Guild Wars 2

The current state of mechanics in PvE, especially dungeons, is very biased towards melee play.

• The downed state allows players to instantly revive a player when everyone is within range.
• If everyone uses melee the party is always within range of support skills, combo fields, and combo finishers.
• AI in general only hit a single target and their AoE is often easy to react to and dodge, limiting risk.
• The attacks of AI often put players at the same risk regardless of if they are in melee or range distance.
• When using LoS pulls enemies are huddled together but have no way of supporting eachother, make no effort to gain distance from an attacker, and give the players no reason to separate enemies from eachother.
• Defiant makes it difficult to effectively CC bosses, limiting a primary form of defense used by ranged playstyles.

All this together creates some rather serious balance issues when it comes to melee vs ranged balancing.

Ranged weapons are viewed as inferior because they are balanced around PvP, not PvE. Using a ranged weapon in PvP puts you in less risk and allows you to hit targets easier, so in order to balance this their damage amongst other things is limited compared to melee weapons.

However, in PvE the risk and difficulty gap between these weapons is much smaller, yet ranged weapons get nothing to compensate for that. They are still treated as though they are in PvP and as a result become inferior weapons.

Furthermore, the range of support skills is too small, many requiring you to be right next to an ally, and some of the largest only extending to 600-900 range, encouraging the use of melee. This is also in direct conflict with certain weapons like the ranger’s longbow as it expects you to shoot from 1,000+ range for its full damage.

Melee vs Ranged balancing needs to be reconsidered in PvE. Either the risk of using melee needs to be brought up to what it is in PvP, or ranged weapons need to be buffed to better represent the difference in risk. Support skills and combo finishers need to have a larger radius and perhaps affect the entire party regardless of range in dungeons.

I totally agree. I am a tad tired of being regarded a noob player just because I prefer to play my ranger as an actual archer, using a longbow. Is it really such a shocking thought that I want to be a ranged class in a MMO, particularly when I roll a class that is traditionally played as a ranged class in pretty much every MMO in history? In GW2, people will laugh at you for doing it, at least. Because the current combat system is more than a little broken in making melee way, way superior in every regard to any ranged choice, for precisely the reasons you listed.

Most of these are not a problem with melee or ranged, but a problem with the related skills, for example the fact that very few support skills are ranged 1200 is just disgusting. Most decent games know that support is the first thing that the developers should always pay attention to, but in this game its pathetic because Anet likes it like that.

This was one of the design goals of the game, so I would not expect any of these things to change any time soon, its built from the ground up for melee zerk stack. They just tried to be too different and largely messed it up. They have tried to invert most of the well-established tropes of MMOs such as T1 support, T2 defense, T3 DPS balancing model and the holy trinity. Some of it good, some of it falls flat.

No professional game designer would build a game where you clear every piece of content in the game (save for WvW and PvP), with a single setup, single group composition (give or take a class or two), and a single tactic. I believe that this is mostly due to vision and communication errors inside of Anet, particularly with all of the employee turnarounds especially at game release time.

Having to go back and release ascended because they miscalculated the actual value of the exotics end-game gear shows that these kinds of things happen.

Yup, instead of having dungeons with mechanics that make ranged dangerous, we have a game where players get shamed for trying any spec that doesn’t involve humping an enemy’s leg.