Playing with melee~ possible new meta

[maze]

Just doing some testing with some of the weapons with the new talents.
the range, the aoe and damage. seeing how the weapons work in the current alpha.
I didn't add any enchants mainly because there was no point. testing them at base gives the same effect.

The results I found; with the new talent's:
Quarterstaff with the talent "Shield Breaker" This boost DPS and gives you a free stun randomly.
On top of it's already passive of to Stun.
5% seems tiny but it happens way more often; and in group mob packs you'll see the mobs get stun very often.
With the new armor update crushing has become even more powerful. every mob currently in Alpha has low Crush armor.
So you'll be seeing boosted DPS hit with crushing + "Shield Breaker"
After more testing I was able to burst most mobs down quickly and keep a few mobs stunned locked.

I think we'll be seeing more Mace/ Quarterstaff builds because of this talent.
We already do see people stun locking mobs to death. this talent just added to it.

so that's my conclusion for now~ Quarterstaff is the new king of melee.

You don't really need to read all this bellow...

Spear:
Video: https://i.gyazo.com/55b5d654dddaca7d3fc9702342b8906e.mp4

spear has been king of Melee for along time. Namely for its high base damage, it's extra range the ability to hit all enemy in front of you.
The spear only benefits from a few melee talents.
it's damage is the highest (during the video we saw crits of 500)
it's speed is average (out of the 3 melee speed slow, average, fast)

Dagger
Video: https://i.gyazo.com/e940179dd4476887d8e643d598434298.mp4

The dagger has long been the underdog of the melee meta.
We'll likely see it more in the future when enemys have much higher armor.
It's group clear is the worse of the melee weapons.
it's new talent "Swash buckler" can be a hit or a miss, I find it's very bad compared to "relentless"
it's damage is alright (during the video we saw crits of 350)

Axe
Video: https://i.gyazo.com/636ef9c9d3769b7f0290d88bb13d74da.mp4

I find not a lot of people use the axe.
It's damage, damage type and speed are the same as the Dagger.
The Axe is also considered a light weapon, so you can pick up all the light weapon damage talents.
In the video we were hitting 370 crits.

Quarterstaff
Video: https://i.gyazo.com/6257970ebfbbe9b3c2a19610f3a176eb.mp4

I'll be fair. this one surprised me.
It's Aoe is the same range as a spear, maybe a little wider.
It's damage, we hit a few 500's in the video, it cleared just as fast as the spear.
it's speed is average again same as spear.
But the game changer was the talent.
we picked up the "Shield breaker" talent. what gives us 5% chance to use the skill bash a good stun.
It went off a lot more then I expected it to and dealt a lot more damage because of it.

Club
Video:https://i.gyazo.com/c9d69bf353246e2358357929849a2b0e.mp4

This one felt weird it; it was AoE but it stop hitting the enemy randomly sometimes.
it stun from "Shield Breaker" talent went off A LOT.
you could likely make a guild called the billy bat police, go around waking people with clubs and perma stun them.
It's damage largest crit was 350.
It's Fast attack speed.
and it's damage is the same as dagger.

Hammer / Mace
Video:https://i.gyazo.com/9ffa34ff343acf03e9a43d38c2538952.mp4

Another Club like AoE range. Janky AoE-ness
It's slower but does more damage.
It's highest damage in the video was 412.
It's attack is average.
Another weapon that can pick up "Shield Breaker"

[Razvan]

• Spear nodes are not implemented yet.
• When you compare 1h vs 2h weapons you should take into consideration enchants because 2h weapons have 4slots in total, while 1h weapons + shield have 8slots. To that, you should add the material bonus of the shield/offhand. Not to mention that shield block makes you a lot tankier.
• There is no best overall weapon. For example, skeletons take very little pierce damage (spear, bow), but a lot of blunt damage. On the other hand, spear still has a much better clear time on goblins. I agree that this test brought much better diversity that what we previously had.
• Hopefully, they add a significant critical bonus on superior knives or restrict the assassination school to them because at this point they are just (much) worse handaxes.

[maze]

the spear node "Pokearm mastery" Might include quarterstaff~ not sure yet
But I was trying to only comment on the current alpha.

Comparing 1h vs 2h weapons~ Shields does not have weapon damage bonus.
The new bonus from wood- I admittedly didn't think of~ but would not give a larger boost either, at the most 30 damage.

