Guild Wars 2

This post was HUGE, so I had to break it up below. My viewpoint on melee, hopefully it can put some confusion and nay-sayers to rest.

1. Melee vs. Ranged:
This one has been around since Beta #1, and for good reason. I’ve always played rogues, assassins, thieves, etc. in any game that gives me the opportunity to, so GW2 was especially jarring to me for this reason- melee fighting will eviscerate you and strangle you with your own colon.
Here’s the deal, and I actually LOVE why they made it this way, the source of the issue is actually ranged play. In other games, ranged players have a disadvantage that they don’t have in this game: lack of mobility. They were balanced because even though they could attack from outside your range, they probably couldn’t do it for long because melee classes were more mobile due to gapclosers, cast times, etc. ArenaNet decided that standing still and doing your rotation isn’t the most fun gaming there could be, so they gave ranged players in GW2 far more freedom of movement.
But OH NO, that means that ranged is imbalanced now! How do we fix this? “Wait!”, said some brilliant, bedazzling genius of a person at ANet, “We’ll make melee do more damage than ranged, providing a high risk high reward scenario! And on top of that, we’ll give every profession ranged and melee options so no one is trapped in one playstyle. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! We’ll ALSO give you the ability to switch between ranged and melee weapons on the fly! BOOOOM!”
If you direct your attention to the base damage of your melee abilities compared to your ranged abilities, you should notice that in most cases, melee damage far exceeds that of ranged. In PvP, I think people are okay with this. I havn’t seen more than a few people even bring it up, because it’s obviously balanced through damage uptime. If a melee fighter faces a ranged fighter, the ranged one should be dealing damage pretty much the whole time, whereas the melee one has to spend time and effort closing the gap.
PvE though is where thousands of people have raised a storm of complaints. That whole melee does more damage than ranged thing? That applies to NPCs too. If you run up to melee them, they’ll melee you right back, and in a straight up slugfest they’ll kill you LONG before you kill them because they have way more health than you. No matter how strong your glass cannon is, it can’t burst down a Veteran, or a dungeon mob faster than that mob can kill you.
The reason is this: You can heal. You need to build enough crowd control, toughness, vitality, and healing power to get you to that next healing ability before you kick the can. Very few enemies can heal, and even then, their heals pale in comparison to yours. Personally, my 30 second CD heal gives me over half my health back. The biggest heal I’ve seen a mob do was about 1/20th of their health.

Many people raise the issue, “This event boss just one-shots me if I try to melee!”. Sometimes, this is actually a legitimate complaint. Some creatures don’t give a significant “tell” before they use a one-shot ability. This was a large issue with that first Beta weekend, and ANet mentioned it specifically, saying they would make sure that attacks other than basic ones would give substantial tells. Still though, I’ve seen a COUPLE, as in, VERY FEW instances where people got crushed for no good reason.
Three other issues are far more common:
1. You don’t have enough defense, and you got slaughtered by a basic attack that has no tell. If you enter melee combat with a world boss, dungeon mob, etc., you NEED a certain amount of Health and Armor so as to not get obliterated in one or two hits. You have a 1 ability on your weapon, it’s probably near instant and pretty much undodgeable. Most enemies have this too, and if you don’t build enough defense in melee you’ll just die with no chance. You have the option to build glass cannon in PvP because most players don’t have a huge healthpool and you CAN burst them down. In PvE you don’t have that option.
2. You didn’t dodge. The monster gave a tell that it was going to screw you royally if you didnt do something, and you didn’t do anything. Dodge, block, counter, interrupt, blind, SOMETHING should have happened to respond to that tell, and you failed to deliver it. It’s okay, you can’t expect yourself to be perfect, this is what the downed state is for, and someone should be a bro and pick you up. If it’s your first or second down, someone can pick you up in no time flat, no big deal. After that, play it safe, move to ranged for a minute until you lose the down penalty, then get back in there and fight like a crab!
3. The enemy was completely engulfed in spell effects or simply wigging out from so many attacks that you couldn’t possibly have even attempted to maybe perhaps see the “tell” that you so vitally needed in order to stay alive.
Sorry guys, this one is just total bologna and my only advice to you is to stay as far away as possible. If you have that many people attacking something it’s not as if you need to be in melee to do that extra bit of damage anyway; that thing is just screwed as it is. Sit back and watch the fireworks.