Give me a reason to play melee in this game

General
81

Not really. People are just playing bad builds, and blame the class or melee for their faults. The “lots of variables” can be condensed into one: you either understand how to build your defenses, or you don’t, and this indeed drastically changes your experience.

Firstly, what the heck are you talking about?

Dodge isn’t a unique form of defense. Glancing Blow is capped at 35% DR, so it’s inferior to generic defenses. And last time I checked, every class uses some combination of generic defenses and healing.

Next, you say Sentinel gets “tons of endurance and DR early game”, but somehow this DR stops existing at higher level? Class passives don’t change, you either have DR or not. There’s one % endurance passive in Paladin available to Sentinel, and zero in other trees. So how exactly does Sentinel get “tons of endurance early game”?

Finally, most people who are complaining don’t even play in high corruption. It’s a vocal minority.

Which enemy does it?
Because AFAIK the only source is a modifier from monoliths. So basically:

  • IF I choose to clear a monolith with this modifier,
  • AND ONLY WHEN I run a monolith with this modifier active, my armor gets reduced

Now, let’s say I somehow get 20 stacks of Armor Shred, that’s 100*20 = 2000 Armor reduction, my armor is 12000 Armor (from F0lk’s example), so my reduced armor is 10000 Armor. I went from ~79% reduction to ~77% reduction.

So AFAIK Armor Shred basically doesn’t exist. And it’s a non-factor for Sentinel anyway :rofl:

No.
Tankiness comes from two things

  1. Mitigation - that is DR, Crit reduction, Frailty, Endurance, Armor, Block, Dodge, Parry, Glancing Blow, Mana before Health and other layers working together.
  2. From how quickly can you replenish the lost health, aka. Sustain.

DR is just one small part of it.

What is that supposed to mean?
Do you think that because a form of defense is available to all classes, it somehow makes it inferior to a form of defense available to only one class?

You seem very confused about this. “Class-specific” isn’t superior to “generic”. If anything, being class-specific means it’s WORSE than generic, because not everyone can use it.

What is this silly mental gymnastics attempt?

So we pick a specific build from a different class and compare it to a specific MELEE build from Sentinel? Then do it properly:

Sentinel gets 12k armor AND 100% Block Chance with 75% mitigation AND 60% Endurance AND 10% less damage from nearby enemies AND 10% less damage vs. blocked hits (which is all hits because 100% block chance) AND 10% less damage vs. void and necrotic from using Healing Hands.

PS: I forgot another real important layer, 100% armor mitigation applied to DoT damage :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
82

Yep, I can check your profile “i pLAy oFflinE noW” either way, you dont really strike me as one to comment on tankiness when your paladin in online had sub 2k hp lol, when you are cruising around in casual mode you feel like god.

Like I said, thats perfectly fine, ill stick to sharing the opinion with people who actively play at a high level rather then some guys on the forums who post more drama then actually play the game lol.

Have you even killed the pinnacle boss yet?

83

I see you didn’t read my previous post. Try reading it again. Pay extra attention to the part where I describe what tankiness means. Notice it doesn’t mention HP anywhere.

I also see that build checking is not your strong suit. My online Paladin is a Ward build.
If you want to check out the approximate HP total, pay extra attention to Healing Hands passives, Glove affixes and my % Increased Healing Effectiveness total, and maybe it’ll click. :wink:

That is an opinion. Next time, try bringing actual counterarguments instead of trying such a silly attack. :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
84

Out of curiosity, how much was that nerfed in 1.1?

85

A lot. Mine wasn’t even that great (I think I only used a single legendary) and it got 40k ward regularly (it was a HH/bolt build, though, not smite). And at 1.1 it only got around 4-5k at most.

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86

A lot. The 60k Ward, 150k Ward, etc. labels, all those builds are coming simply from stacking % Increased Healing Effectiveness. It still works like that, but you’re getting 1/5th of Ward per cast, and due to the Decay changes it goes away MUCH faster above 4k Ward.

You can still reach above 5k Ward with just HH though :slight_smile:

2 Likes
87

These conversations always make me laugh because it’s like they fail to realize that 1000 HP but taking half damage is 2000 effective HP (eHP) so they treat max HP as “the” defensive layer. When in reality it’s that HP becomes more effective the more layers of defense you have protecting it (as you described in your previous post).

It’s no wonder so many people struggle with melee in ARPG’s. They see “cap resistances and add HP” and then go “i can’t survive but my ranged character can!”

3 Likes
88

I’m not following your logic, so help me out. Here’s what I heard you saying (and probably you didn’t say this, so … yeah, help me out)

Assumptions;

  1. defensively they build the same for their melee and ranged char
  2. melee and ranged chars have the same access to defenses
  3. they are dying on their melee and surviving on their ranged chars

that means that the melee char is less survivable.

