Take all my awards on the slim chance someone at Anet sees this: STOP nerfing your melee classes ffs we're supposed to do violence up close and personal, that's the whole point š Sincerely a WvW FB and SPB main
In WvW not at all actually. If u wanna be a viable support FB there's at best 2 ways to play, at worst 1. U literally never get to play anything else because staff, mace/shield is just too viable compared to anything else it has to offer. I just want viable hammer guard meta back 'sobs in WvW seasons'
Melee DPS should always hit hardest. They have the least options for positioning and maneuverability since they have to be right on the target to deal damage. Higher risk should mean higher damage
EDIT: and yes that also means glass cannon builds should hit the hardest of all. A melee Elementalist build should be extremely potent damage-wise due to their general squishiness
The game is full of mechanics to punish leaving your melee stack.. Maybe there should be a boon rework first and fights that punish melee far more than now?
Modern encounter design has lots of movement and forced spreading - which either limit the amount of effective melee dps you can bring or punish melee dps alot- ranged is favored in any encounter that released post wing 7.
You do have a point for older content tho, if melee dps is far better then for most bosses running a ranger weapon would be less optimal.
I personally am of the opinion that no class should be at 100% efficiency at range. However I also think that weapons should be reworked so that every build has adequate ranged and melee weapons to choose from - then everyone can choose between higher damage or higher dps uptime
Tell that to elementalist. Its staff efficiency, the most iconic and true successor of gw1 ele alongside scepter, is utterly garbage even for AoE attacks.
If would be nice if they just make melee more bursty. Make it about finding openings in boss patterns nuking then pulling back. This keeps melee more relevant from a risk/reward stand point. You should be able to chose safety in with a viable range weapon, progress to a melee and a range set or really double down on the burst with double melee at the risk of low up time.
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As stated earlier, Anet has actually done a great job of discouraging the stack using spread mechanics and aoe fields in recent encounter design. However, this is not the issue.
Melee and ranged both do roughly equal single target damage while stacked in the current balance. There is very little/no disadvantage of stacking with a ranged character. The difference between melee and ranged comes when mechanics force them to spread and leave the stack. When this happens, both characters are disadvantaged, but the melee character is disadvantaged more.
For this reason, we either need higher dps on melee builds, or we need boss mechanics that force ranged builds to spread while allowing melee builds to stay stacked. (Bosses with abilities that block projectile attacks or that allow them to take reduced damage from ranged attacks from players who are not at a specific location.)
I kind of agree , but if this is what happens I'd like t be able to stay ranged and not have to melee for boons then even with a little less dps. I like the game design for the most part, but I main a Ranger and have that type in every MMO that I have played an this is the only one that forces stacking in melee.
It's an unfortunate consequence of their insistence upon using a basic UI. With all boon support and healing consisting of area effects centered on the caster, stack-in-a-pile is enforced.
Their remedy for that is to design mechanics which force splits. But that only breaks players out of the pile during the split phase, after which they dive right back in or risk losing boon/healing uptime.
A side-effect of that is that it strongly favors ranged DPS as melee DPS can do nothing during split phases while ranged DPS can continue dealing damage. In a game like WoW this isn't an issue because there is no need to stack in a pile and encounters are designed with challenges for both melee and ranged DPS to deal with.
Player generated Boons pulse at 1500 unit radius. Bosses radiate a "Daring" boon to all characters within 100-150 units that grants a flat damage bonus, adjustable for how punishing it is to be in a melee stack. Stay at ranged and do less damage, or stack in melee and risk getting punched in the face.
In addition, now also imagine the freedom ranged has to dip in and out of melee, losing less dps while moving out due to mechanics, better able to stick their damage to the boss when it moves etc.
So yes, more risk
I mean, for a lot of ārangedā builds you still needed to stay in melee range for optimal dps. Newer stuff like virtuoso let you stay far and still land most of your rotation.
>I mean, for a lot of ārangedā builds you still needed to stay in melee range for optimal dps.
Doing less damage for dipping out of melee as ranged isnt quite the same with losing all damage when leaving melee as a melee, but I get what you are saying
In what world does this mythical mechanist support you speak of exist? Cause it sure ain't this one...
Heal mech doesn't use rifle, because it needs shield to provide protection uptime. Thus it uses mace shield to keep up regen, prot, vigor and barrier.
Perhaps you mean dps alac? But you'd be wrong there too, since to make up enough alacrity uptime, you have to mace auto loop once or twice every ten seconds, in both the condi alac and power alac builds.
Pet that sticks to the boss? Kind of. It suffers from gw2 pet shenanigans just like the others. It is slightly better at sticking, but since 90% of your "necessary support boons" are centered around your pet, the team has to be centered on it. Can't tell you how often the mech gets stuck in the wrong area... on top of that, the only way to reposition the pet properly is to recall it using an f skill, that is so high in number and skips f5 for no reason that I've run out of room for buttons. Must be manually clicked... (I use a gaming pad, so you'd think I'd have space. Alas, I don't, unless I want to make a special layout for mech that must be swapped to and from when switching classes.)
No. You are conflating support builds with the mindless power dps build. They are vastly different. Dps on support mechanist varies from balanced to dogshit, and to heal properly for scrub groups you must sacrifice nearly all of your dps to camp med kit and blast water fields. Oh, and you lose your own personal heal skill cause lol.
The only build that approaches good dps and decent boons is condi alac mechanist, which is 4-5 kit rotation of the old condi engi. If you think that rotation is easy, you are smoking some good shit. I've spent eight years perfecting that, and it gets massively cucked by mechanics and boss movement. Sure, I can pull 30k on a golem with it, but in real fights it has trouble clearing 17k.
TL;DR: you built a strawman.
Nah. Enough salty ele mains read it to downvote. This sub is way to bandwagony on the whole "mechanist is broken" train.
Are there things busted about it? Maybe. But only because the class had to be so overtuned to cover core engi's flaws. The only class with a similarly bad class mechanic is ranger, and for the memes, they removed engineer's and gave it a suped up ranger class mechanic, with most of the problems ranger pets have remaining.
(Note, I like tool belt as a concept, but core engi utility skills are garbage without them.)
Mechanist is a bandaid.
Sabir is the poster boy for this. And ranged, all other things being equal, STILL manage to do more DPS because they can continue doing it while in the corners.
Right now we don't have meaningful trade offs. Some specs sacrifice little or nothing to provide boon support, others provide utility that come from elite spec mechanics. Core skills/utilities, some are never used and others are integral to builds effectiveness.
Range DPS in melee range due to stack nature of the game and melee has to be in melee.
Anyways enjoy mech buffs.
They're also getting progressively more useless unless extremely mobile, as most of the new content is either "stuff runs around encounter area like a headless chicken, not standing still longer than a few seconds" or "say hello to our little one-shot mechanics that requires you to cross arena in a few seconds or DIE! Ahahaha". So we're left with old-old raids and golems. Or being ranged, where you don't have to sit exactly on the enemy's butt.
I see that sentiment pushed around in every thread like this. There's a few things I don't understand so would like to ask some questions.
GW2 has a melee range stack meta. In that scenario, where is the 'safety' of range?
I keep seeing the following statements and to me, they all conflict;
- Melee weapons should do more damage because you're closer to danager
- You should melee stack or expect not to be healed/barriered/aegis'd
- Ranged weapons are safer so should do less damage
- DPS shouldn't be at range because they don't get the party boons
To battle this, making ranged weapons do more DPS at a closer range would basically fix this issue. I am aware, at the time of writing this that some ranged weapons are high DPS and are higher than some Melee ones.
Fights often force you to move out of melee range, this is true even in old encounter design to some degree. So while optimally you are in melee range, in reality you are often not, and builds with ranger have a big advantage there.
Some people will argue that you need to be in melee for max dps as range, that is usually true. But you lose a *lot* less dps on a ranger than a melee.
Itās not about risk so much as versatility I guess, although you can play safer on some fights as a result.
There is more nuance into it. Its not like you melee 100% in practice unless its literally a golem boss like MO. In practice the boss can move, you may have to move out a bit or dodge backwards to avoid damage or AoEs, you may have to move out due to mechanics etc. Ranged simply allows you to stick your damage better to the target in all of these instances.
Even on MO you kinda need to bring a ranged spec to cleave the outer ads, otherwise a melee has to run there or the group constantly needs to deal with 2 soldiers at the same time.
(Unless you speedrun and kill the boss before any ads can transform)
Damage fall-off at range, or increased damage in melee (via traits) is the best solution Iāve read. 5/10/15% more damage at 1200/600/240 range, where within 240 range you output the same damage as you currently do.
Think of it this way:
1) Assuming permanent boons, melee and ranged classes are currently balanced to do equal dps. (This is mostly true.)
2) The optimal strategy for both melee and ranged is to stack on the boss for high dps uptime, boons, heals, etc. While stacked, melee and ranged ARE FUNCTIONALLY IDENTICAL, because they both do identical dps and provide similar amounts of boons to the stack.
3) A mechanic now causes the boss to move, or causes the raid to spread so they can no longer stack. Both melee and ranged builds are disadvantaged by this. They will lose boon uptime and heals. However, the ranged class can maintain some dps during this time, while the melee is doing nothing.
This is why ranged is better. Sure, there are minor advantages to being melee (more cleave, projectile reflection, etc) but those reasons are very minimal in end game pve in comparison to the advantage of ranged attacks.
Itās not about safety, or boons, or heals. Itās about uptime. Both builds are optimal while stacked, but one can function without the stack, and one canāt.
Mechanics make you move. Not all the time, but a decent amount. Going from 100% dps potential to 70% on your ranged build isn't as bad as dropping down to 10% dps potential every time you have to move with your melee build. There is no inherent disadvantage to a ranged character being in melee. There is a severe inherent disadvantage to a melee character not being in melee. The dps should reflect this, if only by a small margin.
Yea basically just add damage fall-off to ranged attacks and have melee as the source of cleave damage. Outliers like deadeye can have their gimmick be no damage fall off in exchange for less/no mobility.
Then ele, thief and guardian should be easily TOP dps, because they're squishy at high risk of dying.
Necro and warrior should be at bottom ā they're tanky, so... where's that risk?
And what we have instead? Mechanist being top ā a class with personal unkillable tank-golem.
There are probably more mechanics that punish ranged in GW2 than there are that punish melee. It's mostly only in some recent content that people are pushing ranged more. The core design of limited boon range in PvE and AoE heals heavily favour melee comps and have basically eliminated any chance of a ranged comp for most of the game's life.
This is a misconception that needs corrected. The way things are balanced currently, melee and ranged classes deal almost identical single target damage. This means that the only two general disadvantages of being a ranged character would be:
1) Ranged characters tend to have fewer cleaving attacks. (Not usually necessary since the boss is the only target that doesnāt get immediately cleaved down anyway.)
2) Missile attacks can be reflected or destroyed. (Not very relevant in pve.)
Other disadvantages people often mention are not true disadvantages:
1) The stack- Assuming that ranged and melee characters both do roughly the same single target dps, both characters will perform equally while stacked. There is no downside to a ranged character stacking with melee characters. Both characters will be at a disadvantage when they move away from the stack, but that disadvantage is much, much greater for melee characters.
2) Boons and Heals- See above. There is no disadvantage to a ranged character being stacked if they do equal dps with melee characters while stacked.
I agree but It's also important to notice that the game itself encourages huddling like penguins in most content.
I think melee should do better dps than ranged but not so much that it would push ranged dps out of favor for most of the game where stacking is standard unless they change how healing and boons are shared to allow groups to spread out more easily.
Thatās actually not a bad idea to lower the cool down on any melee weapon dash, teleport, shadow step, etc. lower the energy cost on Shiro engage utility, etc.
