Make Melee Great for Once

While some individual skills need serious review and most some tweaking, in practice is soooo close to feeling good with slow skills. There are a few problems I see in my experience with my build. For the record, I use a 2hander, I armor break with Rolling Slam, empower with Seismic Warcry (for aftershocks), and exploit broken armor with Hammer of the Gods (most bosses are dead in <15 seconds). I use Leap Slap for some movement which drops consecrated ground and blinds, Bonebreaker where appropriate, Sunder for area and distance or while HotG is on cooldown, and Supercharged Slam fits in to boss heavy stuns for what pitiful amount I can eek given that garbage change to its charge time in exchange for unnoticeable damage boost.

1. Armor/Life simply doesn't have sustain options. While I appreciate they are trying to shift a lot of player power into gear, and relying on the passive tree to supplement the gear, the investment necessary to get any noticeable health regen is huge. Lack of flat leech in tree is also really painful. I have no leech nodes yet my hammer has about 8.5% leech and that leeches with such speed I don't even need the nodes. This needs a looking into, in part such that leech investment should matter, in another part that I shouldn't feel compelled to need 10% leech on gear to sustain properly or compensate for lack of regen.

2. Armor/Life doesn't have enough flat power. Try as I might, I think the best I can hope to do is cap my life at about 3K, maaaaybe reach 80% armor with some choice gear drops or craft slams, but the fact that I get shredded or can be one shot by barely slower/stronger tells than a boss's "basic" attack the moment I have any bonus damage in the waystone is insane. I can't Giant's Blood cuz I simply can't seem to get good strength rolls so I know that will help to a point for my health but still, I'm tier 11 maps now and 2500 health is struggling to keep up.

3. These sustain concerns also work into Mana. Our best options for sustain is Blood Magic or investing in split life/mana costs. Some cost reductions across the board might be necessary, Sunder in particular is kind of insane that 3 sockets at level 17 is nearly 300 mana.

4. I absolutely love that slow attack builds are viable. The problem is that given #1 and #2 the slower wind up skills become really detrimental. Support gems and passives that boost defenses during use of these skills need to be introduced, as well as persistent buffs to boost the play style. Slow as a freight train and slamming twice as hard should absolutely be a viable option, but lack of sustain plus the shear amount of chaos damage for difficulty to get resists completely ruins any hope. I want to hit so hard I don't need to crit and I'm fine being slow to attack in exchange, but we just do not have the tools when mobs still act very close to PoE1 (Breach especially).

5. Rolling Slam got its second hit buffed but aftershocks still do zero damage.

6. Seriously needs some baked in Accuracy somewhere. I should not feel that compelled to get Resolute Technique unless I can stack that much accuracy on gear. Act 3 mobs are so damn evasive, and ONE miss being so slow is a death sentence given how poorly life and armor scale right now.

Revert Armor Break on 'objects' the player creates change.

It was actually cool and fairly balanced to 'build your own bell' with shield wall + fortress and a big armor breaking slam. Bring it back.

Reduce + total attack time by 50-75% on all skills and reduce base attack speed/cast time to compensate. This will let attack speed meaningfully scale these moves.

Add Parry/Hyper-armor phases to most melee attacks and introduce skill wheels and supports that improve/modify these phases.



Parry is a melee only frontal block
Hyper-Armor is increased stun threshold, and knockback resistance/increased push priority.

Parry could be modified in various ways to include ranged attack block (arrow parrying) or be active in 360 degrees instead of 180 (Whirling Strike)

Having this mechanic will make timing melee skills give defenses similar to a shield and would make melee weapon + shield combinations especially tanky while attacking which should be the case.

Hyper-Armor will give longer attack time skills an extra boost of interruption resistance to allow them to activate the skill under pressure.

This mechanic can be modified by adding various buffs to defenses while hyper-armor is active to improve the value of trading damage taken for a big attack. Something where the hyper armor benefits increase with time would also make longer attack time skills more attractive.


Note that while all melee skills can now be scaled with attack speed much more, this will also reduce the time of the parry and hyper armor phases of attacks as a tradeoff. This gives players agency while incentivizing low attack speed high damage play through defensive benefits.





For all indoor and hallway maps:

Double or Triple the width of all rooms and hallways. That or just introduce a a significant number of larger rooms and connections in these maps to reduce the number of hallways and small rooms to give us variety. There is no room to use the positional/roll to avoid gameplay in these tiny maggot lair maps.

Less doors in maps. Neither enemies nor minions know how to deal with them. Either fix the pathing, remove them, or as above, lessen their prevalence in maps by adding significantly more large open rooms.





These changes would go a long way to making melee playable.

