Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Tacgnol]

If you can still see your animations then you don't have enough attack/cast speed.

If you can still see any details on screen, your build isn't zoom zoom enough.

You either kill everything instantly under a mist of particle effects or see them live long enough to kill you. Either way, you lose.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy in one sense. GGG has made all conventional defences almost completely useless, so the only option is to kill everything before they have a chance to kill you.

Then GGG bitches about the clearspeed meta, "Why don't you guys make slower more tanky builds?"

I swear no one at GGG actually plays the damn game.

 

[Jaedar]

If you can still see your animations then you don't have enough attack/cast speed.

If you can still see any details on screen, your build isn't zoom zoom enough.

You either kill everything instantly under a mist of particle effects or see them live long enough to kill you. Either way, you lose.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy in one sense. GGG has made all conventional defences almost completely useless, so the only option is to kill everything before they have a chance to kill you.

Then GGG bitches about the clearspeed meta, "Why don't you guys make slower more tanky builds?"

I swear no one at GGG actually plays the damn game.

Yeah... I feel that even with good armor, end charges, 77% max res, fortify, etc you can still easily get one shot without knowing what happened. It's still good to have those things, but the actual primary defense is having good dps and clearspeed.

 

[Tacgnol]

If you can still see your animations then you don't have enough attack/cast speed.

If you can still see any details on screen, your build isn't zoom zoom enough.

You either kill everything instantly under a mist of particle effects or see them live long enough to kill you. Either way, you lose.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy in one sense. GGG has made all conventional defences almost completely useless, so the only option is to kill everything before they have a chance to kill you.

Then GGG bitches about the clearspeed meta, "Why don't you guys make slower more tanky builds?"

I swear no one at GGG actually plays the damn game.

Yeah... I feel that even with good armor, end charges, 77% max res, fortify, etc you can still easily get one shot without knowing what happened. It's still good to have those things, but the actual primary defense is having good dps and clearspeed.

Yep, my golemancer this league had maxed phys reduction (90%) (from Brass Dome, chaos golem and armour nodes), almost constant uptime on vaal molten shell, 1.2k life regen a second and Divine Flesh with 83% max chaos res.

I was still getting one shotted occasionally.

 

[Saark]

I was still getting one shotted occasionally.

Because armor doesn't work the way you might think it does. It deals best with a lot of small hits, and becomes increasingly worse against big hits, requiring higher and higher amounts (which are essentially unreachable) to mitigate some of the hardest hitting abilities in the game. Against high amounts of physical damage you are thus left with some very weak defensive layers.
-Life regen doesn't protect you against big hits
-Neither does vaal MS (you're better off using a regular molten shell, due to the fact that while it absorbs a smaller amount of damage, its more than twice as effective against any single hit with its 75% mitigation vs vaal MS 35%
-Running divine flesh with only 83% chaosres seems a bit redundant. while it does reduce the damage taken from elemental hits a bit, the investment to get there (as in, the amount of suffixes/passives you spend on getting said chaosres) is not worth the mitigation you gain from it. Unless you're sitting at 85-90%, divine flesh becomes too heavy to invest into for its benefit, and you're most likely losing out on damage which would help you kill threats faster, or other ways of mitigation or avoidance that you could've had access to instead. You will also want some physical as elemental damage taken with it.

You don't mention any secondary physical mitigation layer like endurance charges or a basalt flask or any regular "less damage taken" sources like Kintsugi, Flesh and Stone, Wise Oak, Fortify etc. You also don't mention any avoidance layer either like block, dodge or evade. No physical->elemental/chaos as damage taken conversion. This is where the meat of the mitigation comes from.

It's the combination of multiple layers that makes a character tanky. Investing heavily into one of them (baseline physical reduction) is the easiest but also the most useless against big hits. Against massive hits your armor is likely only reducing the initial hit damage by ~15-20%, another ~20% from your golems, and the rest smacks you in the face.

Remember the layers of defenses. Avoidance, Conversion, Reduction, Mitigation, Effective Health. Combining those layers will give you much better survivability than just investing into one of them, which is why you're still getting oneshot regularly. A properly built character only gets oneshot by abilities that can be avoided.