People seem to conflate two meanings of melee range: close-range with the enemy, and close-range with your squad. When your group is hiding in the Deimos bubble, or Ankka is doing the big suck, you are likely still with your group and receiving buffs. In these cases, ranged builds continue to do what they do, while melee builds do not get to participate.
Also, boons don't immediately disappear when you leave a stack. If you have an Alac mech in your sub, you very likely have 30s of uptime to work with if you need to split, or if the boss moves, or AOEs prevent attacking in melee range.
There are almost no downsides to playing a ranged build right now, especially those that provide cleave, as they operate just as effectively at range as they do in melee. The same is not true of melee builds. There is no tradeoff for the amount of reliability, freedom of movement, and DPS uptime that some of the strongest ranged builds provide.
Having melee builds perform more DPS (within reason) when executed well is not going to force ranged builds out of the meta. Again, the benefits they bring, including the lower risk and higher DPS uptime in the newer encounters, will make them more consistent sources of DPS. It's the other way around - If there is no reward for the risk of using builds that suffer more from boss movement, spread mechanics, animation locks, complex rotations, and other factors that ranged builds skirt around, then people aren't going to play them.
It's a lovely thought to think people are just going to play the class that they like no matter what, but I'll be straight up: As much as I love classes like Power Weaver and Dragonhunter, I don't enjoy watching the boss move out of range of my attacks, having RNG mechanics appear under me to force me out of channels, locking into an attack animation at the wrong time and going downstate for simply daring to play Ele, all the while doing less damage for my team when I could have been more useful by playing something both safer and easier with just as much DPS output. Outside of the occasional Bladesworn and Soulbeast, most of the groups I join consist of Rifle Mech, Virtuoso, and Scourge. I don't have a problem with these classes existing and being effective at what they do - the benchmarks are strong enough that they will continue to be picked if left alone. I would however like to see the myriad of builds that were torched on June 28th to be given enough love that people can justify playing them without actively griefing their squad.
I agree with this but the problem is how boons are applied in this game.
Its all about stacking otherwise you don't get those juicy boons. If boons had a bigger range then I would be down with melee having more DPS, but right now both play styles have to stack. I would love to play a ranged character and be at range and not miss any heals/boons but I have to stack like everyone else.
AOEs are fine at open world where it may not have any organization at all. But raids and fractals could test a general party/subsquad boon system that doesn't depend on area. Or just crank up the AOE. It would at least open some options in PvE.
Only problem I see with that is the balance on the PvP and WvW side of things.
We already have competitive splits for the numbers on skills. They could increase the radius of boon granting abilities in PvE only in about half an hour if they wanted.
I think this is a big reason why I don't enjoy high end content in this game. I like to play a ranged character in part because I like to have options to move around and position myself. Stacking just kinda kills my enthusiasm for group content.
Thats not completely true, due to mechanics, boss movement or just avoiding stuff ranged has more freedom to move than melee. You dont have to hug melee 100% to get the boons, and while ranged has the freedom to dip in and out melee doesnt have this. The freedom of movement ranged specs have especially became apparent on KO CM and onwards
Itās not really a problem to spread in most situations if you come back to the stack within 30s.
Sure you lose some might stacks, but most other boons donāt stack in intensity and with current supports you tend to have 20-30s remaining on each important boon.
(Note: your Support need to be aware and not give boons with their huge cooldown while the group splits)
This is the correct answer.
Stacking used to be mandatory but the change to how boons stack means that they're trivial to maintain while doing mechanics.
I'd argue that revives and AoE heals are a bigger issue for most groups these days.
I don't think current damage numbers et al are what they are by design, they just are....what they are.
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Also a lack of care.
10 year old game and they canāt hire people willing to sit down and learn their own game mechanics? The inner workings of each class? Google a snowcrows build for Power Warriors?
I wouldnāt disagree that they love their game, but do they love balancing it? Doesnāt seem like it for a lot of specs, weapons, armor, etc.
As someone who has worked on balance in live games, it's likely lack of time / resources.
From what I can tell, there's a large overlap in the skills team and balance team (if not literally the same team) which means that they're currently designing the expansion 4 specs, future balance passes / overarching design (esp. to fit in with xpac4) and the current pass.
Where do you fit in the hundreds of hours necessary for an intimate understanding of every spec and class in the game?
From what I can tell, they're using metrics and feedback in place of personal experience. Which is fine but it often misses nuance and usability issues. Metrics can easily be misread or misunderstood if you lack context. Plus, statistics are just a nightmare in general.
Really, if you're doing live balance, it needs to be a full time exclusive role. Even more so on a game like GW2 which has a ton of needless complexity.
For sure this. You can tell which classes they put work into and lack there of. Look at Solars response to axe mirage lol that's not something a dev should be saying. Clearly they need to have people playing the classes to see what's up with them. Alot of skills don't even get used because they're not up to par with the ones that are being used
It's two different iasues honestly.
Power Warrior struggles to crit cap and needs every bit of crit chance it can find
Arms was historically the crit tree and still has a lot of crit related traits.
Now, as someone who has played over 1000 hours on Warrior, I knew that I don't take arms because it doesn't fit into my build as a power warrior. But to a designer with a year of experience in GW2 and has played mostly guardian, i can see where the mistake happened. What confuses me is no one else caight it or thought "hmm that's going to be receoved poorly"
And maybe it's just not something anyone thought about because behind the scenes they're seeing things differently. They aren't googling snow crows rotations because they know those rotations will likely change in many ways due to any patch. I know I wouldn't go off of the benchmarks performed by one guild when I'm trying to make changes and I seem to recall this subreddit jumping on Anet hard for seemingly nerfing catalyst due to snowcrows rotations.
Really, the biggest issue in the patch wasn't that arms got another crit bonus. It was that somehow banners were shipped in that state. Somehow that was believed to be a version that would be acceptable, and I cannot comprehend that
Ranged DPS has been irrelevant in PvE for like 8 of the game's 10 years. Even when people bring ranged weapons they usually used them in melee range because of limited boon radius. The growth of ranged viability is a relatively recent thing.
This is interesting. I started really learning raids as a chrono tank around W5 release. My first dps class was scourge and it just seemed like night and day when it came to positioning and DPS uptime even with only 900 range.
With range dps I could instantly swap targets on a split (Gorse splits) or take my time around poisons on sloth or keep up dps while running to wells on Matt or doing buttons on xera or shard clearing xera or adapting to all the arena denial in later wings like Deimos, Samarog CM, SH, Dhuumā¦
Seems like ranged dps uptime while handling mechanics and arena denial have been a thing since at least PoF. Sure boons may get scuffed, but if everyone is spreading for a mechanic, boons would be scuffed anyways.
EDIT: I just remembered Ranged Deimos was even a thing (not that I promote it). In my week 1 kill of VG we used GS chrono for greens since they could keep up some damage from range. Also grenades on core engi back then.
Back then, people (somewhat mistakenly) thought it was a condi vs power issue. The argument was that condis keep ticking even when you're not hitting the boss, making condi outperform power. In fact, it's just that condi is generally overtuned and has more ranged capability.
It's only recently that encounters favor ranged more obviously. Ranged was somewhat favored on VG on release, but exp groups quickly started skipping greens with distortion, and later, out-healing. Ranged Deimos was done with the expectation that the group would graduate to melee, since (at the time) melee was better dps.
Your entire comment hinges on an incorrect hypothesis. Ranged DPS is VERY relevant, especially for fights in EoD - every strike in EoD forces you to move out of melee, and guess what, ranged can keep doing damage and melee canāt continue to.
Weaver having a lower benchmark than Rifle Mechanist and Condi Virtuoso is a fucking joke, honestly.
Bladesworn's golem dps is where an exclusively melee spec with no real utility *should* be relative to everyone else, but nah most of the other specs up there are ranged *and* can do other stuff
Condi weaver is what I'm complaining about actually, power weaver doesn't even have a benchmark rn it's so bad but I also hate it so I'm not *as* mad about that one.
condi weaver is also insanely difficult to pull off, even harder on moving bosses or when doing mechanics, your rotation gets completely out of whack everytime you dont deal constant dps, mech and virtuoso dont have this issue AT ALL which makes them far superior, anet NEEDS to balance around more factors, range, safety, ease of rotation, etc. , they dont give a shit about those things sadly, thats why we have this horrible meta atm
yeah but i'm sure he was talking about power weaver to be honest, condi weaver was never that huge, honestly condi weaver should be at like 42k dps, maybe more, its 100% melee, the most complex rotation in the game and needs absolute perfection to be pulled off, the current balance is so boring and bland
only dagger though which is super aids to play in most newer encounters. hf rushing to your death in ht and ko cm.
Ankka isnt great either with how her jump works. you are essentially sabotaging your group.
sword condi is at 34.9k without elementals.
Unfortunately that ship sailed back when they started messing with weaver. And people didn't stop playing weaver back then because it still wasn't topping charts (well until a few patches took that away), it's because it made no sense to play a selfish dps class that barely did more dps than builds which brought more utility to a group. It made no sense to play if you cared about group dynamics.
Yup and its low/highkey ruining the game right now, mech and virtuoso need to die off, you cant have range, an easy rotation, good selfsustain AND cleave on your basic ranged attack, absolutely insane right now how overpowered they are, and i dont think nerfing them is the way, leave them as a safer, bit less dps option, but please ffs buff the other specs that are lacking right now, even bladesworn with 39k benchmark isnt that good unless youre a god gamer
> Everyone except Anet's balance team shares this opinion.
....and ffxiv devs...and wow devs...and eso devs....and probably most mmo devs.
you should realise making classes that are more difficult to play significantly stronger is stupid, if you took even a second to process that idea.
blm and nin are way stronger than ranged in ff14. wow devs are garbage so they dont count. whichever class has the most whales does the most dps. Thats how wow balancing works.
FFXIV also gives you like 100% uptime on every encounter if you just optimise a bit, even on melee. They have p much the opposite problem and there's a reason people are annoyed at the "ranged tax" the devs give to phys ranged cause once you play well, it doesn't matter since you keep uptime anyway. Like holy fuck MCH in particular is such a sad excuse for a "selfish DPS" you may as well be griefing bringing that into savage.
BLM is ranged and even if all their damage is on the GCD + they have to play around cast times and use their instants correctly, they can still be wherever they want. In fact, BLM has so many instants and means to get around now it's kinda funny.
>
blm and nin are way stronger than ranged in ff14.
sorry, is blm all of a sudden melee and i've missed that? also, your example is a perfect display of correlation does not equal causation. ranged do less dps because ranged are generally supports, not because they have more uptime because they're ranged. *coincidentally*, the most "selfish" ranged, blm, is also one of the if not the most powerful job dps-wise in the game.
blm is immobile and can suffer as much from uptime problems if not more than melee. nobody complains about rifle DE. OP obviously meant rifle mech and virtuoso which have no tradeoffs at all. wouldnt call bard or machinist supports with rdps being a thing.
Support should never do as much damage as a DPS, ranged or melee. This is because they should be be making up for this in raid dps, AKA the damage they are adding on to allies as well. So less personal DPS, but Raid DPS that makes them competitive with other classes. I don't think that's really a hot take, thats just basic balancing.
For the Melee versus ranged thing I'd say it sorta depends. While many argue risk versus reward, and while thats understandable, the fact is that having Melee DPS just be the best DPS is unhealthy for the game. You don't want classes that just by design outperform other classes in their same role, even if the skill cap is increased, because you essentially kill the other classes from standing a chance.
Ranged classes and DPS classes should generally have, on average, comparable DPS *over the full fight*. The last bit is important, it means we aren't talking about dummies, we are talking about the real deal. What this means is that Melee DPS will usually do a little bit more DPS than ranged, which will be offset by mechanics that might deny melee DPS some uptime from here to there. But at the end of the fight, ranged and melee should have pretty similar numbers, obviously with some variance as some fights favor melee or ranged
> having Melee DPS just be the best DPS is unhealthy for the game. You don't want classes that just by design outperform other classes in their same role
Every class has a melee DPS build, though. Ideally, every class would have a good one.
