit". I think stairing at Dual Strike of Ambiblahblah animations must of burned an afterimagine into his visual cortex or something thats messing with his eyesight. Meanwhile I'm 100% EQ glad starting. EQ big base dmg buff Fist of war ~40% more ailment due to wording change Glad 100% more on bosses aggravated wounds Probably a tincture or something BBoomer "only 10% of players care about melee" - Aesop's Fox if he was a GGG dev "when you die in this game, typically you're getting one shot, you're dieing in one frame; almost always" -Ben_ Last edited by alhazred70 on Jul 19, 2024, 6:06:16 PM
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" Phas was probably talking about how "parroting people" take "melee is bad" out of context when its said by streamers, but those streamers opinions come from racing/hardcore/comparative to ranged and their listeners are all playing softcore trade. Cant speak for the person but thats how I took it. I myself am eyeing bleed groundslam Glad. You could already do this previously but needed a silly bow swap (ensaring arrow) not anymore though with aggrevated bleeding, such an amazing change. So pretty confident it will work but... just better. Might try to fit in impale with all the changes as well. Mash the clean Last edited by Mashgesture on Jul 19, 2024, 6:09:23 PM
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ive already seen this type of mass 'enthusiasm'. it rarely moved past declarations.
bleed is 'dogshit' once you check stuff like mana stacking, Energy Blade/Ephemeral Edge and stuff of this nature. it is actually like 1/10th damage. it is dogshit. the only good thing now is that it might actually be above uber viability threshold. still dogshit tho Ziz and co. will try it briefly, do stat-stacking and move on to better options. Mathil might stick longer but it has been years since he played melee build outside 'trick' subtype (stat stacking, energy blade). the last one - quin's EQ was terrible despite actually being somewhat invested end of week 1 people will move on. builds that fall over and die in T17 are not needed. builds that are 'fine but cant do ubers' are not needed. i do not see people like Ziz playing builds like this, they have rather harsh 'viability' metrics and melee does not meet them and wont meet them. | |
" Hes the best melee player in the world when Ben even acknowledging it if he says it's cooked then it's cooked likely and you didn't even fully watch his stream did you? Naw naw he says for bleed to be good it has to be like a giantatic hit such as lets say RET skill Crushing fish which is likely to do 1000%+ damage effectiveness. Alk and Ben were both talking to each other about bleed too that's the only way for bleed to be good. If it's a MASSIVE hit. Dys an sohm Rohs an kyn Sahl djahs afah Mah morn narr Last edited by Coconutdoggy on Jul 19, 2024, 6:23:45 PM
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I am also eyeing GS due to always liking it, the Vaal hit, and the relatively best in slot attack speed multi for slams. GS is just a classic, used to be my pick when racing the old Decent champions format (I sucked and am not implying otherwise but that didn't stop it being fun).
I wish Earthshaking GS didn't have its speed mutli butchered but I'm wondering if the first swing animation not having a hidden negative compounding multiplier might not make that slow motion feeling go away. I think they've buffed physical skills base dmg enough that almost any decent phys skill can be an okay bleed skill. Sunder, Vigilant strike (700+ dmg effect lol) even Ground slam. They wont be optimal but still amazing psychological things happen when the floor is raised to this extent. Crazy thing is Complex trauma is still on paper probably the best bleed, but the inconsistency of lining up Ruthless blows with max trauma and then slams getting fist of war will wash that out when not pure PoB-warrior-ing I feel. "only 10% of players care about melee" - Aesop's Fox if he was a GGG dev
"when you die in this game, typically you're getting one shot, you're dieing in one frame; almost always" -Ben_ |
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