Melee skills in 3.23

Totem buffs plagued melee for their entire existance because the balance is made around totem buffs.

Id suggest to remove melee buffs from totems completely and compensate the melee skills across the board. Attack speed buffs to melee skills are long overdue anyway.

Totems can have their niche in designed totem builds so totems xan buff the damage of other totems.

But for the love of god dont annoy melee players with the clunky totem playstyle. Ancestor+Warxhief is around 40-50% dmg boost. In my opinion that should not be.

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zzang wrote:

Totem buffs plagued melee for their entire existance because the balance is made around totem buffs.

Id suggest to remove melee buffs from totems completely and compensate the melee skills across the board. Attack speed buffs to melee skills are long overdue anyway.

Totems can have their niche in designed totem builds so totems xan buff the damage of other totems.

But for the love of god dont annoy melee players with the clunky totem playstyle. Ancestor+Warxhief is around 40-50% dmg boost. In my opinion that should not be.

Hard to disagree with all of this.

Sadly, GGG seem hellbent on forcing melee to be a more "active playstyle" by 'forcing' (read: Encouraging) you to press more buttons. You CAN get by without pushing those buttons, but you'll be rewarded by pressing them. Easy to understand the reasoning when we think about the amount of one-button builds out there. PoE 2 seems to go the same route x2, and seems to do so by more than encouraging the use of several skills.

But between totems, berserk, offensive vaal skills, defensive vaal skills, curses, warcries, stance skills, flasks and so on, we have too many of these "encouraging button presses". The totem buffs especially seem obsolete and I think they have to go - with, as you say, some compensation.

Also not a fan of totems or minions. I have tried everything I can think of to replace them with a meaningful alternative. Nothing comes close.

Up

Considering their track record of "compensations", it's best we leave the subject alone before we get no totems and no buffs. They alredy destroyed the Chieftain totem ascendancy with zero compensation, after all.

This suggestion doesn't make sense. As many have stated, nothing about the totems is mandatory if you hate using them, but obviously you are going to do a lot more damage if you DO use them.

In the sentence above, you can replace the word "totems" with "auras" and it would still be 100% accurate.

You could also do this with "frenzy charges," "eldritch implicits," "curses," and so on, for literally any build in the entire game.

Totems are a buff. They buff you. The ONLY way to make totems stop being "mAnDaToRy" is to completely remove the buffs they provide, at which point something ELSE becomes the new "mAnDaToRy" buff you start using on all of your melee builds with the 3 skill gem sockets which just opened up. Absolutely nothing has changed, except now there is slightly less build diversity.

You aren't asking for melee to be buffed, you're asking for the entire game to be dumbed down.

yeah.. semantics

yet another problem with totems: they die INSTANTLY so not only they are used as a justification for shit melee's base damage but they mostly last 3 seconds and die unless you cut your dps to constantly re-summon them

melee totems are shit idea that no other archetype has to mess with (they might if they want, but they are not expected to)

casters? Sigil of Power/Frost Shield/Arcanist Brand/curses etc - you know what they all have in common? they cannot die, their EFFECTIVE uptime is close to 100%, you can count on them being available on request

melee totems? nah, summon, dead. not to mention they mess boss targeting and might actually get you killed


if melee totems are here to stay, they need to take 95% less damage so they actually can survive


playing casters is such a pleasant experience, when all your buffs are automated and cannot be 'stolen'.

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sidtherat wrote:

yeah.. semantics

yet another problem with totems: they die INSTANTLY so not only they are used as a justification for shit melee's base damage but they mostly last 3 seconds and die unless you cut your dps to constantly re-summon them

Consider ironwood/panopticum and the mastery that buffs linger around for 3 seconds after the totems are gone.

yw

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

This suggestion doesn't make sense. As many have stated, nothing about the totems is mandatory if you hate using them, but obviously you are going to do a lot more damage if you DO use them.

In the sentence above, you can replace the word "totems" with "auras" and it would still be 100% accurate.

You could also do this with "frenzy charges," "eldritch implicits," "curses," and so on, for literally any build in the entire game.

