Guild Wars 2

IllegalChocolate.6938:

To be quite honest, the most easiest times I’ve had in dungeons is when we’ve got one or two party members that are just straight melee. Coming from someone who has done almost every single dungeon and FOTM post 20, the game is not anti melee but more punishing against melee who do not take the time to understand how monsters work, and do not understand the general fundamentals of being a melee character in Guildwars 2.

Its almost a Dark Souls approach to melee combat except everything is a lot faster in Guildwars 2. You need to be in the proper mindset as well as being able to detect visual ques in combat.

To answer Rukia’s answer about encounters that are easier in melee. I cannot say “required” but subject alpha is sooooooooo much easier when everyone is in melee range. Moss man is a ton easier to keep track of if he’s kept in place. When the cultist master on cliffside fractal is kept in place by melee, he’s also easier to keep track of. colossus rumblus of AC is a truck ton easier to deal with in melee. The destroyer harpy grawl shaman of that fractal is also mega tons easier with melee that can avoid the lava arrow and the AoE. So many encounters are made trivial by having a few melee for control.

Of course melee is superior when played properly. PvE is so easy that this is easily doable. That still doesn’t remove the fact that ranged get it much much easier (where you either stand still, move bit out of circles or in worst case keep tapping A,D,A,D to evade projectiles).
And “The destroyer harpy grawl shaman”…. On range you A/D/A/D/A/D to avoid its arrows and dodge occasional firestorm. On melee you need to dodge those arrows, dodge that firestorm, dodge everything… and that’s easier?

I agree that the game is ranged focused. People meleeing get pwned by Champion mobs all the time… they should look at this.

Qid.1937:

Dee Jay.2460:

It is an incredibly anti-melee game in PvE

I get that melee is supposed to be a higher risk-reward but the scale is just completely off.

90% of fights in this game are a snooze-fest for ranged combat and can easily be beat by avoiding the red circles.

Melee have to not only avoid the red circles through a clusterkitten of particle effects, they must also observe the boss animations for any sort of 360 melee swings or choreographed attacks and avoid their auto attacks which sometime trigger within 0.5 seconds.

And all that while the boss randomly switches aggro targets every 5 seconds.

Totally balanced.

The biggest joke is the number of abilities that ONLY target melees and that ranged simply don’t have to worry about.

Most boss red circle abilities don’t target melee nor do most ‘randomly switch every 5 seconds’

Are we even playing the same game?

Its all about dynamic combat.

There is a reason every class has great ranged and melee options. You need to know when to use which. Weapons arent the only thing that decides if you are going to be up close and personal or 1200 yards away. I dance in and out on my classes when needed. You dont need to pick a melee option though, you can carry 2 different ranged sets, but you should learn atleast two weapon setups if your class allows weapon switching.

Engineers and Elementalists are different though. As an engi you dont carry more than one wepaon set, then you have kits that are optional. Elementalists should learn their attunements and use them in sync.

I play my guardian as melee and ranged, both sets preform just as good. I jump into the thick of it to unleash blinds and set things ablaze and dish out damage with my sword and buff my mates with my shield. When it gets too risky I pull out to a safe distance and go to my trusted scepter and torch.

You need to find setups that work well together, things that work with your spec and such.

Rustypipes.6238:

I think there just needs to be an in depth guide in game during the tutorial (opening personal story) on how to play against group bosses, since these are the ones with the most visual queues to watch for when fighting that I have seen. The “end boss” in the personal story opening doesn’t count since you can technically kill them blind folded.

Maybe change that, have an option when you create a new character to ask the player if they would like to play the “new player” tutorial which will pause the game to give key pointers and walk them through the process of avoiding damage, give details about boons and conditions and support/aoe skills and effective downed state abilities.

For example, the new player chooses this option and they are fighting the end boss, a large red circle appears the game pauses and tells the player what the circle is, and how to dodge by double tapping a direction or using a dodge key and even ask if they would like to set up a dodge key (if one is not currently set up, which is not by default), if they say yes, it would tell them to press a key to bind to dodge and that the fight will continue and to use the dodge feature when the game resumes. Even awarding small XP gains for successfully dodging.

