Help for Melee

[PsychoBlonde]

So, here are my suggestions for how to help melee out WITHOUT introducing new systems into the game:

1. Make Stealth Good Again. If you're worried about Invisibility, reduce the duration to 10 seconds per level instead of 1 minute per level. Enough mobs have True Seeing these days that it's much less of an issue, anyway.

2. Make Stat Damage Work Again. It's worthless now, and this should be a valid tactic. You have to whack something a pretty substantial number of times to get anywhere with stat damage under the best of circumstances.

3. Make high AC do what it's SUPPOSED to do. Adjusting the hit calculation formula so that you can actually get to a HIGH chance of being missed instead of, hm, 60% at best. A HIGH chance of being missed is more like 90%. Calculate what the highest possible actual AC is and make that 95% miss chance.

4. Make the epic melee-oriented feats non-awful. There are, what, a couple dozen caster-oriented epic feats now, and WHAT for melee?! Blinding Speed and Overwhelming crit? The epic melee feats are ghastly. Bulwark of Defense is incredibly awful. Suggestions: Epic Stunning Blow. Epic Trip. Epic Sunder. Epic Power Attack. Epic Combat Expertise. Epic Precision. Epic Resilience. Epic Shield Mastery. Wider divergence of options.

[Kaboom2112]

To the OP, do you play melees? Just curious.

[Selvera]

1. Part of the problem with stealth is that if you are stealthed enemies can see you around corners, behind doors and places where they could not see you if you were not stealthed. Effectively, if your stealth skill isn't top-notch, trying to not be seen/heard increases your chance of beeing seen and heard. The other part of the problem with stealth is that there are far too many kill-all-to-progress doors in the game.

2. Stat damage is in a sad state; with enemies having inflated stats and regenerating stats and having % chance to resist stat damage. It could really use some un-nerfing given how the effect isn't all that different from stunning blow or hold monster.

3. A big part of the whole AC thing is that the devs decided to give level 1 characters (for some people) an additional +18 AC at level 1. It is really hard to describe just how bad a move that was; it means that a veteran literally naked has more AC then a new player wearing full plate armor wielding a tower shield. And that's not even accounting for AC from extra dex pastlives. It is hard to balance hit chance in low level content when some people have 25 AC and expect to be a tank, and other people at the same level have 40 AC and expect to be a squishy glass cannon.

When I ran a tank life the AC on my character sheet consistently said 80+% chance at level at all levels, and I only have 3 of the possible 9 martial pastlives. Given reaper seems to nerf AC pretty heavily, but I was still seeing miss more often then hit when I was attacked.

4. Epic melee oriented feats mostly seem fine to me. Often I like having the freedom to take heroic feats I couldn't fit into the build, or class specific epic feats (monk/bard/rogue. Other classes could have some love here though), epic toughness isn't trivial (yet) and maybe bullwark could have a slight buff given the powercreep. Epic PA and Epic CE are both in the LD tree, Epic shield mastery is part of US. Epic tactics is a destiny feat (could/should be moved to a standard epic feat).

[blerkington]

In general I don't think melee is in the bad state some posters would have us believe. Even in higher difficulties, I'd say the main issue for melees is bosses with cleave attacks for which the AoE is not indicated and aren't telegraphed. For almost every other situation cooperative play and crowd control serves.

1. I do agree wholeheartedly that stealth needs to be improved. There is currently a good thread by Shadow_Jumper about this.

2. Stat damage is pretty useless now and could use some improvement. For some mysterious reason the devs are still putting this effect on endgame raid weapons, so the least they could do is tweak monsters' stat recovery rate in harder content to find some middle ground between utterly useless like it is now and game-dominating like it has been in the past.

3. The AC issue is a tricky one, because the flip side of the coin here is it's still arguably a little too hard for us to hit monsters in the hardest content even with high investment in accuracy via enhancements, feats and gear. After we got the new to hit formula grazing hits became far more of a problem for melee than they were before. I definitely would not want to increase the frequency of grazing hits we get any further simply for the sake of making AC more defensively useful because there are other ways not to get hit.

4. I don't have a strong opinion about making more epic feats available for melee. On my melee rogue I feel like the ones I have are all good choices apart from one of the epic destiny ones, where the alternatives at that level seem equally unappealing.

Thanks.

[Kaboom2112]

Stat damage . . . the reaper damage debuff makes it useless except for a few items on the lowest of skulls.

Regardless, melee offense is fine. "Defense" is the issue.

[Captain_Wizbang]

In general I don't think melee is in the bad state some posters would have us believe. Even in higher difficulties, I'd say the main issue for melees is bosses with cleave attacks for which the AoE is not indicated and aren't telegraphed. For almost every other situation cooperative play and crowd control serves.