Totems are a buff. They buff you. The ONLY way to make totems stop being "mAnDaToRy" is to completely remove the buffs they provide, at which point something ELSE becomes the new "mAnDaToRy" buff you start using on all of your melee builds with the 3 skill gem sockets which just opened up. Absolutely nothing has changed, except now there is slightly less build diversity.

You aren't asking for melee to be buffed, you're asking for the entire game to be dumbed down.

The power of melee gems is balanced around those totem buffs. It is a very narrow buff, way more narrow than auras, which is what makes them important to talk about over aura buffs. Sure, you CAN get by without them but as a general rule Melee skills do WAY LESS damage than the ranged/spell counterparts. Hence, the "mandatory" feel of totems. As long as they exist in the game, GGG will never power up melee skills to where they NEED to be because you have these insane buffs that exist just for them.

What most folks want is the removal of the totem buffs, and have those numbers be worked directly into the skill itself. No new mechanic, no new "mandatory buff", just simply a more balanced melee starting point.

Your other comparisons are off-base because the vast majority of what you talk about effects far more builds by comparison, and those builds are NOT balanced to take the buff. Gems are not balanced around every build having access to frenzy charges. Skills are not balanced around always having intimidate up. But melee skills especially ARE balanced around having totem buffs active. It is a never-ending plague in the game that continues to have an effect on any changes to melee as long as they exist.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

The power of melee gems is balanced around those totem buffs. It is a very narrow buff, way more narrow than auras, which is what makes them important to talk about over aura buffs. Sure, you CAN get by without them but as a general rule Melee skills do WAY LESS damage than the ranged/spell counterparts. Hence, the "mandatory" feel of totems. As long as they exist in the game, GGG will never power up melee skills to where they NEED to be because you have these insane buffs that exist just for them.

What most folks want is the removal of the totem buffs, and have those numbers be worked directly into the skill itself. No new mechanic, no new "mandatory buff", just simply a more balanced melee starting point.

Your other comparisons are off-base because the vast majority of what you talk about effects far more builds by comparison, and those builds are NOT balanced to take the buff. Gems are not balanced around every build having access to frenzy charges. Skills are not balanced around always having intimidate up. But melee skills especially ARE balanced around having totem buffs active. It is a never-ending plague in the game that continues to have an effect on any changes to melee as long as they exist.

You completely missed my point, and it's a pretty obvious point.

If we're refining "mandatory" to mean "needed for optimal DPS" then EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE BUFF is "mandatory," which means that until your build runs out of available sockets you are going to be adding more buttons to press in boss fights, which is the exact thing OP is complaining about.

Losing the totems gives you 3 sockets and a free anointment, most of the time? Guess that means a Whispers of Doom anoint, a second curse gem, and a blessing aura just became "mandatory." Already got those? Time to add a rage generator and berserk. And some warcries. Why not a vaal aura while we're at it? And obviously Smite, if it's not a brutality build. If you've got any sockets left, better fill those with general's cry and a vaal attack skill.

And you can even employ a Ralakesh bootswap, if you're nasty.

The point is, there are so many conditional buffs players can add to boss fights by using more buttons that using at least one or two will ALWAYS be "mandatory." It's up to each individual player to find the place on that "QoL vs Optimal Play" where they want to be.

Absolutely nobody is forcing OP to use totems for a marginal increase over all these other options (and in all honesty, the double curse route is almost certainly going to be better than totems in most cases), which means the complaint isn't actually ABOUT the totems, it's about the extra buttons themselves. If you don't want to push 7 buttons to play your build, that's great! Don't. But don't expect your build to perform as if you had.

If melee skills underperform compared to spells, the solution is to buff those melee skills. But this still won't solve OPs issue, because there are ALWAYS going to be ways to push more buttons to get more DPS, which is now how we've chosen to define "mandatory."

OP wants optimal gameplay to be one- button gameplay, which is a fundamentally nonsensical idea. Thus, the first sentence of my initial reply:

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This suggestion doesn't make sense.