Guild Wars 2

The only MMO I have ever played that actually got melee right was DAOC. Why? They gave melee much quicker CD’s, more resistances to crowd controlling abilities, snares, and often speed buffs for catching up to players. As it stands now, IMO , this game does the opposite. Range players have many snaring, stunning, knockdown, slowing effects, it is very hard to be a melee player. Even if you do manage to get to a ranged player, they often have better/more abilities to get away quickly.

For example:
Guardian teleport – 45s
Guardian save yourselves – 60s
Guardian retreat – 60s
Guardian zealots embrace – 15s (so easy to just walk 2 steps away and avoid, it needs to be faster)
Guardian 1h sword teleport – 10s (however, if you do this you are giving up any kind of range attacking at all, which makes it not viable, as 1 hand damage is sub par)
There is nothing for guardian that cripples enemies???? 2h Hammer by default should add a snaring effect on its 3 attack for how long it takes to cast.

Mesmer teleport – 30s
Mesmer Staff Retreat – 10s
Mesmer Sword cripple – 12s

Thief shortbow cripple – 3d
Thief – basically every skill is 30s
Thief 1h sword – cripple every 3rd attack
Thief Dancing Dagger- 3d
Thief Stealth – 6d

Elementalist Retreat – 20s
And so on and so on….

Melee seriously needs some loving, in WvW you will more then likely go boom very quickittenrying to do anything. Guardians have no real form of ranged attacks, staff is direction in 1 plane, so if you are above or below, you will not hit anything. Staff damage is also horrible. Melee abilities should be on smaller cool-downs. Guardians skills need to be tweaked, all of their speed buffs on 60s cds? teleport 45? We have to have ways to close the gap faster.

I’m not going to say I’m the best example to look at, or even that I’m a particularly good player, but I find very few players are able to escape me when I’m inclined to chase them down, and very few can catch me when I want to escape (at least as my Guardian in WvW).

I play greatsword/hammer most of the time, occasionally swapping one weaponset to scepter/focus, sword/focus, or staff depending on the situation (my build does not focus on any weapon specifically). I focus on boon duration (+45% total duration in PvE/WvW, +60% in PvP due to Superior Rune of the Monk not existing in PvE, plus an extra 20% might and 25% retaliation duration), might stacking, and defensive/offensive boons. I can maintain swiftness with 100% uptime in sPvP, and roughly 90% in PvE/WvW (100% if I cared to swap out a pair of MF runes for +20% swiftness duration runes). This, along with the leaps on GS and hammer, pull on GS, and the root and RoW on hammer, lets me keep an enemy in melee range easily long enough to pound their face in. In the rare event that I’m fighting too many players to handle, I can usually escape to fight another day, unless there’s simply too much CC to handle.

That being said, I hit very, very hard, and can survive a long time in combat (especially while using the hammer). I rarely feel underpowered due to my heavy focus on melee combat, and when I do it’s mostly because I’m trying to fulfill a role that there is no need for at that time and place (melee initiation into a large zerg). Usually, I’ll go find another task to accomplish: take out guards in other locations, support the zerg from the rear with the staff rather than fighting in the front lines, build a siege weapon, use my survivability advantage to repair a gate or pop Tome of Wrath for some temporary striking power.

Melee is not always a good choice, and when you limit yourself to melee as I do for the most part, you must learn to recognize when your services are not needed, and find something else to do. It kinda stinks at times, but let’s face it: it’s probably a good thing that you spread out from the zerg a bit anyway. Giant zergs can be fun, but they’re also inefficient.

I’ve got the feeling your talking about sPvP, where I got literally not problem at all with dealing with ranged, even with very defensive builds.

Guardians are one of the least mobile classes in the game, and there is a reason for this. Guardians give up mobility to make up for the fact that you can shoot them in the face for three minutes and they don’t die. If you had the mobility of a thief and still had 3400 armor..there would be an issue.

He obviously doesn’t do much WvW. This build you would be doing nothing most of the time. Guardians already basically do nothing for keep/tower defense/attacking.