1. I do agree wholeheartedly that stealth needs to be improved. There is currently a good thread by Shadow_Jumper about this.
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Good post. Melee's are doing fine if you build them properly. Except for higher reaper settings that is. Now that my gaming skills are returning, I have to say there is much to learn for play style and tactics.

[PsychoBlonde]

To the OP, do you play melees? Just curious.

Honey, I play everything. I have 3 heroic/epic completionists, one racial completionist and working on my second.

There are a lot of different things to be done, of course, but some of the major problems are simply that numerous functional options have vanished from the game over the years.

[PsychoBlonde]

For almost every other situation cooperative play and crowd control serves.

In other words, attach yourself like a pathetic barnacle to a non-melee toon and wait for them to make it safe for you to do anything.

[Enoach]

So, here are my suggestions for how to help melee out WITHOUT introducing new systems into the game:

1. Make Stealth Good Again. If you're worried about Invisibility, reduce the duration to 10 seconds per level instead of 1 minute per level. Enough mobs have True Seeing these days that it's much less of an issue, anyway.

2. Make Stat Damage Work Again. It's worthless now, and this should be a valid tactic. You have to whack something a pretty substantial number of times to get anywhere with stat damage under the best of circumstances.

3. Make high AC do what it's SUPPOSED to do. Adjusting the hit calculation formula so that you can actually get to a HIGH chance of being missed instead of, hm, 60% at best. A HIGH chance of being missed is more like 90%. Calculate what the highest possible actual AC is and make that 95% miss chance.

4. Make the epic melee-oriented feats non-awful. There are, what, a couple dozen caster-oriented epic feats now, and WHAT for melee?! Blinding Speed and Overwhelming crit? The epic melee feats are ghastly. Bulwark of Defense is incredibly awful. Suggestions: Epic Stunning Blow. Epic Trip. Epic Sunder. Epic Power Attack. Epic Combat Expertise. Epic Precision. Epic Resilience. Epic Shield Mastery. Wider divergence of options.

1. I think they are moving in the right direction for stealth but still have a long way to go. You don't need to reduce the duration, you just need to make sure that Running and equipment appropriately adjust your move silent score - IE Full Plate should be like Tin Cans behind a Ford Pickup on a brick road. Also, I'm no longer bitter about pulling my first Wounding of Puncturing items (short sword and rapier) the day before the Update where CON damage went from "kill" to stun for a few seconds.

2. I am one that totally dislikes the "Epic Recovery". This kills debuffing making the divide even bigger between a max DC and okish DC. To me the fix would be to create charges on these types of effects for weapons. IE 3 to 10 charges duration next 20 seconds appropriate stacking minus to A Stat. This would help those that hit often but not hard.

3. I agree AC needs to matter. Right now at the top you need to push it really high, right now there are others options that are cheaper and have a lower opportunity cost.

4. I disagree they are awful, they don't necessarily lean towards DPS which right now is the "King". But fixing things like how attribute damage works in epic can help spread out from "DPS or Go Home".

[Enoach]

In other words, attach yourself like a pathetic barnacle to a non-melee toon and wait for them to make it safe for you to do anything.

Stun(s), Trip and SAP are options you have as a melee.

[PsychoBlonde]

A big part of the whole AC thing is that the devs decided to give level 1 characters (for some people) an additional +18 AC at level 1. It is really hard to describe just how bad a move that was; it means that a veteran literally naked has more AC then a new player wearing full plate armor wielding a tower shield. And that's not even accounting for AC from extra dex pastlives. It is hard to balance hit chance in low level content when some people have 25 AC and expect to be a tank, and other people at the same level have 40 AC and expect to be a squishy glass cannon.

A new player with a 25 AC is a tank--in Normal difficulty, where they belong. A vet with a 40 AC IS a squishy glass cannon in the difficulty they play on.

The problem isn't with benefits from past lives. The problem is that newbies want to jump right off the bat into the toughest content and expect to do as well as a vet who has been playing for 8 years and accumulated a huge fund of character "wealth". If they get smashed into paste, that's their own fault.

[blerkington]

In other words, attach yourself like a pathetic barnacle to a non-melee toon and wait for them to make it safe for you to do anything.

Seriously? If that's the depth of your understanding of this issue, you do have a lot to learn about playing a melee.

Survivability is not an issue for decently built, geared and played melee characters in low reaper and below. For high reaper, using specialised tanks and crowd controllers is what I'd call cooperative and efficient play, not being a pathetic barnacle.

