Difference between melee and range builds.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

That has been the case in every ARPG since forever.

Well, i believe in Titan Quest melee CAN actually tank all the shit game throws on you...

And i dont see a real problems there - jusy nerf damage for ranged skills, that's all. Boom - suddenly melee is viable again because they deal 2-3 times more DPS.

I agree. Two things made certain melee builds superior to ranged in TQIT:
- They deal more damage
- They can melee everything (but are far from immortal)

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Sa_Re wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

i believe in Titan Quest melee CAN actually tank all the shit game throws on you...

Two things made certain melee builds superior to ranged in TQIT:
- They deal more damage
- They can melee everything (but are far from immortal)

you guys need to pick one, because tanking everything and immortality are the same thing.

I should point out here that short-range builds and tanky builds are NOT the same thing.

I'm an advocate of short-ranged builds because I think the risk-reward situation for getting really close to monsters when you go in for the kill can be really engaging play. I don't see why skills like that shouldn't be encouraged, allowing those types of builds to have equal or even superior clear speed to longer-ranged builds.

But I'm basically taking melee Assassin types here. For those types of builds, tankiness isn't a primary, it's a secondary clearspeed consideration. If you have a dangerous pack which is tough to approach without getting hit, a little defense means you can just get in there and blow 'em up, rather than having to dance around the pack until you get a good opportunity. Survivability is a timesaver, and clearspeed is still king.

Now, for the concept of the primarily tanky build, which doesn't care about clear speed: well, if this is what you want you are not in tube with the game's reward system at all. You get loot when you kill things. You get XP when you kill things. Kill. Not take a hit and survive it. Kill.

So when you guys talk about tanks, you're talking about straight-up silly builds which are not even remotely trying to be optimal. Unless you're ghostbusting in Zana maps or something; that's about the only true utility I see in tanking.

So going back to builds which actually matter, the killspeed based ones: tankiness can be a gameplay problem if it's too easy for killy builds to tank up. For those builds to have engaging play, kiting needs to be a consideration, rather than "lul immortal idgaf."

Near-immortality can also encourage botting in some situations; for example, every map should have a reasonable chance of eating 6+ deaths from even an absurdly tanky player, of that tanky player is playing like a buffoon and/or lazily coded robot.

And I think this last point is where some players get upset: the want a build so tanky that the chance of dying in a map while watching Netflix on another TV happens much less than twice per map. And as far as that goes, I don't really feel any sympathy.

Although, of course, I do wish that killy melee was a little better.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Sa_Re wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

i believe in Titan Quest melee CAN actually tank all the shit game throws on you...

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what is your point really?

you've made your theory that clearspeed is the king (it kind of is) but it is for completely different reasons and the melee and ranged issue discussed here boils down to the mere fact:


offscreening without being in risk of getting hit or melting entire screens with massive AOE has no drawback when playing ranged. melee players have to risk it (as they are close) and they have absolutely nothing in return for that.


compare the difficulty posed by Avatar of Thunder, Atziri, Uber, Olmec, Death and Taxes when playing ranged and melee.

in (very) short: bow characters currently make selecting other attack types an idiocy. their damage is obscene, their movement speed sick and they are pretty easy to gear on low, mid and high budget. and one of the most sick 2.1 builds is crit volt that can be setup for few exalts tops. all content capable. melee build that is all content capable costs an order of magnitude more (if only). wanders are also strong but they at least meet some hurdles there and there and are not as cheap

cutting bow damage in half - yes, 50% - might solve that. you want risky damage: play melee. want no risk: play archer but it might take a while.

the most amazing part is that most players would not have noticed this damage reduction (if not told) as one shot is still one shot isnt it?

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Sa_Re wrote:

I agree. Two things made certain melee builds superior to ranged in TQIT:
- They deal more damage
- They can melee everything (but are far from immortal)

Right, melee deals far more damage = he's still viable.
And there ARE actually "near-immortal" builds in TQIT, similar to Aegis Aurora builds in PoE - they dont even take damage when trash mobs hit them, but are still vulnerable to bosses.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Sa_Re wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

i believe in Titan Quest melee CAN actually tank all the shit game throws on you...

Two things made certain melee builds superior to ranged in TQIT:
- They deal more damage
- They can melee everything (but are far from immortal)

you guys need to pick one, because tanking everything and immortality are the same thing.

I should point out here that short-range builds and tanky builds are NOT the same thing.

I'm an advocate of short-ranged builds because I think the risk-reward situation for getting really close to monsters when you go in for the kill can be really engaging play. I don't see why skills like that shouldn't be encouraged, allowing those types of builds to have equal or even superior clear speed to longer-ranged builds.

