Let's Talk: Game Difficulty

[Vormaerin]

Undead are actually a lot of fun for my radiant servant cleric. Yeah, he's actually more than a healbot, and not all content in the game needs to be designed with melee toons in mind.

Not sure why you think that comment is relevant to my post. Presumably you weren't following the conversation, because my point was that undead are not an inappropriate challenge, even if they tend to negate significant abilities of almost every class.

The general point of your comment is pretty amusing, too. Just what content in the game is "designed with melee toons in mind?"

It seems to me that, based on your comments in these threads, that you play with a lot of bad players and then transfer the bitterness that engenders to the game system itself. "I don't use my abilities fully, save me!" does not mean "fighters suck".

There are quite a lot of bad divine and arcane casters out there, too.

[Ungood]

This is a totally different thread, but the problem is that thus far the only way the devs can make content "harder" is by putting the burden on the healer. I have an offensive caster that spends more of my blue bar on keeping the party up in epics than actually having fun and casting. I'm a team player so I do it, most of the time.

Some examples:

Frenzied Berserker vicious damage - ***? So I have to heal this guy more because that way he does more damage? If a barb wants to kill themselves I'm okay with it, but seriously bar them from receiving incoming healing when they kick this on. They chug 80 pots and maybe they'll think twice about using the stupid thing.

Well I do not play a barb, so I am not sure on the mechanic, but you would think of a Barb was blitzed out of their mind in a middle of a combat frenzy they would get a Vamperic/Life shield kind of effect, till the rage wears off. That whole "Fueled off battle" kinda of deal.

Maybe some revising of those PRE's might be in order as well to balance them out to be more group dynamic friendly as opposed to everything being a heal fest.

Twisted Talisman - actually had a caster ask me to throw a heal scroll on him after he used it. I was like "they have pots for that".

Upping incoming damage and making AC nearly useless - Once again, the burden of this is on the healer not the person taking the damage. At some point they need to take a step back and penalize the player taking the damage, not the person in the group who can heal the damage.

All Good Points.

As far as AC goes, I would settle for just having Armor Styles play a role in Damage Mitigation, in the form of Heavy Armor offers 33%, Medium 22% Light 11% and Cloth 1% As well as adding in Combat feats for melee classes that can amp these up, perhaps just for heavy and medium armors.

I would also like to see the "Heal Skill" and "Repair Skill" go away, and just have a Rest Shrine restore all HP and SP. That would make things a little easier on the healer.

But yah. I see what you mean. It is an attrition game of the Mobs HP vs the Divines Spell Points. And to be honest, that is not a great means of fun.

[Vormaerin]

Well I do not play a barb, so I am not sure on the mechanic, but you would think of a Barb was blitzed out of their mind in a middle of a combat frenzy they would get a Vamperic/Life shield kind of effect, till the rage wears off.

The point of vicious is that, properly used, you kill the mobs significantly faster and, therefore, come out ahead. Because, in general, the mobs will hit you harder than your vicious does. So mobs dead sooner = less healing needed.

[Ungood]

The point of vicious is that, properly used, you kill the mobs significantly faster and, therefore, come out ahead. Because, in general, the mobs will hit you harder than your vicious does. So mobs dead sooner = less healing needed.

Well. this again, does little but to return to the question of what makes playing a Divine Enticing. And to be honest, Divines do not need any more abilities to make them fun. They are Already a Blast to play.

Divine builds are dynamic, powerful, and highly versatile, they can be mixed with great success. They are fun to play.

Personally, I love playing my Clonk, (18/2, Cleric/Monk) what I don't like is dealing with people who feel that I am their slave.

I don't like the idea that someone is going to fuss at me when they get themselves killed because I was not following them around like a hire healing them. And at the end of the day, there is nothing Turbine is going to do to the Divine Class to fix that problem.

Thus, the only answer lies in beefing up (Revamp perhaps) the melee classes to be less dependent upon the Divine classes, I honestly believe that is the only way to fix the problem of players not wanting to play "Healers"

[GermanicusMaximus]

LMAO, let me help you out here.

