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The original was posted on /r/pathofexile by /u/Steel_Neuron on 2025-01-02 16:14:11+00:00.
I know GGG appreciates it short and sweet, so I won't write an essay. I watched every single interview on the road to PoE2; I'm not going to link timestamps, but on the topic of ranged versus melee, GGG's response about their approach to balance in this regard focused on two aspects:
- Staying close to enemies as inherent advantages in PoE2's action combat framework, because you can quickly avoid cone shaped attacks and other AoEs by moving faster than the boss's turning radius.
- The new accuracy system is skewed in favor of melee because of the accuracy dropoff based on distance: Hits from afar have to worry about accuracy, where melee doesn't.
These seemed to be (and as far as I know, continue to) the two pillars of GGG's approach to ranged and melee balance, but I think they're built on a big misunderstanding:
These are not advantages of melee. These are advantages of standing close.
Unfortunately, all that melee is gaining from these two points (better maneuverability around dangerous targets, and good accuracy at point blank) is equally applicable to ranged, because there's nothing stopping a ranged build from just shooting at point blank if they so desire. In fact, ranged is better than melee at this kind of combat because of the movement flexibility of ranged skills (most of them allow strafing, which makes maneuvering at short range easier). Similarly, accuracy drop-off is such a non-solution to this problem that I'm honestly surprised it made it this far into development. Sure, accuracy suffers at range for a ranged build. You know who also suffers at range? melee builds, which can't hit at range at all.
Now, here's a tough pill to swallow: For melee to compete with ranged, ranged will somehow have to become worse at point blank combat. I think GGG has the right idea with accuracy dropoff, but they got it reversed: accuracy should be low at point blank, and good at a distance, which is coincidentally realistic: No decent archer has a problem shooting at the fullscreen ranges in PoE, but shooting a fast moving target at point blank is very difficult. This would make it so you'd rather pull out your melee weapon when you're staying close, and your ranged weapon when you're staying far, rather than always using the ranged weapon as ranged is a superset of melee.
Even if you don't think ranged builds must become bad at point blank to solve this problem, I do believe that whatever advantages melee builds end up having cannot be summarized to "the advantages of being point blank", because being at point blank is not exclusive to melee builds.