 

[Tacgnol]

I was still getting one shotted occasionally.

Because armor doesn't work the way you might think it does. It deals best with a lot of small hits, and becomes increasingly worse against big hits, requiring higher and higher amounts (which are essentially unreachable) to mitigate some of the hardest hitting abilities in the game. Against high amounts of physical damage you are thus left with some very weak defensive layers.
-Life regen doesn't protect you against big hits
-Neither does vaal MS (you're better off using a regular molten shell, due to the fact that while it absorbs a smaller amount of damage, its more than twice as effective against any single hit with its 75% mitigation vs vaal MS 35%
-Running divine flesh with only 83% chaosres seems a bit redundant. while it does reduce the damage taken from elemental hits a bit, the investment to get there (as in, the amount of suffixes/passives you spend on getting said chaosres) is not worth the mitigation you gain from it. Unless you're sitting at 85-90%, divine flesh becomes too heavy to invest into for its benefit, and you're most likely losing out on damage which would help you kill threats faster, or other ways of mitigation or avoidance that you could've had access to instead. You will also want some physical as elemental damage taken with it.

You don't mention any secondary physical mitigation layer like endurance charges or a basalt flask or any regular "less damage taken" sources like Kintsugi, Flesh and Stone, Wise Oak, Fortify etc. You also don't mention any avoidance layer either like block, dodge or evade. No physical->elemental/chaos as damage taken conversion. This is where the meat of the mitigation comes from.

It's the combination of multiple layers that makes a character tanky. Investing heavily into one of them (baseline physical reduction) is the easiest but also the most useless against big hits. Against massive hits your armor is likely only reducing the initial hit damage by ~15-20%, another ~20% from your golems, and the rest smacks you in the face.

Remember the layers of defenses. Avoidance, Conversion, Reduction, Mitigation, Effective Health. Combining those layers will give you much better survivability than just investing into one of them, which is why you're still getting oneshot regularly. A properly built character only gets oneshot by abilities that can be avoided.

Yeah I know all of that. Note that I said occasionally not regularly.

I hit level 98 whilst intending to stop at level 95, definitely the tankiest character I've played. Face tanked A8 Sirus and Uber Elder without breaking a sweat.

 

[Saark]

Yeah, elementalist is surprisingly tanky. I played one myself this league and didn't break a sweat at all until I started farming T17 delirious maps, at which point my golems just fell apart due to no investment. Fuck Sirus and his corrupted blood too, that shit rips through golems. But overall it's definitely a good start in terms of tankiness, but theres so much more that you can do defensively, that it's a bit asinine to say that theres no way to avoid oneshots. There absolutely is, and powercreep with defenses has been quite drastic in more recent leagues.

GGG has made all conventional defences almost completely useless

This simply isn't true, and I think you know it isn't.

 

[Tacgnol]

GGG has made all conventional defences almost completely useless

This simply isn't true, and I think you know it isn't.

Conventional defences (by my definition) is generally stacking passive defences. We've both obviously been playing the game for a while so know the folly of that trap.

To any new player the logical assumption is going to be that having a lot of armour or evasion (and HP or ES) is going to help you survive a lot of sticky situations, but that's not really true any more.

The only way to have a really tough character on POE these days is to stack layer on layer of defences on a character (usually with massive investment) or abuse auras.

This has strayed a little from the original point (which was GGG bitching about the prevalence of zoom zoom builds, whilst designing content that requires it).

 

[Saark]

FML I just deleted my response because it showed as a double post, but apparently it wasn't one. Unlucky.

Anyway, to keep things a bit shorter this time around - I don't consider any of the more recent leagues favourable for speedclearing. Metamorph was, to some extent, but Delirium, Harvest and Heist are all about extending the endgame by doing Delirious maps or abusing meta systems. None of which are designed for speed-clearers, but people with a brain. Heist in particular is not at all designed for zoom-zoom builds, and you didnt benefit at all from being fast in Harvest either. And while you could speed through maps with a good layout for mirrors in Delirium, it would still only net you 20-25 splinters. The most efficient way was to fracture maps and run them super juiced so you would instead get 150+ splinters. Speedclear builds couldn't do those maps. Even in Metamorph the meta had to change a bit, with both Metamorphs themselves as well as mapbosses becoming much more rewarding to kill. You remember that speed-clear builds before Conquerors simply skipped bosses, right?