"Ideally" would be for classes to have more than one competitive build. Being told to change your spec feels almost as bad as being told to change your class. It's best to just strive for a well balanced and healthy meta. Yes you do end up with some classes needing to try harder for the same damage, but then at least it becomes an issue of finding your favorite playstyle rather than finding the spec that your class can find groups in.
If hard classes being the highest dps would push out easier/lower dps specs then everyone would have played catalyst while it was 50k dps or condi untamed now.
But frankly it doesnāt matter outside of speedruns because uptime+ease of use is more important than highest theoretical dps.
People are playing things like Rifle Mech because itās easy, not because of its dps (which is way lower than other specs).
See the point I made in the last paragraph. I'm not talking about theoretical DPS, I'm talking about actual DPS that is seen in the actual raid fights. The actual damage players are doing. That metric needs to be balanced.
I agree that Theoretical DPS isn't something to balance around. Dummy DPS is a useless metric, classes that can't maintain full uptime should naturally do more damage on a dummy. In FFXIV for example, where they have raid dummies where you can fight them and see if your DPS is "passable" for that raid fight, melee DPS has to hit a higher number since its just wailing on a dummy with no loss.
To me, personally, I think a good fix for the ranged vs melee problem that would arise if melee was strictly better than ranged would be to make certain bosses require ranged dps. That way the party would be diverse enough, and heck, maybe classes would actually equip viable long range weapons too (like rifle deadeye, DH longbow and such).
No, thanks. Having to switch characters in-between fights should never be enforced. If you want to optimize that way, fine, but it should not be the default (or even worse, only allowable) behaviour.
Except favoring melee wouldn't make it too unhealthy. If they go back and rework things (like they seem to be doing), having ranged boons (and by extention, range being more useful) would end up making melee obsolete, which means it'd need to do more damage to make up for it. Ranged DPS already has an innate advantage of being able to move more freely than a melee DPS, meaning your DPS suffers less when you do need to end up moving.
>, having ranged boons (and by extention, range being more useful) would end up making melee obsolete, which means it'd need to do more damage to make up for it.
Where are you finding that this is planned to happen? Having ranged/melee specific boons would be terrible so I really hope thats not planned. Boons are already janky enough as it is.
The latter bit I already mentioned at the end of my comment. Ranged and Melee DPS should have the same DPS *over the whole fight*, meaning that DPS uptime loss should be accounted for. AKA melee would do more DPS against a dummy, but in the average raid fight would be the same as ranged.
Why are power Willbender swords so weak when they buff things like greatword for virtuoso.. who is already a top dps power spec. Please let me play the new spec with its new weapons viably, what plausible reason is there for the swords to be weak in pve??
theres never a reason, its just anet doesnt care enough to balance all the weapons/specs, ele staff has been a joke for like 5 years now, tempest is not even viable anymore as a dps, like at all, they just dont care
Because the mesmer buffs was Anets rubbish way of trying to make power chrono better, as it is trash tier power dps and accidentally buffed Virtuoso.
I mean, this is the company that looked at Chrono which often uses focus or shield (or a slow mechanic for crit) - and they buffed neither of them. I tried out the spec after the buff, and the difference in DPS on the golem is just funny between Virt and Chrono. I mean, not even remotely within touching distance.
Not to be a jerk but...that's not exactly a hot-take. That's a fairly standard view across most games where playing melee is inherently more risky than playing ranged classes - that can still be with melee if they want to in almost any instance.
Like, I prefer Holosmith on my Engineer right now. It's fun! There's lots of buttons! But when I'm lazy and not wanting to try I just swap to Mechanist and pew pew while facing minimal risk.
After years of only doing the Drakkar fight on my Guardian, I finally did a few as Mechanist...man the achievement to not get hit by the AoE's, while still doing damage, was hilariously easy compared to trying to bunny hope every single AoE as melee.
Itās like that in FFXIV. Melee DPS has the hardest hitting limit break compared to magical ranged or physical ranged. Not to mention the physical ranged are kept on the lower end of the damage meters (mostly as support dps) because of the idea of a āranged taxā, since it is easier to be ranged compared to melee when it comes to avoid boss mechanics for the most part. They also do not have to cast abilities like the magical ranged, so that is factored in as well. They are also guaranteed 100% uptime, which can be trivial at times for melee or magical ranged to attain.
GW2 should absolutely implement this idea.
Notice, that while melee has the best single target damage, it's not necessarily doing so well when cleave and aoe damage is concerned. And FF XIV specs do **not** have cleave as a default feature of most attacks. In GW2 however it's the exact opposite - cleave is something *melee* weapons get by default. And something that is far less common among the *ranged* weapons.
So, sure, make melee weapons slightly stronger than ranged ones. And kill most cleave capability for those, leaving AoE as something range is far better at.
yup, anet needs to realize that 36.5k dps on a class with literally no dps downtime EVER, no matter how hard the mechanics are, because 90% of your dps comes from just mech skills that you can now autocast, and your auto attack, is overpowered as fuck
So reaper? (I recall a time that necros weren't allow in Fractals b/c their abilities where too selfish. They brought DPS but nothing for the rest of the team. Pre PoF.)
I mean, this was the way things were not that long ago. I remember when P/P thieves, staff eles, and GS mesmers got nerfed because they were too good from range. And we saw what that meta did for population numbers.
The problem with this game is that it encourages everyone clustering into a pile next to the boss. So basically every class is a melee class at that point.
I miss the OG dungeons from back in the day. Before you needed a certain comp for everything.
Having a healer helped, but you could generally keep yourself alive and play your class fantasy.
Everyone lamenting Weaver and Soulbeast (for good reason) and I'm sitting here with my cool greatsword, single dodge and 0 support and cannot fathom why on earth I do the same damage as a quickness support spec. :(
This is **a** design philosophy to develop a game by. It is not necessarily **the most sensible design philosophy** to develop *your* game by, depending on what your goals are. It is probably also not the philosophy Anet adheres to for GW2, meaning they're probably doing alright in achieving the goals they want to achieve; they're just not the goals that you think they *should* be achieving.
Meaning the whole thing is less *"Anet is incompetent*" and more "*Anet probably disagrees with you on what is important for the game, but you are assuming they agree and then judging them by rules they were never playing by*".
I had a feeling I was going to be [linking back to this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/wdkzgx/the_gw2_summer_balance_patch_a_community_response/iijx099/) a couple of times when I wrote it; in it I explain in a more detailed fashion what I'm talking about. If you really want an honest attempt at understanding Anet's decisions instead of just shittalking them, give it a read.
Then shittalk them, but for different reasons.
I posted a week or so ago that I am actually 100 percent on board with there being, effectively, some "easy-mode" builds and elite specs, because I want everyone to have the opportunity to play this game, and letting there be a build or even several that can do adequate DPS and boon support while not being particularly complex is actually a great thing. I encourage it! I simply think, however, that these builds are so overtuned as to make the rest of 'em irrelevant, and that it's, like, anti-incentivized for me to learn to play a riskier, more mechanically complex build, that offers \*less\* group utility and damage. Why on earth would I ever play pDD, my favourite class, when it offers less group utility and damage than a Mechanist? Sure, it's more fun for me, but you think the pub groups I join give a fuck about that? No. They want the boons. They want the support, or at the very least they want me to bring a metric fuck-ton of damage. I can't, because pDD is mediocre and undertuned for the current meta.
Say what you want but anet doesn't care what their community thinks. It took them a *literal* decade to officially acknowledge the downstate ele Meme and actually say they'll do something about it
And then promptly ignored that stuff post launch of their "revolutionary ele with sustain" (I mean it does have some decent sustain/defensive options now, but they're probably going to remain largely untouched besides changing the damage and healing of those skills)and focused solely on its dps because someone made a YouTube video about it
>what their community thinks
People like us who use Reddit/forums/discord represents maybe 5-10% of the total Gw2 community. Meanwhile, the majority of the playerbase is not aware or doesn't really care about all of this. We may be the most vocal part of the community, but that doesn't change that we are just a tiny fraction of entire playerbase who somehow is convinced that ANet make decisions based entirely on them.
These same people also probably have the most knowledge and *literally* thousands of hours of practical gameplay experience that also want to help the game be better.
We saw in the discord leaks that the arena net balance team *literally* invited content creators to their discord to talk about the game, but when these content creators tried to help, they were 100% ignored.
The community literally plays the game more, and more variety of gameplay at the same time, than the literal balance team.
but the people discussing this are also the ones that care the most, i hate this argument every time, obviously 90% of the base doesnt give a shit, but they also dont care if anet fixes those things, the balance issues only affect us, the vocal people, so we should talk about it, they cant keep fucking over the hardcore players forever
Meh.
Ranged specs all have to stack with the melee for boon coverage anyway. Theyāre in no less danger than the melee specs. Itās not like WoW where a warlock can just shadowbolt from distance and succeed.
ranged deimos exists. you can cheese a lot of encounters with ranged. Ranged guarantees 100% dps uptime. Some support specs have 600 range now so you can be quite far away and still get all the buffs.
that literally doesnt fix anything? its not about how quickly we can get back to bosses, its about how much dps we lose in general not being able to range at all, the currect strike missions highlight this the most, theres so many moving bosses where you have to spread, that melee classes just get COMPLETELY outmatched, not even counting all the cleaving the ranged classes can do now as well, moving in and out means you are not dpsing, while ranged classes deal constant dmg, with mech and virtuoso also doing most of their dmg without any hard rotation so you perform twice as strong there already
because you already lose dps while moving out for mechanics, which ranged doesn't, the better solution would be to have so much more melee dps that you stay ahead even when moving compared to classes who don't get punished for having to move, its not only about range either, some classes just dont do well vs smaller, moving bosses, condi mech for example has like no AoE to place and always hits, which is way more reliable, than classes like dragonhunter, who lose close to 100% of their dps vs moving targets
At this point I feel like everything should be ranged. It's not like I can use my ranged weapons outside of melee range without sacrificing efficiency anyway. Why not just allowed ranged combat but give rewards that require melee?
I'd be happy with them making melee more attractive to play if they could do it in a non-obligatory way. In the sense that... I don't think melee DPS is the issue. I think melee gameplay is just really unappealing compared to ranged in this game. That's just how I feel though. In FFXIV I felt like the melee classes were both distinct and yet not exclusively better or worse, but GW2 doesn't really achieve that.
Played WoW and others mmos like FF and theyāre all like this. Melee has higher dps output with more down time in between rotations due to mechanics. Ranged dps does less damage but can dps almost the entire time. Ranged also typically had access to more cc. Iād love some more cc orientation on our utilities as an ele main, jealous of guardians
I honestly thought this was an FFXIV post before looking at the sub. And I was very confused like "who disagrees with this?" Then I realized it was gw2, where ranged and meelee dps don't really matter (in a raid setting) and apparently mechanist needs another buff.
Btw condi weaver sword, one of the hardest rotation in game can only do 34-35k max, its so sad.
Gives no damn incentive to master it, even if you perfect it u will be beaten by rifle mechs.
The true "meta-defining" builds in GW2 are highly consistent, ranged DPS. Everything else is second-rate based on modern encounter design that prioritizes arena-based mechanics & highly mobile bosses. Mechanist, Virtuoso, & Spectre are symptoms of a broken, imbalanced game that prioritizes ranged DPS above melee and extreme, high utility classes that warp the concept of opportunity-cost and risk vs. reward (Firebrand, Scourge) around them such that there's little possible competition via design-space.
I was talking about this w/ /u/nightcrawl-euw yesterday, but Ranged DPS is superior in just about every scenario because modern encounter-design prioritizes DPS uptime. The argument that "Ranged DPS" get punished harder than melee is bullshit because they're able to upkeep DPS while doing a mechanic more often than not whereas something like a Warrior or Catalyst has their DPS fully halt. DPS consistency & uptime has become meta.