I know it’s hand holding but it would be an option that I think would make the game much more approachable by players who are new to MMOs, or veterans of other MMOs whose combat is so much different than GW2’s.

Let me say the only reason I suggest this is because even at higher level content, which I consider to be level 40+, a player should know all the basics to fighting difficult group encounters and using their abilities in the downed state to be most effective but sadly this is not the case more than you might think.

I know this information exists via the forums, blogs and youtube but a lot of people do not actively seek out this information, for whatever reason.

As for being anti-melee, I agree it seems that melee gets a raw deal but there are so many tools at melee’s disposal for dealing with it and every melee profession has a ranged component alternative and weapon switching is as simple as clicking a button.

I couldn’t agree more with the overall gist of your post. The game severely lacks any information to guide you. I find out so many new things every day via reading forums, googling, etc and it amazes me that this information wasn’t given to me in-game. Even little things like being able to send your collectibles to your bank from anywhere. I found that out on the forums and told my guild, half of which didn’t know either.

GW2 is a very hard game for new players to get into. Hell, I’ve been playing MMOs since the late half of the 90s and still had trouble figuring things out. I can’t even imagine how someone new to MMOs or gaming in general can even get their feet wet.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

anti melee?
What if i tell you about reflection?

Except that a ranged player can just wait out the reflection. They will still have less down time than a melee who has to leave melee range regularly. Mob reflection abilities may have shorter CD’s than player ones, but there are CD’s and the abilities don’t usually last that long.

It all depends. Let’s say you have an Engineer who keeps deploying super elixirs around a boss – That means all blast skills used in the circle gives aoe retaliation, so assuming both melle and ranged players start using blast skills a boss can go down that much faster with melle players in the fight – And with less risk of dying.

Has anyone considered that “range” players have an easier time because the “melee” are distracting the boss while the “range” focus on attacking? Try starting a dungeon party with no melee and you will see everybody dropping like flies and no one being able to attack because everyone is busy running away.

GW2 is a very kite heavy game, in pve good kiting skills can mitigate an enormous amount of damage.
Melee suffers from some kind of similar skill based mitigation, beyond abilities that block there isn’t much else, popping cooldowns and dodges.

It’s an eternal problem in these games and I’ve yet too see an iteration that works.

Actually I take that back, the elder scrolls games stamina /block style is a skill based melee mitigation system

Seems like a L2P thing. Melee both does more damage, and generally has AoE on every attack, making it do even more damage than range.

Is using ranged attacks easier? Yes. Does my 100% melee party complete combat in half the time with fewer people going down than a heavy ranged party? Yes.

As for people wanting more explanations and tutorials… ok maybe but why is just playing the game and learning for yourself, or learning from other people seem like such a foreign concept to you people? Did you people even play video games in the 1990’s (and before)? Learning for yourself is all part of the fun, and honestly I would like to see new content in the form of new stuff, bug fixes, and balance tweaks rather than a wealth of tutorials for people who can’t be bothered to figure things out on their own, or at least learning from other people.

Dee Jay.2460:

It is an incredibly anti-melee game in PvE

I get that melee is supposed to be a higher risk-reward but the scale is just completely off.

90% of fights in this game are a snooze-fest for ranged combat and can easily be beat by avoiding the red circles.

Melee have to not only avoid the red circles through a clusterkitten of particle effects, they must also observe the boss animations for any sort of 360 melee swings or choreographed attacks and avoid their auto attacks which sometime trigger within 0.5 seconds.

And all that while the boss randomly switches aggro targets every 5 seconds.

Totally balanced.

The biggest joke is the number of abilities that ONLY target melees and that ranged simply don’t have to worry about.

exactly.

i posted about this during beta (mmorpg.com) and talked with other players about this. Anet heard the comments.. said they were “looking into it” which is basically mollifying the playerbase while nothing is actually done.

seriously… either Anet has the WORST game testers ever. bad bad. or the devs just didnt act on their comments. GW2 is the prettiest game ive ever played. but its completely devoid of depth in combat mechanics. skill based? rofl.