"

fouquet#0993 wrote:

Revert Armor Break on 'objects' the player creates change.

It was actually cool and fairly balanced to 'build your own bell' with shield wall + fortress and a big armor breaking slam. Bring it back.

Reduce + total attack time by 50-75% on all skills and reduce base attack speed/cast time to compensate. This will let attack speed meaningfully scale these moves.

Add Parry/Hyper-armor phases to most melee attacks and introduce skill wheels and supports that improve/modify these phases.



Parry is a melee only frontal block
Hyper-Armor is increased stun threshold, and knockback resistance/increased push priority.

Parry could be modified in various ways to include ranged attack block (arrow parrying) or be active in 360 degrees instead of 180 (Whirling Strike)

Having this mechanic will make timing melee skills give defenses similar to a shield and would make melee weapon + shield combinations especially tanky while attacking which should be the case.

Hyper-Armor will give longer attack time skills an extra boost of interruption resistance to allow them to activate the skill under pressure.

This mechanic can be modified by adding various buffs to defenses while hyper-armor is active to improve the value of trading damage taken for a big attack. Something where the hyper armor benefits increase with time would also make longer attack time skills more attractive.


Note that while all melee skills can now be scaled with attack speed much more, this will also reduce the time of the parry and hyper armor phases of attacks as a tradeoff. This gives players agency while incentivizing low attack speed high damage play through defensive benefits.





For all indoor and hallway maps:

Double or Triple the width of all rooms and hallways. That or just introduce a a significant number of larger rooms and connections in these maps to reduce the number of hallways and small rooms to give us variety. There is no room to use the positional/roll to avoid gameplay in these tiny maggot lair maps.

Less doors in maps. Neither enemies nor minions know how to deal with them. Either fix the pathing, remove them, or as above, lessen their prevalence in maps by adding significantly more large open rooms.

These changes would go a long way to making melee playable.

I think the Parry mechanics could be good, however it would again pollute the skill tree and introduce new complexities that we would have to deal with.

The best way to help armour characters is to potentially introduce some sort of extra variable like "Damage Reduction Threshold %" that would be incorporated in an armour formula and would trigger when taking big hit, reducing the damage but breaking the armour of the character for 3s? This way you could still take a big hit, but would become vulnerable afterwards. While for smaller hits the formula would work similar. This way we would come closer to ES where you are hit you lose ES and need to wait for the recharge.

It is also logical from the RP perspective when I get hit by a random white mob I barely get hit, but when an anvil is dropped on me I absorb higher amount of damage but my armour has to recover to be usable again.

I wish they would delete accuracy rating from the game.

It makes melee worse for no reason.
Its misleading. You can have 100% chance to hit within 2M and still miss.
It bloats the affix pool.

Actually reduced requirements is not useless for titan. You have tripled requirements on your two handed weapon so you actually need that affix and it's possibly quite mandatory.

"

Puliver#7825 wrote:

Actually reduced requirements is not useless for titan. You have tripled requirements on your two handed weapon so you actually need that affix and it's possibly quite mandatory.

That is the thing it is not mandatory. If you commit to Giant's Blood you should actually have the strength required to wield that weapon, not cheese it, otherwise everyone can get that with that affix and that is exactly what is happening, everyone is going Giant's Blood so it is not even an option but a must.

"

whowe1#7244 wrote:

I wish they would delete accuracy rating from the game.

It makes melee worse for no reason.
Its misleading. You can have 100% chance to hit within 2M and still miss.
It bloats the affix pool.

Or at least they could keep acurracy but give melee weapons like, 50% more damage to compensate

"

Gordyne#2944 wrote:

"

whowe1#7244 wrote:

I wish they would delete accuracy rating from the game.

It makes melee worse for no reason.
Its misleading. You can have 100% chance to hit within 2M and still miss.
It bloats the affix pool.

Or at least they could keep acurracy but give melee weapons like, 50% more damage to compensate

Melee should have accuracy rating increased based on the proximity of the mob, the closer I am the "more" accuracy I have.

"

Sidushi#1349 wrote:

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Gordyne#2944 wrote:

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whowe1#7244 wrote:

I wish they would delete accuracy rating from the game.

It makes melee worse for no reason.
Its misleading. You can have 100% chance to hit within 2M and still miss.
It bloats the affix pool.

Or at least they could keep acurracy but give melee weapons like, 50% more damage to compensate

Melee should have accuracy rating increased based on the proximity of the mob, the closer I am the "more" accuracy I have.

That's already the case, as attacks done from range have an accuracy penalty, while ones done close up do not.

That is for the ranged to penalize off screen shooting, yet they still can keep the distance. What I want is increased accuracy rating for melee based on the proximity.