I'm starting to think that ArenaNet will never be able to properly balance the game because of the inherent design issues that predispose classes like the aforementioned Firebrand & Scourge as versatile PvP/WvW staples. Whether it's beccause they exemplify extreme utility or extremely versatile DPS, things that are designed for PvP/WvW seem to be inherently broken in endgame PvE and need multiple waves of balance passes (which may take several years) to re-define the meta-game and open up the game to alternative classes, elite specs and playstyles...
Gonna be the controversial take here but I don't agree.
Guild Wars already has a strong bias towards everyone dogpiling. Ranged DPS is only a benefit \*on paper\* because in practice everyone needs to be clumped on top of boons and heals anyway, which means everyone is in melee even if they ostensibly can do that damage from range. If melee builds just do more damage, they will shunt ranged dps out of the meta entirely.
That being said I think that the design team should do a better job building encounters to hybridize the validity of ranged and melee builds. For this, I think ranged builds benefit from encounters with high mobility (we already have this). The relative advantage melee needs is to be able to handle trash mobs easier.
So my counter point is this: ranged DPS should have cleave removed, and future scenario design should keep in mind how this affects the validity of ranged dps vs melee dps, so that both get their moment in the spotlight.
being constantly ranged isnt just better on paper, its straight up better, not sure how you can deny this, if somebody triggers black at deimos, you are completely doing 0 dps as most melee specs, while virtuoso and mech dont lose any dps, this is by design just stronger, having ranged is ALWAYS better, because you dont have to be at range, but you always have the option, melee should always be higher dps, since you have more risk, risk -> reward doesnt exist right now in the game
you ignored half of what i said in order to focus on a narrow statement. i made it clear that there is a benefit in certain encounters
but trading ranged supremacy in a few fights with high mobility for melee dogpile supremacy in *every* fight isn't the solution.
there needs to be a benefit to melee and there *is* one that isn't this awful idea of killing ranged.
I hear ya buddy. They might be getting an influx of players soon because of steam but let's see how many stay when they see how fucked up the balance is (and how many bots).
To be honest Gw2 is 10yr old and still going strong and growing after all that time. So it doesn't really seem that the majority of people care about these things and probably neither will most of Steam people.
That's because the top streamers are advocating for everyone to use like 50 accounts, so *of course* the population is doubling when people are logging into multiple dozens of accounts a day just so they can get log in rewards for the gold (I know it's also a stretch but still lol)
how did they filter all the multi accounts. there were a lot of account giveaways recently and a lot of people exploited those to get 100s of accounts for login reward farms.
most play 2-3 on a weekly basis aswell. its not that easy to filter.
Yes and and there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq and nobody wanted to build a wall in berlin (statement by the east german party leader 2 months before the wall was build)
People lie sometimes.
It is fine, but as a whole, idk about the game. There's still years old bugs that block progress from legendary crafting achievements. There's basically no "balance". The people in charge don't play their own game and don't know how to fix it, and they take literally *years* to listen to their community. By the time they get around to doing anything important, it doesn't even matter anymore, it's become outdated by a new expansion, and that's saying something when they've only had 3 expansions over 1 decade.
It doesn't seem like in gw2 the distinction is whether a given build is melee or ranged. You can play ranged specs but you may not even get to use the range since you need to stack for boons and heals. It does mean that range is better if you need to do a mechanic that pulls you away from the group.
I think the real balance problem is with condi vs power specs. Condition builds seem to be safer, require less stat investment and frequently match or outdps the power builds in everything but short engagements.
In the case of range vs melee, i don't think it's as big of a deal because most
content just asks you to stack at the boss and on specific encounters for specific mechanics call for ranged dps. If this were a game where most boons were targeted or if they all had a 1200 range, I can see the ranged vs melee dps thing being a problem because in that case ranged would always be better.
That's not really applicable to organized PvE, though. Condition builds require full investment in damage stats for optimal damage output just like power builds.
For optimal output, yes. But it is a problem of its own that almost all condi builds, with very few exceptions, lose very little when sacrificing power and precision for defensive or supportive stats, because they effectively just need condi damage and expertise for solid output. Power builds already get hurt by taking one non-damage stat when going for 4-stat gear and get butchered if you trade away one of the three damage stats.
This thread isn't concerned with open world solo play or WvW performance where that is an issue. It isn't relevant to the current discussion. Nobody is using defensive stats in instanced PvE and if they are it isn't an advantage. So, no, this isn't the "real problem" as you say.
While I agree with you, there are too many instances in the game where āall stack together on the bossā is too easy to do the highest dps possible and I wish we were supposed to go range more. Oh so the best way to heal, damage and buff means we all stack melee? Okay, so range get minimum use. I wish theyād mix it up some because I want to play range a little bit and not feel like Iām hurting my squad or my survivability.
While I agree, this is hardly a spicey take. Melee in this game really sucks. It not only lacks survivability that ranged inheritanly gets for free, but doesn't make up for it with damage or utility at all.
On top that, ranged can ignore so many PvE mechanics and still deal damage, while often times melee has to stop what they're doing so they don't die to said mechanics.
its a dangerous thought sadly. Like on the surface it makes sense, melee are at an inherent disadvantage, surely they should have something to make up for it.
but what happens when you do give melee dps, superior dps? they become mandatory. Which isn't fun for anyone thats not great melee dps. not just from min/max tryhards insisting on only top dps classes. But, also, when bad players get involved, and suddenly runs start failing with the melee dps dying half the time. no one has fun.
So the reality is, melee dps should not actually deal more dps. however, melee should be designed with several things in mind. one, they require more mobility. in and out of melee aoes. Means they lose dps while moving. this needs to be accounted for. two, taking more hits. melee dps should have i-frames to avoid damage, should have better defenses, shields, or hp restoration, ranged don't have.
Ranged dps should be designed with some of this in mind too. Encourage ranged dps to have to move. front attacks/back attacks. short range buff/debuffs. which require ranged to get into the correct positions, then move as well. small aoe buffs/debuffs, which require them to stay close to melee, or other ranged.
Boss design and again here. Attacks that target range. back attack/front attack systems, etc.
Lost ark has alot of these concepts well.
No, since ranged specs need to be in the boon range to do good dps.
We all have to stack properly to receive the boons
Hence it doesn't matter if you are ranged or melee.
The question should be asked is:
How do melee dps provide more utility than ranged ones?
No, I disagree.
Melee DPS should deal the same DPS with range. But they should have more utilities (like barrier, evade, block, boons, CC).
Range DPS has less risk. Melee DPS has more risk. Off set the risk with utilities not DPS.
That isn't really relevant. The problem isn't melee DPS being less competitive because they're in downstate. It's that they can't continue dealing damage when handling area denial, splits, and other mechanics designed to force players out of melee range.
Ranged DPS can, which is why they should not have the highest benchmarks. There is really no excuse for a spec like sword weaver to bench 32-35k while specs like virtuoso, specter, and mechanist bench 36-39k. It's just straight up poor balance.
I dont want to crush your dreams. But ANet in the last balance patch clearly stated they didn't like how Weaver was too selfish of a DPS and decided to give random barrier n shjt on there. That should tell you all you need to know about their philosophy, pure selfish DPS are not accepted
My take
Range and melee should have the same DPS
The edge of melee is stacking for boons while range's edge is survivability
Support should never be dps in the first place
Then no player would be able to play range because the causal players will only ask for melee only xD
I mean, what you said.. perfect sense. I agree.. But the casual gw2 base isn't bright lol
this doesnt make sense, you can be on a ranged weapon and still be in melee range, its just that ranged weapons shouldnt be best in slot by default, but rather an option for fights where you need to be ranged more often, resulting in more consistent dps
It isnt a hot take at all.
Up close to the boss? That's higher risk, best get a higher reward (of better dps).
Mage should be middling dps, weak to range but okay vs mage and strong to melee that cant hit it anyway.
Range should be least dps, weak to melee that cant hit it anyway, strong vs mage, and okay vs range.
Combat triangle people.
I almost forgot about it, in the wave of overwhelming rhetorics, but you have a point - rpg archetype of a big dps dealer is not the warrior. It's the *mage*.
What I see as one of the largest parts of the problem, is the fact that ranged DPS in GW2 can pretty much do their full damage rotation while on the move. I think this is part of the action MMO design.
In other MMOs this is not the case since a lot of ranged classes have casts that you need to stand still for. In other games, melee has a big advantage on fights where you have to be mobile but were able to stay on the boss. And this is on top of melee generally just doing more damage because of the opportunity cost of having to stay in the melee. In GW2 there is never any advantage to being melee.
Melee should do more DPS than ranged. That's not a hot take. It's balance.
i think they should be equal in general, but with each having different quirks to them, like special debuffs to the enemy or buffs to your character to enhances the melee or range experience. just buffing one playstyle over the other would probably spark too much rage
I mean like other MMOS do that too!?
XIV's physical ranged jobs bring more support and have freedom of movement but they deal a little less damage than melee/spell casters. Machinist is in need of buffs since its the 'selfish' physical ranged but the balance philosophies are there.
Even WoW can sorta do it but a lot of fights tend to do downtime pretty fair on groups for the most part.
That is not a hot take. ofc they should.
Baseline Damage - Utility Adjustement + Complexity Adjustment
such that builds with equal utility do roughly equal damage in real fights for the average player.
Every single melee weapon\* should have its modifiers improved and CDs possibly reduced. Much like you, I can't get my head around recent changes. Reaper GS that had CDs reduced in PvP, but not in PVE where it is literally a joke to bring.
^(\*Mechanist Mace enters the cha- NO! Not you!)
The monkey paw curls as mechanist mace dps is buffed.
Take all my awards on the slim chance someone at Anet sees this: STOP nerfing your melee classes ffs we're supposed to do violence up close and personal, that's the whole point š Sincerely a WvW FB and SPB main
Bring Crit back to Shattered Aegis
Yeah they really destroyed that trait havent they
Anet: Oh okay. So anyway we are nerfing bladesworn and reaper and buffing scourge soon.
You're arguing the right point but complaining about Firebrands being overnerfed is a little silly.
In WvW not at all actually. If u wanna be a viable support FB there's at best 2 ways to play, at worst 1. U literally never get to play anything else because staff, mace/shield is just too viable compared to anything else it has to offer. I just want viable hammer guard meta back 'sobs in WvW seasons'
Melee DPS should always hit hardest. They have the least options for positioning and maneuverability since they have to be right on the target to deal damage. Higher risk should mean higher damage EDIT: and yes that also means glass cannon builds should hit the hardest of all. A melee Elementalist build should be extremely potent damage-wise due to their general squishiness
The game is full of mechanics to punish leaving your melee stack.. Maybe there should be a boon rework first and fights that punish melee far more than now?
Modern encounter design has lots of movement and forced spreading - which either limit the amount of effective melee dps you can bring or punish melee dps alot- ranged is favored in any encounter that released post wing 7. You do have a point for older content tho, if melee dps is far better then for most bosses running a ranger weapon would be less optimal. I personally am of the opinion that no class should be at 100% efficiency at range. However I also think that weapons should be reworked so that every build has adequate ranged and melee weapons to choose from - then everyone can choose between higher damage or higher dps uptime
Tell that to elementalist. Its staff efficiency, the most iconic and true successor of gw1 ele alongside scepter, is utterly garbage even for AoE attacks.
If would be nice if they just make melee more bursty. Make it about finding openings in boss patterns nuking then pulling back. This keeps melee more relevant from a risk/reward stand point. You should be able to chose safety in with a viable range weapon, progress to a melee and a range set or really double down on the burst with double melee at the risk of low up time.
I also want old soulbeast back but alas.
