Guild Wars 2

#forum bug fix – 15 characters

Meanma.5623:

Sojourner.4621:

No… in testing conditions admittedly, ranged does about 15k less DPS than melee on the BEST ranged attacks… melee’s damage is so much higher that even if you spend a lot of time on active defense you will still take stuff down twice as fast, minimum, if you actually learn how to stay in melee range without dying. Maybe that tradeoff is not worth it to you, and that is your right. But please be informed about your choices… they are not “better” even with 100% damage uptime.

It doesn’t matter how much damage you do in testing conditions because the average player will not perform the same when facing controlled enemies in a sterile environment while having access to all buffs of their choice as when facing uncontrolled enemies in an environment where you can get stuck on a rock while strafing, dodge off a cliff, pull other mobs in the vicinity, have something respawn right under you, have another player come along and mess up your strategy (pulling and knocking mobs at the wrong time, overlaying on your field or blasting it before you wanted, etc.) and juggle all these while only having access to your own buffs and crowd control abilities.

I have a weathered looking Charr lady among my characters. A warrior with that half-blind face. Wanted her to be this grizzled murder machine of the Blood Legion. Leveled her using only melee weapons. Still running double axe and double mace. Frankly, it’s too draining and frustrating to use her.

Always being in melee range means I take the brunt of the damage. Always being in melee range means I’m often crowd controlled because I can only dodge so often and have stability up only for so long before I’m inevitably knocked down, knocked back, stunned, feared and dazed in quick succession. Always being in melee range means I play hopscotch for the entirety of the fight as I’m trying to avoid both AoEs and big direct hits while also trying to stay in or run back into range for my weapons to work.

I played her with berserker stats for a while but with how much harder it is to stay alive in melee range I had to realize that my superior melee damage isn’t of much use if I die after 15 seconds. However, I wanted to keep her melee-only, still. I love playing melee characters in other games and was determined to make this work. So I got her full exotic soldier equipment with runes, signets and skills that further increased her defenses and self-healing ability.

Now I have a full melee warrior that finally survives all the cheap crowd control and AoE spamming that mobs use. In return I deal about as much damage as an AFK ranger auto-shooting from the distance and my melee gameplay consists of keeping a constant boring rotation of use up all the mace abilities to crowd control -> use all the axe abilities to do damage -> mace is off cooldown again -> repeat for agonizingly long till the mobs die.

As a player of low or average gaming skills, melee gameplay is either going to be about taking very frequent dirt naps or about whacking away at mobs for so long that you fall asleep mid-event.

Which again boils down to risk vs reward. My own experience with an all melee warrior, my absolutely worst played class, was that last week in preparation for spellbreaker I boosted one to 80 then in an hour and a half ran through 25 Hero points (All 11 in VB, 10 in AB skipping balth, and 5 in TD) solo, including the difficult champs. I was in full berserker gear, and by following basic rules for melee players regarding active defense and running axe/shield ~ greatsword… I did not spend “forever” fighting anything. Damage output was reasonably high and the new Might Makes Right with my gain from GS crits, and dodge rolls do damage at their end passive trait… I was able to dodge all day, do damage, which then gave me might stacks and refilled endurance.

Einlanzer.1627:

Basically this. It surprises me that melee is getting so much defense. It’s the most intuitively obvious thing in the universe that ranged just flat-out works better in most scaled content.

Melee is fine, scaling in some cases isn’t. Fixing the root causes of the issue would be much more beneficial than some band-aid pseudo fix for melee.