Melee builds

Abolutely agree here. I´m playing a Whirlwind barb this season.

He is absolutely fine in players 1-3. Farming Chaos Sanctuary in 2 minutes with the right gear. Got a 100% crushingblow gear with double Death for bosses (12 crushing blows per second). You can´t kill bosses faster.

The big problem lies in all these skills that are slow attacking and are single target.

Maybe we could get a solution to this by introducing a unique juwel that makes you deal splash damage? just like splash gem in path of Exile? This would finally make skills like Concentrate, Revenge or Jab viable...

On another side, melee builds are the best to do ubers.

Why does a barb have to be sorc like ?
If I'm playing a Frenzy barb, I don't want to cast Nova.

Tornado_OLO wrote: 2 months ago

On another side, melee builds are the best to do ubers.

Why does a barb have to be sorc like ?
If I'm playing a Frenzy barb, I don't want to cast Nova.

I align with this way of thinking and i mostly play melee builds. D2 is a heavily unbalanced game and it has some questionable design but for some reason we keep playing it.

PoE "solved" this issue and most melee builds feel like casters, causing special effects through the screen which i am not a fan of. There are also "normal" attacks that are less flashy and also work but are less effective than the flashier ones.

I like the feel of playing melee characters in d2 and i don't see any issue with them. I think that people who do are the ones expecting the same level of power as sorceress which are kinda OP.

I think Diablo 2 was first balanced around concepts that are no longer in game, like rare mana potions that you couldn't not buy, and sorceress could be stronger for a short time, but suck most of the time in melee. Until enough mana leech was reached...

the melee here is kind of not right for content. it should mean physical build.

If you only say about melee, then Mosaic will be kind and melee is strongest.

So remember, in new world, all enhance , buff is not working for bar/paladin physical, non Smite build.

Means, new jewel , new sunder charm is not working for Zeal, sacrify, Frenzy, Double Swing or druid.

It only works on amazon, ww bar.

(On paper, it will looks number become bigger for Zeal... but in real performance, it is not big enough to reduce from 2 hit kill to 1 hit kill)

There are so many ways to give melee better AOE (most already mentioned or in the game)
- improve existing AOE like Whirlwind
- add new WW or Cleave like AOE skills
- runewords that create explosion on Death
- runewords or skills that create shared damage like with WL defiler
- runewords or skills that launch extreme AOE elemental damage e.g. Mosaic).
- Blade copies or thrown Blade copies (e.g. WL Echoing Strike and Mirrored Blades)