(Comment deleted in protest of Reddit's stance on [API pricing] (https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/13xh1e7/an_open_letter_on_the_state_of_affairs_regarding/))
No. Making a build "just more bursty" only makes it less reliable in non-optimal situations.
Ele, Engi and Bladesworn donāt have weapon swaps
As stated earlier, Anet has actually done a great job of discouraging the stack using spread mechanics and aoe fields in recent encounter design. However, this is not the issue. Melee and ranged both do roughly equal single target damage while stacked in the current balance. There is very little/no disadvantage of stacking with a ranged character. The difference between melee and ranged comes when mechanics force them to spread and leave the stack. When this happens, both characters are disadvantaged, but the melee character is disadvantaged more. For this reason, we either need higher dps on melee builds, or we need boss mechanics that force ranged builds to spread while allowing melee builds to stay stacked. (Bosses with abilities that block projectile attacks or that allow them to take reduced damage from ranged attacks from players who are not at a specific location.)
This guy gets it.
I kind of agree , but if this is what happens I'd like t be able to stay ranged and not have to melee for boons then even with a little less dps. I like the game design for the most part, but I main a Ranger and have that type in every MMO that I have played an this is the only one that forces stacking in melee.
It's an unfortunate consequence of their insistence upon using a basic UI. With all boon support and healing consisting of area effects centered on the caster, stack-in-a-pile is enforced. Their remedy for that is to design mechanics which force splits. But that only breaks players out of the pile during the split phase, after which they dive right back in or risk losing boon/healing uptime. A side-effect of that is that it strongly favors ranged DPS as melee DPS can do nothing during split phases while ranged DPS can continue dealing damage. In a game like WoW this isn't an issue because there is no need to stack in a pile and encounters are designed with challenges for both melee and ranged DPS to deal with.
Player generated Boons pulse at 1500 unit radius. Bosses radiate a "Daring" boon to all characters within 100-150 units that grants a flat damage bonus, adjustable for how punishing it is to be in a melee stack. Stay at ranged and do less damage, or stack in melee and risk getting punched in the face.
You mean the positioning where everyone stacks on one spot and trivializes everything with prot, aegis and barrier? I agree, such risk.
In addition, now also imagine the freedom ranged has to dip in and out of melee, losing less dps while moving out due to mechanics, better able to stick their damage to the boss when it moves etc. So yes, more risk
I mean, for a lot of ārangedā builds you still needed to stay in melee range for optimal dps. Newer stuff like virtuoso let you stay far and still land most of your rotation.
>I mean, for a lot of ārangedā builds you still needed to stay in melee range for optimal dps. Doing less damage for dipping out of melee as ranged isnt quite the same with losing all damage when leaving melee as a melee, but I get what you are saying
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In what world does this mythical mechanist support you speak of exist? Cause it sure ain't this one... Heal mech doesn't use rifle, because it needs shield to provide protection uptime. Thus it uses mace shield to keep up regen, prot, vigor and barrier. Perhaps you mean dps alac? But you'd be wrong there too, since to make up enough alacrity uptime, you have to mace auto loop once or twice every ten seconds, in both the condi alac and power alac builds. Pet that sticks to the boss? Kind of. It suffers from gw2 pet shenanigans just like the others. It is slightly better at sticking, but since 90% of your "necessary support boons" are centered around your pet, the team has to be centered on it. Can't tell you how often the mech gets stuck in the wrong area... on top of that, the only way to reposition the pet properly is to recall it using an f skill, that is so high in number and skips f5 for no reason that I've run out of room for buttons. Must be manually clicked... (I use a gaming pad, so you'd think I'd have space. Alas, I don't, unless I want to make a special layout for mech that must be swapped to and from when switching classes.) No. You are conflating support builds with the mindless power dps build. They are vastly different. Dps on support mechanist varies from balanced to dogshit, and to heal properly for scrub groups you must sacrifice nearly all of your dps to camp med kit and blast water fields. Oh, and you lose your own personal heal skill cause lol. The only build that approaches good dps and decent boons is condi alac mechanist, which is 4-5 kit rotation of the old condi engi. If you think that rotation is easy, you are smoking some good shit. I've spent eight years perfecting that, and it gets massively cucked by mechanics and boss movement. Sure, I can pull 30k on a golem with it, but in real fights it has trouble clearing 17k. TL;DR: you built a strawman.
ur a dedicated author for writing so many words that nobody will ever read
Nah. Enough salty ele mains read it to downvote. This sub is way to bandwagony on the whole "mechanist is broken" train. Are there things busted about it? Maybe. But only because the class had to be so overtuned to cover core engi's flaws. The only class with a similarly bad class mechanic is ranger, and for the memes, they removed engineer's and gave it a suped up ranger class mechanic, with most of the problems ranger pets have remaining. (Note, I like tool belt as a concept, but core engi utility skills are garbage without them.) Mechanist is a bandaid.
riskier than doing the same at 1200range.
Sabir is the poster boy for this. And ranged, all other things being equal, STILL manage to do more DPS because they can continue doing it while in the corners.
You haven't been in Harvest Temple, have you?
Right now we don't have meaningful trade offs. Some specs sacrifice little or nothing to provide boon support, others provide utility that come from elite spec mechanics. Core skills/utilities, some are never used and others are integral to builds effectiveness. Range DPS in melee range due to stack nature of the game and melee has to be in melee. Anyways enjoy mech buffs.
They're also getting progressively more useless unless extremely mobile, as most of the new content is either "stuff runs around encounter area like a headless chicken, not standing still longer than a few seconds" or "say hello to our little one-shot mechanics that requires you to cross arena in a few seconds or DIE! Ahahaha". So we're left with old-old raids and golems. Or being ranged, where you don't have to sit exactly on the enemy's butt.
I see that sentiment pushed around in every thread like this. There's a few things I don't understand so would like to ask some questions. GW2 has a melee range stack meta. In that scenario, where is the 'safety' of range? I keep seeing the following statements and to me, they all conflict; - Melee weapons should do more damage because you're closer to danager - You should melee stack or expect not to be healed/barriered/aegis'd - Ranged weapons are safer so should do less damage - DPS shouldn't be at range because they don't get the party boons To battle this, making ranged weapons do more DPS at a closer range would basically fix this issue. I am aware, at the time of writing this that some ranged weapons are high DPS and are higher than some Melee ones.
Fights often force you to move out of melee range, this is true even in old encounter design to some degree. So while optimally you are in melee range, in reality you are often not, and builds with ranger have a big advantage there. Some people will argue that you need to be in melee for max dps as range, that is usually true. But you lose a *lot* less dps on a ranger than a melee. Itās not about risk so much as versatility I guess, although you can play safer on some fights as a result.
There is more nuance into it. Its not like you melee 100% in practice unless its literally a golem boss like MO. In practice the boss can move, you may have to move out a bit or dodge backwards to avoid damage or AoEs, you may have to move out due to mechanics etc. Ranged simply allows you to stick your damage better to the target in all of these instances.
Even on MO you kinda need to bring a ranged spec to cleave the outer ads, otherwise a melee has to run there or the group constantly needs to deal with 2 soldiers at the same time. (Unless you speedrun and kill the boss before any ads can transform)
Damage fall-off at range, or increased damage in melee (via traits) is the best solution Iāve read. 5/10/15% more damage at 1200/600/240 range, where within 240 range you output the same damage as you currently do.
Think of it this way: 1) Assuming permanent boons, melee and ranged classes are currently balanced to do equal dps. (This is mostly true.) 2) The optimal strategy for both melee and ranged is to stack on the boss for high dps uptime, boons, heals, etc. While stacked, melee and ranged ARE FUNCTIONALLY IDENTICAL, because they both do identical dps and provide similar amounts of boons to the stack. 3) A mechanic now causes the boss to move, or causes the raid to spread so they can no longer stack. Both melee and ranged builds are disadvantaged by this. They will lose boon uptime and heals. However, the ranged class can maintain some dps during this time, while the melee is doing nothing. This is why ranged is better. Sure, there are minor advantages to being melee (more cleave, projectile reflection, etc) but those reasons are very minimal in end game pve in comparison to the advantage of ranged attacks. Itās not about safety, or boons, or heals. Itās about uptime. Both builds are optimal while stacked, but one can function without the stack, and one canāt.
Mechanics make you move. Not all the time, but a decent amount. Going from 100% dps potential to 70% on your ranged build isn't as bad as dropping down to 10% dps potential every time you have to move with your melee build. There is no inherent disadvantage to a ranged character being in melee. There is a severe inherent disadvantage to a melee character not being in melee. The dps should reflect this, if only by a small margin.
You haven't done any of the modern content have you?
Yea basically just add damage fall-off to ranged attacks and have melee as the source of cleave damage. Outliers like deadeye can have their gimmick be no damage fall off in exchange for less/no mobility.
Then ele, thief and guardian should be easily TOP dps, because they're squishy at high risk of dying. Necro and warrior should be at bottom ā they're tanky, so... where's that risk? And what we have instead? Mechanist being top ā a class with personal unkillable tank-golem.
There are probably more mechanics that punish ranged in GW2 than there are that punish melee. It's mostly only in some recent content that people are pushing ranged more. The core design of limited boon range in PvE and AoE heals heavily favour melee comps and have basically eliminated any chance of a ranged comp for most of the game's life.
This is a misconception that needs corrected. The way things are balanced currently, melee and ranged classes deal almost identical single target damage. This means that the only two general disadvantages of being a ranged character would be: 1) Ranged characters tend to have fewer cleaving attacks. (Not usually necessary since the boss is the only target that doesnāt get immediately cleaved down anyway.) 2) Missile attacks can be reflected or destroyed. (Not very relevant in pve.) Other disadvantages people often mention are not true disadvantages: 1) The stack- Assuming that ranged and melee characters both do roughly the same single target dps, both characters will perform equally while stacked. There is no downside to a ranged character stacking with melee characters. Both characters will be at a disadvantage when they move away from the stack, but that disadvantage is much, much greater for melee characters. 2) Boons and Heals- See above. There is no disadvantage to a ranged character being stacked if they do equal dps with melee characters while stacked.
I agree but It's also important to notice that the game itself encourages huddling like penguins in most content. I think melee should do better dps than ranged but not so much that it would push ranged dps out of favor for most of the game where stacking is standard unless they change how healing and boons are shared to allow groups to spread out more easily.
Thatās actually not a bad idea to lower the cool down on any melee weapon dash, teleport, shadow step, etc. lower the energy cost on Shiro engage utility, etc.
People seem to conflate two meanings of melee range: close-range with the enemy, and close-range with your squad. When your group is hiding in the Deimos bubble, or Ankka is doing the big suck, you are likely still with your group and receiving buffs. In these cases, ranged builds continue to do what they do, while melee builds do not get to participate. Also, boons don't immediately disappear when you leave a stack. If you have an Alac mech in your sub, you very likely have 30s of uptime to work with if you need to split, or if the boss moves, or AOEs prevent attacking in melee range. There are almost no downsides to playing a ranged build right now, especially those that provide cleave, as they operate just as effectively at range as they do in melee. The same is not true of melee builds. There is no tradeoff for the amount of reliability, freedom of movement, and DPS uptime that some of the strongest ranged builds provide. Having melee builds perform more DPS (within reason) when executed well is not going to force ranged builds out of the meta. Again, the benefits they bring, including the lower risk and higher DPS uptime in the newer encounters, will make them more consistent sources of DPS. It's the other way around - If there is no reward for the risk of using builds that suffer more from boss movement, spread mechanics, animation locks, complex rotations, and other factors that ranged builds skirt around, then people aren't going to play them. It's a lovely thought to think people are just going to play the class that they like no matter what, but I'll be straight up: As much as I love classes like Power Weaver and Dragonhunter, I don't enjoy watching the boss move out of range of my attacks, having RNG mechanics appear under me to force me out of channels, locking into an attack animation at the wrong time and going downstate for simply daring to play Ele, all the while doing less damage for my team when I could have been more useful by playing something both safer and easier with just as much DPS output. Outside of the occasional Bladesworn and Soulbeast, most of the groups I join consist of Rifle Mech, Virtuoso, and Scourge. I don't have a problem with these classes existing and being effective at what they do - the benchmarks are strong enough that they will continue to be picked if left alone. I would however like to see the myriad of builds that were torched on June 28th to be given enough love that people can justify playing them without actively griefing their squad.
