Melee vs Ranged Balance: Damage Effectiveness

You can always use Decoy totem before getting into melee distance. It is surprisingly effective and it can take a fair number of blows. You can even use those totems to 'scout' ahead of you, since the'll will trigger even for mobs slightly offscreen.

I'm not saying that a better balance is not needed, I just think that the end goal should not be that both ranged and melee should be able to faceroll everything. This would be boring.

On the other hand, melee is more desync prone and since it is a issue that is not going to be solved, it should be taken in consideration, but I honestly have no idea how one would make up for such a situation...

Hi

GGG should consider re working the damage scaling of the monsters before any further nerfs to players skills.(If I could've put a capital on that period I would've)

Someone in GGG has been watching to much Lord of the Rings and thinks Legolas and Gandalf are the best and Aragorn and Boromir don't do anything:(

cheers

dps is not the issue- in fact, for both ranged and melee classes over level 90, having too much is a detriment due to reflect.

the only reason melee is bad is because of survavibility and projectile proliferation via lmp/chain/gmp and aoe potential of certain skills.

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mazul wrote:

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Sodomee wrote:

I was under the impression that melee builds actually deal more damage than ranged builds. My brother plays a wander and could not keep up with my cleave dps when we were leveling. He had to upgrade to a 6L to beat my 4L dps.

I'm sitting at 30k(6L) Cleave dps in town and I'm not even using full 20/20 gems yet. My swords are pretty nice for being on Anarchy, but they can get a lot better. With auras, I have 40k dps. When I am getting auras from the party + power and frenzy charges from conduit I hit well over 60k dps.

I also know of flicker strike builds breaking 100k dps easily. The only build that actually beats melee in dps is discharge and that isn't really huge AoE unless they use a Divinarius or two. Without AoE bonuses, Discharge is almost melee range.

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Melee needs survivability, not more dps. I have seen good tank builds, but there is no diversity. All you do is stack life, armour, and block(including spell block) to become a tank. If you are geared, you can break 25k dps with infernal blow and still tank everything(including Shrine Piety and Crema Boss).

Compare that to Shavroness-RF Freeze Pulser and you can laugh at your cleave damage.

The thing is that matters is damage*survivability and cleavers are inferior to the best ranged builds in that aspect. Damage alone is not of interest, the multiplication of the both is.

Freeze pulse is pure ele damage.

While the dps looks great on the tooltip, in reality it is inferior to phys dps. The reason for this is because resists reduce ele damage by a far greater amount than armour reduces phys damage.

Just going to say (and everyone in thread has missed it)

The melee vs ranged imbalance is ENTIRELY clear speed.

Melee can get plenty tank enough to survive, as can ranged.

Melee can get plenty of dps, as can ranged.

But ranged kill things from a distance. And so they can clear things far faster. Even ignoring the dps output of discharge, just regular ranged skills clear things far faster than melee.

This is the true imbalance, regardless of everything else, and it is inherent in the fact that they are ranged.

So any 'fixes' to the relative worth of being melee/ranged have to be looking at 'does this mean melee can clear a map faster while not improving a rangeds ability to clear a map'

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Sodomee wrote:

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mazul wrote:

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Sodomee wrote:

I was under the impression that melee builds actually deal more damage than ranged builds. My brother plays a wander and could not keep up with my cleave dps when we were leveling. He had to upgrade to a 6L to beat my 4L dps.

I'm sitting at 30k(6L) Cleave dps in town and I'm not even using full 20/20 gems yet. My swords are pretty nice for being on Anarchy, but they can get a lot better. With auras, I have 40k dps. When I am getting auras from the party + power and frenzy charges from conduit I hit well over 60k dps.

I also know of flicker strike builds breaking 100k dps easily. The only build that actually beats melee in dps is discharge and that isn't really huge AoE unless they use a Divinarius or two. Without AoE bonuses, Discharge is almost melee range.

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Melee needs survivability, not more dps. I have seen good tank builds, but there is no diversity. All you do is stack life, armour, and block(including spell block) to become a tank. If you are geared, you can break 25k dps with infernal blow and still tank everything(including Shrine Piety and Crema Boss).

Compare that to Shavroness-RF Freeze Pulser and you can laugh at your cleave damage.

The thing is that matters is damage*survivability and cleavers are inferior to the best ranged builds in that aspect. Damage alone is not of interest, the multiplication of the both is.

Freeze pulse is pure ele damage.

While the dps looks great on the tooltip, in reality it is inferior to phys dps. The reason for this is because resists reduce ele damage by a far greater amount than armour reduces phys damage.

A hell lot of mobs have 0% cold resistance. Any mob that doesn't say "resist/vulnerable to cold or elemental resist/vulnerable", has 0% cold resist.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

To all those who say that what melee needs is more survivability:

You can't directly control defensive parameters. All classes have access to the same defensive gear, and to the same passive nodes...