Damage Dealing
So after we’re done with the survivability conversation we’d need to talk damage. There you have to consider that melee requires a greater degree of avoidance, and during that time melee isn’t doing damage.

So then the question is, has EHG built melee to be better at burst damage?

There is so much ego and feelings in this thread. Seems to me pretty obvious that unless EHG has made melee builds better at burst damage, or made melee characters tankier, then ranged is going to be easier to play than melee. Given EHG’s recent post on this topic, they agree.

Again, entirely possible I’m not up on recent events or am unaware that melee is tankier or melee is significantly more bursty. But if either or both of those aren’t true, then it seems pretty clear to me that ranged is easier.

89

The sole assumption is that they’re playing their melee characters without building proper defenses because they’re used to ranged characters who can kite/avoid damage more easily than a melee character. Hence why they struggle on melee rather than ranged. This does not mean that melee is less survivable, it means that you can’t build and play melee characters the same way you’d build and play a ranged character. Unless you’re a god tier player you’re going to be hit in both playstyles, but melee WILL be hit a lot more than ranged due to the nature of the playstyle.

This is a discussion as old as MMORPGs (in all variants) themselves. Melee has to disengage to deal with mechanics while ranged can keep attacking, add in casters who can’t attack while moving and you have the typical trifecta.

Yes, melee requires a greater degree of avoidance, comes with the territory of playing melee, and EHG hasn’t gotten the ratio perfect for Melee dealing comparable damage to ranged. But no one has. Not even WoW or FFXIV.

Edit: not to say they shouldn’t strive for balance, FFXIV was close from what I remember when I played. But if you pick melee you go in with the understanding of “I will not have 100% uptime, but I will try to get as close as I can to 100% uptime” this is where player skill comes in. A better player can deal more damage than another with the exact same stats and build.

Edit 2: thinking further, the only reason games like WoW and FFXIV can even come close to balancing the damage potential for ranged vs melee so due to those games having realistically attainable “best in slot” gear. It’s theoretically possible to calculate the best possible gear for a specific build in an ARPG, but 1) that gear is not realistically attainable and 2) that would imply everyone playing Forge Guard is using the same build(s) which is just not the case in an arpg.

An optimal melee build with an equally skilled player will always lose to an optimal ranged build. Nature of the beast.

1 Like
90

This is not an MMORPG. MMORPG balance has no place in an aRPG.

91

MMORPGs have melee and ranged classes.
ARPGs have melee and ranged classes.

MMORPGs have boss mechanics that require melee to disengage.
ARPGs have boss mechanics that require melee to disengage.

MMORPGs have discrepancies in ranged and melee dps due to this mechanical requirement.
ARPGs have discrepancies in ranged and melee dps due to this mechanical requirement.

Seems like there’s enough to use MMORPG balance as a point of comparison.

Edit: hell, you could use Ranged vs Melee builds in any game as a point of comparison. Ranged will always have an easier time dealing with mechanics than melee and as such there is a damage discrepancy. Either in favor of melee through a “ranged tax” or in favor of ranged because it just has less to deal with.

92

Which does mean that, all things being equal, melee is inherently less survivable then ranged. I mean, you say it right there. So a developer could offset that (and frequently they do), by making melee inherently more survivable. I think EHG has tried to make each mastery equally able to be either melee or ranged, so they have chosen not to make melee characters inherently more durable.

So again you agree that melee is at a disadvantage in LE to ranged.

So now that we’ve, hopefully, removed some of the emotion from this conversation the question is… so what? As you say, this probably is as old as there being both ranged and melee characters in video games. If you are choosing to play a melee character, you should know that going in. Fair enough.

But for someone to come along and say that is not the case, that melee isn’t harder than ranged, well that’s kind of bullshit, isn’t it? To be clear, I’m not saying that you are saying that. But if someone were to say that range didn’t have an advantage in LE, that would be wrong or dishonest.

Whether anything is done about that or not is up to EHG. I’m pretty sure I remember them saying that they are looking at it. It’s certainly out of my hands. I like to play both types of characters. I’d like to see melee characters (actual melee characters, the ones in melee range) get a boost to survivability. I’d also like to see melee characters get some tools to do damage similar to what a ranged character can do. But even if they don’t, I’ll still play them because I like them.

93

I don’t think that is actually an issue. I mean, most games have this:
-In PoE it’s the skill you select that defines if you’re using melee or ranged. The character itself is always the same, so what is available to one is available to the other, which means that ranged is inherently advantaged due to the reasons already mentioned.
-In GD it’s also the skill you select that defines it.
-In D4 (as limited as the options are) the same thing happens.
-Even in D&D this has always been the case where melee is stronger at low levels but is outpaced by everything else at higher levels.

