How to balance melee combat styles

[catfumaster]

Have been giving this topic a lot of thought lately and with the adjustments to epic destinies coming I figured now was as good a time as any to put this out there for consideration. Will do my best to be concise but still giant block of text warning. Also please read through the whole list of proposed changes before rending judgement on any single idea.

My overall design goals with this list of changes is to as per title help balance the combat styles. Those being at the most basic: Two Handed Fighting; which will include both bastard swords and dwarven axes; (THF), Two Weapon Fighting (TWF), Single Weapon Fighting (SWF), Sword and Board, Wolf, and Bear forms. It's no real secret that Tempest Ranger is the king of dps both in raw numbers and overall game play meta. They have a varied list of enhancements that make them best suited at almost every aspect of combat: giving no room for other styles to stand out in a meaningful way. While everyone wants their favorite style to be the best; the better approach would be to give each style some kind of identity. With that in mind I concocted this list being careful to try and prevent overlap and abuse of combat styles.

1. Cleave/Great Cleave

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Tempest is Dance of Death's ability to hit multiple targets per swing at full attacks. Again they aren't just the best at single target they excel at aoe as well. The best solution bringing other styles up to speed is to overhaul the Cleave feats. At a three feat investment in current form they are all but useless in the end game on higher difficulties. While I'm sure it would prove taxing time wise to do so I think changing them would be the ideal option. They are currently available to any class, build, or style and can remain a generic source of aoe dps.
After a great deal of back and forth I think the new cleave format should be a stance. Retain the Power Attack requirement but have Cleave as separate function.

The new Cleave Stance would look like -
Cleave; Passive Stance; While this stance is active your off hand attack chance and off hand double strike chance are reduced to 0%. When you kill an enemy you gain a stack of Cleave (For each stack of cleave you possess your basic attacks strike on additional target swing.) Maximum of 1 stack. Stacks of Cleave decay at a rate of 1 every 15 seconds.
Great Cleave would increase the maximum number of cleave stacks by 1 for a total of 2. Other abilities like Supreme cleave and the Acrobat capstone could increase that maximum to 3.
Thematically this would all fit with the traditional form of cleave.

2. Glancing blows

Remove them from the game. Replace bonuses to glancing blow damage with double strike increases of about 2%.
For obvious reasons in regards to cleave changes they would have to go away.

3. Two Handed Fighting

Change the feats for THF to:
THF - You gain an increase of 15% to your total double strike
Improved THF - You gain an additional 15% to your total double strike
Greater THF - You gain an additional 20% to your total double strike (for a total bonus of 50%) and your double strike over 100% applies to a third or fourth attack if high enough.
Perfect THF - 10% double strike with a two handed weapon.
This would give them, potentially, the most attacks per main hand strike; innately enhancing their cleave attacks over other styles.

4. Single Weapon Fighting

Simply add 5% armor piercing to each feat. Add 10% armor piercing to Perfect SWF. So a total of 25% armor piercing for 4 feats.
Make SWF the style that gets the most consistent crits across all mob types. Not a raw dps bump but something to make it stand out.

5. Two Weapon Fighting

Basically nothing changes. It should remain the best single target dps style. The only possible change would be a shift in Dance of Death's Cool down/duration to something like 30/15 for balance purposes.

6. Wolf Form

Again really nothing changes. Its a strong style on its own and like ranger through enhancements has a little bit of everything.

7. Bear Form

Add the effects of THF feat to Bear Form and Greater THF to Dire Bear. They were already basically trying to be two handed anyway. Will give them some gearing advantages turning any weapon into a two hander and make their base cleave attacks better.

8. Sword and Board

Keep everything as is and add a new feat.
Greater Shield Bashing: Your Shield bashes can benefit from the effects of Cleave.
Its a fairly large feat investment as is for sword and board builds but aoe shield bashes is pretty powerful for dedicated builds. Ultimately this style should have a lower overall dps meta since it benefits from a decent jump in defenses by using a shield.


Overall I think the whole of this would make great steps towards balancing combat styles and making each one good at something, without relegating styles to a cosmetic decision. A fair number of enhancements would need to be updated to fall in line with all this and some values will likely need tweaking but I stand by the basic function of the ideas. In particular with cleave; a solitary TWF build should not be the only and best aoe option for melee. At the very least I hope this list gets a serious look. Thanks for taking the time to read through this mess.

[Ballrus]

On g blows:
Glancing blows are "the thing" for thf. If you remove this, is better delete these weapons.
With th weapons, you loose off hand bonuses, have slow attack speed.
And is easy to get high doublestrike w/o these feats.

On s&b:
Shield bash is useless with the internal cooldown (1sec). More shield bash % means nothing atm.
Nor high jump in defeses with shield. If you want dps with shield, you need deep vanguard (41 points), 20 lvls fighter (or paladin).
And rangers, monks and rogues can reach similar defenses, plus dodge.

My two cents.