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Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

T. Reich

Arcane
Joined
Apr 15, 2013
Messages
2,714
Location
not even close
Everyone will point at you and laugh at you because you're weird.
Your potential power will be much lower than the one of the ranged builds, especially aoe capability.
Your survivability will be lower, too, because ranged builds get access to every defense you can have but don't have to get up close and personal with dangerous shit.
But it's playable! The devs semi-fixed some annoying shit like increasing weapon range and improving melee skill targeting somewhat.

Ask Quatlo , he's the resident melee dude.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,882
i play melee builds almost exclusively. Key is choosing those skills that fake ranged ones...

main problem are some bosses. As ranged its easy to shoot and evade some weird attacks. Getting in melee range requires higher attention to detail. Additionally your attack window - time between dodging/running around to evade special attacks, is smaller.
To compare most ranged characters can attack stuff off screen.

that being said, go melee(unless you want to play ice spear, when in doubt always play ice spear build)
Those are not melee builds, those are "melee" builds.
 

Jason Liang

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2014
Messages
8,335
Location
Crait
Does Blade Flurry count as melee? My Blade Flurry hits to 2/3rds towards the edge of the screen.

Melee has some benefits over even projectiles: you get a damage bonus from Strength, life and mana leeching from the Shadow area on the passive skill tree near Ghost Reaver, and Fortify support which adds a lot to survivability. Blade Flurry is also the only non-spell channelling skill: there is no projectile attack skilll that can link to cast while channelling.

A lot of melee skills provide innate damage conversion which is helpful.

You also get your choice of busted dirt cheap unique weapons to wield, so you save a lot on not having to craft your weapon.

You also get to use a shield. A bow uses two hands, and the best Shields are still better than the best Quivers. You could use a Wand and Shield, but then you don't get Whirling Blades for movement.

But you know the expression about bringing a knife to a gunfight. PoE combat is a gunfight.

At least you cant shoot enemies three screens away. So a close ranged gunfight.

Maybe the original Diablo was the only Diablo-clone to balance Melee with Ranged and Spells? Its sucessors have strayed from the formula and melee has suffered for it.
 
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ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,882
BF is not melee, it only uses melee weapon for its ranged attack. One skill that is true melee but still good at clearing screens is that Flicker Strike one.
Frost Blades is not like Freezing Pulse, FB is way more irritating to play as you still need to click first attack on someone before projectiles spread and if you use multistrike to get over this problem you often get stuck in place for too long waiting for animations to end.
 

T. Reich

Arcane
Joined
Apr 15, 2013
Messages
2,714
Location
not even close
My personal criteria for determining
rating_prestigious.png
-ness of a melee skill:
1) Does it require namelocking for attacking? No = faux-melee.
2) Can it hit enemies at least 1/3 screen away from the point of attack? Yes = faux-melee.
Yup, that pretty much puts most of melee skills into "not-really-melee" category. Sadly.
 

Zdzisiu

Arcane
Joined
Dec 3, 2009
Messages
3,489
My personal criteria for determining
rating_prestigious.png
-ness of a melee skill:
1) Does it require namelocking for attacking? No = faux-melee.
2) Can it hit enemies at least 1/3 screen away from the point of attack? Yes = faux-melee.
Yup, that pretty much puts most of melee skills into "not-really-melee" category. Sadly.
Viper strike for the true melee experience!
 

T. Reich

Arcane
Joined
Apr 15, 2013
Messages
2,714
Location
not even close
My personal criteria for determining
rating_prestigious.png
-ness of a melee skill:
1) Does it require namelocking for attacking? No = faux-melee.
2) Can it hit enemies at least 1/3 screen away from the point of attack? Yes = faux-melee.
Yup, that pretty much puts most of melee skills into "not-really-melee" category. Sadly.
Viper strike for the true melee experience!

