Splash damage

Has GGG ever considered a splash damage support gem for melee skills? Splash damage/AoE damage generally gives an aesthetically pleasing feeling (seeing your character damage everything at once simply feels more efficient whether it actually is or not - maybe that's just me?). Obviously with the correct setup, it could be more efficient and potentially bring out some more utility in melee skills (Glacial Hammer for example).

The implementation I'm imagining would be one of two ways:

1) Support makes the attack have -% effectiveness (80% for example). Attack damages all enemies equally (before defense modifiers, obviously) within a small radius around the original target. This way would effectively turn melee skills multi-target skills much like LMP/GMP do for ranged skills.

2) Deal 100 damage to a rare mob. All the white mobs around him take a %portion of that damage. This way would simply be adding a bit of extra on top of the already good single-target skill. This implementation doesn't sound as fun/useful, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.

Either way any effects the skill has would take effect as well (glacial hammer chance to freeze, dominating blow creating a specter if a unit dies, infernal blow explosion, etc.).

I'm not great with balancing numbers so don't take the examples too seriously, but I hope the general idea makes sense.

If you haven't seen it before here is an interesting thread for a mechanic to turn excessive damage from single target melee attacks into aoe damage. A kind of damage overflow support gem.

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BlastMonkey a écrit :

If you haven't seen it before here is an interesting thread for a mechanic to turn excessive damage from single target attacks melee into aoe damage. A kind of damage overflow support gem.

Interesting, thanks for the link!

No worries. I think a melee aoe support would be a lot of fun and that overkill support was a really interesting way of doing it. I hope we get something along those lines some day.

Overkilling seems like a nice idea but it would require for you to be hitting so hard to one-shot your target and then have excessive dmg to do aoe. Not all weapons would be up to the task.

Here are my ideas for melee splash /and by my ideas I mean common sense ideas that have probably already been mentioned multiple times :) /



Red Support gem: Shockwave

Requires: Non-AoE melee skill

Description: Upon hitting a target a shockwave is released damaging nearby enemies

Properties: 30% less damage, levelling adds 1% increased AoE, quality adds 0,5% physical damage
(place holder numbers, all properties should be balanced according to the game)



Green support gem: Mirror strike

Requires: Non-AoE melee skills

Description: Upon hitting a target the damage dealt is also applied to the 3 nearest enemies
(only the damage, no other effects like stun, elemental ailments or life/mana leech)

Properties: reduced % dmg effectiveness, levelling adds damage

The point of the overkill damage support is that against a strong target there is no overkill and therefore no aoe, but against a group of weaker targets you can hit one so hard it hurts the guy next to him. It's meant to make single target high damage builds less tedious when clearing up groups of weaker targets without turning them into true aoe builds.

I thought it was a cool mechanic especially if the overflow were to chain to a nearby target, possibly overflowing further if that target was also killed outright. It's something a little different from typical aoe behaviour.

Mind you I've no objection to a bog standard aoe support but I'm keen for more unusual behaviour where it's possible.

Yes, they are thinking of such a melee splash support gem. Chris mentions the concept in his interview with Kripp.


Petrov.

Oh, very cool! I didn't get a chance to see the interview - was it recorded anywhere?

Sort of, I did an amateurish summary of the 3 hours here: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/60234. Sorry it's relatively stream-of-consciousness.

Petrov.

Thanks Petrov, some good news in that thread.