The problem with your line of reasoning here is that you obviously come from another MMO that favors the sacred trinity.

This is the second MMO I have ever played, and no, the prior one didn't have a trinity, sacred or otherwise. It was a strategy game involving entire armies, not individual toons.

Bards and Artificers can heal and have UMD.
Sorcs are Cha based, so it's easy to get UMD up, or you can just be a WF.
Wizards have tons of skill points, so it's easy to get UMD, or you can be a PM or a WF.
Paladins have LoH, need a decent Cha (for UMD), and have Cures.
Rangers have Cures and have plenty of skill points for UMD.
Monks have WoB and light Monks have FoL.
Rogues have UMD.
Fighters and Barbarians are the only ones with any issues self healing, and they can and have solo'd some of the tough content which you would claim "need" a dedicated healer. So if the two of them can keep themselves alive in tough content, anyone can.

The game mechanics quite clearly do allow for all the things that you mention, and players SHOULD be taking advantage of them. In fact, a fairly low percentage of non-casters do, and it appears the trend for non-casters is in fact downward.

We will soon embark on a discussion on class balance, where no doubt melee toons will complain about not being as powerful as casters, who in fact are powerful because they make investments in self healing. It should be an entertaining discussion.

Take a moment and think about what you just said:
"I have never been in a group where there was a wipe and people decided they died because the ranger/monk failed to heal them."
Now take responsibility for your own actions and make some attempt to keep yourself alive. If you die, 99% of the time it's not the healer's fault. 99% of the time it's your own fault.

My main toon is a cleric, which I play well over 95% of the time. The quote you have included is based upon my experience playing that cleric. I do appreciate your attempt at helping me, however.

[Kasiddy]

/delurk

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

Inconsistency, though after some experience this isn't so much an issue, I think. It may make for some nasty surprises for new players.

But I am still miffed that my pre-U11 monk who used to work fine in epics is now considered gimp by a great deal of the community. This is not entirely a developer issue... but not entirely a playerbase issue either. (HP + Fort + more damage) might make a quest more challenging by some definitions, but this hardly equates to more fun, especially at the expense of resources. There also seems to be a growing expectation that casters are supposed to be chugging sp pots on normal, even in quests. I really don't expect normal runs to cost pots even in raids or a well-coordinated epic.

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

For a lot of us, especially if we've been around a while, there are two things to get from play: rewards for overcoming some challenge we set for ourselves, and/or socialization and recreation.

Rewards are kind of obvious, I think, whether in-game loot items or personal satisfaction.

Socialization and Recreation Examples:
* Rolling dice for the Reaver tank then setting up disco balls and using /dance emotes while cracking jokes over in the corner in reaver, waiting for elementals to spawn.
* Naked Dragon/Drunken Dragon/some combination of the two.
* General goofing off in shroud or on the platform at quest entrance, with multiple back-to-back runs. (That's right, complete but don't finish - because it takes an awful lot of chests to get enough larges for a double-shard Tier 3... and new loot mechanics don't really change this, and it seems like there are fewer shrouds now.)
* Rolling dice for mind-flayer tank duties in Titan pre-raid (we can still do this).
* Dashing through DQ with whoever/whatever, especially newbies, just for a fast, fun completion. (can still sorta do this.)

I am aware that "inconsistency" makes some of the examples possible. I guess do whatever you want with hard and elite difficulty, but some recent changes really make me wonder if you understand the part of your playerbase who value the social rewards they get from casual (not necessarily meaning difficulty) play.

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

After half a dozen TRs, as many GS items, and whatever raid loot you want (except maybe that torc that never drops...) and some +3 tomes.... well, yeah, maybe things *should* be easy-ish. Or maybe a very few high level epics just became accessible. I don't have a problem with "easy epics." I don't have problems with extreme challenges either and see no reason why there can't be both. (Provided the challenges aren't stand around and whittle down the uber hp and heavy fort boss fights. Oh, and respawns/kiting challenges. I hate respawns and kiting.)

