Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[T. Reich]

Everyone will point at you and laugh at you because you're weird.
Your potential power will be much lower than the one of the ranged builds, especially aoe capability.
Your survivability will be lower, too, because ranged builds get access to every defense you can have but don't have to get up close and personal with dangerous shit.
But it's playable! The devs semi-fixed some annoying shit like increasing weapon range and improving melee skill targeting somewhat.

Ask Quatlo , he's the resident melee dude.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ArchAngel]

i play melee builds almost exclusively. Key is choosing those skills that fake ranged ones...

main problem are some bosses. As ranged its easy to shoot and evade some weird attacks. Getting in melee range requires higher attention to detail. Additionally your attack window - time between dodging/running around to evade special attacks, is smaller.
To compare most ranged characters can attack stuff off screen.

that being said, go melee(unless you want to play ice spear, when in doubt always play ice spear build)

Those are not melee builds, those are "melee" builds.

 

[SirSingAlot]

Been nearly 3 years since I touched this game.

I almost swear, I could understand you guys at some point.

How's melee holding up anyway?

atm the meta isnt really melee.^^

after 3.0...well, lets see if they come up with some more changes

 

[Jason Liang]

Does Blade Flurry count as melee? My Blade Flurry hits to 2/3rds towards the edge of the screen.

Melee has some benefits over even projectiles: you get a damage bonus from Strength, life and mana leeching from the Shadow area on the passive skill tree near Ghost Reaver, and Fortify support which adds a lot to survivability. Blade Flurry is also the only non-spell channelling skill: there is no projectile attack skilll that can link to cast while channelling.

A lot of melee skills provide innate damage conversion which is helpful.

You also get your choice of busted dirt cheap unique weapons to wield, so you save a lot on not having to craft your weapon.

You also get to use a shield. A bow uses two hands, and the best Shields are still better than the best Quivers. You could use a Wand and Shield, but then you don't get Whirling Blades for movement.

But you know the expression about bringing a knife to a gunfight. PoE combat is a gunfight.

At least you cant shoot enemies three screens away. So a close ranged gunfight.

Maybe the original Diablo was the only Diablo-clone to balance Melee with Ranged and Spells? Its sucessors have strayed from the formula and melee has suffered for it.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ArchAngel]

BF is not melee, it only uses melee weapon for its ranged attack. One skill that is true melee but still good at clearing screens is that Flicker Strike one.
Frost Blades is not like Freezing Pulse, FB is way more irritating to play as you still need to click first attack on someone before projectiles spread and if you use multistrike to get over this problem you often get stuck in place for too long waiting for animations to end.

 

[T. Reich]

My personal criteria for determining

-ness of a melee skill:
1) Does it require namelocking for attacking? No = faux-melee.
2) Can it hit enemies at least 1/3 screen away from the point of attack? Yes = faux-melee.
Yup, that pretty much puts most of melee skills into "not-really-melee" category. Sadly.

 

[Zdzisiu]

My personal criteria for determining

-ness of a melee skill:
1) Does it require namelocking for attacking? No = faux-melee.
2) Can it hit enemies at least 1/3 screen away from the point of attack? Yes = faux-melee.
Yup, that pretty much puts most of melee skills into "not-really-melee" category. Sadly.

Viper strike for the true melee experience!

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[T. Reich]

My personal criteria for determining

-ness of a melee skill:
1) Does it require namelocking for attacking? No = faux-melee.
2) Can it hit enemies at least 1/3 screen away from the point of attack? Yes = faux-melee.
Yup, that pretty much puts most of melee skills into "not-really-melee" category. Sadly.

Viper strike for the true melee experience!

It's actually my N1 skill to try out in beta, if I get in.

 

[ArchAngel]

Viper Strike actually works well if you use Bino's and Abyssal Cry

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ArchAngel]

huh, was not aware that viper strike applies poison now. Was still living in world where those viper counters were not poison.
Sure bino is nice for spreading those poisons but... if you use skill that applies poison 100%, wont it be better to use weapon that isnt a dagger?

