Best melee is ranged melee. Welcome to Poe.

It was a thing since day one of early access You are not alone in your feelings

Both can be true at the same time 🤣

Jk but I’d say melee is harder. I love to play warrior and I usually start as a warrior… when I’m done I do something else and I’m like damn this is so much easier and quicker

It’s not even the same game if you’re playing melee. Giant gap between the two play styles

Only because of how GGG designs bosses and monsters. If you pay attention to that, you will see that most area denial zones are placed within melee range, which obviously makes it difficult for melee to get any hits in.

You’ve got ground degen puddles near/around monsters, shotgunning skills, charge up attacks, no staggered attack times (as in, all mobs within a group can attack you at the same time), aura effects, certain enemy types that are ass to fight as melee (i.e. the giant birds that will slam dunk you if you try to move away to recover) and so on and so forth.

The game has very anti-melee design baked in from the get-go. It’s something they just can’t get right. Never have and probably never will. A lot of their designs seem rather like a “design first, fix later” type of thing. I.e. the tornado shit bird that has been nerfed several times already, is still buggy as shit and is far more annoying to fight as melee.

Eh I felt that way on first attempts but a huge amount of bosses I think are easier the closer you are to them if you keep circling. Jamanra is way easier melee as long as you’re not impatient about positioning

At the very least, with melee insufficient defense is much more obvious, because you’re taking a lot more hits. Ranged can disregard defense in a lot of situations.
Just being in the melee range is inherently more dangerous. But I find it more satisfying.

The idea of ​​feeling that a warrior can take less punishment than a mage is frustrating. I love melee combat and do it in every league, but only for entertainment. After the campaign, I’ll go back to my bloodmage.

That’s why the best melee skills are “range” skills

You may be bad, but melee is a lot worse than ranged.

A fundamental problem across all ARPGs

it is and will be. even when broken it is weaker.

The issue in my opinion is the following: Lets say there are 100 sources of dmg.

Right now: 48 hit you only in close combat.
50 hit you whereever you stand.
2 hit you only in range combat.

Balanced would be: 30 hit you only in close combat 40 hit you wherever you stand 30 hit you only in range combat

Obviously it is hard to make realistic scenarious where the second division applies.

But right now melee can avoid almost no sources of dmg while range can avoid a LOT of them.

Logically a ranged unit would always be in less danger than a melee person, so a 30/40/30 dovision us not logical at all. It’s hard to find a good balance.

The best melee is to stack as much AoE to the point you are considered ranged. This is the true melee experience of Poe1 and Poe2.

2 different games honestly. Which sucks cuz melee is so much more satisfying

The thing with melee is that you are prone to everything the game throws at you with little in the way to protect yourself. Ranged attacks, melee attacks, ground degens, corpse explosions etc. Good luck trying to outrun any mobs if you need to back off. That being said I die less often on melee, I just don’t find the gameplay that riveting.

Melee is harder bc you can’t really avoid getting hit as well as ranged can, there’s no way to really stack hp, and armor is the worst of the 3 main defenses. So you can’t avoid getting hit, you don’t have the defenses to stop said hits from hurting, and you don’t have the hp to survive more than a few hits.

Melee in POE2 is worse than melee in POE1 because the animations are 5x as long.

When you decide to play melee, like pure melee, you have decided to go hard mode.

It’s just because of how many enemy attacks and passive damage is so much harder to avoid when you are in melee range. So you’re forced to dance in and out of combat while a ranged character can just keep dpsing while running around.

There’s no concept of projectile collision for enemies. Their ranged shots will phase through their melee units to hit you. They also don’t have friendly fire. So there’s absolutely no protection from hugging a mob closely to avoid ranged line of sight.

When mobbing, I have not yet seen a time where being far away is worse than being up close.

My biggest issue with melee is that slows are absurdly overtuned in this game (50% action speed chill lmao) and for some reason rare mobs with slowing affixes are designed to only ever affect melee range.

It basically means you need to invest pretty heavily into slow reduction as a melee which just adds more to the list of “required” stats needed for comfortable gameplay. To make matters worse, melee warriors are already hamstrung by the movement speed reduction of armor/shields and the reduced attack speed nodes on the tree, making any additional slows feel unbelievably awful.

I really hope GGG tones down slows across the board and makes more of them affect mid to long range playstyles rather than the already slow melees.

Yeah absolutely. The bear is my first melee character I’ve gotten to maps. Usually hit a wall around act 3 anytime I make warrior or monk

Definitley agree that melee is tougher than range

0.4 was the first time I league started a melee character and it was frost wolf, which what I’ve heard from others, is a pretty strong melee league starter build. I never struggled as hard and died as many times on league start as I did this time around.

The main thing for me was that as melee (at least with most skills) you have to stand still to do dmg to the enemy where as with range skills you can always move around, dodging projectiles while dealing damage.

Also all those ground effects are cancerous when you’re a melee character (I’m looking at you abyss rares with green ground effect). I couldn’t do endgame maps that had abyss for a long time, until I had enough dps to almost oneshot rares.

always was always will be

Its not you ranged aoe skills are hundred times better than melee

Melee is good as long as you’re one shotting or it’s whirling assault.

Both…..probably.

All melee skills that are up close should give inherent DR at the start of the skill wind up , committing to these slow ass animations can be a death sentence. Melee is inferior to ranged and spells in every way

At a fundamental, physical level, melee will always be worse than ranged.

There’s a reason modern warfare has evolved to get the attacker as far as reasonably possible from the defender while still being able to attack them.

The best warrior build I had in PoE2 was using a crossbow. I hope that answers your question.

