Highlights, POE 3.7 Melee Revamp Several Major Features Guide
Grinding Gear Games has announced the latest expansion and Challenge League for its free-to-play action RPG Path of Exile. Legion will be released for PC on June 7, 2019, before coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on June 10, 2019, and Grinding Gear Games’ Chris Wilson was able to give RPGamer a heads-up on the new content as well as a complete revamp of the game’s melee combat.
Path of Exile has always been about defeating huge crowds of enemies, with players using an impressive assortment of spells and weapons to tear through everything in their way.
1. Over the podcast, kept repeating that it is hard to "see" this in action. It's something you need to play and feel. No video/text write-up can fully explain how good it feels
2. Animation Canceling applies to BOTH Melee and Spells
3. Double Strike will allow you to cancel animation just after one swing. Looks like it borrows a thing or two from D3/Grim Dawn's combat, which is great news.
4. If you use one skill and then instantly use another skill, the first one won't even happen because it's been canceled. The example shown was Default Attack followed by Double Strike. There also seems to be action queueing. If you use one skill and wait until the very last moment to use another skill, it'll be queued up as soon as the first one is done.
5. Except for obviously being stunned, you can cancel any animation with a movement skill. At level 4, every Class now gets a defensive movement skill. Not meant for traveling.
6. All movement skills are now instant when getting in and out of combat, but repeated usage will not be instantaneous. You still go through with the animation timings from repeated usage of consecutive Leaps.
7. Name Re-locking is now a thing. If you've name-locked a monster and it dies while you're still holding down the button, simply moving the cursor over the next monster will re-lock onto it, and over and over until the entire pack is dead. This also works when you're simply running and targeting the ground, and then decide to mouseover the monster. With that being said, if you intentionally want to target the ground (ie. Earthquake), you can still do so.
8. If you target your skill near a monster and then immediately mouseover the monster, the game will auto-target that monster for you by name-locking to it. So if you "miss" your click, you'll still be able to recover and hit it.
9. Players will essentially be given a "free move" in between attacks that don't sacrifice your actions per minute due to animation canceling.
10. Previously, every single Melee skill would have their attack time equal to the weapon's attack speed. Additionally, all of the Melee skills' animations would be rendered to all have matching times, when in reality, all of these animations have truly different times. To fix this, every single Melee skill will now have a hidden modifier called "Attack Time Modifier" which they will balance accordingly. They realized they can make certain attacks more powerful just by slowing them down and increasing damage, to match their animation speed. They have generally done this for all of the "Slam" and "Heavy Strike"-esque types of skills to give it more oomph. If you're killing a pack in one hit, you won't notice the slowdown with these skills.
11. All Melee skills will have a small amount of Added Damage as the gem levels up. Takes a little bit off a load of how good your Melee weapon needs to be. This way, they can fine-tune Damage Effectiveness to compensate for it.
12. Previously, every single-target Melee skill only hit one target. Now, every Melee attack can hit multiple enemies - whatever it looks like your animation swing should hit, will hit. It's technically not giving AoE to single-target attacks, but rather, having to do with your Weapon Range can allow you to hit multiple enemies if they're standing very close to each other.
13. Every single Skill in the game now renders it's AoE distances correctly.
14. Base Cyclone AoE is still normal. The one you saw in the trailer had very high Weapon Range. As part of Cyclone's rework becoming a Channeled skill, it will stop as soon as you let go of the button. Having the cursor on yourself means you spin in place forever, and moving the cursor slightly away from you means you Cyclone at a slower speed... and moving the cursor very far away means you'll move at the maximum speed you can. There will be 3-4 gradations.
15. Ancestral Call will work as normal and be updated to these changes.
16. They're still in highly discussing this internally, but a question raised if for example a skill like Molten Strike - if the simple animation of swinging hits multiple enemies, should ball spawn per each enemy hit? Currently, they're saying no, but it may or may not change once Legion releases. They will tune each skill on a per-Skill basis to answer this question.