D&D does come closer to this balance, but that is because each class/subclass is very boxed in and doesn’t allow for variance. A level 10 warrior is mostly the same as another level 10 warrior, with just a few perks changed.

So you can try to make melee feel better and try to close the gap, but when ranged has access to pretty much the same tools as melee, melee will always be inherently worse off.
The only way to counteract this is to make melee skills deal more damage.
Though even then, there are skills that can work both as melee and ranged, so… :man_shrugging:

94

My character died :sleepy:

95

Overall, well said. I guess my issue with the argument is that, and this is coming from someone who almost exclusively plays melee in ARPGs (I’ll dabble with ranged but something about being a juggernaut rampaging through hordes of enemies just scratches that itch for me, you know?), melee has never been so worse off that it’s not viable and many, MANY, arguments are claiming it isn’t viable simply because ranged is better.

If you (general “you”, not you specifically) aren’t able to enjoy something because something else is “better”, then you shouldn’t be playing games with build variety. This “tier list” mentality of ranking everything against each other in a vacuum is ridiculous to me. Don’t compare ranged with melee, they’re literally different playstyles. I’d even go so far as to say don’t compare builds across masteries. Just because a specific Healing Hands Paladin Build can clear 400c doesn’t mean that your Marksman build that can clear 800c is op and needs nerfed or the Paladin build needs buffed. If 8/10 Paladin builds are capable of clearing 600c and the other two are at 400c and 800c it’s a balanced class. Numbers are arbitrary of course, just trying to say that comparing everything to everything else isn’t a productive way to balance a game. Especially with how many options are in ARPGs

96

The FFXIV way of balancing ranged vs caster/melee was the proverbial “ranged tax.” because the physical ranged classes could buff their party (2/3 anyway) and could freely move and attack from anywhere, they did comparably less personal damage than any other class. With melee having to deal with disengages and casters having to deal with interrupting their casts to move they could deal more personal dps.

So basically, any skill that’s instant cast and ranged would be nerfed by x% due to having no positioning or cast time requirements.

97

It could also be a skill issue (ranged can stay further from the boss while doing damage & having more time to avoid stuff) or bosses being “too difficult”.

98
  1. No

We had an example from the author of this topic, comparing his Void Knight to his Runemaster. I analyzed his characters and left a post in the beginning of this thread, feel free to read it.

No, it doesn’t.

Taking more hits does not equal less surviving.

Going back to the MMORPGs example, the “tank” is usually a melee character, whereas the “healer” is usually a ranged character. Despite this, the “tank” is the more survivable one :slight_smile:

It isn’t.

It’s like saying my life is harder because I have to move two metres to the left (on a specific ability, in a specific bossfight, which I do once in a blue moon).

That’s the default difference between melee and ranged in any game - attack range. But there isn’t any kind of absurd gap in power, or in survivability, like you guys are suggesting.

99

People arguing about MMO balance don’t seem to get it. The biggest reason people don’t like MMOs is because they are so cookie cutter balanced. There’s no good way to break the system and find cool builds/systems. That’s why the genre is declining as a whole. Combine the cookie cutter balance with the insane time commitment and it’s easy to see why people don’t like MMOs anymore.

aRPGs don’t need that type of balancing. They just need a system that promotes out gearing the entire game. That’s the point. We chase loot that makes the game easier. So, 90% of class builds just suck because gear has little impact on the game. That’s what needs to be fixed.

I mean, you could fix melee classes by boosting endurance threshold to like 50% on melee characters. You’d have to make a few changes in other areas, but solutions are really easy. Just do it. Let people build cool classes that trivialize boss fights as they invest time in to character development.

That’s the reason people play this genre. When you can’t do that, people quit and move on. That’s why LE is a ghost town. It is pushing a stupid Dark Souls boss system that no one likes and class balance makes the Dark Souls system absolutely brutal for most class builds. Then when you can’t out gear most of it with character development, you realize that the game is just not a real aRPG but one masquerading as one up until you boss fight.

FYI - You can trivialize ALL the boss fights in every aRPG ever made except LE. You can do it in PoE, in D4, D3, D2, D1, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, etc and the list goes on. You can do this in ALL those games with the vast majority of classes. You can’t do it in LE with most classes. That’s why people are running for the hills. End game is trash and it’s due to boss difficulty and really bad class balance.

Edit: Wanted to add, my brother gave up on this game and so did a friend. They are sayng the same thing. Boss battles and class balance suck and they aren’t interested in devoting time to cool ideas that don’t pan out in the end. They moved on after two weeks of play and have no intention of ever returning. Too many good game son the horizon. The devs need to really rethink the approach or they are gonna go out of business.

100

Really enjoying melee now. Might make another tank. Beastmaster was very satisfying.