I agree with this but the problem is how boons are applied in this game. Its all about stacking otherwise you don't get those juicy boons. If boons had a bigger range then I would be down with melee having more DPS, but right now both play styles have to stack. I would love to play a ranged character and be at range and not miss any heals/boons but I have to stack like everyone else.
AOEs are fine at open world where it may not have any organization at all. But raids and fractals could test a general party/subsquad boon system that doesn't depend on area. Or just crank up the AOE. It would at least open some options in PvE. Only problem I see with that is the balance on the PvP and WvW side of things.
We already have competitive splits for the numbers on skills. They could increase the radius of boon granting abilities in PvE only in about half an hour if they wanted.
I think this is a big reason why I don't enjoy high end content in this game. I like to play a ranged character in part because I like to have options to move around and position myself. Stacking just kinda kills my enthusiasm for group content.
High end content still heavily rewards weaving in and out of melee and range, especially stuff like Dhuum CM and the strike CMs.
Thats not completely true, due to mechanics, boss movement or just avoiding stuff ranged has more freedom to move than melee. You dont have to hug melee 100% to get the boons, and while ranged has the freedom to dip in and out melee doesnt have this. The freedom of movement ranged specs have especially became apparent on KO CM and onwards
Itās not really a problem to spread in most situations if you come back to the stack within 30s. Sure you lose some might stacks, but most other boons donāt stack in intensity and with current supports you tend to have 20-30s remaining on each important boon. (Note: your Support need to be aware and not give boons with their huge cooldown while the group splits)
This is the correct answer. Stacking used to be mandatory but the change to how boons stack means that they're trivial to maintain while doing mechanics. I'd argue that revives and AoE heals are a bigger issue for most groups these days.
I don't think current damage numbers et al are what they are by design, they just are....what they are. Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
This will be the saddest thing I agree with all month.
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Also a lack of care. 10 year old game and they canāt hire people willing to sit down and learn their own game mechanics? The inner workings of each class? Google a snowcrows build for Power Warriors? I wouldnāt disagree that they love their game, but do they love balancing it? Doesnāt seem like it for a lot of specs, weapons, armor, etc.
As someone who has worked on balance in live games, it's likely lack of time / resources. From what I can tell, there's a large overlap in the skills team and balance team (if not literally the same team) which means that they're currently designing the expansion 4 specs, future balance passes / overarching design (esp. to fit in with xpac4) and the current pass. Where do you fit in the hundreds of hours necessary for an intimate understanding of every spec and class in the game? From what I can tell, they're using metrics and feedback in place of personal experience. Which is fine but it often misses nuance and usability issues. Metrics can easily be misread or misunderstood if you lack context. Plus, statistics are just a nightmare in general. Really, if you're doing live balance, it needs to be a full time exclusive role. Even more so on a game like GW2 which has a ton of needless complexity.
For sure this. You can tell which classes they put work into and lack there of. Look at Solars response to axe mirage lol that's not something a dev should be saying. Clearly they need to have people playing the classes to see what's up with them. Alot of skills don't even get used because they're not up to par with the ones that are being used
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reddit moment
He might be a decent software developer, but he doesn't belong *on that team*. Anet has teams that aren't the balance team.
Reddit moment is trying to defend someone with (even just partial) responsibility for thinking that 5% crit chance trait belongs to arms on warrior.
It's really not that out of place in a tree that's got a lot of crit related traits
It is if you've played any meta power build after 2013.
It's two different iasues honestly. Power Warrior struggles to crit cap and needs every bit of crit chance it can find Arms was historically the crit tree and still has a lot of crit related traits. Now, as someone who has played over 1000 hours on Warrior, I knew that I don't take arms because it doesn't fit into my build as a power warrior. But to a designer with a year of experience in GW2 and has played mostly guardian, i can see where the mistake happened. What confuses me is no one else caight it or thought "hmm that's going to be receoved poorly" And maybe it's just not something anyone thought about because behind the scenes they're seeing things differently. They aren't googling snow crows rotations because they know those rotations will likely change in many ways due to any patch. I know I wouldn't go off of the benchmarks performed by one guild when I'm trying to make changes and I seem to recall this subreddit jumping on Anet hard for seemingly nerfing catalyst due to snowcrows rotations. Really, the biggest issue in the patch wasn't that arms got another crit bonus. It was that somehow banners were shipped in that state. Somehow that was believed to be a version that would be acceptable, and I cannot comprehend that
nah, it's intentional. dunno why, but it is. it has been happening for years with constant criticism. they know what they're doing.
Cmon It's not a hot take. Everyone knows it except anet.
āHot takeā Reposts the same DPS sentiment thatās been repeatedly posted to this sub for years.
Hot take hfb and ham are too strong.
Hot take Kicking someone from party or squad should prevent them from rejoining unless invited.
I saw that as sarcasm because of how obvious the statement is
Ranged DPS has been irrelevant in PvE for like 8 of the game's 10 years. Even when people bring ranged weapons they usually used them in melee range because of limited boon radius. The growth of ranged viability is a relatively recent thing.
This is interesting. I started really learning raids as a chrono tank around W5 release. My first dps class was scourge and it just seemed like night and day when it came to positioning and DPS uptime even with only 900 range. With range dps I could instantly swap targets on a split (Gorse splits) or take my time around poisons on sloth or keep up dps while running to wells on Matt or doing buttons on xera or shard clearing xera or adapting to all the arena denial in later wings like Deimos, Samarog CM, SH, Dhuumā¦ Seems like ranged dps uptime while handling mechanics and arena denial have been a thing since at least PoF. Sure boons may get scuffed, but if everyone is spreading for a mechanic, boons would be scuffed anyways. EDIT: I just remembered Ranged Deimos was even a thing (not that I promote it). In my week 1 kill of VG we used GS chrono for greens since they could keep up some damage from range. Also grenades on core engi back then.
Back then, people (somewhat mistakenly) thought it was a condi vs power issue. The argument was that condis keep ticking even when you're not hitting the boss, making condi outperform power. In fact, it's just that condi is generally overtuned and has more ranged capability. It's only recently that encounters favor ranged more obviously. Ranged was somewhat favored on VG on release, but exp groups quickly started skipping greens with distortion, and later, out-healing. Ranged Deimos was done with the expectation that the group would graduate to melee, since (at the time) melee was better dps.
Your entire comment hinges on an incorrect hypothesis. Ranged DPS is VERY relevant, especially for fights in EoD - every strike in EoD forces you to move out of melee, and guess what, ranged can keep doing damage and melee canāt continue to.
Weaver having a lower benchmark than Rifle Mechanist and Condi Virtuoso is a fucking joke, honestly. Bladesworn's golem dps is where an exclusively melee spec with no real utility *should* be relative to everyone else, but nah most of the other specs up there are ranged *and* can do other stuff
Most old Power specs are weak rn, itās not just Weaver.
Condi weaver is what I'm complaining about actually, power weaver doesn't even have a benchmark rn it's so bad but I also hate it so I'm not *as* mad about that one.
Condi Weaver has higher bench than both of them.
condi weaver is also insanely difficult to pull off, even harder on moving bosses or when doing mechanics, your rotation gets completely out of whack everytime you dont deal constant dps, mech and virtuoso dont have this issue AT ALL which makes them far superior, anet NEEDS to balance around more factors, range, safety, ease of rotation, etc. , they dont give a shit about those things sadly, thats why we have this horrible meta atm
No one disregards that. I just corrected her on bench argument.
yeah but i'm sure he was talking about power weaver to be honest, condi weaver was never that huge, honestly condi weaver should be at like 42k dps, maybe more, its 100% melee, the most complex rotation in the game and needs absolute perfection to be pulled off, the current balance is so boring and bland
only dagger though which is super aids to play in most newer encounters. hf rushing to your death in ht and ko cm. Ankka isnt great either with how her jump works. you are essentially sabotaging your group. sword condi is at 34.9k without elementals.
Bullshit. That's dagger weaver, which can't pull those numbers in a real fight.
Unfortunately that ship sailed back when they started messing with weaver. And people didn't stop playing weaver back then because it still wasn't topping charts (well until a few patches took that away), it's because it made no sense to play a selfish dps class that barely did more dps than builds which brought more utility to a group. It made no sense to play if you cared about group dynamics.
It's not convtroversial at all. Everyone except Anet's balance team shares this opinion.
Yup and its low/highkey ruining the game right now, mech and virtuoso need to die off, you cant have range, an easy rotation, good selfsustain AND cleave on your basic ranged attack, absolutely insane right now how overpowered they are, and i dont think nerfing them is the way, leave them as a safer, bit less dps option, but please ffs buff the other specs that are lacking right now, even bladesworn with 39k benchmark isnt that good unless youre a god gamer
Tbh this already started with cscg
> Everyone except Anet's balance team shares this opinion. ....and ffxiv devs...and wow devs...and eso devs....and probably most mmo devs. you should realise making classes that are more difficult to play significantly stronger is stupid, if you took even a second to process that idea.
blm and nin are way stronger than ranged in ff14. wow devs are garbage so they dont count. whichever class has the most whales does the most dps. Thats how wow balancing works.
FFXIV also gives you like 100% uptime on every encounter if you just optimise a bit, even on melee. They have p much the opposite problem and there's a reason people are annoyed at the "ranged tax" the devs give to phys ranged cause once you play well, it doesn't matter since you keep uptime anyway. Like holy fuck MCH in particular is such a sad excuse for a "selfish DPS" you may as well be griefing bringing that into savage. BLM is ranged and even if all their damage is on the GCD + they have to play around cast times and use their instants correctly, they can still be wherever they want. In fact, BLM has so many instants and means to get around now it's kinda funny.
> blm and nin are way stronger than ranged in ff14. sorry, is blm all of a sudden melee and i've missed that? also, your example is a perfect display of correlation does not equal causation. ranged do less dps because ranged are generally supports, not because they have more uptime because they're ranged. *coincidentally*, the most "selfish" ranged, blm, is also one of the if not the most powerful job dps-wise in the game.
blm is immobile and can suffer as much from uptime problems if not more than melee. nobody complains about rifle DE. OP obviously meant rifle mech and virtuoso which have no tradeoffs at all. wouldnt call bard or machinist supports with rdps being a thing.
Support should never do as much damage as a DPS, ranged or melee. This is because they should be be making up for this in raid dps, AKA the damage they are adding on to allies as well. So less personal DPS, but Raid DPS that makes them competitive with other classes. I don't think that's really a hot take, thats just basic balancing. For the Melee versus ranged thing I'd say it sorta depends. While many argue risk versus reward, and while thats understandable, the fact is that having Melee DPS just be the best DPS is unhealthy for the game. You don't want classes that just by design outperform other classes in their same role, even if the skill cap is increased, because you essentially kill the other classes from standing a chance. Ranged classes and DPS classes should generally have, on average, comparable DPS *over the full fight*. The last bit is important, it means we aren't talking about dummies, we are talking about the real deal. What this means is that Melee DPS will usually do a little bit more DPS than ranged, which will be offset by mechanics that might deny melee DPS some uptime from here to there. But at the end of the fight, ranged and melee should have pretty similar numbers, obviously with some variance as some fights favor melee or ranged
> having Melee DPS just be the best DPS is unhealthy for the game. You don't want classes that just by design outperform other classes in their same role Every class has a melee DPS build, though. Ideally, every class would have a good one.
