Feedback and Suggestions - Strike Skills still feel really bad to play, especially early on. (Problem/Solution format) - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

Problem: Strike Skills' slow first hit and quicker second hit make them feel really awkward until you have extremely high attack speed. Additionally, the Strike area of effect is quite awkward and dependent on the weapon.

Solution: Make Cleave the default Strike Skill animation, with a large difference in AoE between weapons of different sizes.

New Problem: Strike Range has become irrelevant with this change.

Solution: All instances of Melee Strike Range should be converted into Strike Area of Effect, which should make the default Cleave animation scale similarly to how Melee Strike Range scaled the area of Strikes (from a pure numbers perspective).
A new modifier would be added to Cyclone and similar skills that reads "Modifiers to Strike Area of Effect apply to this Skill's Area of Effect at #% of their value" to replace the old modifier.

New Problem: Ancestral Call Support and Melee Splash Support have become irrelevant with Cleave becoming the default animation.

Solution: Remove both Ancestral Call Support and Melee Splash Support. Replace all instances of "Strike Skills target # additional nearby Enemies" with #% increased (more?) Strike Area of Effect.

Problem: Strike Skills still won't feel good to play after these changes, even if they've become much easier to understand and build.

Solution Preface: Good melee in games typically have movement attached to use of melee, as well as movement during melee actions, therefore...

Solution: Add two new Support Gems:
1. A Support Gem with little to no extra damage, that gives the player the ability to move, albeit slowly (slightly less slowly as the gem levels up), during the use of a Strike Skill.
2. A Support Gem with little to no extra damage, that teleports the player to the selected position of the mouse when they use a Strike Skill (with a limit on travel distance).

Problem: Strike Skills still under-perform, after all of these changes.

Solution: Buff all Strike Skills to have usable levels of damage.

There are other issues these changes create, but I think from this starting position, Strike Skills could become properly enjoyable, and feel good to play.

I'm bumping for mentioning the godawful swing animation problem as problem #1 and will continue to do so until someone at GGG realises just how bad the default is.

Bring back the old animation! Or just set them all to heavy strike anything but the current one.

Given that a large part of the problem with melee is that the characters have to be in a specific location to DPS either more damage or more defenses would greatly improve balance.

Given that more base damage gives you the freedom to invest in more defense and vice versa they amount to the same thing mostly.

Without strong defenses players are required to move outside of their own attack range to stay alive which reduces DPS uptime this is just an inherent part of melee characters but every time an area denial effect in implemented it makes melee characters worse... except for a single instance (mana siphoner).

The attack animation is trash too though.

I think making everything splash is not a great solution but it does touch on other problems. I'm ok with drawbacks as long as melee isn't strictly worse than other types of characters though.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

I don't have any idea how people are playing strike/melee skills on anything but a berserker. 2 attacks/s wth. 20 attacks per second feels minimum to feel alright. 2 aps you will just get 1 shot before you have a chance to leech.

You gotta try Wild Strike Raider, which is stupidly fun to play either full cold variant, full "arc" variant, or full ele variant with shroud of the lightless for that all ele pan and claws. Soooooooooo fun to play, flashy, but difficult to get past T10 without bigger investments (also, well, melee :D)

I also played my fair share of gladiator bladestorm, which has been one of the tankiest character I#ve ever had, and the onyl one where I successfully 1 portaled breach boss invitation without chickening out (HC only player, and not the most skillful at that!)

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diarmuidtherat wrote:

Solution: Make Cleave the default Strike Skill animation, with a large difference in AoE between weapons of different sizes.

actually i previously posted about how torchlight infinite handled melee.

this is actually how they did it.

melee range is very generous.

i could technically kite enemies with some investment in aoe, as i could be dancing around the boss avoiding his telegraphed attacks while sneaking in a hit or 2.

compared to poe where you need SIGNIFICANT weapon range AND ancestral call in order to kite a boss. and even then theres a ton of area denials that make you unable to reach the boss via melee in a meaningful way.

don't have any criticisms, but I do have three addendums:

"strike skills target # additional enemies" shouldn't be outright removed. It serves an entirely separate purpose from AoE. AoE is generally a circle of damage based on where you strike. Targetting additional enemies allows more circles / coverage. They work in tandem, not either/or. Agreed that all strike skills should have splash damage baked in.

Love the idea of having movement incorporated in some way with each strike skill. Make all slam skills ALSO perform a leap. Make most other strike skills perform a dash. Make your character IMMUNE to damage during that movement. If that's too OP, add a slight cooldown between the movement phase of the strike skill so you can't chain it a la flicker strike.

BUT the single greatest hindrance to melee combat viability is as Terzian described: in order to be melee, you have to be in the thick of enemies. There HAS to be some kind of defense on every melee skill. If it has the melee or strike tag, have it also give you "1-2% reduced damage taken per enemy nearby, up to 20%.

This is the right idea, the solution is just terrible because the animation looks like absolute trash.

Why not simply remove the melee splash suport gem and add it by default to all melee skills where it makes sense? it would also give an aditional socket slot, an indirect buff, which every one knows melee needs.

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sonicphi wrote:

Why not simply remove the melee splash suport gem and add it by default to all melee skills where it makes sense? it would also give an aditional socket slot, an indirect buff, which every one knows melee needs.

Because targeting a specific monster depends on the size of the monster, including the comparative size of nearby monsters, the density of the pack, the number of effects, items on the ground, shrines and other clickable objects, monster speed, etc. In other words, it needs to be precise where AoE skills get away with just "shift+click in the general direction".

OP's suggestion of retiring the 25+ years old basic attack from Diablo 1 (that was made worse by strike animation) is on point. It has no place in modern PoE.