Melee combat is fundamentally broken

Been playing a Hollow Palm/Chayula Monk this league and I've finally reached my limit on mechanics not working properly.

There are many glitches that cause you to either deal no damage, or basically abort attacks entirely. Either geometry clipping your attack animation and causing the entire attack to be nullified while you swing futilely; a "valid path to the enemy" being deemed not possible, so rather than blink to the enemy you basically stand there doing nothing for a time, etc. Bosses now being mandatory on all maps, yet so many of them have poorly or not at all telegraphed 1shot attacks, especially for melee who need to be at close range to do any appreciable damage. Don't even get me started on how the VFX basically make it impossible to see mechanics in a group with all the player effects blinding you.

Examples:
Tempest Bell literally slowing down my attack animation by half or more when it's locked onto as the "primary target".

Shattering Palm having you stand there doing nothing if it determines it can't path to the target you clicked on because something else walked in front.

Relying heavily on dodge roll, yet still being easy to trigger sprint in the heat of the moment and facing multiple seconds of being stunned/zero defenses which is generally a death sentence as melee.

Attack speed seemingly slowing down to a crawl or stopping entirely when "surrounded" ... not sure if that is simply the instance simulation slowing down in a mob dense period, or some sort of undocumented debuff? I don't see my character getting flinched, and no curses or chilled ground are in play and it still happens. It's like my character gets scared and stops fighting.

And of course, there is no log so there is no way to verify what happened leading up to your death, so I have no way of knowing what I could have done differently if anything at all.

And the payoff? 99.999% of dropped loot being worthless garbage, and any decent piece of gear I might be able to craft for myself costing so many divs in mats, I would need to farm multiple nights to even make one attempt at putting one together. Any appreciable currency I get is basically from selling waystones and unique chance bases, almost never from the actual maps themselves.

I never played POE1, so I have no idea if it was like this as well, but I can tell you: This ain't it. I shouldn't need to be a crafting meta master or delete things before they're even in view as Deadeye in order to enjoy the game and feel like I got rewarded by it in any way.

EDIT: Almost forgot Culmination appearing to be broken as well. I've never seen a single charge generated from skills I put it on. Sniper's Mark similarly fails to generate a charge the vast majority of the time, which severely hampers Charged Blade usage for CI builds, as normal generation via frozen isn't really viable.

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ShinonAsahina#6448 wrote:

Attack speed seemingly slowing down to a crawl or stopping entirely when "surrounded" ... not sure if that is simply the instance simulation slowing down in a mob dense period, or some sort of undocumented debuff? I don't see my character getting flinched, and no curses or chilled ground are in play and it still happens. It's like my character gets scared and stops fighting.

Pretty sure what you are talking about here is a light stun. It cancel your attack and yes, your charactere look like he's scare lol

It's quite common when surrounded because you tank multiple hit. Even with evasion you wont be avoiding every single hit so in the situation of being surrounded it's common to take some hits and get light stun.

I'd recommend getting some nodes on the tree for it. If you use EV/ES gear i think the "increase stun threshold based on % of your ES" is better since we usualy have less life than ES.

For the rest, the pathing is defenitly not optimal when playing melee and you can get stuck by some objects or terrain that dont really seem obvious for the eye. It can be anoying specialy on certain maps. Attacking a pot or a rock always feels awkward.

The bell can also behave weirdly on bosses that do not stand on the ground, like the boss from forge or hidden grotto. I dont even botter anymore to drop it there.
They did made the hitbox slightly better for regular attack tough.

I know what light stun looks like (what I would call flinching): There is a sound for it and a visual flash when it happens. That isn't happening in these cases. I'm watching my health bar (ES bar as it were) and it's not moving for multiple seconds at a time -- plenty of time for me to be able to get some attacks in at a 0.13s attack speed and... my character just doesn't.

It's a slow-motion train wreck I've learned to mostly see coming and try to mass roll and "reset" the encounter entirely because of it. It usually starts with shattering palm's ice shards failing to attach or detonate for whatever reason, so then you try apply them again and/or swing a few more times with ice blade to detonate and... my character is just like nah I'm good.

(Also I already have the added stun resist from ES passives)

Ha yeah i see. I dont know i never have that but i dont use the ice palm.

Something i noticed, not often, is that i'm slowed, even like walking not only attack, and i do not have any debuff appearing in the corner like usualy.

I have the impression that some monsters maim you but it's not appearing in the debuff icons.
I had that with thoose horse guys that are always with hyena. And i know they can maim.
Why i think it's seem invisible but it's just the icon not showing up.

Cant really record it or something to show it in the bug section because it's so rare and when it happen it's too late to start recording.