What are your expectations here, exactly? That in high skull content DPS builds should be able to go toe to toe with multiple enemies and reliably expect to survive? Sounds to me like you don't understand the capabilities of melees in the current version of the game and want easy mode instead.

Thanks.

[the_one_dwarfforged]

So, here are my suggestions for how to help melee out WITHOUT introducing new systems into the game:

1. Make Stealth Good Again. If you're worried about Invisibility, reduce the duration to 10 seconds per level instead of 1 minute per level. Enough mobs have True Seeing these days that it's much less of an issue, anyway.

2. Make Stat Damage Work Again. It's worthless now, and this should be a valid tactic. You have to whack something a pretty substantial number of times to get anywhere with stat damage under the best of circumstances.

3. Make high AC do what it's SUPPOSED to do. Adjusting the hit calculation formula so that you can actually get to a HIGH chance of being missed instead of, hm, 60% at best. A HIGH chance of being missed is more like 90%. Calculate what the highest possible actual AC is and make that 95% miss chance.

4. Make the epic melee-oriented feats non-awful. There are, what, a couple dozen caster-oriented epic feats now, and WHAT for melee?! Blinding Speed and Overwhelming crit? The epic melee feats are ghastly. Bulwark of Defense is incredibly awful. Suggestions: Epic Stunning Blow. Epic Trip. Epic Sunder. Epic Power Attack. Epic Combat Expertise. Epic Precision. Epic Resilience. Epic Shield Mastery. Wider divergence of options.

1) not melee specific, does not even affect most melees.

2) not melee specific, not even most beneficial for melees.

3) i think making meaningful ac more accessible for melees in general would be a good move, and allowing full tank builds to have significantly more effective ac still wouldnt be a bad thing, but giving 90% miss chance even for dedicated ac builds is a bad idea. as it is, ac is not melee specific.

4) taking this one literally: your suggestions are 1) bad and 2) do not increase options. having power attack and epic power attack simply means that one of those feats is useless, or they are both effectively mandatory, or one is a mandatory but useless prereq. trip and sunder already have specific feats you can take to improve them, how would epic versions be different? resilience is already not a feat a frequently used feat, that likely wouldnt change for an epic version. feat related changes that would increase options would be condensing the moronic weapon focus feat system in adding more feats that do different things, plus a complete overhaul of all existing feats.

Honey, I play everything. I have 3 heroic/epic completionists, one racial completionist and working on my second.

There are a lot of different things to be done, of course, but some of the major problems are simply that numerous functional options have vanished from the game over the years.

completionist means nothing. your credibility was questioned because your suggestions for addressing issues with melee are significantly off the mark.

[noobodyfool]

So, here are my suggestions for how to help melee out WITHOUT introducing new systems into the game:

1. Make Stealth Good Again. If you're worried about Invisibility, reduce the duration to 10 seconds per level instead of 1 minute per level. Enough mobs have True Seeing these days that it's much less of an issue, anyway.

2. Make Stat Damage Work Again. It's worthless now, and this should be a valid tactic. You have to whack something a pretty substantial number of times to get anywhere with stat damage under the best of circumstances.

3. Make high AC do what it's SUPPOSED to do. Adjusting the hit calculation formula so that you can actually get to a HIGH chance of being missed instead of, hm, 60% at best. A HIGH chance of being missed is more like 90%. Calculate what the highest possible actual AC is and make that 95% miss chance.

4. Make the epic melee-oriented feats non-awful. There are, what, a couple dozen caster-oriented epic feats now, and WHAT for melee?! Blinding Speed and Overwhelming crit? The epic melee feats are ghastly. Bulwark of Defense is incredibly awful. Suggestions: Epic Stunning Blow. Epic Trip. Epic Sunder. Epic Power Attack. Epic Combat Expertise. Epic Precision. Epic Resilience. Epic Shield Mastery. Wider divergence of options.

I love this great suggestions thank you!!!

[PsychoBlonde]

Survivability is not an issue for decently built, geared and played melee characters in low reaper and below. For high reaper, using specialised tanks and crowd controllers is what I'd call cooperative and efficient play, not being a pathetic barnacle.

What are your expectations here, exactly? That in high skull content DPS builds should be able to go toe to toe with multiple enemies and reliably expect to survive?