I think as a general rule, a reasonably-built 28-point character should be able to cap, craft some GS, and run some epic content (not necessarily all epic content), including a raid or two. I nominate VON, DQ, and *maybe* Chrono, as entry epic raids because they have decent loot and are lower level to start with. Ramp up House C all you want. I would even dare say that "reasonably-built" would include the final stats and feats (though not necessarily enhancements) you get after completing a pre-built path. Otherwise you are completely screwing over new players who don't know any better. They are, after all, following a developer's suggestion, and after putting effort and time into their MMO character they should expect to get progress/reward out of it... not get to level 14 or 18 and discover they are gimp.

Finally, I'd like to mention game refinement, as this thread comes close to that and I'm not sure if there will be a thread specifically about that... and it does have to do with game play, or at least enjoyment, frustration, and disappointment while playing.

DDO is not refined.
*There are floating trees in the Red Fens that nobody has bothered to plant properly. (Really, the only floating trees that make any sense at all are in House J...)
*Shroud collectibles have never worked.
*Necro 1 flagging issues.
*The "I hit the bottom of the ladder and climb up 3 feet then hit the bottom of the ladder and climb up 3 feet then hit the bottom of the ladder and climb up 3 feet..." bug. (Surely I'm not the only one?)
*Lag.
*More lag.
*Insert amusing/frustrating shroud anecdotes concerning lag here.
*Certain recent exploits that have become semi-well-known but which I still must not mention.
*Handwraps
*Ancient loot tables (Threnal, anyone?)
*Awkward flagging dialogue or glitches in quest chains. (Threnal, anyone? or maybe Deleras?)
*Can you still lose your GS in Abbot? I don't mess with Abbot....
*How long have some of those "Known Issues" been on the "Known Issues" list anyway?
*Etc.

While I applaud your efforts to introduce new content and refine game play... my VIP dollars would be very happy to see your entire 2012 update cycle pushed back an update or three and instead have those months spent fixing existing issues in the game and making sure the new content does not introduce new issues to an already too-long list. Oh, and do something with Threnal. Dave deserves better.

/relurk

[Ungood]

Note: All the Class with UMD is a cross Class skill, they can only get to a 11 Base, which is not enough to get any real use out of it, perhaps bypassing Race Required, but that is pretty much it. Just want to clear that up. However, if you get the faction for SP pots, self healing at the Higher levels becomes more viable. IF you get the favor that is. So. Among your List Calebro, many of them will not be able to get the UMD they want or need even if they have the skill points to play with.

Take a moment and think about what you just said:
"I have never been in a group where there was a wipe and people decided they died because the ranger/monk failed to heal them."
Now take responsibility for your own actions and make some attempt to keep yourself alive. If you die, 99% of the time it's not the healer's fault. 99% of the time it's your own fault.

True this!

But I would like to see the Melee classes be given more options for Self healing, as UMD the skill is not enough in it's own right.

[mystafyi]

most divines can solo a quest easier then having a full group. Sadly the biggest problem is dungeon scaling and this wont be changed.

[mystafyi]

Note: All the Class with UMD is a cross Class skill, they can only get to a 11 Base, which is not enough to get any real use out of it, perhaps bypassing Race Required, but that is pretty much it.

my pure wiz can no fail heal scrolls while buffed. and I dumped cha. just saying.....

[GermanicusMaximus]

The general point of your comment is pretty amusing, too. Just what content in the game is "designed with melee toons in mind?"

Actually, most of the game is designed with melee in mind, aside from the Necro packs. That's fairly evident whenever something pops up in the game that DOESN'T have melee in mind. Crystal Cove and Mabar spring to mind immediately. The amount of complaining that goes on in the forums is amazing. Usually, it follows the line of "my toon can't do this, this is just ^*&* game design". Of course, melee toons can do this content, its just not optimized around their strengths.

Do I need to even mention the changes to Shroud where epic geared melee got shredded because they insisted on standing in the blades, and then jumped onto the forums and proclaimed Shroud normal to be "impossible"?

It seems to me that, based on your comments in these threads, that you play with a lot of bad players and then transfer the bitterness that engenders to the game system itself. "I don't use my abilities fully, save me!" does not mean "fighters suck".

