devs hate melee

[math92]

all the devs are casters, sorry to say

[droid327]

No worse...all devs are dirty casuals

Whenever they talk about their actual play characters, they're always flavor builds

[Orangine]

Well, playing melee at endgame reaper is hard.
Imagine having to take damage in order to deal damage. The horror!
Imagine being unable to simply run in circle to avoid 100% of damage.
Mix with insane self-healing reduction in reaper and boom, you have an entire trash playstyle.

Melees can be decent but it simply requires so much more past-lives and reaper points than casters or rangers.
They also require 100% optimized gear to be able to take some aggro at endgame reaper.

[KoobTheProud]

Melees would also benefit from more of a trinity style environment with dedicated healers and tanks. Right now that is only the rule in raiding. Groups are much more likely to be BYOH and in Reaper that can be very hard to do effectively if you also take a lot of damage.

[Siegfrid24]

all the devs are casters, sorry to say

Seeing what they plan for the lvl increase its obvious none of them have been on a live server since U51 and none of them ever played a melee in a group...
The near complete disapearance of melee from group play at high lvl while all they think about is boosting caster destiny mantle...
Thoses casters taht will get even stronger since their ability scale with lvl in Isle of dread...

I was seriously hoping for a balance with the Tabaxi and then the expansion , but they just confirmed melee are just toy to take out twice per week to do a few raids and then go back to sleep until the next week.

[Bjond]

Melees can be decent but it simply requires so much more past-lives and reaper points than casters or rangers.

This part isn't true. I have a DPS melee that has tanked R8 (including dooms) with minimal PLs and about 35 reaper points (at the time). He's got 60'ish now and more EPLs. I have another moderately similar one that has tanked R6 with hire heals and could probably tank R8 with a real one.

They also require 100% optimized gear to be able to take some aggro at endgame reaper.

This is only half of it -- or maybe 1/3 of it. You need an optimized build, too. And in order to even ponder doing it, you need to have played at high reaper so you know what that build needs. So, while it's possible to do it with minimal PLs, there's no way a relatively new player can do it. The builds I know are VERY narrow, too.

As far as ease of building these days I'd rank it as ranged > blaster > tank > melee > DC caster.

---

BTW, to address the Title/OP, I don't think the devs "hate" melee. I think they've got the same fear every other MMO has with melee. If you make melee strong enough to toe off with minimal build/gear/etc effort, the entire game becomes trivial and very much not fun. This is what SWTOR is like. The hardest content in that game can be easily solo'd. It's roughly the same as EE difficulty would be here to strong character. It gets old *really* fast.

IMHO, melee does have issues that need to be addressed, but it's more in the nature of AE and CC than survival. ALL melee need to be able to contribute to trash clearing. SDK chains was a nice step in that direction, but it's really far too deep in the racial tree. I'd do it by fixing the cleaves. Make them 360. Get rid of the 3-5s delay between activation & hit. Make doublestrike and off-hand fully proc. Give them a CC option via tacticals that are stances with DCs that use the current weapons attack or damage stat (just the cleaves, not all melee hits!). And have attack speed scale CDs and not just attack rate.

I'd probably give intimidate a large boost, too -- like doubling it if you have hit something with a melee weapon in the past few seconds. Tanks are so rare in this game that if someone wants agro, they really should get it without much build effort. NOTHING in game should be immune to intimidate. This is the primary reason DDO is not a trinity game.

[fatherpirate]

all the developers are --- salary employees
that will read this thread, roll their eyes and say 'whatever'.

:-P

[Memnir]

I don't think they hate melee*, per say.
They just prefer and incentivize other play styles over melee.



*you want to see hate, try to play stealth.

[rabidfox]

The near complete disapearance of melee from group play at high lvl while all they think about is boosting caster destiny mantle...

Nearly every high skull group I'm in has tons of melee, they leave a trail of dead bodies in their wake. Even sorcs run around as melee, as EKs slaughter things...

[Eantarus]

*you want to see hate, try to play stealth.

They actually don't hate stealth. Its even worse than if they hate it: they just don't care about it. The game simply was not built with stealth in mind, and every new quest is designed without stealth in mind. How many quests have the "kill all the monsters to unlock the door" mechanic?

[Siegfrid24]

Nearly every high skull group I'm in has tons of melee, they leave a trail of dead bodies in their wake. Even sorcs run around as melee, as EKs slaughter things...

Well i guess we are not playing the same game.

I play on Orien and the only melee i saw contributing high reaper was a Shintao monk all the others i saw (there was not many) spent most of their time being carried as soul stones and soon after they were Tring.

I would love to see melee actually contribute to the quest . That would give me something to look forward as my character has many many more life to play . But from my experience as a melee i can't solo any legendary quest on elite or r1 and if I join a high skull group i will be bagage IE dying every time a mob target me.

I played a warlock life and a PM deep gnome ( i wanted some Mrr for my melee) both were poorly itemised, no full set , no sentient and both could solo r1 or r2 in draconic and could contribute *moderately* in high reaper group, with some epic strike , some CC (yah sometime reaper and champion would fail their save lol) On R1 draconic breath was doing close to 20 k damage on aoe Greater ruin around 42 k on a crit...
While my melee crit at 3 k and every trash mob hit for 1/3 or 1/4 th of my life.