Yes, because going toe-to-toe with enemies is HOW MELEES ATTACK. If you have a six person party against a group of 10 mobs (common), then each person in the party should be able to handle AT MINIMUM two mobs at a time. (At least one party member in a full-on attack can be assumed to be busy with something not related to doing damage.) A dedicated, "specially constructed" tank should be able to handle THE WHOLE PACK with support. As it stands, even before Reaper came out a dedicated tank could not charge into a mob pack in ToEE (which is stupidly over-tuned for the level it is) and stay alive. I've seen people try it and it was brutal. These are TRASH MOBS. There is another pack EVERY TEN FEET. They should be *relatively trivial*.

Now, I'm not talking Reaper 10. I have no problem if maximum difficulty really is TROLOLOL difficulty and is just stupid for everybody. That's dandy, who cares.

The situation today is somewhat similar to the situation back when I first started playing, actually, when it was not possible for anything but very specific builds to stand toe-to-toe with even ONE active enemy in endgame content and survive. The specific solutions are now different but all rely on heavy use of crowd control (primarily possessed by casters) intensive healing (possessed by someone other than you in reaper).

A true melee toon (not discussing slant or combo builds like a melee wizard or bard) doesn't have much in the way of effective AOE crowd control, and they can't SPAM it the way casters can--melee tactical cooldowns exceed the duration except in the case of single-target abilities. Given that around 50%+ of melee builds rely on hitting multiple targets at once to maximize damage output (cleaves, glancing blows, etc.) and you have a situation where they cannot, themselves, create the setup they need to be able to actually do what it is that they do. Are there ways around this? Yes, but in some respects they create their own problems and are often prohibitive to use in a group because they are SLOWER.

This is not true for ranged builds and casters, who can BOTH set 'em up AND knock 'em down. (Although bow is in a terrible place DPS-wise right now for the vast majority of the game. That's a different problem that has existed for the entire time I've been playing due to the way Manyshot was initially implemented and about 500 iterations of attempts to deal with it without appearing to take away someone's beloved toy.)

So, ask yourself this--given, say, 5 skull reaper legendary elite quest, would you prefer to have a mixed group of melees and caster toons, or six hardcore dedicated melee toons? (As in, say, one each of a 20 rogue, 20 fighter, 20 paladin, 20 barbarian, 20 ranger, and 20 monk). Granted, if I got together five other people I actually know who know how to play and who can be relied upon to pick up the slack, I'd be happy enough with the second one, but if I were running with 95% of the people I run across in the general game, I'd say forget it, I want a couple casters or this is going to go bad REALLY FAST. If you were running 6 casters, say (as is common) 2 warlocks, a cleric, a wizard, a druid, and an arti or bard, would you say "****, we really need a barbarian in here?" No. Don't be silly.

What I want is for people not to look at a 6-melee group for DIFFICULT content and automatically think "er . . . this kinda sucks."

And, yes, we get Dire Charge, which helps some but you only have Dire Charge even available at levels 29 and 30, and the problem that melee's face doing higher-difficulty content starts well before then.

[blerkington]

So, ask yourself this--given, say, 5 skull reaper legendary elite quest, would you prefer to have a mixed group of melees and caster toons, or six hardcore dedicated melee toons? (As in, say, one each of a 20 rogue, 20 fighter, 20 paladin, 20 barbarian, 20 ranger, and 20 monk). Granted, if I got together five other people I actually know who know how to play and who can be relied upon to pick up the slack, I'd be happy enough with the second one, but if I were running with 95% of the people I run across in the general game, I'd say forget it, I want a couple casters or this is going to go bad REALLY FAST. If you were running 6 casters, say (as is common) 2 warlocks, a cleric, a wizard, a druid, and an arti or bard, would you say "****, we really need a barbarian in here?" No. Don't be silly.

What I want is for people not to look at a 6-melee group for DIFFICULT content and automatically think "er . . . this kinda sucks."

With the example you've given I think it would be perfectly possible for decently built and geared characters run by experienced players to succeed on six person quests on R5 in an all melee group. There is a significant tanking, healing, instakill and cc potential available with the classes you've listed, through class and ED features, if the players work together and use complementary builds.

The sort of people who think six melees automatically suck are those who want to play harder content like it was elite. Where they don't have to think about anything much apart from running in the right direction and left clicking their mouse. Capable players, who can pull their weight in R5, are thinking about how the group is going to accomplish main tasks of the quest; which is not only doing damage but mitigating it and healing it. And then they use what their build allows them to do so they can succeed.

I think there are several problems with your post. Firstly, I don't think what you've suggested would fix what you seem to think the problem is. Secondly, I think you are understating (and possibly also underestimating) what can be done by melees in low to mid reaper content. Thirdly, we may have a difference of opinion about whether or not harder content should demand more from players and provide a place where non DPS specialist builds (tanks, healers, cc and instakillers) become more desirable.

