I Love that this Game is being considered Hard, BUT...

it simply is not Hard. It is trying to be Hard, but in a way where it gets frustrating especially white normal enemies.

I Love that Rares and Uniques can Oneshot if dont Played mechanically correct and THATS kinda HARD. Playing Mechanics incorrect should be punished imho, BUT normal (white) enemies should not be able to (randomly) oneshot and stun you when there equal level.

Let the Magic and Rare enemies Stun me i don't mind that, but the amount of white mobs you encounter in a group of enemies, especially with the Abyss "affix" as a Melee Player its either Kill and Stun first or get Stunned and Killed first. Its just not fun as a Melee Player to get chainstunned and animation locked by white mobs.

What i also think is "changeworthy" or "balanceworthy" is the Range of white enemies targeting and attacking you, sometimes Caster enemies target you outside of your view i.e Shades throwing their ice and freezing you or those casters in Act 2 Bone Pits with those Meteors but the caster is in Act 3 sitting next to Doryani in Black Chambers Casting that Meteor.

I think just balancing the above mentioned problems would bring joy to melee players not all of them of course.

As a Player who startet every Season as a Melee i switched to Range after i reached Endgame and Played nearly every Meta Build in S1 with Temporalis auto bomber and LS Deadeye in S2 i just did not find it fun anymore Playing my 3rd Season as a Ranged Lightning based Class that clears the whole map with 1 attack. I'm not saying that Oneshot Builds should not exist, i even think its healthy for the Game.

Iam of course NOT speaking for everyone as this is just MY Fedback and i dont see myself as a Casual. Just take in consideration that this Game is NOT Made for only Juicers and Hardcore Players. Casuals exist and they need to exist.

While I agree that normal mobs in both PoE1 and PoE2 are over-tuned for no reason, I really don't understand why any game should be "hard" instead of "fun." I don't understand how this RPG community constantly tries to force developers to do the hardest sh*t instead of demanding more fun content. It makes the developers lazy, and they're fiddling with numbers in an Excel sheet every patch while trying to focus on selling cosmetics rather than actually developing the game.

I think melee needs general bonuses. Things like, "If you've dealt melee damage to 3 or more enemies in the last 8 seconds, you take 20% less damage" or "If you've dealt melee damage to 3 or more enemies recently, you can't be stunned." I think playing melee; non-AoE (screen-blasting) melee builds in a game made by GGG is a huge mistake if your build doesn't one-shot everything. You're wasting your valuable time for stressing yourself out.

well i mentioned "hard" because the Devs simply want engaging and hard gameplay.
I dont mind a beeing Hard or engaging, but having overtuned enemies or constant stuns or animation breaks is not hard or fun, its frustrating.

And yes i agree with you that melees need a buff to let it be damage and defensives.



"I think playing melee; non-AoE (screen-blasting) melee builds in a game made by GGG is a huge mistake if your build doesn't one-shot everything. You're wasting your valuable time for stressing yourself out."

I totally agree with what you said that playing melee or any class with screen wide aoe. But not every player wants that, even me if i play a meta specc i want those screen wide explosions. But i also want to login sometimes and play a class that is not clearing screen wide and is good to play. Melee in general feels bad to play if you're not playing it with range abilities like Monk's storm wave i.e.

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sh1nzuu#6658 wrote:

As a Player who startet every Season as a Melee i switched to Range after i reached Endgame and Played nearly every Meta Build in S1 with Temporalis auto bomber and LS Deadeye in S2 i just did not find it fun anymore Playing my 3rd Season as a Ranged Lightning based Class that clears the whole map with 1 attack. I'm not saying that Oneshot Builds should not exist, i even think its healthy for the Game.

That's a big reason people play SSF or hardcore. Softcore Trade is kinda boring. After you've cleared 10 maps in 2 minutes each, why clear 1000 more? Except a lot of people love that playstyle, so it's sticking around.

Sounds to me as though you would enjoy playing harder leagues.

It's not just that this game is not hard.

This game is being designed in a way that is antithetical to difficulty.

When a game is difficult, hard, when a game is challenging, players are expected to die.
Succeeding at a task is meant to take multiple tries, and as such the game allows you to take multiple tries.
Needing multiple lives to clear a map, multiple attempts to take down a boss, because it's not easy enough to clear deathlessly. And in turn, the game lets you die those multiple deaths without losing more than the time spent on it.

This game is built such that you are expected to never die.
The xp penalty, content vanishing from the map if the boss kills you, losing the map entirely at first death if you dared to give it content, drops on the ground in campaign going away with zone resets upon death.
Compelling players to only engage with content that can be effortlessly cleared deathlessly. Easy content.

Never dying is not a challenge.
If you never die, there is no challenge.

Spec'ing a build to never die and to kill stuff easily is literally the entire genre. The challenge is picking/finding/crafting/trading for gear to reach a level where you are stomping everything aside from the Uber boss content. (IMO)

That gameplay loop of course needs to be balanced around taking a reasonable amount of time (or a long time, whatever) to get to that point.

The issue is that, cheap deaths with 12 frame enemy one shot attacks is neither fun, fair, or "difficult". This, combined with one portal map juicing to obtain loot in faster than 1,000 hours of play time for 10 div's probably shouldn't be a thing.

However, Game devs want us logged in for as many hours as possible, So it is a thing. Shrugs*

I haven't seen stun ever since lvl 60. Show your build and let's check if we can do something about it?

The best thing would be if they change things so you can adjust things to your liking somehow. Some people (like me) want to pull out a full combo for every fight, whether it's white monsters or bosses. Some people want white monsters to be a walk in the park but bosses to be difficult. Some people want every fight to be easy and just focus on farming currency.

Imho, it should be possible to adjust things to your liking, probably using the atlas tree; that's the best way to make everyone happy.