Actually, I PUG fairly extensively. At the lower end of the spectrum, whenever I am off timer I'm always willing to drop down to Reaver's elite and help some lower level toons get a completion. At the upper end of the spectrum, I run the standard high end raids (ToD, MA, LoB, eVon6, eChrono,eADQ).

I get to see a fairly wide slice of the player spectrum, both in terms of toon level and player skill. That doesn't leave me embittered (if it did, I would simply adjust how I play or quit playing altogether), but it does give me some empirical data that allows me to make fact based observations about how the game operates.

The quotes you have tried to attribute to me are not anything I remember saying. They appear to be something you fabricated.

Frankly, you are the one who seems to be getting a tad emotional here.

There are quite a lot of bad divine and arcane casters out there, too.

If you look at the standard Shroud party pre-Update 12 (its a bit early to determine whether its changed), it was 1-2 divines, 1-2 arcanes, and the rest melee. Bad arcane and divine casters quickly become marginalized simply because

1) there are not enough slots for them.
2) bad arcane and divine play leads to party wipes

They either become bank toons, are rerolled, or deleted.

There is ample room for less than stellar melee toons in groups.

[Vormaerin]

they can only get to a 11 Base, which is not enough to get any real use out of it, perhaps bypassing Race Required, but that is pretty much it.Just want to clear that up. However, if you get the faction for SP pots, self healing at the Higher levels becomes more viable. IF you get the favor that is. So.

Among your Lost Calebro, many of them will not be able to get the UMD they want or need even if they have the skill points to play with.

Except that there are all kinds of bonuses to that. Persuasion for +3, Heroism & Greater Heroism, Luck items/spells, Deneith skill potions, one's Cha score, etc.

Plus, most of the classes mentioned have curing ability of their own. Paladins & Rangers have notable self healing, if they bother to develop it, even without UMD. Sorcerers who can't repair themselves have very high Cha bonuses to strengthen their UMD.

[Calebro]

Note: All the Class with UMD is a cross Class skill, they can only get to a 11 Base, which is not enough to get any real use out of it, perhaps bypassing Race Required, but that is pretty much it. Just want to clear that up. However, if you get the faction for SP pots, self healing at the Higher levels becomes more viable. IF you get the favor that is. So. Among your Lost Calebro, many of them will not be able to get the UMD they want or need even if they have the skill points to play with.

That's a common misconception.

Any class, regardless of Cha as a primary or even secondary stat can attain semi-useful UMD with a little effort.

8 base +2 tome = 10 / 0 mod

11 ranks
5 (or 6) GS cha skills
3 (or 5) competence from Cartouche (or 7 fingered gloves), etc
3 enhancement from epic spyglass or big top, etc
3 Cha +6 item
4 GH scroll (yes, you have enough to get a GH scroll off, just not 100% yet)
2 luck HoGF
----------------
31 (or 34), and that's without a ton of work on building it up.

That's a 60% chance on Heal scrolls (or 75% in some cases) for someone with a 10 Cha with UMD as a cross class skill.
For classes that have any sort of Cha requirements, it gets even easier. So Sorcs and Pallys have it quite easy if they choose to. And as I said, you could just be a WF Sorc or use LoH and Cures as a Pally to supplement.
Wizards and Rangers have it a little harder on UMD than Sorcs and Pallys, but they also have other ways to heal themselves via PM or WF for Wiz and Cures for Rangers. Monks have WoB and sometimes FoL, as I said.
If you have a Bard in the group it's even easier.

UMD as a cross class skill is absolutely not relegated to using RR items. It just takes a little more work to get past that point.

Every single class in DDO has the ability to be self sufficient if built for it. Even Barbarians and Fighters, although they admittedly have a much harder time with it than other classes.

[jkm]

my pure wiz can no fail heal scrolls while buffed. and I dumped cha. just saying.....

Yes, but heal scrolls have this nasty little thing called a concentration check. While your arcane put points into it, the melee classes above didn't. That means that heal scrolls are useless if there are still mobs swinging at you since you'll pretty much auto-fail them.