The trick is to have such large aoes that you can clear from one screen away :D

Both

yeah, it’s not a poe thing tho

I have played melee exclusively since EA release. Some players will naturally have an affinity to certain playstyles. Caster/Minion playstyle is the farthest thing from what i find fun (unless its sorcerer from dragons dogma). I also attribute my affinity to melee from playing monster hunter for the longest time.

There are ways round ‘harder’ e.g I’ve had time of needs and mana stacking builds this season that have been pretty immortal (the latter being 100% immortal unless you make a mistake and forget to enable it, I have like 40k a sec mana regen). Then once you reach circa 1m dps on any build, everything insta dies.

But yeah, broadly, ranged seems to be better off than melee and I presume it always will be. Suits me as I always prefer the way ranged builds play, but, it’s crap on close range melee enjoyers. I presume the only way it for GGG is to really skew the defences for them, where they make them virtually unkillable as default, but maybe find a way to stop them doing as much damage as the other builds, make them the tank class across the board.

Yes it is and I LOVE IT!

Its harder until you get used to it, then theyre basically the same.

Yes, as a melee character you have to stand in melee range. In case you wondered

Gotta play like a earth/fire bender

Yes and no. Range starts of strong and stays strong. Melee is often a bit more fuckup especially early on, but slams hard (pun intended) if you get it going.

Ice striker monk is good or spintowin titan.

Yes, the melee one.

I hear melee is more difficult. I’ve never attempted to play ranged so I don’t know that from personal experience but that’s pretty much what everyone says.

U have to have good reactions and pay attention to your surroundings.

Also in certain situations, it is much better to attack than trying to panic roll out of it. Especially when there are so many mobs around u. Stun, freeze and electrocute are to me the best thing theyve added which can be abused for melee.

But Jonathan said they fixed melee.

Melee is the most fun though, I’m having a blast with werewolf lunar assault and I main invoker. HCSSF - the nomnom is real.

The best melee skills are skill that do damage from ahem range. Yes it’s unfair. On top of the aura disadvantage and on death explosions, and standing still while attacking, u also get to use crappy Armour as ur starting point. You are welcome 😉

Chain explo. 1 atk, screen boom. If mobs close to other mobs, all die type tech makes melee in poe2 sooo much fun.

These games all seem to not have great melee in terms of how it feels to play.

I think it’s because fundamentally these games are bullet hell games, and it’s hard to balance running TOWARDS the bullets as well as running FROM the bullets.

I think there were dev statements to the effect that melee would be more challenging for exactly the reasons you describe. Then they mentioned intent to make it at least viable. This is all iirc, so get out your salt

I played freeze wolf mostly through the campaign, and by increasing AoE and freeze buildup you can stop them before they get you. Look for GGG to nerf EZ-freeze, soon™. 

Based on nothing, it feels like they’ll stage nerf it

AOE is the ONLY answer

If you wanna be in melee quite a bit rather than using slams then you’re going to likely be using resonating shield quite a bit. It’s definitely viable but slow compared to just the unga bunga slams,

I had the most fun as a full on leap slam warrior with dual 2H maces and 100% aftershock. I had blood letting and that one abyss jewel, + level stack so leap slam was level 40 and got lucky with some great weapons from trade. I still have the screenshot of my leap slam reaching 800k!

Back when I played a Glacial Hammer build i had a ranged skill too. I would use Frostbolt to soften up the mobs before and ran up and smashed them in the face. Sometimes I used Cold Snap linked to a Trap gem. For those who are wondering, I’ve never followed a build I just play what’s fun and I really like freezing and shattering.

I cant remember an arpg where melees arent harder, but in poe2 with all the bs mechanics, I feel like melees are almost discriminated level of worse. Its a bit better in poe1, because the game is faster and more smooth, but even there bosses like to stand in various dead zones and all you can do is sit afar and wait.

My worst expirience was a melee caster build

Nope, melee is hot dog water compared to rng

Context is important, POE1 still had bad melee skills until a year or so ago. Slam and strike skills worked for a while and cyclone has had 1-2 seasons… out of like 15 years.

Melee has to solve defense as well as DPS so it’s inherently harder than ranged, which just needs enough EHP buffer to not die to incidental damage and then pumps infinite DPS.

I’ve been playing instant Earthquake titan this league and it’s been tons of fun, it’s extremely tanky, and you can still beat uber pinnacle bosses, so it’s perfectly viable, you just have to actually play the game as melee instead of snoozing through one button maps.

Yes, it’s harder. It’s not that hard though, lock in. 🫡

Yes melee is a self nerf. It’s very logical. 

Poe2 comes down to two aspects. Dealing damage and taking damage. 

Melee and Ranged basically deal same dps. With ranged beeing ranged and melee having only small range. 

Both also take the same damage. Both basically have same defensive options. 

There is no upside for playing melee balancing the range downside. 

Therefore ranged always is better. 

Simple fix would be to either give melee a flat dps multi of some form. Or a defensive multiplication of some form. 

State now is melee is a straight nerf in attack range. 

GGG can never make melee good. It is not in their philosophies. If you want to play proper melee, play other games.

Colossally harder. I’d been playing a bunch of melee characters, and then played a ranged one. I kept thinking “this is so jank, I really need to upgrade some gear, there’s no way I’m getting past X like this,” and then not only did I get past X, I did it easily on the first try. It’s just monumentally easier when you have more room, more time, and avoid a lot of crap by default.

Honestly, I’m convinced GGG thinks of melee as “challenge mode,” thinks people pick melee because they want the game to be harder. They are extremely resistant to giving melee serious survivability tools, and design far more mechanics that punish melee than they make mechanics specifically to punish range. Some of it seems to be misguided ideas about verisimilitude, but most of it, really, seems to be the simply fact that GGG is led by people whose idea of a good ARPG is PoE1’s Ruthless mode.

Ranged is easier, but also more of a margin for error

a melee gets hit but can take it better
a range get hit and dies