Yes, you can not balance melee with the passive tree or gear. It cant be done, because of the "everybody-can-take-everything" nature of the tree.

But saying that melee needs more offense and that clear speed will solve the disparity is ridiculous. Tell me how more offense will help, when going melee against say, mobs that shotgun you with 7 projectiles at once? :P

Melee fighting style needs a buff. In the above scenario for example, those 7 projectiles should have a chance to miss (even if they are spells), the closer to the mob you are. So if you are in close melee range, half of those projectiles should miss you. That would give melee an edge over ranged, and not a FU in the face like its now.

Or make those projectiles damage scale with distance - damage is at say 50% in close proximity and scale to 100% the farther away they travel. That would give players an incentive to go face to face with mobs and not just spam AoE from distance.

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mazul wrote:

A hell lot of mobs have 0% cold resistance. Any mob that doesn't say "resist/vulnerable to cold or elemental resist/vulnerable", has 0% cold resist.

This is not necessarily true from testing damage output and from the monster-specific text itself.

A monster that has negative resists will say "vulnerable to..." Some of those monsters that do not say "resists..." will still not have the "vulnerable to..." text when you curse them with ele weakness, indicating that their resists were higher than 0.

Try testing out a pure ele damage and a pure phys damage (per hit) on various monsters in the game. Throw out the crits because those distort the numbers. In merciless and maps, I think you'll see that phys damage will do more per hit even if the tooltip claims they do roughly the same damage per hit.

Monster armor in this game is not as high as monster resists, and not to mention that armour is not as effective a form of mitigation as resists anyway.

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mazul wrote:

A hell lot of mobs have 0% cold resistance. Any mob that doesn't say "resist/vulnerable to cold or elemental resist/vulnerable", has 0% cold resist.

Where is your source for this?

I'm pretty sure that nearly every monster in the game has varying resists. A monster that says "Resists Cold" is supposed to have maxed(75) cold resist. Also Cold Resist and Elemental Resist monsters are extremely common in maps. Rare monsters with Purity Aura are also very common. To top it off, +75 resist affixes are on maps.

Compare that to monster armour which is a very small amount. The only other damage reduction comes from the +30% physical resist affix on maps which is less than half of the elemental resist affixes.

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If resists weren't a big issue for casters, they wouldn't be using penetration support gems or curses. Have you seen any physical builds using vulnerability? They don't need the extra dps because monsters barely mitigate their damage.

The only real form of physical damage mitigation is block/evade and that varies based on monster type. There is a reason why EK was an overpowered spell.


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To add to what I've said, the highest dps RF freeze pulser I have seen was 11k with 5 projectiles and 3 frenzy charges. This was before the nerf. I just hit level 93 today on Anarchy and got another 3.2k dps from picking up "Finesse".

I am now at almost 44k dps phys cleave with hatred aura. I'm fairly certain that no FP build can top my kill speed in a 75+ map.

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Sodomee wrote:

I was under the impression that melee builds actually deal more damage than ranged builds. My brother plays a wander and could not keep up with my cleave dps when we were leveling. He had to upgrade to a 6L to beat my 4L dps.

I'm sitting at 30k(6L) Cleave dps in town and I'm not even using full 20/20 gems yet. My swords are pretty nice for being on Anarchy, but they can get a lot better. With auras, I have 40k dps. When I am getting auras from the party + power and frenzy charges from conduit I hit well over 60k dps.

I also know of flicker strike builds breaking 100k dps easily. The only build that actually beats melee in dps is discharge and that isn't really huge AoE unless they use a Divinarius or two. Without AoE bonuses, Discharge is almost melee range.

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Melee needs survivability, not more dps. I have seen good tank builds, but there is no diversity. All you do is stack life, armour, and block(including spell block) to become a tank. If you are geared, you can break 25k dps with infernal blow and still tank everything(including Shrine Piety and Crema Boss).

Just to touch on this.
Wander dps is very misleading due to shock stack on ST and shock stack + chain on AE.
My ele wander used to show something like ~2k+ on GMP tooltip or 4-5k with charges, but would 1 to 2 shot the entire screen.
His ST 4L (not using Maligaro's or TFists) would show something like 14k and 20k+ with charges.
But he'd down lvl 70 piety in less than 1.3 secs (~1.6 including curse time), post boss-curse nerf.

It was 4 attacks in the space of that time frame and the 4th, because it carried 3 shock stacks and culling strike, would about take her from half to dead.
I don't know what lvl 70 Piety's life is, but 1.3 secs is fkn huge dps.
Bear in mind that the fight ended as soon as optimum dps was achieved, too. So on higher life bosses it would be more (it wouldn't affect the shock stacking, that's almost a given because of crit and high ias, more so if using Tfist)