I'm also going to point out there is a significant portion of the player base that is downright nasty about divines that don't use their blue bar to heal them. I've been in multiple raids/quests where people would start yelling at you about not healing them. Going so far as to purposely die or sabotage the raid because they threw such a hissy fit about it.

Heck Cal, haven't you noticed on Khyber for the last 2 years that our "power guilds" just farm out healing to pugs? The entire raid will be melees from their guild with 2-3 pug healers. Why should they have the expense of being a healer?

[Vormaerin]

The quotes you have tried to attribute to me are not anything I remember saying. They appear to be something you fabricated.

Sorry, should have used ' ' instead of " ". But you have repeatedly said things like 'all a melee needs to do is left click' and other comments implying that more skill is necessary to play a non melee character. But that's simply not true.

Its equally easy to play a bad caster as it is to play a bad melee. The only difference is that the bad caster is more obvious.

In many ways, its far more difficult to play a good melee character because they have fewer abilities just handed to them. You claim that your casters "invest" in self healing, but that's kind of disingenuous. Its IMPOSSIBLE to make a cleric that can't self heal. Its very easy to make a wizard, fvs, or sorcerer who self heals. What's the "investment"? You pick a spell? Gosh, I'm totally impressed with your skill and effort there.

Melees have to gather gear for their resists, heals, and other buffs. Clerics just have all that for existing. The only "investment" is remembering to use it.


Is the /role/ of party healer harder than other roles in the game? Yes. Part of that is because so many players are bad at the game, part of that is just the nature of games. DPS roles are easy. Tanking and Healing are more difficult and more obvious when they fail. However, only a small amount of content requires either.

Btw, your argument about content that is melee centric is spurious. Which of that melee centric content could you not complete with casters just as easily? Where's the content that has clerics and wizards saying "OMG, the barb can do that and I can't."

LFMs are kind of stupid way to evaluate things, considering how many people put entirely unnecessary restrictions on their groups. Besides, its not like you are going to seriously claim that you can't get a group on your cleric? Or even that you ever need one, except on a raid?

[Calebro]

Heck Cal, haven't you noticed on Khyber for the last 2 years that our "power guilds" just farm out healing to pugs? The entire raid will be melees from their guild with 2-3 pug healers. Why should they have the expense of being a healer?

One of my toons has completed more Titans than he has Shrouds, because every single time I want to run Shroud on him I get tired of waiting and end up swapping to one of my healers instead.
Since his TR, he has over 30 Titans, but doesn't have a cleanser yet. It's kind of sad.
But I don't see what that has to do with this. Raids need nannybots. It's a fact of life.
Most quests do not need nannybots like that.

[Seb]

"No challenge, no fun" reflects my sentiments perfectly. The Abbot raid has long been my favorite quest, specifically because it requires some learned skills. Failure is not uncommon in Abbot but it generally happens pretty quickly and reforming is easy.

I like the recent increases to difficulty in epic Von and shroud as well. Makes those old quests more interesting. The normal version is still there for people just learning.

If I had one quest to change it would still be threnal east part 3. It is better now that we can knock out coyle but it is still really frustrating to fail just because he is so squishy and stupid. It feels almost like the old von2 where you could do everything right and fail the whole quest by falling.

Most quests feel like playing poker. There is luck involved but over the long run skill counts. Threnal east 3 is more like Russian roulette. I've learned enough tricks to get through it most of the time but sometimes I do everything right and coyle still shoots himself in the head.

[sweez]

If a pure barbarian can solo elite Sins sans hireling, then why are groups constantly searching for a dedicated healer?

How many barbarians have you seen solo elite sins without SF pots? It's a silly example, since I'd wager that less than 1% of the population (and by that I mean population that actually has the packs to get 400 favor) has access to SF pots.

True, the situation is changing, slightly, due to the bravery bonus, but not by much.

[sweez]

The point of vicious is that, properly used, you kill the mobs significantly faster and, therefore, come out ahead. Because, in general, the mobs will hit you harder than your vicious does. So mobs dead sooner = less healing needed.

