Fixing Melee (Warrior/Mace)

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ScandiDiver#0604 wrote:

They will never ever fix melee with that mindset. To be honest that answer just sounds to me like big copium from a ranged fanboy doing mental gymnastics to justify no downsides only benefits from ranged.

Nah, that's not Hayes. The thing to keep in mind is he's typically coming from a more MMO background. And there, you have the team dynamics, with a healer and a tank to keep the damage dealers alive, as well as fights that are typically a bit longer. So there, the damage over the course of the fight can't differ that much from one DPS to the next, provided both are filling the same role (say ST damage dealer). But that is over the course of the fight. A rogue will need to have higher potential DPS than a wizard, to compensate for positional requirements, time spent closing on the mobs, and likely having to spend more time avoiding mob mechanics. These things will mean that, in the end, the realized DPS will be about the same.

For a single player game, the dynamics change. And it can go either way, depending on how easily mobs can be eliminated. If players can kill mobs quickly or easily keep the fight ranged, then ranged's benefit goes up, because bullets travel faster than players and the ranged type will not have to worry about losing potential DPS keeping the fight ranged, typically. And so melee then needs higher DPS per fight to compensate. But conversely, if mobs do not die fast and can generally close, then ranged characters are the ones that potentially need higher DPS, to compensate for being glass cannons. On the assumption that the ranged have less built in defenses, relying on the "don't let them touch you" layer of defense. The extreme of this being a tank build versus a glass cannon one.

Or to put it another way, imagine if, in this game, ranged spells acted like Molten Blast, and stopped you from being able to freely move. This would drastically increase the amount of damage ranged types take, especially if enemies weren't super easy to obliterate, and consequently, change the entire risk versus reward dynamic. ES users in particular would suffer, since it would be much harder to avoid getting hit long enough for the shield to recharge while trying to deal damage.

At the end of the day, it is a matter of balancing the risk versus reward and PITA versus reward. The higher the risk, the greater the cost of the risk, and the more annoyance you have to deal with, the greater the reward needs to be.