I wonder how many of these failed leagues will it take GGG for them to learn, if ever?

Melee in D2 was fine and on par with elemental/magic builds before patch 1.10. Then they added 50% stone skin to all hell monsters reducing physical damage and life-steal effectiveness.

If you need to pick just 1 thing that can improve melee, that would be a bump in damage. Melee needs to hit a lot harder than ranged to FEEL melee.

To throw in a random game, in Guild Wars 2 melee feels very well compared to ranged because all melee skills/auto have cleave effect and they hit harder. Ranged skills/autos don't generally have cleave effect. With the exception of a couple of ranged builds (which are just on par), all melee builds have better dps output.

As for my 2 cents on Diablo 2 classic. Whirlwind Lance Barbs were quite competitive at clearing monsters, dealing damage or magic finding or all 3 of them. With the expansion pack i remember the monsters got some kind of heavy damage reduction/HP increase in classic were my lance started to break by trying to kill monsters during a act 4 run without even completing a full zone.

Nothing else changed about the monsters, no character or monster animations and all of a sudden the barb went from feels good to garbage because of the damage.

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zzang wrote:

Nothing else changed about the monsters, no character or monster animations and all of a sudden the barb went from feels good to garbage because of the damage.

Yep....hence the last paragraph in my other post. Melee on its own is never going to pull its weight. Melee NEEDS the power, generally MORE power than ranged counterparts for it to remotely stand a chance. It's not just going to simply be popular or stay popular because its melee.

I hate to bring it up, but we can see evidence of this with D4, a totally brand new game in the "modern" era. Built on the historical success of D2 (and D3......), it became quickly clear that the barbarian at the beginning was total utter trash. So people stopped playing it. Even with all of the history and hype and classic ww D2 playstyle.....it was not saved from the lack of damage.

And then you have the mobility issues. This is a bigger issue in PoE1 than in some other games, but the fact that melee requires you to be....in melee range means that these skills and builds should ALSO get some kind of mobility buff or control. This was the downfall of D2 melee for the masses. While a fully decked out melee barb was powerful, only one build was really ever used: whirlwind. Why? Because movement was baked in. Frenzy barbs ALSO had movement baked in with the massive speed boost you got from using frenzy, but even that wasn't really enough to make frenzy super popular. Zealots just weren't really played seriously, although some managed to perfect using charge to move around even with all the obstacles (cough cough....shield charge analogy).

Basically....it is NOT TRUE that melee, simply because its melee, is overrepresented, popular, or powerful. It is actually MORE susceptible to issues when compared with any other class, because even a lack of a single dimension can make the entire archetype feel like total crap.

Every build can't be the "best." Melee has all the built-in disadvantages mentioned in the post above, so it really can't compete for "best" at all. But there is another way to play these games than seeking the most optimal build, and that is to play the best of a given paradigm.

Melee can't compete with ranged? Then play the best melee build you can. Play for the journey, not to compete with other, more "effective" builds. You really want a build you can be proud of? Make something which, while not the top of the heap, is top of it's own heap. ='[.]'=

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Raycheetah wrote:

Every build can't be the "best." Melee has all the built-in disadvantages mentioned in the post above, so it really can't compete for "best" at all. But there is another way to play these games than seeking the most optimal build, and that is to play the best of a given paradigm.

Melee can't compete with ranged? Then play the best melee build you can. Play for the journey, not to compete with other, more "effective" builds. You really want a build you can be proud of? Make something which, while not the top of the heap, is top of it's own heap. ='[.]'=

Playing full copium mode (ala SSF etc) is all fine and good for the 1% copium enjoyers but the core PoE game is balanced for trading. This means interaction and competition with other players for faster/better progression is how the game is meant to be played.

To me personally, the league content itself isn't even that much of an issue. Yes, being forced into the mechanic sucks and it would have been so easy to give players the option to opt-out of Necropolis mods in maps. People could have still made use of the Graveyard crafting without having to farm corpses, atleast in trade.

What I am massively disappointed in is the Atlas overhaul, T17's, and what is now called Path of Scarabs. I genuinely hate this new scarab system. That, in combination with T17's has ruined so many other league mechanics for trade. I was actually hyped to play my first LA Deadeye and go farm Legion to trade emblems, incubators aswell as some Deli orbs...you know, just basic stuff. But this new system completely bricked all of that. There's so many things that are completely worthless now it's crazy.

The balancing is also completely off. You farm Uber fragments in maps that are harder than Ubers themselves. You unlock the 5th mapdevice slots in T17's instead of giving players who aren't able to even do a T17 the extra slot like usual, making it so they can atleast use an extra Scarab (UGHHH...I really do hate Scarabs now).

By far the worst changes in my time playing PoE, and I witnessed Archnemesis.

I miss loot pinata leagues. These tedious "crafting" leagues are not fun.

In fairness, plenty of people hold the opposite opinions - "loot pinata" leagues are shallow and boring, and the Lootsplosion never has anything worth picking up or using. Crafting leagues, on the other hand, let them work steadily and tangibly towards cool stuff they actually want to use, or great items they can sell.

Gotta have a healthy mix of both, and people who hate one or the other can do another Baldur's Gate 3 run on the leagues they don't care for. Like Trial of the Ancestors. Which, really, nobody liked.

I really prefer crafting leagues to loot pinata leagues. Leagues like affliction are fun for a short while but don't have much longevity, whereas crafting leagues let me do a lot of cool shit and make plans for longer. Necropolis to me was a real success as I thoroughly enjoyed it, and still am. :)

I honestly prefer the leagues that are neither, most crafting leagues have been full of potential but atrociously executed with absolutely awful UI's and multiple layers of utterly obnoxious busywork that completely kills most people's interest in using it and makes it horribly frustrating to try crafting with given the games insistence on multiple massive layers of RNG for everything. Loot pinata leagues have a tendency towards burn out and massively distort the economy whenever there is one strategy better at abusing the loot pinata aspect.

Leagues that are neither and instead add new content to the game, like Sanctum and Ancestors tend to be better executed (Ancestors was really poorly executed but had the bones of something potentially great and was still better executed than Crucible or Necropolis) and are less likely to devolve to everything being abusing a singular mechanic as much as possible the way Affliction and Necro have gotten.