Exactly. The faster mobs die, the less you have to heal. That's why 0 AC tanks work - sure, you'll have to heal them more often, but the boss also dies faster, so it evens out in the end

I've never found frenzy to be of any significance while playing my healers, there's plenty free healing sources available to divines (RS aura, FvS capstone). Now if a barb has low enough heal amp that you don't just have to throw a freebie at him once in a while, then yeah, it can become an issue. But that's a gear issue (really it's 2011, not having at least 150ish heal amp is just sad), not a frenzy issue.

[Monkeytoe]

I'm not sure that this thread was intended to solicit opinions on how to get more people to play healers, But here is my reponse to some of what I read about that in this thread:

When I play one of my healers, often because I saw an lfm requesting heals or because someone (usually, but not always, a guildy or someone I know from pugging other characters asks me to) it is my intention to keep the party healed and protected with whatever divine magic I can bring to bear. I don't play my healers to dominate the kill count, to do traps, or to CC... although I suppose I could if I wanted to make the trade-offs.

If encouraging people to dust off their healers or start new ones is an issue, I think that could be done by putting something in the xp report showing how much healing each character contributed and how many hit points each character had to be healed. That way the party would have proof that it was, it in fact, the Warforged Sorcerer that sucked up all of the healers sp, not the poor Half Orc Barbarian. I'm not saying that the only reason people worship kill count is because its in the XP report or that the only reason people don't play healers is because it gets no XP-report love, but just because I'm not saying it doesn't mean it isn't true.


I'm not sure that this thread was intended to solicit opinions how much better it is to solo quests than to learn how to play with other people, But here, again, is my reponse to some of what I read about that in this thread:

When I started playing this game it seemed like we were ALL noobs. It was great. We had to figure out the quirks of all feats, skills and gear, figure out each quest, and work together to successfully complete them. There was alot of fighting in doorways and using other tactics, there was tanking and dps'ing and cc'ing and people learning different, and sometimes counterintuitive, roles for different classess.

But never mind all of that, what I liked was that it was social: we played in groups, maybe only because we had to to do it to succeed, but the game wasn't nearly as antisocial an activity as people (well, people that post alot) seem to think it should be. I'm not saying I think players should be beat into grouping, but I liked this game because it was a team oriented tactical roleplaying game, not because I wanted to log onto to a massively multiplayer persistent world scenario and prove how above it all I was by playing alone.

Now... If I read the OP correctly, this was intended to solicit opinions on the difficulty of the game. Well. The most difficult part of this game is understanding equiptment and the second most difficult thing is navigating certain quest chains. I beleive that those are the two most off-putting things to new players.

If the devs were to go after only one of those two things, I'd say go after un-complicating the quest chains.

I don't know what could be done about understaning equiptment except maybe putting a link to DDOWiki on the splash screen. Learning (and exploiting!) the byzantine and often occluded desideratta of proper equiptment has always been one of the charms of D&D. Well, *I* think so, anyway.

The difficulty of the quests themselves seems ok to me. Its hard to judge, though, because the equiptment can vary so broadly between a toon fresh off the boat and even another 28 pt. build with well crafted gear. I don't blame crafted gear, I've aquired some pretty sweet low level race restricted gear that, for my lowbies, I still prefer over cannith crafted gear for the application. What I mean is, that quality of gear was always available if you were the kind of nut who looked for it, and it was possible well before cannith crafting to twink a character out to perform at a significanly higher CR than level alone would indicate.

I think that, when designing a quest's encounters to fit a certain level range, if you take the max of gear and character optimisation as the max Character CR for that character level and index that to your Creature CR for the encounters at Elite difficulty and then work backwards towards some rational model of how well equipt and optimised a new character of the character-level in question usually is and index that to your creature CR for Normal difficulty, and then split the difference for Hard difficulty... I think that you could relegate "dungeon scaling" to Casual difficulty (giving everything a Casual difficulty box) and then... every one might be able to play all of the content, level appropriate, solo or with friends. Assuming they have friends.

Oh sure, just skip to the bottom!

[GermanicusMaximus]

Its equally easy to play a bad caster as it is to play a bad melee.

I don't know if it is fruitful to talk about the relative ease of doing anything poorly. The bottom line is that doing anything poorly really isn't that much fun, at least to me.