As far as your defence issues go, I simply don't understand why people complain about that (not saying you do, it's just a very prevalent notion on reddit in particular). There's so many tools available defensively, but oftentimes when people complain about dying too often, I see the build, I see 5.5-6k hp at most, or 6k ES, I don't see Fortify or Flesh and Stone or a ToH+Basalt, no life/es block on hit. Maybe 3 endu charges, but that's pushing it already. Of course these people will die regularly. Once you layer 5-6 things on top of each, you're able to tank A8 Sirus diebeams with ease and it's not like you have to sacrifice a fuckton of DPS for it either. Just mean's youll do 20mil instead of 30mil DPS.

I did a Flamewall build that could reach up to 60-70mil DPS but was only sitting on ~30% mitigation and 5.5k EHP. I decided I don't need that much DPS, went for a tankier build with 7.5k EHP, multiple defensive layers and still doing ~20mil DPS, and I could easily farm T17 100% delirious maps with this without dying a single time. It's a choice, and most people make the wrong one. Not the games fault. The only complaint I can agree with is the piss-poor communication on how armor works and why it's one of the weaker layers of mitigation compared to all the others.

 

[Jaedar]

I did a Flamewall build that could reach up to 60-70mil DPS but was only sitting on ~30% mitigation and 5.5k EHP. I decided I don't need that much DPS, went for a tankier build with 7.5k EHP, multiple defensive layers and still doing ~20mil DPS, and I could easily farm T17 100% delirious maps with this without dying a single time. It's a choice, and most people make the wrong one. Not the games fault. The only complaint I can agree with is the piss-poor communication on how armor works and why it's one of the weaker layers of mitigation compared to all the others.

I think you need to check your gear privilege (or post a PoB).

At least for me, I often feel I need to sacrifice a decent amount of survivability to hit 500k dps or something along those lines, at least with gear I can find on my own in a reasonable amount of time.

EDIT: The above discussion just now made me realize you can get like 60% phys reduction just from chaos golem as elementalist with no gear. That's pretty crazy. I guess GGG will nerf it hard for next league, otherwise I might run it just for the fun.
EDIT2: Nvm the same buff doesn't stack. You'd need lots of +golems to get crazy effect.

 

[Tacgnol]

EDIT: The above discussion just now made me realize you can get like 60% phys reduction just from chaos golem as elementalist with no gear. That's pretty crazy. I guess GGG will nerf it hard for next league, otherwise I might run it just for the fun.
EDIT2: Nvm the same buff doesn't stack. You'd need lots of +golems to get crazy effect.

With the right primordial jewels (and levels on chaos golem gem) you can get 40% phys reduction from chaos golem at least. It's a fairly expensive build though.

Pretty much all golem builds are on the expensive side.

The only complaint I can agree with is the piss-poor communication on how armor works and why it's one of the weaker layers of mitigation compared to all the others.

This goes for every aspect of the game these days and gets worse with every new league. Every time I try to get new people into POE (many of whom are ARPG veterans, or at least not casuals when it comes to games), they inevitably get completely overwhelmed.

 

[Saark]

With the right primordial jewels (and levels on chaos golem gem) you can get 40% phys reduction from chaos golem at least. It's a fairly expensive build though.

Yeah I just ran Harmony+Eminence with lv23 chaos golems for the phys mitigation, 4 max golems so 24% mitigation (i used the uber lab enchant for it as well), but since I didn't run any minion nodes at all and just used golems for the ailment immunity and easy global damage/phys mitigation, they melted to sirus beams or in T17 deliriums. While it was great for general purpose clearing and even the occasional golem death on Sirus wasn't really an issue, it just wasn't the greatest ascendancy choice for farming delirious maps. Build was nice though, and flame wall scaling is utterly ridiculous, most likely gonna play the build again in the next league but as chieftain or trickster instead.