GW2 is mash and dodge. rinse repeat until the boss is dead. zero group dynamics. zero need for any utility synergy or teamwork or trait specs. just get it done and get it done fast.. we have 109201920192 other dungeon tokens to grind.

mashy mashy

I remember the early discussions about combo finishers being a big potential boost players could coordinate to take down elite/boss mobs. How it plays out in reality is people don’t even intentionally do them. And they almost never know they are doing them, when it actually happens. It truly is more about being good at mash & dodge, not to take away from that however. Not everyone becomes good at it, apparently.

Part of it is that their sustain mechanics are at a very low power level, which puts a large premium on avoidance.

But most of it is simply how their encounters are designed. There are very few encounters in the game that are really punishing for ranged players; usually monsters will use their ‘anti-ranged’ abilities at point blank as well, which just gives you a hard hitting attack that’s incredibly difficult to avoid.

They’d be a lot better off if, say, the legendary cultist only used his hammer lunge / smash as a gap closer to attack ranged foes (who can realistically dodge), instead of hitting people already in melee for a ton of nigh-unavoidable damage.

I’d just like to add, ta vines boss is sooooo much easier at melee than range, esp if you can stand inside the mob.

Ensign.2189:

Part of it is that their sustain mechanics are at a very low power level, which puts a large premium on avoidance.

But most of it is simply how their encounters are designed. There are very few encounters in the game that are really punishing for ranged players; usually monsters will use their ‘anti-ranged’ abilities at point blank as well, which just gives you a hard hitting attack that’s incredibly difficult to avoid.

They’d be a lot better off if, say, the legendary cultist only used his hammer lunge / smash as a gap closer to attack ranged foes (who can realistically dodge), instead of hitting people already in melee for a ton of nigh-unavoidable damage.

This.

Seriously they needed to make ranged harder AGES ago, and reduce some of the cheese that melee have to avoid. Dem earplugs A-Soft…Dem earplugs…

i dunno i find melee actually safer than range for some fights. one of the top of my head atm would be the howling king in AC.

Just play ranger duh.
Then you have the excuse you need.

I do agree melee is hamstrung in their best damage damage. It’s a risk vs reward game. You deal nearly double the damage at melee range, but take worst potential damage up close. If you take lesser risk and range, you tend to deal less damage but made up for it in terms of ‘consistency’

You dodge less and heal less if range is done right.
While melee has to worry about all those.

If you really can’t make up your mind about what class to pick, definitely go Warrior for safest dungeon runner.

If you’re an unskilled player (that’s as diplomatically as I can put it) then you can get away with a lot playing ranged. You will not have so much room to maneuver with melee.

This is a pretty old subject and unfortunately the best answer (from those of us who play melee in dungeons all the time and scratch our heads at these types of posts) is going to be L2Play or some variation thereof.

I play melee d/d elementalist primarily in all game modes, and I definitely find my dps better than with staff, and find it more fun. That said, I do find that I have to do a LOT more than my ranged group members in pve dungeons, especially in high level fractals where a missed dodge can mean death. It really doesn’t seem like it’s worth the bother sometimes when ranged can do fine dps facerolling with 25% of the dodging.

UnicornViolet.3081:

It seems like every group event, and dungeon I have participated in heavily favors ranged players.

Is there any advantage to playing melee character at all?

Has Arena Net addressed this problem at all?

The damage and the area effect damage. I run a banner warrior and I have constant regeneration. Keeping myself alive is not a problem.

If you run glass cannon, then yes, it’s a pain to be a melee. Otherwise not so much. I can only speak of warrior perspective though.

Eh, melee is fine as they are. You get a weapon swap for a reason, so you can use one of the two depending on the situation. As a guardian, I can stick to my melee weapon most of the time for higher aoe burst damage output and roll out if I’m taking a bit too much damage while changing to range to maintain dps. Most range classes lack in aoe damage (eg. gs and hammer can hit 3-4 targets at once while range can only hit 1 or 2 most of the time). The only class which is capable of hitting many and ranged is elementalist and that’s because they lack a weapon swap ability so it evens out.

ANet has long balanced ranged for PvP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdevV3itRpY

The fact every class got a ranged weapon was detrimental to the gameplay. If some classes had no such options, the combat designers would have been forced to make sure the combat is fun and not extra hard for all melee players.

