Chris Wilson: "I want to make sure that melee classes are as good as they can be"

When asked on yesterday's Front Seat Gamer podcast what his favourite PoE class is, Chris said:

"

Chris a écrit :

I've frequently gone back to playing melee classes in Path of Exile, and this is partly because I want to make sure that they're as good as they can be, but also because I really like the Cyclone skill. And so while Cyclone characters often turn into Sunder characters and so on, I do typically resonate with melee characters.

I have a question about this. When was the last time one of your Cyclone characters turned into a Heavy Strike character? Or Infernal Blow? Glacial Hammer? Cleave? Double Strike?

Are melee classes as good as they can be when they have 2-3 skills that vastly outperform all the others?

What you suggest? My opinion melee needs some extra defense that non melee cant have and more melee only support gems.

front line melee are under power in this game for so many reason

1- physical melee have less skill gem vs range and caster mean less option
2- physical melee are not able to convert other type of damage to physical but all other damage type are able to convert physical damage Oo
3- front line melee have very limited armor choice belly of the beast or Kaom's Heart or your low life build will you die vs monster explosion Oo
4- physical melee using resolute technique have very limited choice of unique overall thx god now is have one good amulet Carnage Heart
5- the game have any physical damage aura Oo but all other elemental type have aura Oo
6- the game have elemental damage armor buff Molten Shell (fire) but still nothing for physical Oo
i dont expect chris will say oh melee are the under dog of poe , but everyone know deep inside melee fall far behind , you just have to go watch all steamer Oo all you will see is range and caster 1 shot everything ,

what front line melee miss in my opinion

a bit more survivability and option , i know is easy to say and harder to introduce in the game because caster and range will like to be more op and use this item ,but i think already ggg try to work on this the best exemple look how Brutality Support work :) , i just hope ggg make the same for 1 aura for physical melee 1 amure buff like Molten Shell but physical maybe some razor armor blade , or spike armor , or bone . i think is going to be kool razon armor give bleed effect , spike damage , and bone maybe poison , always have some idea takecare peace

front line melee can be made viable ONLY with ranged nerfs

right now even increasing damage makes NO DIFFERENCE (not to mention that it is a SAD PATHETHIC JOKE that Sunder deals more damage than SINGLE TARGET junk skills)


want a proof? load your 90+ melee and ranged character and go to the dried lake (level ~35 area). this makes damage you deal irrelevant

who will clear faster? who will face less risks? what difference would it make if your damage (melee) was 10 times higher in T15? who cares!

ranged has everything melee has AND has the range.


what can be done to 'fix' this situation? make leech 'from enemies nearby' only. and make that nearby really, really close. so you can offscreen as much as you want but you HAVE to be careful or you just get splatted. melee - can deal with that.

but this wont happen because the audience GGG decided to cater - would riot

PS. make a summoner, go find 'frost sentinels'. you need just echo and GMP but ofc other links make it better. run few maps. and tell me that melee is even remotelly in the same league. even the lol-melee blade flurry or sunder

and in few days you will be able to get T16+ frost sentinels (or other, equally bonkers) spectres in 30 seconds tops and these spectres NEVER f.. die

melee.. why? just.. why bother?

"

sidtherat a écrit :

front line melee can be made viable ONLY with ranged nerfs

Spoiler

right now even increasing damage makes NO DIFFERENCE (not to mention that it is a SAD PATHETHIC JOKE that Sunder deals more damage than SINGLE TARGET junk skills)


want a proof? load your 90+ melee and ranged character and go to the dried lake (level ~35 area). this makes damage you deal irrelevant

who will clear faster? who will face less risks? what difference would it make if your damage (melee) was 10 times higher in T15? who cares!

ranged has everything melee has AND has the range.


what can be done to 'fix' this situation? make leech 'from enemies nearby' only. and make that nearby really, really close. so you can offscreen as much as you want but you HAVE to be careful or you just get splatted. melee - can deal with that.

but this wont happen because the audience GGG decided to cater - would riot

PS. make a summoner, go find 'frost sentinels'. you need just echo and GMP but ofc other links make it better. run few maps. and tell me that melee is even remotelly in the same league. even the lol-melee blade flurry or sunder

and in few days you will be able to get T16+ frost sentinels (or other, equally bonkers) spectres in 30 seconds tops and these spectres NEVER f.. die

melee.. why? just.. why bother?

i guess you are 110% right here , last time i team up 1 ranger and never i have the time to leap or run and touch 1 monster , already all dead in 1 shot :( this is why last topic i give the option to buff the monster because most player will cry to get nerf Oo

It's funny Chris would mention cyclone as his means to check if melee is viable.
In my opinion cyclone is the most potent of a few skills that make it impossible to make greater changes to melee as a whole.
360° AOE, clear while moving, deals many hits, free stun avoidance.

compared to primitive ol' namelock skills this is laughably OP.