I think you need to check your gear privilege (or post a PoB).

I mean I generally don't struggle with acquiring currency early on, so getting a build that costs 15-25ex on day 3-4 is very much achievable, and allows me to just amass currency as time goes on to get builds at their fullest potential. It would be very different in SSF for sure or if you dont enjoy trading/dont have a lot of time to play when a league releases, so your mileage may vary of course. I can try and find an old PoB that's a bit more budget if you'd like, but its just like any generic Fireball Ignite build, only you use a GMP+Fork Fireball for clearing, and another 6l Flamewall for singletaret/delirious DPS. Theres a really damn terribly geared build guide here, that guy is still sitting at ~1.4mil dps (700k RF, 700k Flamewall) without any cluster jewels, and the build is on a shoestring budget. I think I played around with his baseline a bit and easily pushed his DPS up to ~4mil on Flamewall with barely 10ex involvement, while adding Divine Flesh, Fortify, a CoH setup as well as a bunch of cluster jewels. Lost like 500life for it, but that's kinda whatever. The PoB he linked in the video is missing the Flame Wall gem in the helmet, so you'll have to add that yourself.

 

[Tacgnol]

Yeah I just ran Harmony+Eminence with lv23 chaos golems for the phys mitigation, 4 max golems so 24% mitigation (i used the uber lab enchant for it as well), but since I didn't run any minion nodes at all and just used golems for the ailment immunity and easy global damage/phys mitigation, they melted to sirus beams or in T17 deliriums. While it was great for general purpose clearing and even the occasional golem death on Sirus wasn't really an issue, it just wasn't the greatest ascendancy choice for farming delirious maps. Build was nice though, and flame wall scaling is utterly ridiculous, most likely gonna play the build again in the next league but as chieftain or trickster instead.

Not even thought about builds for next league yet. Might do trapper/miner again (my miner in harvest was very effective).

I guess it depends on what gets crit by the GGG nerfbat.

 

[Jaedar]

Theres a really damn terribly geared build guide here, that guy is still sitting at ~1.4mil dps (700k RF, 700k Flamewall) without any cluster jewels, and the build is on a shoestring budget.

I have been meaning to try RF at some point. Might be starter build for next league I guess (Also lol at calling kaom's heart shoestring budget).

 

[Tacgnol]

Theres a really damn terribly geared build guide here, that guy is still sitting at ~1.4mil dps (700k RF, 700k Flamewall) without any cluster jewels, and the build is on a shoestring budget.

I have been meaning to try RF at some point. Might be starter build for next league I guess (Also lol at calling kaom's heart shoestring budget).

Kaom's heart is a lot cheaper than it was. The div card set was about 3c each early in the league, so about 30c for the whole set.

 

[Saark]

Yeah, Kaoms is actually really cheap these days. Most people either push for Shavs early to play lowlife/auras or explody chest. Body Armor is also easier to get a decent 6L earlier so Kaoms is usually pretty cheap. Getting one for ~0.5ex on day 1 or 2 is pretty easy all things considered. Do un-id chaos recipe for ~2 hours and you have the currency to buy a full div-card set.

 

[Saark]

Well, that's some easy money

 

[Tacgnol]

Yeah, Kaoms is actually really cheap these days. Most people either push for Shavs early to play lowlife/auras or explody chest. Body Armor is also easier to get a decent 6L earlier so Kaoms is usually pretty cheap. Getting one for ~0.5ex on day 1 or 2 is pretty easy all things considered. Do un-id chaos recipe for ~2 hours and you have the currency to buy a full div-card set.

Yep it's Shavs that's the money maker these days. The offering div cards are hella valuable early on.

 

[Perkel]

I swear no one at GGG actually plays the damn game.

Chris Wilsson said openly that the current POE is not what he personally would wish for a game but it is what people wanted from feedback. Money rules everything. They saw Breach doing great they automatically assume. HMMM more breach means more money ! And they did so and people showed up with money.

Only way POE2 will change is when competitor will show up and remove floor under them. Nothing gets people working on issues as sight of failure looking on horizon and nothing gets someone as laze as lack of competitor who can take away a bread they have.