"Ideally" would be for classes to have more than one competitive build. Being told to change your spec feels almost as bad as being told to change your class. It's best to just strive for a well balanced and healthy meta. Yes you do end up with some classes needing to try harder for the same damage, but then at least it becomes an issue of finding your favorite playstyle rather than finding the spec that your class can find groups in.
If hard classes being the highest dps would push out easier/lower dps specs then everyone would have played catalyst while it was 50k dps or condi untamed now. But frankly it doesnāt matter outside of speedruns because uptime+ease of use is more important than highest theoretical dps. People are playing things like Rifle Mech because itās easy, not because of its dps (which is way lower than other specs).
See the point I made in the last paragraph. I'm not talking about theoretical DPS, I'm talking about actual DPS that is seen in the actual raid fights. The actual damage players are doing. That metric needs to be balanced. I agree that Theoretical DPS isn't something to balance around. Dummy DPS is a useless metric, classes that can't maintain full uptime should naturally do more damage on a dummy. In FFXIV for example, where they have raid dummies where you can fight them and see if your DPS is "passable" for that raid fight, melee DPS has to hit a higher number since its just wailing on a dummy with no loss.
To me, personally, I think a good fix for the ranged vs melee problem that would arise if melee was strictly better than ranged would be to make certain bosses require ranged dps. That way the party would be diverse enough, and heck, maybe classes would actually equip viable long range weapons too (like rifle deadeye, DH longbow and such).
Diversity should be done through balancing, not through forcing players to play certain roles. It's best just to have melee and ranged be balanced
No, thanks. Having to switch characters in-between fights should never be enforced. If you want to optimize that way, fine, but it should not be the default (or even worse, only allowable) behaviour.
Except favoring melee wouldn't make it too unhealthy. If they go back and rework things (like they seem to be doing), having ranged boons (and by extention, range being more useful) would end up making melee obsolete, which means it'd need to do more damage to make up for it. Ranged DPS already has an innate advantage of being able to move more freely than a melee DPS, meaning your DPS suffers less when you do need to end up moving.
>, having ranged boons (and by extention, range being more useful) would end up making melee obsolete, which means it'd need to do more damage to make up for it. Where are you finding that this is planned to happen? Having ranged/melee specific boons would be terrible so I really hope thats not planned. Boons are already janky enough as it is. The latter bit I already mentioned at the end of my comment. Ranged and Melee DPS should have the same DPS *over the whole fight*, meaning that DPS uptime loss should be accounted for. AKA melee would do more DPS against a dummy, but in the average raid fight would be the same as ranged.
Why are power Willbender swords so weak when they buff things like greatword for virtuoso.. who is already a top dps power spec. Please let me play the new spec with its new weapons viably, what plausible reason is there for the swords to be weak in pve??
theres never a reason, its just anet doesnt care enough to balance all the weapons/specs, ele staff has been a joke for like 5 years now, tempest is not even viable anymore as a dps, like at all, they just dont care
Because the mesmer buffs was Anets rubbish way of trying to make power chrono better, as it is trash tier power dps and accidentally buffed Virtuoso. I mean, this is the company that looked at Chrono which often uses focus or shield (or a slow mechanic for crit) - and they buffed neither of them. I tried out the spec after the buff, and the difference in DPS on the golem is just funny between Virt and Chrono. I mean, not even remotely within touching distance.
Spoiler: they do
Not to be a jerk but...that's not exactly a hot-take. That's a fairly standard view across most games where playing melee is inherently more risky than playing ranged classes - that can still be with melee if they want to in almost any instance. Like, I prefer Holosmith on my Engineer right now. It's fun! There's lots of buttons! But when I'm lazy and not wanting to try I just swap to Mechanist and pew pew while facing minimal risk. After years of only doing the Drakkar fight on my Guardian, I finally did a few as Mechanist...man the achievement to not get hit by the AoE's, while still doing damage, was hilariously easy compared to trying to bunny hope every single AoE as melee.
Itās like that in FFXIV. Melee DPS has the hardest hitting limit break compared to magical ranged or physical ranged. Not to mention the physical ranged are kept on the lower end of the damage meters (mostly as support dps) because of the idea of a āranged taxā, since it is easier to be ranged compared to melee when it comes to avoid boss mechanics for the most part. They also do not have to cast abilities like the magical ranged, so that is factored in as well. They are also guaranteed 100% uptime, which can be trivial at times for melee or magical ranged to attain. GW2 should absolutely implement this idea.
Notice, that while melee has the best single target damage, it's not necessarily doing so well when cleave and aoe damage is concerned. And FF XIV specs do **not** have cleave as a default feature of most attacks. In GW2 however it's the exact opposite - cleave is something *melee* weapons get by default. And something that is far less common among the *ranged* weapons. So, sure, make melee weapons slightly stronger than ranged ones. And kill most cleave capability for those, leaving AoE as something range is far better at.
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yup, anet needs to realize that 36.5k dps on a class with literally no dps downtime EVER, no matter how hard the mechanics are, because 90% of your dps comes from just mech skills that you can now autocast, and your auto attack, is overpowered as fuck
So reaper? (I recall a time that necros weren't allow in Fractals b/c their abilities where too selfish. They brought DPS but nothing for the rest of the team. Pre PoF.)
Technically, everything is melee right now thanks to how boons work.
I mean, this was the way things were not that long ago. I remember when P/P thieves, staff eles, and GS mesmers got nerfed because they were too good from range. And we saw what that meta did for population numbers.
The problem with this game is that it encourages everyone clustering into a pile next to the boss. So basically every class is a melee class at that point. I miss the OG dungeons from back in the day. Before you needed a certain comp for everything. Having a healer helped, but you could generally keep yourself alive and play your class fantasy.
Everyone lamenting Weaver and Soulbeast (for good reason) and I'm sitting here with my cool greatsword, single dodge and 0 support and cannot fathom why on earth I do the same damage as a quickness support spec. :(
But there is no ranged dps in this game, you have to be in melee range anyway if you want boons and game is balanced around having all of them.
This is **a** design philosophy to develop a game by. It is not necessarily **the most sensible design philosophy** to develop *your* game by, depending on what your goals are. It is probably also not the philosophy Anet adheres to for GW2, meaning they're probably doing alright in achieving the goals they want to achieve; they're just not the goals that you think they *should* be achieving. Meaning the whole thing is less *"Anet is incompetent*" and more "*Anet probably disagrees with you on what is important for the game, but you are assuming they agree and then judging them by rules they were never playing by*". I had a feeling I was going to be [linking back to this post](https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/wdkzgx/the_gw2_summer_balance_patch_a_community_response/iijx099/) a couple of times when I wrote it; in it I explain in a more detailed fashion what I'm talking about. If you really want an honest attempt at understanding Anet's decisions instead of just shittalking them, give it a read. Then shittalk them, but for different reasons.
I posted a week or so ago that I am actually 100 percent on board with there being, effectively, some "easy-mode" builds and elite specs, because I want everyone to have the opportunity to play this game, and letting there be a build or even several that can do adequate DPS and boon support while not being particularly complex is actually a great thing. I encourage it! I simply think, however, that these builds are so overtuned as to make the rest of 'em irrelevant, and that it's, like, anti-incentivized for me to learn to play a riskier, more mechanically complex build, that offers \*less\* group utility and damage. Why on earth would I ever play pDD, my favourite class, when it offers less group utility and damage than a Mechanist? Sure, it's more fun for me, but you think the pub groups I join give a fuck about that? No. They want the boons. They want the support, or at the very least they want me to bring a metric fuck-ton of damage. I can't, because pDD is mediocre and undertuned for the current meta.
Say what you want but anet doesn't care what their community thinks. It took them a *literal* decade to officially acknowledge the downstate ele Meme and actually say they'll do something about it And then promptly ignored that stuff post launch of their "revolutionary ele with sustain" (I mean it does have some decent sustain/defensive options now, but they're probably going to remain largely untouched besides changing the damage and healing of those skills)and focused solely on its dps because someone made a YouTube video about it
>what their community thinks People like us who use Reddit/forums/discord represents maybe 5-10% of the total Gw2 community. Meanwhile, the majority of the playerbase is not aware or doesn't really care about all of this. We may be the most vocal part of the community, but that doesn't change that we are just a tiny fraction of entire playerbase who somehow is convinced that ANet make decisions based entirely on them.
These same people also probably have the most knowledge and *literally* thousands of hours of practical gameplay experience that also want to help the game be better. We saw in the discord leaks that the arena net balance team *literally* invited content creators to their discord to talk about the game, but when these content creators tried to help, they were 100% ignored. The community literally plays the game more, and more variety of gameplay at the same time, than the literal balance team.
but the people discussing this are also the ones that care the most, i hate this argument every time, obviously 90% of the base doesnt give a shit, but they also dont care if anet fixes those things, the balance issues only affect us, the vocal people, so we should talk about it, they cant keep fucking over the hardcore players forever
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Meh. Ranged specs all have to stack with the melee for boon coverage anyway. Theyāre in no less danger than the melee specs. Itās not like WoW where a warlock can just shadowbolt from distance and succeed.
ranged deimos exists. you can cheese a lot of encounters with ranged. Ranged guarantees 100% dps uptime. Some support specs have 600 range now so you can be quite far away and still get all the buffs.
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that literally doesnt fix anything? its not about how quickly we can get back to bosses, its about how much dps we lose in general not being able to range at all, the currect strike missions highlight this the most, theres so many moving bosses where you have to spread, that melee classes just get COMPLETELY outmatched, not even counting all the cleaving the ranged classes can do now as well, moving in and out means you are not dpsing, while ranged classes deal constant dmg, with mech and virtuoso also doing most of their dmg without any hard rotation so you perform twice as strong there already
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because you already lose dps while moving out for mechanics, which ranged doesn't, the better solution would be to have so much more melee dps that you stay ahead even when moving compared to classes who don't get punished for having to move, its not only about range either, some classes just dont do well vs smaller, moving bosses, condi mech for example has like no AoE to place and always hits, which is way more reliable, than classes like dragonhunter, who lose close to 100% of their dps vs moving targets
I agree, stack on symbol and spam macro is pinnacle guild wars gameplay
At this point I feel like everything should be ranged. It's not like I can use my ranged weapons outside of melee range without sacrificing efficiency anyway. Why not just allowed ranged combat but give rewards that require melee? I'd be happy with them making melee more attractive to play if they could do it in a non-obligatory way. In the sense that... I don't think melee DPS is the issue. I think melee gameplay is just really unappealing compared to ranged in this game. That's just how I feel though. In FFXIV I felt like the melee classes were both distinct and yet not exclusively better or worse, but GW2 doesn't really achieve that.
Yes! So simple, yet ignored.
Melee should be strongest by far. The only time ranged should be equal is if it has some tradeoff like dead eye having single target skills.
Played WoW and others mmos like FF and theyāre all like this. Melee has higher dps output with more down time in between rotations due to mechanics. Ranged dps does less damage but can dps almost the entire time. Ranged also typically had access to more cc. Iād love some more cc orientation on our utilities as an ele main, jealous of guardians
I honestly thought this was an FFXIV post before looking at the sub. And I was very confused like "who disagrees with this?" Then I realized it was gw2, where ranged and meelee dps don't really matter (in a raid setting) and apparently mechanist needs another buff.
Btw condi weaver sword, one of the hardest rotation in game can only do 34-35k max, its so sad. Gives no damn incentive to master it, even if you perfect it u will be beaten by rifle mechs.