Damage per hit is part physical and part chaos but secondary effect of Viper Strike is that it applies poison on hit.
Any other weapon does not give you AoE Poison and so it makes it weaker. And you can go Assassin with Bino because it has good base crit and then take Assassin traits that give more poison damage. You hit toughest guy 2 times, bino spreads poison and you use Abyssal and everything on screen then dies due to chain reaction. If you focused on bonus chaos damage all 3 damage sources will do bonus chaos damage. You can use Added Chaos damage with your Viper Strike so to not need to have physical damage boosts. And in second hand a high ES shield or if you are going life (and acrobatics in that case) one of those shields that gives you that your attacks cannot miss so you don't need to raise accuracy at all.

 

[Quatlo]

Melee is very much playable, but I play on scrubcore so I die a lot when starting a league and dont worry about it. Last league I did axe+shield glad and was pretty much unkillable except random bigass crits on very rippy map mods, I had no trouble clearing the guardians (except that one time when I rolled 3 damage mods and temp chains :D) It worked great with pretty much every namelock skill but I stayed with static strike so I could just kill small trash mobs while shield charging around.

This league I went full hipster modo and made CI melee elementalist witch with 2h sword and wild strike, took me some time to adjust to CI since it was my first ES based build ever, but after working around some rough edges and getting decent ES on gear i manage to outleech and facetank everything (this will no longer be the case with ES/VP/GR changes, rip hipster me), the damage is fucking insanely good and build is overall fun to play and colourful to watch, I just wish WB would work with 2h because leap slam sucks donkey balls.

I really wish they'd add more namelock melee skills instead of these shitty "hit the ground and wait for explosions" they keep adding but with different colour flavouring.

 

[Endemic]

Newcomer to the game here, decided to jump in without doing much reading on mechanics. Picked ranger and I have a couple of annoyances right away:

-Camera is too zoomed in; I can't use my character's bow effectively

-Map is garbage, especially the overlay version

Other than that it seems alright so far.

 

[Zdzisiu]

Newcomer to the game here, decided to jump in without doing much reading on mechanics. Picked ranger and I have a couple of annoyances right away:

-Camera is too zoomed in; I can't use my character's bow effectively

-Map is garbage, especially the overlay version

Other than that it seems alright so far.

The camera is something you get used to. And is a very conscious decision made by the devs to limit both the player vision and the ranged weapons effective range. But still, you can easily off screen kill mobs with ranged attacks and spells.

The map will be improved with the release of 3.0.

Here you have a preview of how it might look in 3.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehRxyluumA8

It was confirmed that it will be customizable to a certain extent.

 

[Hyperion]

The map starts as a pretty low opacity, you can go into options and max out the slider. I think it looks pretty good as is, but I played for years with the shitty opacity, so when I finally made the change it was eye opening. I was under the impression the current map overlay was a bit of a conscious decision to give it that D2 feel. But there's no reason not to improve it and they really knocked it out of the park.

 

[Endemic]

The camera is something you get used to. And is a very conscious decision made by the devs to limit both the player vision and the ranged weapons effective range. But still, you can easily off screen kill mobs with ranged attacks and spells

Fair enough. Guess I'll see how it goes at higher levels.

It was confirmed that it will be customizable to a certain extent.

Much better

 

[SirSingAlot]

 

[T. Reich]

HOW?!

Uh, I mean, did you really find it?
Um, it's a pretty useless gimmicky crap, you know...
I'll give you 5 ex for it, because I like useless gimmicky crap.

 

[SirSingAlot]

i dont bite on 5ex; i bought it.
because i like flipping useless gimmicky crap.
(for wayyyyy more than 5ex)

 

[T. Reich]

2 ex and 5 necropolis maps then?

How much did you pay for it, you bastard? I've wanted one since it got leaked.

 

[SirSingAlot]

better question is: how much are people willing to pay for this on standard?
it was a lucky find on market and i was able to afford it after some serious haggeling.
paid a lot, because yolo and why not