And as long as the melee splash problem isn't solved that gap isn't gonna close any time soon.
Melee Splash is mandatory and without alternatives except a few treshold jewels and slayer.

They could throw heavy strike, infernal blow and frenzy together and it would probably be still worse than most other melee attacks.

for me the biggest issue is just flat out survivability issues.

I took my zerker lvl 90, to uber atziri.

It has 7k life, 45% damage reduction a rumi's to bring block up to 35% if i can generate my endurance charges, nearly impossible to keep cause most generation is on kill, so that means you don't have any on bosses. But at that point i can creep up to 57% damage reduction.
Max resist and I do 70-100k DPS a second. And i have fortify for 20% flat damage reduction across the board.

AND you still get 1 shotted. I mean the hell.

OMG for the love of all holy screw that I mean i can't really make the build any more lean and mean, I mean I guess I could dump 100 ex to boost myself to maybe 70% reduction but I still doubt it would do much and its for damn sure not going to be viable for 90% of players to afford.

Meanwhile ranged just says screw defense I'll just melt it flat out dead before it makes it's way across the screen to hit me.

If it does manage to hit me, eh i'm insta leeched to full cause i'm 100k DPS a second, and well i just toss a decoy totem down at start and it lasts just long enough to let me flat roll it.


The main viable end game melee builds are ones that try to still double dip best they can via fire and ignite damage. Or they just attempt to out leech, but even then bosses like uber atziri etc become super to impossible hard. I know they are suppose to be hard, but you flip to a ranged and they are trivial.

The biggest fix is just making armor nodes valuable to extremes, cut down the armor penalty, and let melee be able to get high damage reductions, via armor values, so they don't have to put 40% of their tree points into life nodes, and get forced into 2 chest pieces to try and squeeze enough defense to not get 1 shot killed on end game content.

Y'all seems to miss something: while he indeed says "as good as they can be" about melee chars, nowhere it is said or implied that is/could be as good as ranged chars :D

It's not so much tankiness that melee need. It's more how a ton of the skills function. So many skills require a melee swing to land and it just doesn't work in the endgame very well. These skills work in diablo/diablo 2 since it so much slower... grim dawn is a slower game as well, but even that game has multiple effects happen on default attack.

Lots of power on this game are on kill effects, strong unique flasks, or small windows of power spikes, that you want to keep this flow going. Killing faster and keeping 5...10...15+ different buffs going.

Then the aesthetics of the skills are very lacking. You have ranged characters/spell casters who blow screens up, herald of ices shatter sound effect blowing up packs, really cool looking mtxs makes these characters feel better to play. How many different ways can you swing a melee weapon, this skills converts to cold, this one to fire.. but they all end up very similar. Melee splash was a band aid to help a bit, but theses don't really work in this game.

I'm not really sure why they spent time to adjust the melee swings hitbox to actually hitting the target from dead on to slightly off. They should just rework all these skills into shift skills. Where you swing in some AoE, Cone, or w/e and if you hit enemies effects happen. Ditch melee splash, change the slayer splash passive and move on.

Example Static Strike, Swing in an AoE in front of you, for each enemy hit a charge of lightning comes out after a delay in an AoE.

Threshold Jewel - With 40 int in radius, the charge effect shoots an chaining arc beam instead of an AoE.

Booom interesting skill, I'd actually play it, and lightning mtxs could be made for this, more money. Win Win imo.

It's obscene that melee tanks need well over 6K HP to be considered "viable". To do this you have to plot ridiculously splayed life-node paths through the skill tree and max out added-life mods on practically every piece of gear. After doing that, capping resists, and pumping Endurance Charges, there's only a few weapons and skills your Juggernaut (what else) can use that are overpowered enough to ruffle the end-game's uber-bosses.

To "balance" this game for melee would require far more extensive changes than just nerfing the grossly OP excesses of ranged characters. The ad-hoc conglomeration of unconstrained "MORE" steroids and potions would have to be strictly bound within immutable diminishing-returns formulas forged to replicate a passing resemblance to physical reality. This would enable players to diversify their builds to achieve the most bang for the buck among meaningful offensive/defensive trade-offs, rather than obsessively maxing out their OP single-skill spam machines. Until then, it's all just a scavenger hunt theme park of self-aggrandizing magical wish-fulfillment fantasies dressed up in "bad ass" horror show costumes.