17. Steelskin is a new defensive skill that will allow you to mitigate 70% of damage, capped at a specific value of total mitigation for a given hit. This value increases as you level up the gem.
18. Molten Shell now mitigates 70% of damage while the Shell is up, up to a cap which is determined by the amount of Armor you have. The damage Molten Shell deals as it breaks it also scaled with how much Armor you have.
19. Fortify has been buffed, but he forgets the specifics. There are nodes on the Passive Tree that buff Fortify, so you can invest in it if you so choose.
20. There is now Animation Queueing. Say you get stunned and press Leap slam to get out of combat as a panic button, your Leap Slam will be queued as soon as it wears off.
21. You will be unable to rotate between 3 of the new movement skills to travel at crazy speeds due to some of the movement skills having a global shared cooldown.
22. TL;DR, they switched from Manhattan Distance to Euclidean Distance to help fix movement skills getting stuck on a pebble. It was not an issue with collision, but rather, different systems disagreeing with if the player was truly able to make that move.
23. You are now able to contextually dodge monster/boss attacks so long as it makes sense animation-wise. If Hillock makes a right-wing... you can now dodge the attack by moving to the left... whereas if you were to move to the right, you'd still get hit by the attack.
24. While using console commands to respawn instances of Twilight Strand to showcase new things, Jonathan accidentally spawns an instance with Uber Hillock / Oni Goroshi. Dat RNG doe...
25. Some monsters, like Hillock, have slower wind-ups to some of their attacks while unleashing the blow is at normal speed. This is to help anticipation for defensive skills/mechanics/dodging. This occurs at other parts of the game too, with the idea of increasing monster damage but allowing for more windows of opportunity to dodge them. As another example, Fire Fury's firestorm AoE is now smaller but deals more damage. The majority of focus for this is just an early game because over time, the early game has become too easy.
26. Accuracy is now capped at 100%. They've tweaked the Accuracy equation and increased the sources of Accuracy to the point where getting 100% Accuracy is not a problem for most players. Just need a few sources of it.
27. Players will still block 100% damage, but some monsters will now have % Chance To Block, and when blocked, they will take reduced damage from the hit. Not 100% sure with Spell block.
28. There is now a sound effect when you miss a hit.
29. Base stun duration from Melee hits is now longer whereas the base stun duration from Spell hits is shorter. You also need less damage from Melee attacks to stun a target compared to damage from Spells. Also, Elemental Damage has less weight contributing to a stun whereas Physical Damage has more weight contributing to a stun.
30. As part of the Melee revamp, they found tons of bugs to squash, making everything feel better overall.
31. All of the single-target Melee skills have been significantly buffed in terms of damage.
32. Elemental Damage on Abyssal Jewels will be lowered while Elemental Damage on Weapons will be raised.
33. There will be a bunch of new Support Gems, and there are ones that are specific to each of the weapon types. One for claws, one for daggers, one for axes, etc. Also, one Support Gem to reward slower and larger hits.
34. Glacial Hammer has been redesigned to be a 3-hitting skill. Two small hits and then a gigantic third hit, which gives bonuses to its Freeze stats.
35. Leap Slam will now always stun bosses that are on Full-Life.
36. Shield Charge's damage is now calculated similarly to how Shield Spectral Throw is calculated. Shield Spectral Throw's damage has been buffed as well.
37. Daggers are getting a new line of Caster-Dagger variant bases that do not roll attack mods.
38. Staves are getting a new line of Attack-Staff variant bases that do not roll caster mods.
39. The goal of the Armour buffs was to make it work against Boss fights.
40. All of the counterattack Melee skills (ie. Riposte) where on the list to get buffed, but he forgets how specifically they are getting buffed.
41. If you hold Shift while pressing Quick Dodge, your character will backstep opposite direction of the cursor. So if you're using slam-based skills, you can slam -> backstep -> slam in that direction again as a sort of tactical retreat mobility move. Quick Dodge can also go up and down ledges and Spellcasters can also use it. There is also an unannounced new movement skill for Casters.