I agree with you, actually. "Melee" and "Ranged" tags are quite misleading, cause there are "Melee" builds who can offscreen kill mobs, and "Ranged" builds that can hits only close targets.

So let's call all short-ranged builds "melee", even if they're casters, etc. And let's call all long-ranged builds "ranged", even if they're using Ground Slam, etc.

Immortal build indeed are a great incentive for botting, but why GGG then implements items like Aegis Aurora? It's clearly made for that "AFK-immortal-bots", because in average content (like Dried LAke) you're immortal with it.

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sidtherat wrote:

what is your point really?

you've made your theory that clearspeed is the king (it kind of is) but it is for completely different reasons and the melee and ranged issue discussed here boils down to the mere fact:

offscreening without being in risk of getting hit or melting entire screens with massive AOE has no drawback when playing ranged. melee players have to risk it (as they are close) and they have absolutely nothing in return for that.

compare the difficulty posed by Avatar of Thunder, Atziri, Uber, Olmec, Death and Taxes when playing ranged and melee.

in (very) short: bow characters currently make selecting other attack types an idiocy. their damage is obscene, their movement speed sick and they are pretty easy to gear on low, mid and high budget. and one of the most sick 2.1 builds is crit volt that can be setup for few exalts tops. all content capable. melee build that is all content capable costs an order of magnitude more (if only). wanders are also strong but they at least meet some hurdles there and there and are not as cheap

cutting bow damage in half - yes, 50% - might solve that. you want risky damage: play melee. want no risk: play archer but it might take a while.

the most amazing part is that most players would not have noticed this damage reduction (if not told) as one shot is still one shot isnt it?

And my point was that exactly. If playstyle A (bow) has higher range and AoE, than playstyle B (melee), then it should have proportionally lower DPS to even odds. Or have some other benefit. Or A should have other drawbacks...
Anyway, you CAN balance that out. IF you WANT to do this, of course. The question is - do GGG WANT to balance melee VS ranged?

Aegis does bother me.

Unique flasks don't bother me (other than my general disdain for unique items in general). It seems fair to me that you should be able to enact a string defense, but temporarily and not automatically.

Permanent flask uptime, on the other hand, bothers me. Especially Pathfinder.

The thing is you guys can discuss as much about stuff as you want. GGG wont do anything and never will. The meta now is the same as it was when spectral throw was new. Ranged can hardly die, does way more damage, has better aoe and runs faster. It is a simple win/lose situation that could be fixed in a hundred ways. What does it help if none of the good advice from this forum ever has any impact on decision making of GGG? Their devs obviously favour ranged by default since the beginning.



What I experienced since I logged in 2 days ago and today:
13 rot: walking behind, dealing no damage just watching and running.

then played with old friend:
2x his lvl 12 map: got one shotted 1x by something
then:
1x my lvl 11 map: got one shotted 1x by something

I logged off.

Today I wanted to give it another chance, played 1x lvl 10 map alone:
got one shotted 1x by something.



I keep up dual rumi's all the time


Other gear that I use:


Ye, its not perfect, I have barely been here for the past 18 months and nearly haven't traded at all, but I guess it is pretty close to what you want when playing an RT melee tank.
I got ~130%+ all res, 11% chaos res, 6k+ life. Got 90% Phys reduction with all the stuff being activated, some block and spell block with the flasks. It is not enough to play a lvl 10 map alone and not enough to participate by any means in any rotation.

So why discuss? The matter is clear. Good luck with infinite useless discussions anyways guys! I am gone and play better games! ^^

Not sure how you manage to do that, I often don't even manage to get my trapper killed and he has 3,7k Life, no armor, no endurance charges and just a bit of evasion. I simply use cwdt immortal call (it only holds about 1 sec but prevents short bursts like Tornado Shot) and thats it.

There are things that can oneshot me, but they are easy to avoid with Whirling Blades. I use Arctic Armor and Temp Chains/Blasphemy. And the thing I do is I just use whirling blades into the pack, use abyssal cry and whirl out and throw a pack in. I always get hit, but since all enemies in the pack hit shortly after each other the IC keeps the damage minimal, though I cannot do that against elemental damage, but it normally is easy enough to even whirl out before taking a single hit, since the chilled ground and temp chains slows everything down to basically nothing.

The thing with fighting in melee range is that it is far more dangerous, as a melee character you have to take care of attack animations. If you have Temp Chains and Chill enemies it is really easy but even without you can often use whirling blades to escape the attack of an enemy before he actually finishs it. This means in theory you can walk into a pack, attack and whirl back out without taking any damage.