I would like to believe there is no overall best weapon, but at the same time that is unfortunately not true.
During these current test there is so little to divide the classes into anything other then DPS.
As for most one handed weapons are just subpar; you normally end up taking more damage since you can't burst the enemy down in 6-8 secs with spear/quarterstaff

Dagger is my favorite weapon, it has been driving me nuts how under powered they are to everything else.

[KocaineBlaKK]

I found daggers single target dps far ahead of anything else. Maxed per/dex/str/stealth with [shadow dance+death mark] using strike wounds followed by blind/bleed/crip and shield block.

[Sativo]

@KocaineBlaKK
Single target yes, but overall dps is higher with Quarterstaff due to the large frontal cone area damage. You can kill 10 mobs much quicker with a quarterstaff than with a dagger.
Personally, I use it with Frenzy, Bash, Blind, Shockwave and WOP:Stun.

[Ostaff]

@Sativo said in Playing with melee~ possible new meta:

I use it with Frenzy, Bash, Blind, Shockwave and WO

That makes sense though, who would ever take on a mob with just a dagger? You definitely want something like a polearm to do that, and a polearm wouldn't be very useful against a single opponent (like a dagger would be) due to its slowness and being harder to use when up close and personal.

[Zori]

i've used a club/bludgeon for the stuns + shield.

Concussive Strike
Frenzy
Shield Block
Enrage
Bash

Concussive Strike + frenzy + bludgeoning gives you stun, DoT + Attack Speed and burst.
Concussive strike also is a 2 second cool down so you can pretty much re-apply that as you keep hitting.
When Bash CD goes down every 10 seconds, you can pretty much trigger a manual stun, other than that, you'll get constant stuns from the club/bludgeoning weapon anyway.

I'm not saying you can stun lock with it but it deals quite a heavy damage + stuns. It gives a lot of sustain and CC.

You can probably switch out the talents to a pure damage as it is tanky enough but heres what I use with the talents.

edit:

Essentially with this build what you wanna do is trigger bash first for the stun.
then switch to concussive strike, once bash CD goes off, you can switch to it again.

You'll have shield block as a focus skill active, only thing you need to be mindful of is switching between concussive strike and bash.

If you're in front of a high CC mob (stuns) just pop enrage and you've got 30 seconds of stun immunity.

Not to mention that you got perma frenzy on so there's very little to worry about with your attack speed. This build doesn't require a lot of SP, the only "SP" drain is triggering bash, it's not even necessary to have bash on this build, you just have spare 2 points on memory so might as well chuck that on.

and with 18 con + 18 str, you'll pretty much get 20/20 on both with this talent path.
You can probably drop a bit of endurance or some resistance and switch it to the 'dex' line with increase damage on 'light' weapons as club is considered light.

[Razvan]

@maze
Fair enough, I thought you were speaking for the full extend of this alpha and I assumed they'd eventually add the polearm and CHA nodes.
I don't think quarterstaff would benefit from both masteries. At least in my opinion, they shouldn't. 1h weapons can stunlock just as well and with the shieldblock/enchantments you're a lot tankier. I agree that in the current state PvE, 2h weapons have better clear time, however, I'd suspect 1h could be quite powerful in PvP. My point in the previous post was not that all weapons are equal, but that you see more diversity in builds than in the earlier tests when everyone was either spear or mage.

@Zori
If I can suggest slight modifications to your build: the last poison node gives poison immunity, so you can invest 5 points instead of 8 and get better stats (remove red, add blue). Now you have 3 extra points. If you remove the points from the 2nd fortitude node (light red) and add them to the 3rd one (light blue), you have access to the -20% CC time reduction node. Same with the armor nodes (dark red and dark blue), which would unlock the +20% armor node. Now you have one extra point, which I'd put in 5% passive CC on blunt weapons.

[Zori]

@Razvan said in Playing with melee~ possible new meta:

I've tried what you've suggested a bit, it seems that it lost a bit of tankiness but i suppose it's cause the build was counter CC based as opposed to 'face tank em' sort of based. With this one though i switched it up a bit and switched it to pure damage.

heres what it also looks like

https://i.imgur.com/GzAt8Sh.mp4

[maze]

@Razvan Poison statues Immunity. It means you can't get the poison debuff. You can still be hurt by poison skills.