Huntress is the evidence that you just don't know how to make a good melee archetype
" + They need to bring on an actual action fighting game dev if they want to make melee 'good' and stop giving ranged ALL the quality of life with almost no downsides. The way they are patting themselves on the back for coming up with combo skills and contextual skills on the amazon is like watching someone build an oval and thinking they invented the wheel. ARPG melee could be amazing. It could play almost at the level of DMC with full, deep move-set customization. It COULD be amazing but the limited imagination and experience around actual action combat and translating it to isometric views is holding it way back. |
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" It´s natural. Because the ones theory crafting (I don´t btw) ranged builds know that the melee experience is a slug. I think it was a streamer who said it, and i´m paraphrasing: “why would you stand there and wait for your parry to go off”, It´s the same with Warrior and block. The gameplay shown works in Act 1-3 but falls apart once you reach maps and endgame. There is a reason why shout/explosion builds are popular when it comes to warrior. You can not play this slow in any reasonable form in endgame when dozens of mops are coming at you, nevermind shock/stun/freeze you. You either kill them fast or be killed. And, if the devs, or rather the director, thinks that all combat should be this slow, then i´m very, very convinced that the game will end up with a skeleton player base. Because an ARPG is not a soulslike game. These two genres don´t mash up that well, and you can´t have both. This is what we are seeing now, one of the big elephants in the room and why, according to their own data the “median” level is somewhere in the 80s. You have two different games here. A slow campaign and a fast kill or be killed endgame. And this is also why the melee huntress will be all about explosions and speed. That will sure be possible, considering they are adding another 100+ skill gems that will break the game in no time :) And this has nothing to do with the players, but the way the game is designed. |
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" Have you tried No Rest for the Wicked? It's exactly that - a top-down ARPG with souls-like combat built around dodging, blocking and careful timing. Problem is, while the entirety of No Rest is built around this idea, PoE2 is a Frankenstein's monster trying to lump tactical combat gameplay together with one-hit-KO screenwide AoE enemies and bad enough grind to make "slow, deliberate combat" a painful experience. Which, naturally, doesn't work and won't ever work unless they go for some "back to the drawing board" treatment. |
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" Exactly this. Adding a dodge roll does not suddenly make it anything close to a soulslike. In fact dodge rolling in most soulslike games is mostly a last resort to avoid getting killed. Timing of blocks and parries along with good movement and positioning gets you out of more trouble than anything. The reason why this works is that you can actually see attacks coming and read what the enemies are doing. Try that with all of the screen clutter you get in POE2, you can't see most of the incoming attacks or tells because so many effects are layered on the screen at one time. Sometimes you don't even have enough time to read the monster affinities before it kills you. This game has a lot of work to do if it wants to be anything remotely resembling a soulslike. |
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" Perhaps POE2 (as all other aprgs so far today) is not ready to fix it. It tried with some low level melee skills, like that very first one of the warrior, but this experiment failed simply because there are too many enemies in the game. That's why explosions / AOEs are again everywhere and we all know in the future it will be worse until the gameplay literally becomes indiscernible from POE1. I was thinking about that for a long time now and nothing really came to my mind how to do it except making scripted movie-like series of melee strikes, punches and moves where you indeed attack multiple enemies at once with fists, legs, knives, swords, clubs, whatever - and not with stupid explosions or stupid AOEs like trembling ground or spikes growing from below. Pretty sure this may look really cool, but not so sure how it will actually feel, because it needs a lot of automatization and auto-targeting. And of course this is much harder to script, to program, than adding a couple of stupid circle-like visual effects and 1 swinging animation, like all arpgs do right now. POE2 made only 1 genuine move towards next-gen arpg combat. That is combo skills and possibility for skill effects to interact with each other. This is really something new for the genre. But again for the most part this is used only in very early game and later degrades into braindead zoom-zoom. But unlike melee combat which cannot be fixed in POE2, this thing can be saved. |
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" I have and I like it :) It´s naturally nothing like this game or the competition. By definition this is an ARPG, but so are “Soulslike” games, because the definiton of an ARPG is very simple. When I, and I think that is reasonable, talk about ARPG and PoE2/1, it is in the context of what defined that genre and what the PoE devs themselves quoted as their inspiration. The Diablo series, and what followed them. Be it D3+, LE, GD, Book of Demons, TQ, etc etc. I played them all. No rest for the Wicked is a more slower game, it lacks the go out and kill hordes of monsters that the Diablo like games have. It has more in common with a normal RPG game. Thus, I wouldn´t compare it to PoE2, which follows that aspect. I agree with you btw, it is a Frankensteins monster because the vision has failed and was a failure from the begining. As a side note, there are always these “leaks from devs” and everybody laughs at them because they think it´s fake. Turns out they aren´t. |
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So who classified the class as melee?
Huntress is an extension of the Diablo 2 Amazon class. Huntress is a direct generational update to that. Core melee classes are: Warrior(maces), Marauder(Axe), Duelist(Sword). Therefore Strength based classes. Huntress is core Dexterity, which is in the same branch of Ranger, the primary ranged-bow character. Huntress is in between Melee and Ranged. Its probably the most well designed class in the entire genre. Last edited by Climet#7103 on Mar 28, 2025, 6:05:52 PM
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" You know, most people back then played their Ama as a Ranged? Safe spot and bows were awesome. Huntress will be META Ranged Lightning Spears, aka cheap Ranger LA, but probably more fun after they gutted Heralds. [Removed by Support] Last edited by BenMH_GGG#0000 on Mar 28, 2025, 8:28:21 PM
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" Yes, that was my comment, Huntress isn't core melee, and a direct archetype from D2 Amazon. Ranged, and not primarily melee. " We have the class footage, skills, weapons, ascendancies, and skills already available, I mean if you are 'slow' to understand how it would play out, then it's not really my problem, is it? Stop being biased. Last edited by Climet#7103 on Mar 28, 2025, 8:32:06 PM
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" They just need to accept that if you play a melee class and go heavy into defenses, that you can eventually tank most of the content, even if the screen is full of enemies and you are completely surrounded. The tradeoff for the survivability and ability to push harder content safer is overall doing it slower due to less DPS. Think of D2 how fun it was with a Zeal Paladin fully surrounded just chopping away or Barbarian leaping into entire packs and whirlwinding around. I have an Infernalist in SSF HC in maps. My experience throughout the campaign and so far into maps is this. Even with doing everything I can to be as tanky as possible, I STILL nearly get 1 shot. I can't even fathom NOT stacking defenses as hard as possible. Even with Mind over matter, Grim Feast, Shield, max resists, armor, increased block, some evasion...even overcharged energy shield...there has been a few times at full life, nearly dead from 1 hit. Can't even imagine dropping one of those defenses. Would be back on the beach. The game shouldn't require you to have all of that to just barely survive. Last edited by Utukka#5444 on Mar 28, 2025, 8:52:11 PM
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