As it stands now, it feels like “that this attack is spammed and badly telegraphed for melee but they can just use their bow and be fine anyway” was used too often.

Or was it “hey, I know it’s impossible to see the boss at all under all those flashy effects but you understand, ranged players are far from the action so we had to make their attacks extra flashy so that they could enjoy them. What? You cannot see the boss at all to avoid it’s attacks or to aim for it’s back? Why don’t you just take out that bow like the others and enjoy making flashy stuff too?”

I’ve been a warrior since early Beta and over 75% ov PvE battles I am forced to go ranged especially in dungeons/fractals. I do not know why Arenanet have gone so Anti-melee in this game but is is also prominent in WvW where ranged battles and not melee are the normal. I am not sure what the solution is to this since mobs now seem a lot more balanced than they orignally were. Melee either need some kind of damage reduction when in melee range or all the mobs A.I need adjusting and balancing armound melee fights.

I used to have a thief as main, used d/d the whole way, had a few problems here and there but not much tbh. I rerolled guardian to level 80, and since then I have got so used to melee weapons, I hardly have any problems with that. When I try out my alt mesmer, its a real pain in the kitten to use ranged weapons, I just do not like ranged(I dont hate it, its just awkward for me to use). I use scepter on my guard whenever I cant reach my enemy, like towers n keeps in wvw. Other than that, I do love melee weapons. Dungeons arent hard either, you just gotta learn what to do in each one.

TLDR: Practice is key, dodging and knowing when to use skills is important for melee, gw2 doesnt have healers to babysit.

I guess red circles prioritising the furthest players would fix most of the issues people are having.

As a melee Mesmer player, my opinion is that melee is 100% viable.

However ranged is easier in practially every situation melee is possible, and there are situations where melee is NOT possible.

Arena.net needs to do some work on making more fights where ranged is punsished severely for kiting and missing dodges.

I have done all dungeons/paths, multiple times, run dungeons every day/hour in GW2 if i aint WvW’ing and i have no problem melee’ing 95% of all bosses/events in dungeons. I play in a pretty causal guild and most/if not all of my guildie play a melee oriented fighting style. And yes i do play a guardian, in full knight gear with 15000 HPs, one of my guildies runs in full zerker, always in melee and rarely dies.

The only real exception being high level fractals, because of the lame agony mechanic making melee a lot harder then just kiting and spamming.

Is melee harder then range? Initially, Yes but when you know a boss/event you can pretty much face-tank it without doing anything else then dodge the one big-kill attack.

When you got a party speced/setup for melee everything just gets easier: more regen, more protection, more cc, more boons, more dmg = the boss dies a LOT faster = less dodging and running around.

It is still not a question about viability. It is a question about ranged players being able to faceroll. Melee is very viable just because dungeons are simple and easy (when you can solo Arah something is really wrong). Personally I do my best to avoid ranged because it is so boring and I find this really a balance issue.

There are (at least) two severe issues: side-stepping projectiles and slow melees.
Ranged players can very easily mitigate lots of ranged damage by simply side-stepping when melee players need to use dodges. When enemies hit hard (Agony) this becomes a clear issue. Not sure about solution, maybe AI should come closer when we side-step or just have faster projectiles.
Everyone knows that if you are melee you need to have mobility or ranged kite you to death. That’s why it’is weird when many many melee enemies lack mobility. Again ranged players can mitigate lots of damage with simple kiting when melee users need to spend dodges (or rely on unreliable out-ranging/circling). Solution would be simply adding low-damage mobility skills which enemies just use as gap-closers.

I melee 80% of the time. 95% in wvw. And I’m not “full tank”, it’s very easily doable. you’re just not building the class right. Redo traits and armor

To everyone going “Melee’s damage is worth the risk” or “Melee just gets you killed”…. Use both.

You have a melee weapon for mixing it up with the boss when your cooldowns are up, and you have spare health, to speed the fight along, and a ranged weapon for when your damaged and need to patch yourself up.

Swapping between melee/range is much more effective than pure melee or pure range, unless you’re EXTREMELY good at melee, AND have toughness/vit stacked.