It's actually my N1 skill to try out in beta, if I get in.+M
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,882
huh, was not aware that viper strike applies poison now. Was still living in world where those viper counters were not poison.
Sure bino is nice for spreading those poisons but... if you use skill that applies poison 100%, wont it be better to use weapon that isnt a dagger?
Damage per hit is part physical and part chaos but secondary effect of Viper Strike is that it applies poison on hit.
Any other weapon does not give you AoE Poison and so it makes it weaker. And you can go Assassin with Bino because it has good base crit and then take Assassin traits that give more poison damage. You hit toughest guy 2 times, bino spreads poison and you use Abyssal and everything on screen then dies due to chain reaction. If you focused on bonus chaos damage all 3 damage sources will do bonus chaos damage. You can use Added Chaos damage with your Viper Strike so to not need to have physical damage boosts. And in second hand a high ES shield or if you are going life (and acrobatics in that case) one of those shields that gives you that your attacks cannot miss so you don't need to raise accuracy at all.
 
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Quatlo

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2013
Messages
941
Melee is very much playable, but I play on scrubcore so I die a lot when starting a league and dont worry about it. Last league I did axe+shield glad and was pretty much unkillable except random bigass crits on very rippy map mods, I had no trouble clearing the guardians (except that one time when I rolled 3 damage mods and temp chains :D) It worked great with pretty much every namelock skill but I stayed with static strike so I could just kill small trash mobs while shield charging around.

This league I went full hipster modo and made CI melee elementalist witch with 2h sword and wild strike, took me some time to adjust to CI since it was my first ES based build ever, but after working around some rough edges and getting decent ES on gear i manage to outleech and facetank everything (this will no longer be the case with ES/VP/GR changes, rip hipster me), the damage is fucking insanely good and build is overall fun to play and colourful to watch, I just wish WB would work with 2h because leap slam sucks donkey balls.

I really wish they'd add more namelock melee skills instead of these shitty "hit the ground and wait for explosions" they keep adding but with different colour flavouring.
 

Endemic

Arcane
Joined
Jul 16, 2012
Messages
4,321
Newcomer to the game here, decided to jump in without doing much reading on mechanics. Picked ranger and I have a couple of annoyances right away:

-Camera is too zoomed in; I can't use my character's bow effectively

-Map is garbage, especially the overlay version

Other than that it seems alright so far.
 

Zdzisiu

Arcane
Joined
Dec 3, 2009
Messages
3,489
Newcomer to the game here, decided to jump in without doing much reading on mechanics. Picked ranger and I have a couple of annoyances right away:

-Camera is too zoomed in; I can't use my character's bow effectively

-Map is garbage, especially the overlay version

Other than that it seems alright so far.
The camera is something you get used to. And is a very conscious decision made by the devs to limit both the player vision and the ranged weapons effective range. But still, you can easily off screen kill mobs with ranged attacks and spells.

The map will be improved with the release of 3.0.

Here you have a preview of how it might look in 3.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehRxyluumA8

It was confirmed that it will be customizable to a certain extent.
 

Hyperion

Arcane
Joined
Jul 2, 2016
Messages
2,120
The map starts as a pretty low opacity, you can go into options and max out the slider. I think it looks pretty good as is, but I played for years with the shitty opacity, so when I finally made the change it was eye opening. I was under the impression the current map overlay was a bit of a conscious decision to give it that D2 feel. But there's no reason not to improve it and they really knocked it out of the park.
 

Endemic

Arcane
Joined
Jul 16, 2012
Messages
4,321
The camera is something you get used to. And is a very conscious decision made by the devs to limit both the player vision and the ranged weapons effective range. But still, you can easily off screen kill mobs with ranged attacks and spells

Fair enough. Guess I'll see how it goes at higher levels.

It was confirmed that it will be customizable to a certain extent.

Much better :thumbsup:
 

SirSingAlot

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 27, 2014
Messages
750
Location
in front of my keyboard, obv
better question is: how much are people willing to pay for this on standard?
it was a lucky find on market and i was able to afford it after some serious haggeling.
paid a lot, because yolo and why not
 

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