I spend some good time playing D3 half a year ago and after all those changes it is pretty great ARPG which is a lot considering 1.0 was absolute trash, it has its issues like set reliance at the end game but since lvl1 to about torment 1 there is good deal of customization due to introduced Kanai Cube. I also see constantly pretty good news coming from quarterly updates to D4 development and if nothing wrong happens D4 will be back to proper glory..

It is fucking shame though that Wolcen devs are so incompetent, they really had amazing base with those juicy melee combat.

Either way owners of GGG are set back for life due to Chinese deal so it is not like they care.

 

[Tacgnol]

I swear no one at GGG actually plays the damn game.

Chris Wilsson said openly that the current POE is not what he personally would wish for a game but it is what people wanted from feedback. Money rules everything. They saw Breach doing great they automatically assume. HMMM more breach means more money ! And they did so and people showed up with money.

Only way POE2 will change is when competitor will show up and remove floor under them. Nothing gets people working on issues as sight of failure looking on horizon and nothing gets someone as laze as lack of competitor who can take away a bread they have.

I spend some good time playing D3 half a year ago and after all those changes it is pretty great ARPG which is a lot considering 1.0 was absolute trash, it has its issues like set reliance at the end game but since lvl1 to about torment 1 there is good deal of customization due to introduced Kanai Cube. I also see constantly pretty good news coming from quarterly updates to D4 development and if nothing wrong happens D4 will be back to proper glory..

It is fucking shame though that Wolcen devs are so incompetent, they really had amazing base with those juicy melee combat.

Yeah POE needs good competition to keep GGG on their toes.

I'm not convinced D4 will be it, as I'm sure Blizz will find a way to fuck it up badly, but even if it isn't D4 hopefully something will come along to challenge them.

Big issue any competitor has with POE is that the game just has so much content and systems from years of content updates. It's a tough package to compete with, and people rarely give competitors the time they need to get established.

 

[Saark]

Chris Wilsson said openly that the current POE is not what he personally would wish for a game but it is what people wanted from feedback. Money rules everything. They saw Breach doing great they automatically assume. HMMM more breach means more money ! And they did so and people showed up with money.

I think GGG slowly and steadily went down that road and didn't realize what it actually did to the game until it was too late. Changing the core gameplay now and slowing things down, which is what they would like to do, is not something you do from one patch to another however. I think they already stated as much with PoE2, which will allow them to reign in a variety of power-creep features that were introduced over the years, balance new content around a slower pace again and then also address any current one-hit-clear-screen issues they feel they might be having.

I think at the core PoE will still be about minmaxing builds to the point that you will demolish everything in your path, but the way it is right now where most builds clear entire screens with a single press of a button will most likely be reserved for the most expensive and minmaxed builds like it was in the olden days. At least that's what I hope. :/

 

[Tacgnol]

Chris Wilsson said openly that the current POE is not what he personally would wish for a game but it is what people wanted from feedback. Money rules everything. They saw Breach doing great they automatically assume. HMMM more breach means more money ! And they did so and people showed up with money.

I think GGG slowly and steadily went down that road and didn't realize what it actually did to the game until it was too late. Changing the core gameplay now and slowing things down, which is what they would like to do, is not something you do from one patch to another however. I think they already stated as much with PoE2, which will allow them to reign in a variety of power-creep features that were introduced over the years, balance new content around a slower pace again and then also address any current one-hit-clear-screen issues they feel they might be having.

I think at the core PoE will still be about minmaxing builds to the point that you will demolish everything in your path, but the way it is right now where most builds clear entire screens with a single press of a button will most likely be reserved for the most expensive and minmaxed builds like it was in the olden days. At least that's what I hope. :/

I sort of hope so as well, though I fear that might not happen.

I suspect there will be a severe backlash to killing zoom zoom. It depends on whether they rebalance rewards around zoom zoom not being the preferred playstyle I guess.

If they, for example, reduce the zoom factor but improve rewards, then people might be more willing to accept a reduction in speed.

 

[Perkel]

Big issue any competitor has with POE is that the game just has so much content and systems from years of content updates. It's a tough package to compete with, and people rarely give competitors the time they need to get established.

