Playing Melee builds feels overly punishing and bad against Abyss packs

Basically title.

Melee feels awful to play, especially this league with the ranged Abyss monsters that absolutely murder you before you even manage to get to melee range and hit them even once.

It's not fun to die before having a chance to do anything. It's not a good gameplay loop. It's not interesting. There's no upside.

Even if somehow you don't die from a billion projectiles being thrown in your face at the same millisecond, you will then have to suffer from an egregious amount of ground effects, dots and the insane green laserbeams.

You can't stand still and hit monsters in the face because there's ground effects everywhere and green lasers being targeted right at you.

You have to move to surive. And guess what a moving melee player can never do? That's right, damage.

You can't close in to deal damage because of the insane amount of ground effects that will kill you if you stay in them. You can't deal damage if you stand outside the ground effects because the ranged monsters have no incentive to move out of the ground effects.

The only realistic way to deal with large packs of Abyss monsters is to be ranged. Melee is just awful with Abyss monsters.

Ranged abyss monster design is fundementally anti-melee. Playing melee is just a bad choice that nobody should ever do with the current state of Abyss.

I would recommend bringing back the very old PoE1 tech that prevents monsters from shooting all at the same exact millisecond for starters, then making it so that the ground effects can't be placed directly beneath Rare mobs to give melee players a chance to hit them. Place ground effects a minimum of 10 yards away from rare Abyss monsters type of game logic.

Then just bring in basic survivability buffs like Fortify for melee, or make the mobs deal significantly less damage to melee players who are in melee range of rare mobs.

Yeah, the ground effect is too punishing. I died like dont know how many times with almost 2k HP in under 3s from I cant see it when they spill or died.

I have no idea what's even causing the damage during these abyss encounters. You can't see shit with the build I'm doing

As someone who is also playing melee, I'd like to give my two cents as well. I'm playing a fangs of frost Chayula with elemental sundering to instantly burst packs, herald of ice and ash for packs, infernal cry for more explosions and I'm still having a hard time with abyss encounters. Before you say skill issue, I manage to survive and kill most of the abyss packs but when 2 to 3 rare monsters spawn with soul siphon teleporting to you even when you sprint away, corrupting blood attacks and a green long range beam it then becomes a battle of attrition as you can only survive as long as you have health flasks in these situations even with time of need and high life Regen rate.

I can manage to parry and destroy packs but as a melee enjoyer who doesn't want to cheese my way through the game, id love if something can be done to get abyss at a decent state so that as the op said very maturely, us melee players who are on the right side can play the game as intended. I really enjoy Poe 2 especially this league but I'm losing experience just because I love abyss encounters because it's hard to compete with ranged builds.

To add to the changes op recommended: -instead of multiple rares spawning with the melee unfriendly mods, have them always instead fuse into a boss and remove the other monsters from the encounter and create a boss ring to avoid other map monsters from joining in. -improve the visual clarity on ground degens and abyss monsters special abilities.

I struggled the same way with ice strike monk. Felt like a real battle of life or death with those abyssal rares. Constantly had to run off to survive.
Playing deadeye I literally just spammed from a distance no problem. I assume its similar with other ranged skills

I play Bunny hop Warrior with Forge Hammer lol.

I die some times but it seems like bunny hopping is the only viable way to play these stupid encounters.

so i've tried ranged builds a couple of times now and my conclussion is that they are incredibly boring in comparison.

The game is already too easy but at least melee needs to play SOME mechanics, most bosses dont even do anything at range

Found a completely crap combo as melee from Abyss mobs, it was proximity invulnerability and that horrible life draining aura. Can spam my more ranged abilities on it because I have to be close, get close and have a constant health aoe that I can't out heal eating me up.

Chaos resist wasn't that high as I was still lower lvl and didn't have really any chaos resist gear or nodes.

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Anton__Chigur#9285 wrote:

I have no idea what's even causing the damage during these abyss encounters. You can't see shit with the build I'm doing

same. i abandoned my warbringer ballista cluster grenades for that reason and rerolled a lazy summoner... 0.0 my face when i realized vaal guards specters do the same visual cancer... i can't lol


really doesnt help that "bloom" cant be turned off and minimum is 25%. so much god damn bloom... cant see shit, everything gets "mixed" together. it doesnt even look good ffs.

Melee titan here

Not really it’s just one mod that is a bit annoying but manageable

The dot no regen thing that is. Takes just a few extra seconds to deal with it


Other than that; nothing really to report issue wise with abyss mobs