I agree in some parts that melee is tougher, but to me its part of the fun. The only major issue I have is the inability to see the mobs animations half the time due to visual effects. they need a slider to give us the ability to see that move thats gonna crush ya skull.

Use both.

Ranged generally does less damage than equivalent melee attacks in this game (sometimes ALOT less). The idea should be that you melee as much as you think you can get away with while staying alive and ranging when you feel the risk isn’t worth it. You may be able to get away with 100% melee uptime vs some fights and feel that you should range on others, that’s fine.

I can also tell you that for every fight you think should be played 100% at ranged, someone out there is doing 100% as melee, doing more damage than you, and still not dying.

I feel like I’m a lot better at triggering combos with a melee weapon.

UnderdogSMO.9428:

digiowl.9620:

UnderdogSMO.9428:

digiowl.9620:

TexZero.7910:

Melee combat punishes inexperienced players, that’s all.

So all we need to do is to run the same encounter enough time that we can time our dodges and such on rote?

No you have to play the game enough to know the visual ques that tell you when the best time to dodge is. And to know when you have othe players boons efecting you and whats effecting the mob

Funny, i thought ANet told us to play the game, not the UI

Good thing theres in game effect for all this kitten! It becaums easyer to recognize the more you play.

I refuse to play this game on low settings. Sorry with all ANets AWESOME graphics enabled I can’t even see a boss inside the kaleidoscope of colors and effects.

The PVE is bad. Very bad. Hence ANet admitting it was bad and is why they are redoing almost all the regular dungeons. Part 1 of the dungeon patch was removing rez rushing. Part 2 is going back and actually making real encounters rather than the random melee spam they have now.

Looking forward to that. Until then I just play WvW. If I want dungeons there are other MMOs that do it better.

Anti-melee? I’d say the total opposite. If you’re at melee range, you should expect to take more damage.

On the other hand, melee has the highest DPS in the game *cough*cof1farm*cough*

Having played both ranged and melee and leveled to 80 a guardian, a warrior, a ranger, a mesmer and an engie, I used to think that ranged had a huge advantage. In fact, I find after having played all of these that I’m more survivable over all on my guardian and warrior, and I certainly tend to get more rewards from events using them.

All the melee effects in this game seem to be AOE. I have far less AOE on my mesmer. Some, but not enough. So when I charge into a DE with my warrior or guardian, I’m always hitting multiple targets and getting credit for all of them.

I do a lot more damage with melee than I do with ranged as well.

Do I got down more? In certain situations yes…but not that many. And since both warriors and guardians have the option to swap out to range in those situations (best of both worlds), I’m not seeing a problem here.

I think the idea that melee should be more risky because of higher reward/risk is a poor counterargument to why melee is more risky generally.

The reason is that the overriding concern isn’t about whether ranged verse melee damage is balanced but only whether it is fair to force players who only want to play using melee combat into ranged combat simply because they can’t cut it in melee combat due to the game’s developers giving mobs abilities that frequently only pose a serious risk to meleers and not ranged players.

Melee only sucks if your party is full of cowards and force you to be the only melee. Even then it’s not as bad as some players seem to think.

While i am fairly new i just leveled a warrior to level 80 last week and am now working on a thief i have some comments about this.

My warrior is a GS beserker(glass cannon) and i do very well with him in a melee role IF(and this is a huge IF) i am in a group on voice comms and can call when im about 3 seconds from going down and the team can res me right away. If this is not the case well im less than effective lets just put it that way. Glass cannons are more of a group build IMO not a solo build.

What i do find is just poor programming/game design is the ease in which ranged character have it vs melee characters.

Playing my warrior if im in a high level area like CS or frostgorge i have to be on my toes for all veteran or champion mobs, constantly looking for signs of the powerfeul attacks coming so i can effectivly dodge and kite when needed to regain health. Im constantly moving and changing the angle of my attacks and always have a escape route planned, ive been on the edge of my seat many battle fighting for my life with less than 1000hp left and all skills in recharge and just trying to keep kiting and out of the way of any attacks.