Sure in a 1v1 fight your are fine. Sure in sPvP its fine. But as soon as you throw in 5-10 players tossing cripple, blind, immobilize, stun, root, you won’t be doing anything much before they teleport/stealth/run off. I am just saying by default we have no crippling effects on weapons? You have to either put points into the hammer trait to get this, or slap a rune of ice on your weapon.

But hey, at least you can look pretty in your front line doing nothing while the range is aoeing.

I guess one could roll a thief and stay stealthed 24/7 while attacking.

What i wanna know is,

Why as the melee class of this game do i feel it takes more “Aiming” on our part to get a decent hit, then most of the ranged classes out there….

-Tzenjin

Because you are forced to use a small subset of weapons/skills/traits to teleport to players constantly to keep them within melee range long enough for them to die. Otherwise you will be walking around limping 24/7 and doing nothing.

Kharel, you can get Superior Rune of the Monk from farming AC.

Ah, true—I didn’t realize that; I was mostly looking on the TP, where you cannot find said runes.

At any rate, I do play a lot of WvW. Most of the time, I run with a small group. We take and hold supply camps, capture points, attack jumping puzzle campers, act as scouts-in-force for commanders, and occasionally take and hold undefended towers.

What we don’t do is merge with a zerg. That is not the strength of a melee-focused small group, so we don’t even try it. Occasionally, if we see an opportunity in a zerg vs zerg combat situation, we’ll flank and hit a zerg from the rear, where people can’t see, and aren’t focusing their CC so much. We’ll hit them, kill off a few of the squishies hanging in the back, and either work our way through the group, killing as we go, or back off and run away before the majority of the group turns around if the zerg is overwhelming. That’s the only time we get involved in zergs whatsoever, though.

The way in which mobs are tagged in PvE could also use some work imo. I often find that I’m using a staff just for the 180 degree AoE to tag the mobs before the zerg can burst them down in a few seconds. The Swing and Whirl of my GS doesn’t seem to cut compared to my staff and the other weapons are just fairly meh for tagging.

Being in the area of the mobs and actively helping the group should count as a whole rather than specifically hitting that singe mob in order to make it drop loot

SKuDDer.1860:

Guardians already basically do nothing for keep/tower defense/attacking.

Guardians are no less adept at manning Arrow Carts and Catapults than anyone else. Why is a ranger that could be attacking from the ramparts using a catapult in the courtyard? Why are elementalists on the ramparts with arrow carts when they could be laying down combo fields for a sortie? Too many guardians or not enough supply for defensive seige weaponry? Sortie. It works. If you’re on the attacking side, provide support for your ranged attackers. An elementalist can die really fast, you can keep them alive long enough for them to drop a few spells and fall back. Line of Warding can keep foes from a door or from getting away from a door. Guardians (especially with +healing) can help others back on their feet. There is a lot to do in WvW when attacking and defending keeps.

SKuDDer.1860:

I am just saying by default we have no crippling effects on weapons? You have to either put points into the hammer trait to get this, or slap a rune of ice on your weapon.

Just because the ranger crippled my foe doesn’t mean I can’t chase him. Teamwork. Alternatively, who said it is your job to chase. If they are running away, your side is winning. A foe that is attacking you is (generally) not attacking your allies.

SKuDDer.1860:

But hey, at least you can look pretty in your front line doing nothing while the range is aoeing.

Tome of Wrath can devastate an army, and I can stand up long enough to use it. Sure, it is an elite, but group quickness and ~2kdps/target at 1200 range is a nice spike. But lets say you don’t want to do that, lets say we just ignore the elite altogether. Protecting allies is not nothing. Pushing the enemy back is not nothing. Baiting foes into chasing you is not nothing. Baiting foes into using long cooldowns is not nothing.

Guardians have access to every boon and can give allies most of them too. Guardians can provide some of the best condition removal and damage prevention in the game. Indirect combat may be less glorious than direct damage, but it is strategy, not AoE damage, that wins WvW.