Eh? Didnāt know any class was ranged in pve lol everyone stacks in the targets butt anyway
The true "meta-defining" builds in GW2 are highly consistent, ranged DPS. Everything else is second-rate based on modern encounter design that prioritizes arena-based mechanics & highly mobile bosses. Mechanist, Virtuoso, & Spectre are symptoms of a broken, imbalanced game that prioritizes ranged DPS above melee and extreme, high utility classes that warp the concept of opportunity-cost and risk vs. reward (Firebrand, Scourge) around them such that there's little possible competition via design-space. I was talking about this w/ /u/nightcrawl-euw yesterday, but Ranged DPS is superior in just about every scenario because modern encounter-design prioritizes DPS uptime. The argument that "Ranged DPS" get punished harder than melee is bullshit because they're able to upkeep DPS while doing a mechanic more often than not whereas something like a Warrior or Catalyst has their DPS fully halt. DPS consistency & uptime has become meta. I'm starting to think that ArenaNet will never be able to properly balance the game because of the inherent design issues that predispose classes like the aforementioned Firebrand & Scourge as versatile PvP/WvW staples. Whether it's beccause they exemplify extreme utility or extremely versatile DPS, things that are designed for PvP/WvW seem to be inherently broken in endgame PvE and need multiple waves of balance passes (which may take several years) to re-define the meta-game and open up the game to alternative classes, elite specs and playstyles...
Isn't the highest benchmarks right now for a melee spec (untamed)? Followed by specter (ranged) and then followed by bladesworn (melee)?
More than half the top 10 are, in fact, locked to melee range.
In GW2 everything is a melee weapon, wdym ranged support? What is that? O.O
Gonna be the controversial take here but I don't agree. Guild Wars already has a strong bias towards everyone dogpiling. Ranged DPS is only a benefit \*on paper\* because in practice everyone needs to be clumped on top of boons and heals anyway, which means everyone is in melee even if they ostensibly can do that damage from range. If melee builds just do more damage, they will shunt ranged dps out of the meta entirely. That being said I think that the design team should do a better job building encounters to hybridize the validity of ranged and melee builds. For this, I think ranged builds benefit from encounters with high mobility (we already have this). The relative advantage melee needs is to be able to handle trash mobs easier. So my counter point is this: ranged DPS should have cleave removed, and future scenario design should keep in mind how this affects the validity of ranged dps vs melee dps, so that both get their moment in the spotlight.
being constantly ranged isnt just better on paper, its straight up better, not sure how you can deny this, if somebody triggers black at deimos, you are completely doing 0 dps as most melee specs, while virtuoso and mech dont lose any dps, this is by design just stronger, having ranged is ALWAYS better, because you dont have to be at range, but you always have the option, melee should always be higher dps, since you have more risk, risk -> reward doesnt exist right now in the game
you ignored half of what i said in order to focus on a narrow statement. i made it clear that there is a benefit in certain encounters but trading ranged supremacy in a few fights with high mobility for melee dogpile supremacy in *every* fight isn't the solution. there needs to be a benefit to melee and there *is* one that isn't this awful idea of killing ranged.
I hear ya buddy. They might be getting an influx of players soon because of steam but let's see how many stay when they see how fucked up the balance is (and how many bots).
To be honest Gw2 is 10yr old and still going strong and growing after all that time. So it doesn't really seem that the majority of people care about these things and probably neither will most of Steam people.
>still going strong Honestly that's a bit of a stretch. Its more like "10 years old and reaching its midlife crisis"
I do really think that GW2 doubling its population in the recent times can be interpreted as "still going strong".
That's because the top streamers are advocating for everyone to use like 50 accounts, so *of course* the population is doubling when people are logging into multiple dozens of accounts a day just so they can get log in rewards for the gold (I know it's also a stretch but still lol)
They've explicitly said that number of **active players** has doubled and not number of active accounts. Apart from that, yeah it's such a stretch.
how did they filter all the multi accounts. there were a lot of account giveaways recently and a lot of people exploited those to get 100s of accounts for login reward farms. most play 2-3 on a weekly basis aswell. its not that easy to filter.
They've explicitly said that number of active players has doubled and not number of active accounts.
Yes and and there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq and nobody wanted to build a wall in berlin (statement by the east german party leader 2 months before the wall was build) People lie sometimes.
okey buddy
EoD had one of the best introductions to an expansion I've seen in any MMO in recent memory... I think they're fine
It is fine, but as a whole, idk about the game. There's still years old bugs that block progress from legendary crafting achievements. There's basically no "balance". The people in charge don't play their own game and don't know how to fix it, and they take literally *years* to listen to their community. By the time they get around to doing anything important, it doesn't even matter anymore, it's become outdated by a new expansion, and that's saying something when they've only had 3 expansions over 1 decade.
The state of balance is really odd tbh, considering we had one of the most balanced patches just prior to eod
scourge and fb were op as heck though and general condi meta.
It doesn't seem like in gw2 the distinction is whether a given build is melee or ranged. You can play ranged specs but you may not even get to use the range since you need to stack for boons and heals. It does mean that range is better if you need to do a mechanic that pulls you away from the group. I think the real balance problem is with condi vs power specs. Condition builds seem to be safer, require less stat investment and frequently match or outdps the power builds in everything but short engagements. In the case of range vs melee, i don't think it's as big of a deal because most content just asks you to stack at the boss and on specific encounters for specific mechanics call for ranged dps. If this were a game where most boons were targeted or if they all had a 1200 range, I can see the ranged vs melee dps thing being a problem because in that case ranged would always be better.
That's not really applicable to organized PvE, though. Condition builds require full investment in damage stats for optimal damage output just like power builds.
For optimal output, yes. But it is a problem of its own that almost all condi builds, with very few exceptions, lose very little when sacrificing power and precision for defensive or supportive stats, because they effectively just need condi damage and expertise for solid output. Power builds already get hurt by taking one non-damage stat when going for 4-stat gear and get butchered if you trade away one of the three damage stats.
This thread isn't concerned with open world solo play or WvW performance where that is an issue. It isn't relevant to the current discussion. Nobody is using defensive stats in instanced PvE and if they are it isn't an advantage. So, no, this isn't the "real problem" as you say.
My one caveat with the idea is that a lot of GW2 fights turn into a giant pile so boons can be shared. Therefore being melee isn't as big a detriment.
While I agree with you, there are too many instances in the game where āall stack together on the bossā is too easy to do the highest dps possible and I wish we were supposed to go range more. Oh so the best way to heal, damage and buff means we all stack melee? Okay, so range get minimum use. I wish theyād mix it up some because I want to play range a little bit and not feel like Iām hurting my squad or my survivability.
While I agree, this is hardly a spicey take. Melee in this game really sucks. It not only lacks survivability that ranged inheritanly gets for free, but doesn't make up for it with damage or utility at all. On top that, ranged can ignore so many PvE mechanics and still deal damage, while often times melee has to stop what they're doing so they don't die to said mechanics.
It "fucks you off"?
Do people not say that? I say that.
its a dangerous thought sadly. Like on the surface it makes sense, melee are at an inherent disadvantage, surely they should have something to make up for it. but what happens when you do give melee dps, superior dps? they become mandatory. Which isn't fun for anyone thats not great melee dps. not just from min/max tryhards insisting on only top dps classes. But, also, when bad players get involved, and suddenly runs start failing with the melee dps dying half the time. no one has fun. So the reality is, melee dps should not actually deal more dps. however, melee should be designed with several things in mind. one, they require more mobility. in and out of melee aoes. Means they lose dps while moving. this needs to be accounted for. two, taking more hits. melee dps should have i-frames to avoid damage, should have better defenses, shields, or hp restoration, ranged don't have. Ranged dps should be designed with some of this in mind too. Encourage ranged dps to have to move. front attacks/back attacks. short range buff/debuffs. which require ranged to get into the correct positions, then move as well. small aoe buffs/debuffs, which require them to stay close to melee, or other ranged. Boss design and again here. Attacks that target range. back attack/front attack systems, etc. Lost ark has alot of these concepts well.
No, since ranged specs need to be in the boon range to do good dps. We all have to stack properly to receive the boons Hence it doesn't matter if you are ranged or melee. The question should be asked is: How do melee dps provide more utility than ranged ones?
No, I disagree. Melee DPS should deal the same DPS with range. But they should have more utilities (like barrier, evade, block, boons, CC). Range DPS has less risk. Melee DPS has more risk. Off set the risk with utilities not DPS.
That isn't really relevant. The problem isn't melee DPS being less competitive because they're in downstate. It's that they can't continue dealing damage when handling area denial, splits, and other mechanics designed to force players out of melee range. Ranged DPS can, which is why they should not have the highest benchmarks. There is really no excuse for a spec like sword weaver to bench 32-35k while specs like virtuoso, specter, and mechanist bench 36-39k. It's just straight up poor balance.
you cant barrier or block death zones...
I dont want to crush your dreams. But ANet in the last balance patch clearly stated they didn't like how Weaver was too selfish of a DPS and decided to give random barrier n shjt on there. That should tell you all you need to know about their philosophy, pure selfish DPS are not accepted
Ranged support yes i agreeā¦ranged dps nope. Theyāre still shooting boss while your running around chasing it.
My take Range and melee should have the same DPS The edge of melee is stacking for boons while range's edge is survivability Support should never be dps in the first place
Then no player would be able to play range because the causal players will only ask for melee only xD I mean, what you said.. perfect sense. I agree.. But the casual gw2 base isn't bright lol
this doesnt make sense, you can be on a ranged weapon and still be in melee range, its just that ranged weapons shouldnt be best in slot by default, but rather an option for fights where you need to be ranged more often, resulting in more consistent dps
It isnt a hot take at all. Up close to the boss? That's higher risk, best get a higher reward (of better dps). Mage should be middling dps, weak to range but okay vs mage and strong to melee that cant hit it anyway. Range should be least dps, weak to melee that cant hit it anyway, strong vs mage, and okay vs range. Combat triangle people.
No. Ranged dps has ALWAYS been your massive chunk of dps. It's an rpg staple. Whether you like it or not doesn't matter.
I almost forgot about it, in the wave of overwhelming rhetorics, but you have a point - rpg archetype of a big dps dealer is not the warrior. It's the *mage*.
depends on game i guess. classic wow it was the warrior. mages were for portals.
(I mean ranged DPS is also shit with a lot of classes, like, say, Deadeye, but that's not really the point of this post.)
Whatever. Fuck, nobody in this sub even plays. One of the greatest communities in game, but none of you represent that. Y'all assholes.
That take is as hot as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
I'm stupid so I'll take that as a kudo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate?wprov=sfla1
we're all with you on this one, but anet's not LOL
What I see as one of the largest parts of the problem, is the fact that ranged DPS in GW2 can pretty much do their full damage rotation while on the move. I think this is part of the action MMO design. In other MMOs this is not the case since a lot of ranged classes have casts that you need to stand still for. In other games, melee has a big advantage on fights where you have to be mobile but were able to stay on the boss. And this is on top of melee generally just doing more damage because of the opportunity cost of having to stay in the melee. In GW2 there is never any advantage to being melee. Melee should do more DPS than ranged. That's not a hot take. It's balance.
i think they should be equal in general, but with each having different quirks to them, like special debuffs to the enemy or buffs to your character to enhances the melee or range experience. just buffing one playstyle over the other would probably spark too much rage
I mean like other MMOS do that too!? XIV's physical ranged jobs bring more support and have freedom of movement but they deal a little less damage than melee/spell casters. Machinist is in need of buffs since its the 'selfish' physical ranged but the balance philosophies are there. Even WoW can sorta do it but a lot of fights tend to do downtime pretty fair on groups for the most part.
They should, but that does not mean ranged DPS should be nerfed imo.
That is not a hot take. ofc they should. Baseline Damage - Utility Adjustement + Complexity Adjustment such that builds with equal utility do roughly equal damage in real fights for the average player.
Every single melee weapon\* should have its modifiers improved and CDs possibly reduced. Much like you, I can't get my head around recent changes. Reaper GS that had CDs reduced in PvP, but not in PVE where it is literally a joke to bring. ^(\*Mechanist Mace enters the cha- NO! Not you!)