Compare this to my thief which i prefer a shortbow build for and its night and day as far as difficulty of combat. Admittingly theif is only low level right now but when i do world events with a few other players all thats needed is standing usually completly still near max range and running through my skills over and over. Throw up a combo field shoot mob a few tims and repeat. Its completly brain dead combat with zero risk of dieing, i have rearely had to even repair armor before finding better armor to replace it with and i was constantly repairing the armor on my warrior, i can telly you the location of every armor repair vendoe in the Charr lands because i was there so much i should have got on some reward points armor repair program.

Hell with my thielf i could beat most world events i have come across so far(only low 30’s level wise) on auto attack and just stand in the back and not have to worry about it and could make a coffe while figting a boss, if i tried that with my warr i would be down in the first 10 seconds, and dead in 15.

Since starting my thief i have actually started to feel ripped off as my warrior, for the amount of skill, time, planning/tactics and aggrivation that goes into playing a melee warrior compared to a ranged class there is ZERO additional rewards. Makes me wonder why anyone would bother, i can tell you one thing for sure im sure not ever going to make a minaly melee based character in this game ever again there is no point other than to give yourself a wall in which to beat your head against while the whole time you could be using a ranaged weapon doing just a good with no skill other than hitting the 2-5 keys every time a cooldown is up.

i play guardian.

and i dont use range weapons.

only for the few encounters here and there i might take the staff.
learn to dodge, use your gap closers, aegis, regens, etc…

and you can melee everything.

true, im a very good player, but still

i tank grenth. dodge between his legs hit him where it hurts!

good melee practice; tank vet karkas, or champions 15-20 lvl below.

make sure your keyboard is well configured (no double tap dodge, or 6-7-8-9), dodge on mouse button is best i find, if you have 2 xtra mouse buttons, use dodge and attack 1.

good luck.
or use ranged class

Yo Avatar – it is good to see another very good player, especially another very good guardian.

What’s with all these scrubs mate- were they here before? ;-)

the game doesnt help the newbs with the terrible keybord config at start.

thats the only excuse possible!

Avatar.1923:

the game doesnt help the newbs with the terrible keybord config at start.

thats the only excuse possible!

Actually it never occured to me that people might be playing with a three button mouse, on a 17 inch laptop screen and half-baked keyboard…

Rebinding a lot of movement onto mouse buttons is one of the first things I did and makes the game much more playable – double tapping dodge… forgot about that being the default too there until today.

^

true.
“gear” does matter i guess! whatever they said in their manifesto is bullkitten !

heh

I think it’s a simple and quite frankly obvious fact that playing melee is both much harder and also riskier than playing ranged.

I’ve been playing since launch and I have multiple level 80s, various ranged, various melee, and here are some points I have to say;

When going in most dungeons (Arah comes to mind since it’s the one I do the most, also TA), it is alright if the player has both melee weapons and ranged, it is alright if the player has only ranged, but it is NOT alright if the player has only melee.

You simply cannot realistically do Lupicus in melee, he’ll summon grubs and insta eat them, he’ll kill you in the fraction of a second. In TA you are simply not able to actually move around without having some sort of ranged attack to kill off the blossoms; I once had a melee guy run up to the blossoms and smack them with his sword, activating ALL of them and killing us all.

By this simple fact alone it should be clear that melee is at a huge disadvantage to ranged.

You could say “well maybe some places it’s just best to be ranged and others it’s best to be melee”, which isn’t the case however. There are many places where it’s virtually IMPOSSIBLE to progress with melee, while you are able to do anything, go anywhere and kill everything while ranged.

To a lot of people, to my guild, to my friends and so on, a player that walks into a dungeon without a ranged weapon doesn’t know what he’s doing and we’re gonna have to rez him in almost every hard fight.

I myself love playing melee, however there is no way I would EVER make a pure melee character because that is nothing short of stupid.

So you may say this or that about this subject but when it comes right down to it, (in PVE) melee will simply always get the shorter end of the stick, melee will always have to suffer while ranged gets almost a free ride.

As a guardian, I can relate. I haven’t played scepter in a really long time… I can’t say I remember my ranged capabilities being very amazing. Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s basically melee or go home for me and most of the time nothing is melee friendly.

i think theres some video of a greatsword warrior soloing lupicus.

google it.

and to all guards and warriors who feel “kitten” by playing range; l2p