By talking with others players many said they just dropped melee since U51

I am far from being an old palyer or strong in any way but from my experience melee needs work much more than casters atm.

[Siegfrid24]

Even sorcs run around as melee, as EKs slaughter things...

That EK is in Draconic mantle , wearing gear with spell power , spell critical damage and basically unleashing magical damage on melee range , he is not doing melee destiny mantle using melee epic strike...?

SO yah he is good to unleash his spell on melee contact but its still casters damage vs melee damage.

From my very limited experience and point of view.
Melee suffers on epic from bad destiny mantle and very bad epic strike at least to clear trash mobs wich lets be honest is the biggest part of every quest.

I must confess i used mostly shadowdancer, dreadbringer and grandmaster of flower epic destiny mantle and the epic strike would not help me kill the pack of mobs fast enough to survive the encounters on solo , in high reaper they were totally and completely useless...

[Weemadarthur]

They actually don't hate stealth. Its even worse than if they hate it: they just don't care about it. The game simply was not built with stealth in mind, and every new quest is designed without stealth in mind. How many quests have the "kill all the monsters to unlock the door" mechanic?

Sorry to contradict you but the game was built with stealth very much in mind and initially stealth was frequently the better option for quest completion. The problem arose over time though that certain stealth mechanics were abused and eventually "invisi zerging" became the norm. As has become the norm in recent years rather than fix the actual issue they instead just nerfed the playstyle into obsolescence.

So although I agree in the modern game your surmise is correct this was not always the case. Stealth was originally a very viable option and a major part of the game. That is why a lot of old time players still lament it's loss.

[Enoach]

When talking melee there is a wide variety of melee

1. DPS - only goal is to sheath their weapon(s) into as many opponents as quickly as possible until it is dead
The issue is when the DPS is not high enough that it allows the opponent hits. The problem is the Band-Aid solution of More Hit Points, which then turned into "opponents need to hit harder", etc.

2. Tank - Goal here is to not get hit or if they get hit, not take a lot of damage from said hit
The issue here is the idea that there is no longer a "nearly unhittable" defense, and "nearly undamageable" damage mitigation. In many cases hits cause high amounts of damage, and because the miss-chance is nearly gone, this makes the hits constant.

3. Tactical - Goal here is CC via skill
Trips, stuns, etc. If it can't attack it can't do damage. Here we have the issue of CC effectiveness time. This is reduced and, in some cases, you never see the benefit in higher difficulties


Bottom line "throwing Hit Points at it" is not the right solution.

[Eantarus]

Sorry to contradict you but the game was built with stealth very much in mind and initially stealth was frequently the better option for quest completion. The problem arose over time though that certain stealth mechanics were abused and eventually "invisi zerging" became the norm. As has become the norm in recent years rather than fix the actual issue they instead just nerfed the playstyle into obsolescence.

So although I agree in the modern game your surmise is correct this was not always the case. Stealth was originally a very viable option and a major part of the game. That is why a lot of old time players still lament it's loss.

That's fair.

[Bjond]

from my experience as a melee i can't solo any legendary quest on elite or r1 and if I join a high skull group i will be bagage IE dying every time a mob target me

Build might be the issue, but only if you're playing a "flavor" build; eg. starting out with "I want to play TWF" will mean solo clear times twice as long as THF. You can still do the same difficulties. It just takes much longer to kill things 1x1.

My guess would be play style more than gear or build for any experienced DDO player shifting from your natural comfortable style to one that is less familiar, such as a natural ranged or caster swapping to melee.

Solo melee can make single-pulling with Bluff work, but it's much faster to LOS packs. Agro, duck around corner, wait for the melee to show up (they rush in faster than caster or ranged). Kill those, then work the rest.

Charging demands high aggression. Never stop moving. Never attack from the front. Use latency to your advantage. By the time it starts swinging at you, make sure you're not really where it thinks you are. You can tank anything forever without taking damage by taking one step after every swing (so you're always attacking from the side). Great on bosses, less so on packs (too many swings & sides), but you can still strafe away most attacks.

Targeting is critical. Which critters you kill first is the difference between "easily" killing a pack and dying. For most solo melee, this means casters must die ASAP. Pick them out and make SURE you kill them fast. It's pretty much the same thing grouped. Ignore held mobs. Kill casters. I kill casters over most reapers -- can't kite or avoid stacked dots.

[Anuulified]

No worse...all devs are dirty casuals

Whenever they talk about their actual play characters, they're always flavor builds

Someone finally got it partially correct. Devs are the cause of most flavor / META builds.

[fatherpirate]

I am no fan of SSG.
BUT

I think it is fair to give them a break on this one.
Most of the developers either had nothing to do with the game design or
were not even on board when the game was created.

The basic D&D structure was set long before this game ever came out.

[Oxarhamar]

I am no fan of SSG.
BUT

I think it is fair to give them a break on this one.
Most of the developers either had nothing to do with the game design or
were not even on board when the game was created.

The basic D&D structure was set long before this game ever came out.

This is an over simplification

It’s got more to do with the buff & nerf cycle

Caster will only rule for so long before a round of balancing changes out the FOTM

[Karthunk]

Casters without proper: gear, build and reaper points struggle just as much as melee in the same boat. It's just not as noticeable as they sit in the back doing very little but not dying often.

If you're going to be a melee in high reaper you need to have your house in order.