POE 3.7.0 - Melee Balance, Character Balance Update Guide
POE 3.7.0 will be released soon, and the Path of Exile official website has released the first wave of POE 3.7 updates. Let's take a look at Melee Balance, Character Balance Update Guide in POE 3.7.
1. POE 3.7.0 - Melee Rebalance Guide
- We've made massive, sweeping (excuse the pun) changes to melee combat. Many of these are specific to skills, but some are broad and affect all aspects of melee combat (and combat in general):
- Hit Multiple Enemies: Every attack -- even Glacial Hammer -- can now hit multiple targets by default. Previously, an attack would look at targets in melee range in front of your character and choose one. Now it chooses all of them that the attack physically passes through. Note that this is not "area of effect", "area damage" or "melee splash".
- Animation Cancelling: You can now interrupt a skill with movement or movement skill. If you use a skill (any skill, not just an attack), you can now interrupt the animation before it finishes playing. If you do so before the point in the animation that damage is dealt (or a projectile is created etc...) you will not deal damage. There is a small window before this point where you will be 'locked into' the animation until the contact point, so you won't accidentally prevent yourself from dealing damage by being overzealous with your movement. You won't be able to use any other skills if you previously canceled an animation after the point it would deal damage until that animation would have finished playing, meaning you can't use animation canceling to artificially speed up your rate of attack. You can use a skill immediately after canceling a previous one if it didn't have a chance to deal damage (or produce a projectile etc...).
- Directional Attacks: Many monsters now deal damage in a specific area in front of them when they attack, meaning you can avoid taking damage by sidestepping or moving away. Previously, monsters would deal with damage to their target, even if they had moved to the side. The area for most of these attacks is a 120-degree cone in front of them.
- Attack Signalling: We've improved a lot of enemy attack signaling, slowing down the initial windup but speeding up the strike, giving you an opportunity to respond with an appropriate movement or skill use. This is particularly the case for 'old' monsters.
- Targeting: We've made enormous improvements to how skills target enemies in groups which will result in a more natural, do-what-you-want-it-to experience. This is the culmination of many, many small user experience improvements.
- Attack Range Signalling: Player attacks now accurately signal their damage range via skill effects and trails. Sources which increase your attack range or area of effect with an attack will be reflected in the attack's visual effect.
- Fluidity: We've made a lot of changes to how animations work to allow changing targets while chaining attacks back-to-back to look and feel much less clunky. A dual-wielding character will alternate attacks in a way that feels much more natural than previously and will make your off-hand weapon choice more important. We've also updated pathing, which should allow for much smoother movements with your character.
- Accuracy: Accuracy is no longer capped to a 95% chance to hit. With enough accuracy, an enemy will never be able to evade an attack, so you will no longer have lone surviving monster frustratingly taunting you (unless you didn't get enough accuracy!).
- Blocking Enemies: Enemies with shields can block attacks, but will only prevent a large portion of the incoming damage, rather than all of it. When an enemy blocks an attack, an effect will play.
- Better Feedback: New effects and sounds allow you to more clearly identify who you have and have not hit with your attacks.
2. POE 3.7.0 - Character Balance Guide
- Elemental and Chaos damage is treated as having dealt -25% damage for the sake of stuns. This is additive with the Melee damage stun bonus, so a purely Elemental or Chaos or mixed non-physical Melee hit will see no change to previous Stun behavior.
- As mentioned above, your chance to hit enemies with an attack is no longer capped to 95%. With enough accuracy, you can guarantee that every attack will hit.
- In light of changes to melee combat (see above), the formula which turns Accuracy Rating into Chance to Hit has been changed. In general, it will be easier to hit and be hit.
- Effects that split incoming damage from specific damage types across mana and life (such as Mind of the Council) now also do this for Damage over Time effects of specific types. Previously such effects could only split damage from hits.
- Unarmed attack range of player characters has increased by 2.
- Projectiles are now treated as having a smaller collision size with regards to terrain than monsters. This should alleviate the frustration of casting Freezing Pulse through a doorway and watching your projectiles vanish before hitting anything.
Previous: POE 3.7.O - New Content and Features Update Guide
Next: POE 3.7.0 - Skill Reworks and Skill Balance Update Guide
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