I think its more interesting to talk about the relative ease of playing

1) an average melee vs an average caster
2) a stellar melee vs a stellar caster

As I have said, from what I have seen the average, 50th percentile non-monk, non-tank melee doesn't do much more than click and hold left mouse button. That 50th percentile includes all the melee that simply have auto attack turned on. I'm pretty sure that the average caster, arcane or divine, requires more than that. Either that, or I am really, really good and simply not giving myself enough credit.

A stellar melee vs a stellar caster? This could be an interesting experiment. Imagine taking 2 of the iconic figures on the forums: Sirgog and Shade. Have Sirgog roll a barb, Shade roll a FvS. Throw those toons into some moderately interesting content, say eChrono. Which toon do you think would perform better? My bet is on the barb, assuming the FvS could keep him up for any length of time.

The only difference is that the bad caster is more obvious.

We have this that we can easily agree upon.

In many ways, its far more difficult to play a good melee character because they have fewer abilities just handed to them. You claim that your casters "invest" in self healing, but that's kind of disingenuous. Its IMPOSSIBLE to make a cleric that can't self heal. Its very easy to make a wizard, fvs, or sorcerer who self heals. What's the "investment"? You pick a spell? Gosh, I'm totally impressed with your skill and effort there.

The cleric investment here is pretty substantial. Its taking a class that has significantly less DPS potential in return for the ability to heal. That certainly seems like significantly more than just picking a spell.

The FvS has more DPS potential (to be expected for a P2P class), but can't match or exceed the average melee DPS unless he goes past the 50th percentile effort and actually does something more than auto-attack or hold down left mouse button (sorry, reality of average melee play once again).

To obtain self healing, an arcane is usually a Pale Master (an entire PrE enhancement) or a WF (a race with less than optimal stats for a caster).

The average investment of a melee toon in healing? Typing "Hjeal me!" in party chat.

Is the /role/ of party healer harder than other roles in the game? Yes. Part of that is because so many players are bad at the game, part of that is just the nature of games. DPS roles are easy. Tanking and Healing are more difficult and more obvious when they fail.

Agreed, and to be honest I think tanking, when you look at the entire picture of what it takes, is probably even more demanding than being a healer in this game. I sure wish we had more good tanks. When I run a raid with a good tank, the first thing I do is scan my chest loot for anything I can toss his way, because he certainly deserves it.

If MadFloyd wants to start buffing melee, I certainly hope he looks at tanks first.

However, only a small amount of content requires either.

On tanks, agreed.

Healers? The game, as most mere mortals play it, seems to require a party healer unless the party is specifically constructed with a self healing entry requirement. The LFMs for those are easy to spot. They seem to say either "all caster" or "BYOH". I don't run in BYOH parties, but I assume that is often met with a cleric hireling per player.

Btw, your argument about content that is melee centric is spurious. Which of that melee centric content could you not complete with casters just as easily? Where's the content that has clerics and wizards saying "OMG, the barb can do that and I can't."

That would depend upon whether we are talking about

1) the average, 50th percentile, hold down left mouse button melee vs the average, 50th percentile, hold down left mouse button (AKA bank toon) caster

2) an elite melee vs an elite caster.

The bank toon has a hard time competing in scenario (1). In scenario (2), the caster kicks butt, but then going back to my theoretical Sirgog vs Shade challenge, I don't believe most top melee players can play the caster at an elite level of effectiveness. Those we can probably play both already, and its the caster which tests the limits of their player skill.

Besides, its not like you are going to seriously claim that you can't get a group on your cleric? Or even that you ever need one, except on a raid?

As you would expect, my cleric isn't exactly begging for opportunities to join a group.

Sadly, I have never been able to successfully solo eWizKing. Or a lot of other things for that matter. Of course I can solo a great deal of content. To be honest, when I want to just kick back and relax, I run something solo. Yes, keeping myself healed, and offensive casting and/or meleeing through a dungeon is actually easier and more relaxing than throwing party heals in this game.

That's not to say that soloing is easy. Its just easier than healing a party. Its much easier than healing a party full of people who seem intent on doing foolish things.