Combat Feedback

To begin with I'm a big fan of action games and I would like to share my feedback regarding mechanical part of combat in PoE2. The goal of PoE2 combat from my understanding was always to make multiple skill builds viable. However I feel like there is couple of issues plaguing melee skills. Ranged skills would also benefit from some of these changes.

Main issue for the melee skills is lack of innate advantage over ranged combat. It's especially noticable this league with abyss mobs effects, where on ranged character you basically can ignore 90% of mobs mechanics just by staying out of range. While I understand that statboosts might not exactly be the way to go as all of the characters use the same skill tree, I think a mechanic that a lot of action games use would be quite appropriate that is stagger. I believe that stagger based on damage dealt would be a great mechanic that would allow melee characters to be much more effective both offensively and defensively.

Another issue is that unlike ranged combat, where if you shoot same projectile/spell multiple times over and over is fine, realisticly proper melee combat has a lot of moves and spamming the same move over and over for me at least is not exactly great. There are couple factors that make using different moves feel incredibly clunky in contrast to spamming just one move over and over:

Recovery frames, especially at low attack speeds, create a scenario that you feel like you are being punished for using different skills one after another. You have wait ages to use another skill, while if you just use one skill it feels and spam it animations just flow very well between each other. From action games, especially asian ones I've learned that seemless transitions between skills are very important if the melee combat is to feel good to a player. Reducing recovery frames between different skills will create a scenario where there is a benefit of using multiple skills, regardless of other power sources.

Performing combos should be decoupled from enemy status, or at least changed to such a degree that the next skill will benefit from performing moves in certain order regardless of their status, because monsters just die way too fast for the most part. Counter example of such skill would be monks killing palm. Its a fine skill early on that allows to generate power charges from weak monsters but it becomes completely useless if there is a single very tanky monster. Instead I think it would be much better if the skill generated a charge for example if next used skills is a lightning skill or if its a strike skill. This way the skill will be usefull all the way to endgame, while promoting combat with multiple abilities.

There is overall lack of melee skills. This might sound ridiculous since we have only 2 weapons but for melee to use multiple skills its necessary imo. The best action combat games I've played have a l0-20 different moves that can be woven together in different sequences to perform interesting combos.

Another and maybe even more interesting way would be to create more interplay between skills. Decoupling enemy status from combos would also allow for one skill to affect other skills in different ways. For example performing frozen locus after 3 attacks of ice strike could create 3 locuses instead, while performing glacial cascade after 3 attacks of ice strole would perform the cascade horizontally instead of going forward. I think my favourite example of such interplay was vine arrow and siege cascade from patch 0.1, which I find a shame that it was removed instead of incorporated properly and just nerfed damage wise. Siege cascade is a skill that is best used vs multiple enemies, however if you used it to target vine arrows it became also incredible single target tool. Creating support gems that enable such intereactions could be one way of implementing such system, while reducing the need for just damage boost support gems.

Lastly I think there are some skills that would benefit from follow up moves like Rake. It is extremly awakward animation wise to spam Rake, so adding couple more attacks after initial rake, somewhat akin to ice strike, would probably enhance the feel of the skill. The same goes for palm skills.

nice well articulated feedback. hopefully they can improve melee to feel more melee than poe1.

I agree with the 'interplay between skills' portion. it would feel way more fluid- rake can be combined with disengage to feel lil less clunky, but unfortunately rolling still feels superior most of the time

i am lil surprised they nerfed the vine arrow /siege cascade (never tried it) it might be due to it not being in line with their 'archetypes' and not about damage- which would be sad. i'm saying this because LA/LR combo is still still one of the strongest in game.