Anyway, although I don't agree with your assessment of the state of melee or the value of the fixes you've proposed, I posted here in good faith for the sake of a discussion, not to be argumentative or attack you personally. If you don't want disagreement with your ideas, maybe in the future you could mention that so those of us who think differently know to avoid you.

Thanks.

[PsychoBlonde]

I think there are several problems with your post. Firstly, I don't think what you've suggested would fix what you seem to think the problem is.

I said "help" not "fix". Dungeons and dragons is what, like 60 years old now and NOBODY has been able to "fix" it.

And I've solo'd heroic quests on R5, so yeah, a 6-person party should DEFINITELY be able to do R5. I've solo'd The Pit AT LEVEL on R5. The question wasn't "can they do it?" the QUESTION was, given the OPTION between tackling, say, a full run on R5 Temple of Elemental Evil, would you RATHER run with 6 melees or have a mixed or all caster group? Say you've got limited play time and you want to get the run done in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not talking about doing some random favorably-easy heroic level quest on R5. There are huge differences in difficulty even between two quests at the same level. I'm talking end of the game, everyone is level 30, and doing level-appropriate content, you're running with people you don't know so none of that "well my friends can do it" stuff. How do you expect the quest to go when you've got NO casters, NO ranged, and you're doing something actually hard?

Even under the best of circumstances with everyone pulling mobs intelligently and working together, not biting off more than they can chew, it's still going to take a lot longer to do the quest on an all-melee group, and there are going to be LOTS of near-wipes and recoveries every time someone has bad luck and takes a nasty hit.

Heck, do me a favor and go do the mirror fight in Epic Terminal Delirium with a melee-only level-appropriate (28, not 30) group and tell me that melee is not having some serious challenges currently. Honestly, the pure awfulness of that single fight makes me think I'm just missing something in that quest and they can't seriously expect you to kill all that ****.

[Enoach]

I said "help" not "fix". Dungeons and dragons is what, like 60 years old now and NOBODY has been able to "fix" it.

...

Just to be clear 1974 was not 60 years ago.

We have seen several versions of the rule set since it's inception. While I agree not all of these were good things, but that is the nice thing about the "house rules" rule

[blerkington]

I said "help" not "fix". Dungeons and dragons is what, like 60 years old now and NOBODY has been able to "fix" it.

And I've solo'd heroic quests on R5, so yeah, a 6-person party should DEFINITELY be able to do R5. I've solo'd The Pit AT LEVEL on R5. The question wasn't "can they do it?" the QUESTION was, given the OPTION between tackling, say, a full run on R5 Temple of Elemental Evil, would you RATHER run with 6 melees or have a mixed or all caster group? Say you've got limited play time and you want to get the run done in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not talking about doing some random favorably-easy heroic level quest on R5. There are huge differences in difficulty even between two quests at the same level. I'm talking end of the game, everyone is level 30, and doing level-appropriate content, you're running with people you don't know so none of that "well my friends can do it" stuff. How do you expect the quest to go when you've got NO casters, NO ranged, and you're doing something actually hard?

Even under the best of circumstances with everyone pulling mobs intelligently and working together, not biting off more than they can chew, it's still going to take a lot longer to do the quest on an all-melee group, and there are going to be LOTS of near-wipes and recoveries every time someone has bad luck and takes a nasty hit.

Heck, do me a favor and go do the mirror fight in Epic Terminal Delirium with a melee-only level-appropriate (28, not 30) group and tell me that melee is not having some serious challenges currently. Honestly, the pure awfulness of that single fight makes me think I'm just missing something in that quest and they can't seriously expect you to kill all that ****.

If I know my group of six melees had the core tasks covered, I am not worried about going with a party of them into reaper quests. But the example you've selected is a particularly obnoxious one because of the huge numbers of monsters and the end fight in part 2, and isn't really representative of a lot of the six person game at cap.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect the game to be made easier to accommodate groups of six melees that can't do anything but DPS; that is making R5 the same as elite, which is not what I want. Is it what you want, even more erosion of difficulty in the game and no need for specialised roles in harder content?

Your proposed changes would do very little at all even to 'help' melee. They certainly wouldn't let non tank melee builds go toe to toe with groups of monsters in R5 if the players ignore aggro management, instakills, healing and CC. I said in my first post I agree with some of your suggestions, but they aren't going to do much for what you seem to want.

With the mirror fight in that Delirium quest, managing your aggro makes all the difference. Let the NPC take it and stay near the wall as much as you can, killing mobs one by one. Split up and aggro a lot of them at once and it's a fast wipe.

Anyway, I think I've spent enough time on this now.

Thanks.