42. Many of the Acts 1-3 monsters are getting new abilities / buffed abilities.
43. Jonathan's favorite skill in this patch is Cyclone.
44. There are buffs to Bleed and Poison but he forgets what they are.
Path of Exile has always been about defeating huge crowds of enemies, with players using an impressive assortment of spells and weapons to tear through everything in their way.
1. Over the podcast, kept repeating that it is hard to "see" this in action. It's something you need to play and feel. No video/text write-up can fully explain how good it feels
2. Animation Canceling applies to BOTH Melee and Spells
3. Double Strike will allow you to cancel animation just after one swing. Looks like it borrows a thing or two from D3/Grim Dawn's combat, which is great news.
4. If you use one skill and then instantly use another skill, the first one won't even happen because it's been canceled. The example shown was Default Attack followed by Double Strike. There also seems to be action queueing. If you use one skill and wait until the very last moment to use another skill, it'll be queued up as soon as the first one is done.
5. Except for obviously being stunned, you can cancel any animation with a movement skill. At level 4, every Class now gets a defensive movement skill. Not meant for traveling.
6. All movement skills are now instant when getting in and out of combat, but repeated usage will not be instantaneous. You still go through with the animation timings from repeated usage of consecutive Leaps.
7. Name Re-locking is now a thing. If you've name-locked a monster and it dies while you're still holding down the button, simply moving the cursor over the next monster will re-lock onto it, and over and over until the entire pack is dead. This also works when you're simply running and targeting the ground, and then decide to mouseover the monster. With that being said, if you intentionally want to target the ground (ie. Earthquake), you can still do so.
8. If you target your skill near a monster and then immediately mouseover the monster, the game will auto-target that monster for you by name-locking to it. So if you "miss" your click, you'll still be able to recover and hit it.
9. Players will essentially be given a "free move" in between attacks that don't sacrifice your actions per minute due to animation canceling.
10. Previously, every single Melee skill would have their attack time equal to the weapon's attack speed. Additionally, all of the Melee skills' animations would be rendered to all have matching times, when in reality, all of these animations have truly different times. To fix this, every single Melee skill will now have a hidden modifier called "Attack Time Modifier" which they will balance accordingly. They realized they can make certain attacks more powerful just by slowing them down and increasing damage, to match their animation speed. They have generally done this for all of the "Slam" and "Heavy Strike"-esque types of skills to give it more oomph. If you're killing a pack in one hit, you won't notice the slowdown with these skills.
11. All Melee skills will have a small amount of Added Damage as the gem levels up. Takes a little bit off a load of how good your Melee weapon needs to be. This way, they can fine-tune Damage Effectiveness to compensate for it.
12. Previously, every single-target Melee skill only hit one target. Now, every Melee attack can hit multiple enemies - whatever it looks like your animation swing should hit, will hit. It's technically not giving AoE to single-target attacks, but rather, having to do with your Weapon Range can allow you to hit multiple enemies if they're standing very close to each other.
13. Every single Skill in the game now renders it's AoE distances correctly.
14. Base Cyclone AoE is still normal. The one you saw in the trailer had very high Weapon Range. As part of Cyclone's rework becoming a Channeled skill, it will stop as soon as you let go of the button. Having the cursor on yourself means you spin in place forever, and moving the cursor slightly away from you means you Cyclone at a slower speed... and moving the cursor very far away means you'll move at the maximum speed you can. There will be 3-4 gradations.
15. Ancestral Call will work as normal and be updated to these changes.
16. They're still in highly discussing this internally, but a question raised if for example a skill like Molten Strike - if the simple animation of swinging hits multiple enemies, should ball spawn per each enemy hit? Currently, they're saying no, but it may or may not change once Legion releases. They will tune each skill on a per-Skill basis to answer this question.
17. Steelskin is a new defensive skill that will allow you to mitigate 70% of damage, capped at a specific value of total mitigation for a given hit. This value increases as you level up the gem.
