Saark
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2010
- Messages
- 2,235
I'm sorry to say this but if thats how you experience the game, you suck at making melee builds. You can facetank A8 sirus beams with proper builds, and still have good dps. And no, it doesn't require insane items or investment of currency. It requires being good at the game, understanding its mechanics and utilizing them to make a character that can do what you set out to do. There isn't 1000 mechanics that you need to stack to be tanky. There's 4. Avoidance, damage conversion, mitigation, damage reduction. Some of these have slight differences based on whether the damage you take is from attacks or spells. Some are different based on whether the damage you take is physical or non-physical. Some of it is different based on whether it is a hit or a damage over time. But if you're confused by the basic layers of defence in PoE, maybe you should play D3 instead where you just stack 2 stats to get tanky. That seems more up your alley.Game simply doesn't support melee period. Armor system is shot with 1000 mechanics that you need to stack introduced over the years which still will not make you melee viable as you will need to either way run around rather than stand in place and hit things. There are simply to many monsters around with way to much damage per monster, Those monsters also don't have any health so main advantage of melee aka delivering high damage to single targets is simply not viable way to play game.
And that is just melee part.
You're complaining about melee, but your issue isn't with melee. Your issue is with single-target abilities vs multi-target/AoE abilities. Yes, your single-target namelock ability will be bad on AoE. That's.... kinda the point? That's why these skills have better, you know, single-target damage instead. I honestly don't even get what you're upset about. How do you envision a melee gameplay that's viable in your eyes without having access to AoE? What game does this well? What are you comparing this to when you say that it's bad in PoE? What makes melee gameplay feel "melee" to you? Cause for me what makes melee melee is the requirement to be in hitting distance of a mob, and then splashing around said enemy. Compared to ranged builds which fire from a distance. Melee is smashing the ground so hard that tremors ripple out and hurt enemies around you. Melee is whirlwinding through enemies and killing them as you travel past them. You know, exactly how melee skills work in this game. I fail to see how having to run into packs and hitting Earthshatter is the same to you as standing in the back and firing projectiles into packs 2 screens away to kill them. They're fundamentally different ways to kill enemies, one is literally requiring you to be in close proximity to deal damage. Or, you know, melee.
There's not a single hack'n'slay or aRPG that works differently in this regard. Unless you want maps to be inhabited by 7 monsters, each of them a single rare with 50000% the health of current white-mobs, which drop 5000 items, there is simply NO way to make this work and still feel nice. The game needs to have a decent mix of single-target and AoE encounters, and it does. There are plenty of skills that function as pure single-target skills due to their small coverage of area, that are used to kill bosses, while your clearing skill is done on a second 6l setup or only requires a 4L.Try to take any melee SINGLE TARGET skill and go play game. I dare you. After act 2 you will barf.
Blight is a single-target skill and sees heavy use whenever your ED/Contagion didnt manage to kill a tanky rare-mob or you engage the map-boss, a metamorph or a guardian/conqueror/unique boss. People use heavy-strike in melee-builds that otherwise clear with cyclone. Frenzy+barrage is run in Iceshot builds. People run two elemental hit setups, one for single-target one for clearing. People swap out support-gems or weaponswap to massively boost their single-target damage when the situation asks for it.
The thing you're asking for is already in the game. There's no deep-seated issue of abilities being viable or not viable enough, it's just that not all abilities are viable for all types of encounter. That's a good thing. You wanna go back to the old days of having a single 5L or 6L setup that is best for both single-target and clearing? It was dumb. Now we have more and more builds that require multiple buttons again, whether it is setup-like spells like the Exert/Slam interactions, abilities that utilize corpses that need to be summoned first or short-duration selfbuffs that massively boost damage for single-target that you need to set-up before unloading on a boss.
If there's one issue with the game, is that some skills are fundamentally better than others at specific things. Toxic Rain/Scourge Arrow are simply better versions of Lightning Arrow or RoA. ED/Contagion are superior to Soulrend in almost every way. Icicle Mine performs better than Lightning Trap in pretty much every single way. The issue with these abilities, is that at their core they serve one purpose, and obviously some skills are better than others at this specific purpose. New skills are generally better than old skills because where older abilities need support skills that aren't pure damage modifiers to work, these new skills don't, and thus have a higher damage ceiling. That doesn't mean that you cannot make a Soulrend or Lightning Trap build that can still clear t17 100% delirious maps. You can. It just requires more investment or different avenues of scaling each skills damage than the meta-skills do. The choice is yours, but theres only a few skills I would say are completely terrible and un-usable. And then someone thinks of something cool and proves me wrong. That's nice, and it's what I love about PoE. But there is no massive issue with melee not being viable. That has been proven wrong time and time again by dedicated SSFHC players who compete with the most broken spell-builds and perform on the same level or even beat them.