I completely disagree. If you sandwitch has shit in it, regardless of how many layers of lettuce you put you will not eat that sandwich.

POE is just plain unfun to play anymore due to compounding issues and not adressed core issues of POE that were there since start that we hope would improve with time but they degraded even more.

Melee was always weak point of POE but now melee is in even worse place it was in beta. GGG even doesn't even hide it. They just make all new "melee" skills just STR spells.

I think they already stated as much with PoE2, which will allow them to reign in a variety of power-creep features that were introduced over the years, balance new content around a slower pace again and then also address any current one-hit-clear-screen issues they feel they might be having.

Nothing about POE2 says that. Just them confirming that POE2 is essentially expansion rather than new game means that all core issues of POE1 that were there from back in beta will be there for POE2.

For example they teased spears. I am fucking willing to bet 50$ this will be just skin for rapiers, Much like polearms are just skin for two handed axes.

Their STR-INT-DEX system being tied to weapon classes is one of core issues i hoped they would address over the years or POE2. Introducing something like crossbow or spear in that system is basically impossible because all weapons have to have space in passive tree.

Passive skill tree which was always good thing about POE expanded in such a way that your class choice is now more important than ever.

Ascendancy system proved to be one of the worst things they introduced which basically forces you to play specific class instead of like early POE be your own class. You can't be anymore Ranger with zombies because without necromancy subclass you suck even with items.

 

[Saark]

Nothing about POE2 says that. Just them confirming that POE2 is essentially expansion rather than new game means that all core issues of POE1 that were there from back in beta will be there for POE2.

Chris literally said so in the post-Exilecon interviews? Delirium endgame-content and Heist have already been two leagues with a much bigger focus on slower more difficult content, that takes a longer time to fully complete but also scales its rewards based on how far you can push it. I'm not sure what game you're playing, but the most profitable ways to play PoE these days have absolutely nothing to do with zoom-zoom meta anymore.

Melee was always weak point of POE but now melee is in even worse place it was in beta. GGG even doesn't even hide it. They just make all new "melee" skills just STR spells.

Just because you don't like the way that melee skills have larger AoE now, doesn't mean that melee is dead or bad. It's not. Lacerate, Earthshatter and Cyclone are all great builds that have no issue competing with some of the better spell or ranged builds and theres a variety of other melee builds that are slightly worse but still very much playable. If anything, bow-builds are much worse off than melee. There's essentially only 2 playable bow skills at the high-end compared to like 4-5 spells and 3 melee skills. Half the bows that people use are for spells, and there's essentially no purpose for any of the ranger ascendancies. Deadeye is used more for deepdelving than anything else, pathfinder is just pestilent strike/bladevortex poison builds, and no one plays fucking raider at all. The ones who do don't play bow-builds either. So if you wanna complain about a lack of build-opportunities, don't start with Melee because those builds are still very much viable and playable. But that wouldn't fit the narrative of "melee is dead" even though its very much alive, and always has been.

POE is just plain unfun to play anymore due to compounding issues and not adressed core issues of POE that were there since start that we hope would improve with time but they degraded even more.

Like what? Throwing around platitutdes like that isn't actually saying anything. What are the compounding core-issues that aren't being addressed?

 

[Perkel]

You are complaining that you can't beat end game with some shitty build you made.
I complain about core of game that is shit regardless if you do Act 2 or end game.

I can right now take cleave and make it end game viable. IT doesn't mean i will give rat as about it when melee combat is so fucking bad and i have to make out of it essentially ranged or AOE character in the end.

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.

Try to take any melee SINGLE TARGET skill and go play game. I dare you. After act 2 you will barf.

Good ARPG balances out single target and AOE damage. Single target usually delivers much damage at low cost but AOE is needed in crowd control situations but eats mana quickly.

POE simply does not have this. AOE is the king because monsters are shat from every closet and mana is non existant feature of game that is mostly limit to your auras than to your heavy hitting skills.

And that is just melee part.

 

[Saark]

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.

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.

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.

Try to take any melee SINGLE TARGET skill and go play game. I dare you. After act 2 you will barf.

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.

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.