Guild Wars 2

So I have a guard, thief, and ele @ lvl 80 all of them have at least 2 full exo sets and plenty of exo weapons, I have a warrior & necro ~60 a mesmer round lvl 30 and haven’t really touched engi/ranger.

The theme that I’m getting from all those classes is that melee is just plain better than ranged. If you want to kill anything as a ele you have run d/d. I run short bow and d/d on my thief because pistol just feels weak. Guardian, I only use a scepter when I physically walk up to something and swing my sword/hammer into their face.

Long story short, I build full glass cannon on most classes ranged, the damage isn’t much more than building tanky DPS melee plus you get added support stuff when everyone is grouped up melee.

Anyone else see any trends on other classes?

I have a staff ele and it feels awesome. I perform much much better compared to d/d and everything just melts in front of me… So, ammm, I disagree.

You perform much better on your staff compared to your d/d play. In PvE and big WvW battles Staff works, in any sort small battle 1v1,2v2 etc d/d outshines staff so hard.

I’d tend to agree but you also have to remember DPS isn’t as simple as raw numbers.

Take for example thieves and mesmers. Their melee DPS is somewhat inferior to guardian or warrior and they have to contend with being squishies in melee range.

But they deal isn’t one sided, they can drop a huge amount of damage in a short timespan (followed by a cooldown) and supported by controls and utilities that make their damage spike hard to avoid, for example thief’s backstab from stealth, or a mesmer’s 6-clone shatterspike.

So it’s not entirely black and white; tanky classes get high overall damage but reduced utility and range. Glassy classes get stronger ranged and melee damage that trends towards spikes (and the tools to pull off a spike) so their reduced melee survivability is less of a factor

Ranged should never be as good as melee, because it’s that much harder for a melee class to counter a ranged one than vice versa (Ask yourself why in the real world wars are fought almost entirely at range)

Melee is riskier, thefore should offer higher reward, in this case damage.