I didn't play Guild Wars but this is very true for Guild Wars 2. Check out this thief who specced solely into condition damage and relies on applying bleeds with leaping death blossom:Originally Posted by squirrelfanatic
traits: http://www.twitch.tv...ter/b/316642773
gameplay: http://www.twitch.tv/flipmeister/b/316627049
He does great dps but as soon as a character starts cleansing (the ranger cleanses every time he dodges if traited that way) he becomes useless.
Funny you mentioned that. I was having a blast on my elementalist and decided to give the warrior a crack. It was pretty crappy by comparison, until a rifle dropped. After that I played it more or less like a hunter from wow.
Based on my experience I dont at all see why anyone would ever roll a melee warrior, ranged tops it in every department.
Something arenanet said they were addressing. It was mostly about melee getting too much attention from mobs in general and ranged fighters having much easier time due that. I preferred melee actually, guess I just loved getting smacked down all the time :P
Frankly, I think it's always a balancing issue that every fantasy MMO has had to contend with: Lethal ranged combat > melee combat. If you have rifles, why would you fight with swords?
Every MMO has answered that problem the exact same way - nerf ranged DPS comparative to melee DPS - and every player has responded to that the same way - "we can't get invited to raids, buff our DPS!" or simply speccing/gearing as glass cannons - and beat out everybody, especially in group combat. Longer range, faster target acquisition and front-loaded damage = lolgg.
AoC at launch was massively imbalanced when you hit levelcap because bow rangers who crafted and gemmed their gear appropriately could one-shot anyone they wanted. Likewise, xbow rangers could bowl over entire lines of people and two-shot them before they got back up again.
In TR, the sniper had such a long firing gap that fighting groups was a hassle, but they could one-shot every single boss the game had. You basically just brought the sniper along to dungeons to do just that.
In any large group, anybody who could front-load their DPS and pewpew from the back relatively unmolested basically topped the charts, and from vanilla to WotLK in WoW, PvE crit gear was still more useful than PvP gear in larger engagements.
In WAR, especially in the larger zergs, the pewpew and the AoEs basically rendered melee nigh-impossible and gave the shadow warriors more or less carte blanche to pick and choose their enemies. In Rift it was the exact same thing for rangers: Tab-target, spam top three damaging attacks, laugh, tab-target.
One of the design issues I think GW2 is having trouble with right now is that melee is, likewise, harder to play than ranged. I played a ranger in the weekend beta, and I played it just how I used to: Tab-target, pew pew, use get-out-of-combat-free card if anybody looked at me funny.
I think you are right in the way of melee being harder to play. That's probably a part of core combat mechanics of the game though and is unlikely to change. However, melee isn't necessarally bad, and I'm sure more experienced players will play it later on. On the other hand, the way I was playing my thief, I was constantly switching between melee and ranged sets, using all 10 of my main abilities.
Don't get me wrong: I love that nobody's totally gimped in their unfavored mode - if indeed those modes are unfavored - but people have been complaining about the divide in difficulty.
Yeah, they need to add some more tutorial stuff before release too, heard loads of complaints about difficulty in that way. Didn't have any problem with any of it myself, but I'm used to that. People these days want their hands held.
In my experience melee did much more damage than ranged. You're both right about difficulty however, melee has a much harder time surviving in the fray especially in group fights. In WvWvW zergs and against long lasting, hard hitting boss fights melee does becomes useless. I tried melee against the shaman boss in the char starting area and was demolished. Picking off the same boss from range was simple and only required dodging the occasional red circle on the ground.
In structure pvp where you are often against 1 or 2 opponents however I think the advantage goes to melee.
I did see a dev post in the beta forums saying they are aware melee has issues and are looking into it. The problem is, if they buff melee up it will severely affect structured pvp balance.
i did pretty well with a melee warrior. as well as a melee thief and ranger. well, as much as any class is one thing. i frequently switched between ranged/melee weapon sets as the situation called for. melee warriors can definitely do quite a bit of damage, but one main issue is that certain skills, i've noticed, for the warrior (and the thief) require you (and your target) to stand still for about 3-4 seconds-- which is a bit stupid given the nature of the combat.
kiting is also rather easy, but i think the whole system is rather set up to be flexible. if you want to play melee and only melee, you'll suffer for it, but if you're willing to switch to a bow/rifle when someone starts kiting/running away, you'll be rewarded.
The best way to balance ranged and melee would probably be to make the game turn based.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
Just had to share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes
The video shows one dynamic event and how it 'flows', there is actually story unfolding behind every single phase that most people, myself included, probably missed.
Really displays the amount of effort and detail that has been put into these events. Ran into one similar event myself and caught part of the 'behind the scenes' - story which had similar detail. This beats even some single player games in the 'living world' - feel :P
I do not really see why people were having such issues with melee, I personally only play melee, coming from WoW as a rogue and warrior.
I played the Warrior in the structured PvP using greatsword combined with Stomp, Endure Pain and Rampage, I was top every match I played and died only once.
I found as a greatsword Warrior, I just slow people with Bladetrail, if they were out of range use Whirldwind or Rush to catch up, once I was in melee range they only lasted a few seconds, even getting attacked by 2-3 enemies, I could just pop Rampage combined with Endure Pain and escape or wait for help.
I have to ask do alot of you play ranged classes and just haven't adapted to playing in melee range?
Melee is fine in PvP because everyone has plenty of health, but in PvE the monsters deal too much damage to deal with, when you can kite them for a lot less effort.
Are you referring to PvE in general, or those Champion "bosses" that occasionally appeared, because that is only time I saw melee have issues since those bosses just one shot you. Though that could just be because of being underleveled.
Yup, there seems to be a huge amount of sillyness whenever someone mentions melee to not see the difference between pve and pvp.
Small scale PVP is pretty fine as it is, some skills need sorting but the overall balance is fairly good amongst equally skilled players in my experience.
Large scale PVP is a bit more limited for some classes but there's plenty of support that all classes can provide at range and WvW has many opportunities to escape the zerg and attack supply depots and provide help in general.
PVE needs some changes in regards to how mobs target things and deal with range as well as the damage that bosses deal in melee range. I know that my warrior was one shotted by a certain event boss. Anet has acknowledged this and there should be changes being put in place. If more mobs had ranged attacks or ways of closing distance/immobilising then ranged wouldn't have such a super easy time compared to melee, not that melee was too hard in most places anyway.
Yeah this is something I really regret not doing more of in the BWE, sticking around for the chains of dynamic events. I will definitely be hunting them down next time.
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