Caster vs Melee unbalances around lvl 70s

spell castings problems all stem from the unnecessary difficulty damage during the leveling process.

sure it all balances out at level 80+ but for most people 80+ is the stopping point , not the starting point.


spell builds suck until level 40 - 50.

and they suck for many reasons.

chief among them is the lack of proper scaling methods. good spell casting items are rare , you most certainly will not find them on a standard play through , most of the time if i am not twinking ill have two 10 + 25% spell damage wands at level 50 , at which point i would need to waste a ton of alts to get a few 10 + 40% wands.



having the spell casting items share stat spaces with actual weapons , was not a good idea.
It makes finding them needlessly difficult and as a result makes leveling a spell caster not fun.


the other issue is the low base damage. until level 60 most spells will do about half the damage of weapons.

whether that is balanced or not is irrelevant , because it is most certainly not fun , people don't play that which is not fun.

Melee is not melee anymore.

Spectral throw changed everything. With the new two handed buffs, even a mediocre 2 hander will blow most of the spells (Read: Not discharge) right on out the water in scaling till they hit level 20, by which time the melee user has already acquired a much better weapon.

Previously, two things were true.

1. Two handers were not as powerful. Thus you had to get a pretty damn good one to get good scaling.

2. Even if you got an amazing weapon, you had to put yourself at risk by waddling into packs, unless you were ground slam, which can only be used with like two weapons, one of which is very very hard to get good rolls on (Staves). And even then, spectral throw now blows ground slam right out the water damage wise.

The reality now is "melee" clean house with spectral throw then go in for an easy single target kill on rares with sick double strike/pick your poison dps.

I think the only solution, without reverting a ton of the two hander changes/ melee buffs, is to make gems level faster. Currently progression wise, gems hits 20 at around level 85 ish.

That's pretty absurd. Casters should be done with base spell dmg upgrades by 75-78 in my opinion, and be looking for straight gear progression from there.

My biggest issue is that Melee doesn't have to waste a support-slot to get Life/Mana Leech, while Spellcasters always have and there are a lot of situations where you don't want to wait for ES to regen, which again would greatly limit the clear-speed something the low dps already does.

A Crit-Reaver who can neither be stunned nor frozen can easily sustain any situation, while doing 50k+ DPS. To do something similar you already have to use a Life-Leech gem but you can't leech more than about 9% from a lvl20 Life-Leech gem, while Melees can by bypass that by far. The funny thing is that ES as problematic as it is for casters it is great for Melees, since it allows with CI the permanent usage of Bloodrage.

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ScrotieMcB escribió:

I don't buy this argument. At all. Melee being popular isn't going to make more weapons drop; casters being unpopular isn't going to make less wands drop. And anything that seems good, players are going to stash away; it's not like players don't have shitloads of stash tabs by this point.

The majority of players only have 4 tabs. I'm not sure how you decide what's good but I'm not playing thin margins, I have 70 tabs but I still don't save many items that could sell for a chaos. I'm trying to save items that will sell for a chaos quickly.

Back when melee was considered awful I was trying to make a staff crit build. There were a dozen of staves I could find, most didn't have crit chance and the ones that did were 6l, selling for 10-20 ex. The ones going cheaply, as I didn't want to spend that much on an experimental build, were pretty much garbage. Now go look how many 2h weapons are for sale.

It's not the items aren't being dropped, it's that the demand is shifting so sellers are shifting. If casters are popular you'll see a lot of mediocre wands, like 30-50% SD, 50% crit, 10% cast speed (2 of the 3), now you're finding many 300 dps 2h weapons and 200 1h weapons because melee is popular. The sellers know there's people playing builds that can use them, new/poor players with 1-2 chaos that will buy their weapon as a filler until they get some funds together for something better. The mediocre wands will become rarer. Not because they aren't dropping as often, because they aren't selling, why waste the space in your limited stash for something that might not sell for a month or 2.

Good items always get stashed, that's not my point. What changes with build trends is the middle market. If you really need proof do an odd build and go shop for items, maybe a specter build focused on elemental damage. Have fun finding something that isn't GG.

I remember in closed and open beta that people were whining that melee wasn't any good. This was because ranged could do the exact same thing, but not risk getting hit, and the only good melee skill was the ranged skill that used a melee weapon (lightning strike).

If I'm not mistaken didn't GGG intend for rotating meta builds? The "balance" issue is one that developers can really get mired down in. Casters were the way to go for basically the entirety of open beta while melee kinda fell behind. That's not to say you couldn't play melee then and it's certainly not to say you can't play a caster now, but I just don't think the disparity between melee and casters is that great that it warrants a re-balancing. To me it makes pretty good sense that spectral throw is the flavor of the month, it was the premier skill released alongside the Scion and 1.0. My advice, give it time and casters will come back into the spotlight again.

Well...

Crit Casters sooooo....

Pure casters have actually been pretty terrible ever since CB. Although its true in CB ranged were better, that ranged was catalyst LA bow users and sporkers, it was never really pure casters

Pure casters just legitimately can't compete with other builds when you factor in gear dependency. For one thing, getting good ES gear is much harder than life gear, this is a fact, its due to the change of possible mods for drops

Pure casters often have to deal with insane mana costs, and often end up going more out of their way in having to deal with this problem, melees have things like Blood Magic (gem or node), reduced mana cost etc etc. Also its true that casters have a higher mana pool, but its not high enough to deal with that 300 mana cost spell that they use

The other thing is, most casters end up being mid ranged combat specialists. Even though it was theoretically possible for casters to do what LA rangers were doing at their peak, they did it at much less range, which means that they have to deal with increased risk of dying.

Now people may argue that casters have utility to deal with this (although the only utility that actually helps casters in this case is freeze and chill, and melee's have stun which provide a similar status effect), that utility is simply put, not enough to deal with the increased risk of dying. In PoE there are so many ways to die, get one shot, etc etc, that its hard to build a caster to deal with all of these situations while still providing sustainable dps (all at the same time while having medium range)

The best way to solve this problem is to add some really strong utility nodes right at the start of the witch area

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deteego escribió:

Pure casters have actually been pretty terrible ever since CB. Although its true in CB ranged were better, that ranged was catalyst LA bow users and sporkers, it was never really pure casters.

In the first phase of CB shock nova was able to destroy anything on the whole screen in two seconds. It had no donut effect and incredible range and damage when augmented properly. After that we had completely broken firestorm builds which abused the flat damage from the added chaos damage and added lightning damage supports. After that, when GMP (in fact it was just MP back then) had no damage penalty, Fireball- and Icespear-builds trivialized the Maelström of Chaos. In their time, all of these were the strongest builds around, and they were casters. Pure casters were so overpowered in the first months of CB that the feedback forum was pretty much about how to nerf them. If I recall correctly lifeleech and manaleech on regular magic and rare items even worked with spells. In addition to having the highest damage output intelligence characters had the best survivability because a high-level raise spectre gem could raise like seven high hp spectres, without any investment of skillpoints or support gems needed.

For historians its probably all very interesting how things were months ago, and a great subject with a glass of dark ale.
But from a feedback few of point, its maybe better to discuess the current unbalanced situations? ;)

Btw i dont have a 80+ pure caster so i dont know from own experience if the dps difference really gets fixed at that point, but others keep telling me that.
But i do have a few pure caster builds in the 70s and i have played with melee chars of that level, and there definitely is a really big difference there.
This is something that should get fixed, especially because that level range is so important, since the game actually starts there for serious players.