18. Molten Shell now mitigates 70% of damage while the Shell is up, up to a cap which is determined by the amount of Armor you have. The damage Molten Shell deals as it breaks it also scaled with how much Armor you have.
19. Fortify has been buffed, but he forgets the specifics. There are nodes on the Passive Tree that buff Fortify, so you can invest in it if you so choose.
20. There is now Animation Queueing. Say you get stunned and press Leap slam to get out of combat as a panic button, your Leap Slam will be queued as soon as it wears off.
21. You will be unable to rotate between 3 of the new movement skills to travel at crazy speeds due to some of the movement skills having a global shared cooldown.
22. TL;DR, they switched from Manhattan Distance to Euclidean Distance to help fix movement skills getting stuck on a pebble. It was not an issue with collision, but rather, different systems disagreeing with if the player was truly able to make that move.
23. You are now able to contextually dodge monster/boss attacks so long as it makes sense animation-wise. If Hillock makes a right-wing... you can now dodge the attack by moving to the left... whereas if you were to move to the right, you'd still get hit by the attack.
24. While using console commands to respawn instances of Twilight Strand to showcase new things, Jonathan accidentally spawns an instance with Uber Hillock / Oni Goroshi. Dat RNG doe...
25. Some monsters, like Hillock, have slower wind-ups to some of their attacks while unleashing the blow is at normal speed. This is to help anticipation for defensive skills/mechanics/dodging. This occurs at other parts of the game too, with the idea of increasing monster damage but allowing for more windows of opportunity to dodge them. As another example, Fire Fury's firestorm AoE is now smaller but deals more damage. The majority of focus for this is just an early game because over time, the early game has become too easy.
26. Accuracy is now capped at 100%. They've tweaked the Accuracy equation and increased the sources of Accuracy to the point where getting 100% Accuracy is not a problem for most players. Just need a few sources of it.
27. Players will still block 100% damage, but some monsters will now have % Chance To Block, and when blocked, they will take reduced damage from the hit. Not 100% sure with Spell block.
28. There is now a sound effect when you miss a hit.
29. Base stun duration from Melee hits is now longer whereas the base stun duration from Spell hits is shorter. You also need less damage from Melee attacks to stun a target compared to damage from Spells. Also, Elemental Damage has less weight contributing to a stun whereas Physical Damage has more weight contributing to a stun.
30. As part of the Melee revamp, they found tons of bugs to squash, making everything feel better overall.
31. All of the single-target Melee skills have been significantly buffed in terms of damage.
32. Elemental Damage on Abyssal Jewels will be lowered while Elemental Damage on Weapons will be raised.
33. There will be a bunch of new Support Gems, and there are ones that are specific to each of the weapon types. One for claws, one for daggers, one for axes, etc. Also, one Support Gem to reward slower and larger hits.
34. Glacial Hammer has been redesigned to be a 3-hitting skill. Two small hits and then a gigantic third hit, which gives bonuses to its Freeze stats.
35. Leap Slam will now always stun bosses that are on Full-Life.
36. Shield Charge's damage is now calculated similarly to how Shield Spectral Throw is calculated. Shield Spectral Throw's damage has been buffed as well.
37. Daggers are getting a new line of Caster-Dagger variant bases that do not roll attack mods.
38. Staves are getting a new line of Attack-Staff variant bases that do not roll caster mods.
39. The goal of the Armour buffs was to make it work against Boss fights.
40. All of the counterattack Melee skills (ie. Riposte) where on the list to get buffed, but he forgets how specifically they are getting buffed.
41. If you hold Shift while pressing Quick Dodge, your character will backstep opposite direction of the cursor. So if you're using slam-based skills, you can slam -> backstep -> slam in that direction again as a sort of tactical retreat mobility move. Quick Dodge can also go up and down ledges and Spellcasters can also use it. There is also an unannounced new movement skill for Casters.
42. Many of the Acts 1-3 monsters are getting new abilities / buffed abilities.
43. Jonathan's favorite skill in this patch is Cyclone.
44. There are buffs to Bleed and Poison but he forgets what they are.
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