And here is the issue with Melee that cannot actually be fixed (unless we are not speaking about real melee). Unless you have enough damage to kill all enemies with one hit you will lack clearspeed since you have to take that hit and run approach (ideally charging around the enemy not that much in and out). So here are the two scenarios we have that both are basically unacceptable:

1. Melees have the damage to do that which would basically make the game trivial for them. Without having to back up they would actually come close to ranged clear speed but it would make any encounter trivial for them that is basically an attrition war or allows free hits, since they deal so much damage in that time (Like Oversoul emerging etc.) And to actually achieve that Melees would have to deal about 3 - 4 times the current damage, otherwise the requirement to move to enemies and the occassional requirement to back up from a group and reengage would still make them slower.

2. Ranged would be reduced so far that they need to take as much time as melees do with backing out of fights. This however would mean that they would always get slaughtered when they encounter a regenerating enemy that has anything that stops escapes or when ranged chars are forced to fight in confined spaces (like Proximity shield).

This basically means if you say ranged should have less damage because they are ranged you have to ensure that they actually can fight at range. In recent patches exspecially parts of A4 the ability to actually be ranged was greatly diminished, you have small arenas like Kaom or Malachai or very mobile enemies like Daresso. Another good example is the Pit, imagine having to fight Bakthrul as a ranged char with only 1/3 of the current damage.

Of course you could end up with something between. But this would still mean that Melee would suck because they can't kill packs quick enough and have to back up and ranged would suck because they still die because they cannot get rid of adds quick enough.



GGG should actually do what they have already done. They just have to be a bit more careful and what I would actually like them to do is to make some reasoning behind the changes. The buffs to Tornado Shot totally look like "Someone in our team wanted to play a TS ranger next time and we wanted to make his experience really awesome". Tornado Shot was awesome and they made it awesomer. Giving reasons for changes would actually provide a basis for discussions. Riot Games actually does a really good job in explaining nerfs and buffs to champions and why they feel they are necessary. GGG should do the same, since it would actually help seeing where there are differences. Maybe they have numbers that show certain trends that are not very obvious to people here in the forum. We often look at the best and most cutting edge builds here, but sometimes there is a big grey mass of mediocre stuff out there we oversee and this can lead to some odd numbers. It should be fairly clear though that with cyclone being the only used melee skill in the top10 (and I don't want to know how many of those are CoC) that there is an issue. And it is not as if they are not buffing melee, they constantly buff it, but they also give new reasons to not play melee.

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And my point was that exactly. If playstyle A (bow) has higher range and AoE, than playstyle B (melee), then it should have proportionally lower DPS to even odds. Or have some other benefit. Or A should have other drawbacks...
Anyway, you CAN balance that out. IF you WANT to do this, of course. The question is - do GGG WANT to balance melee VS ranged?

They do want to balance it out. However there are a few issues they have:

1. Exspecially for Temp leagues attack based builds are often limited early on and with 2.0 there was a lot of hype around cyclone and thus a lot of use of it and they count that as melee. So 2.1 didn't see that many melee buffs (there still were a few).

2. It is so much easier to create mechanics that punish melees than it is to make mechanics that punish ranged chars. The labyrinth could actually be really beneficial to melees since these traps hurt ranged and melee alike and ranged chars often sacrifice some defenses because they usually don't need that much, maybe those traps change that a bit. But in general some less melee traps and some more punishing mechanics for ranged chars would even the odds a bit.

3. It is likely really hard for them to get data on some of the melee skills. They are not that often used, but without them being used it is hard to tell why. It is very likely that a change here ends in some completly unnecessary buffs that don't really help or create another imbalance. I assume the reason why they buffed Tornado Shot and nerfed Split Arrow was because Split Arrow did crowd out Tornado Shot as a bow skill. They didn't really compare it to Melee skills here, but to each other. That might also be why they nerfed Sweep, because it was dominant over other melee skills. To gather some data it would be interesting to play some Melee only leagues. The only skills allowed are those with a Melee tag, such leagues would not only be some fun change to the everyday league but also provide data that is likely necessary to actually assess where and when melees struggle and in which situations they actually perform well (which also happens).

4. They maybe noticed a low interest in melee playstyle. Likely something that happened in D3 as well with the DH basically being top end for most of RoS and part of classic until recently. If people enjoy a ranged playstyle more it is natural that they invest more ressources into making this playstyle better. That is likely the reason why we do not have buffering of skills which would be great for warcries or the ability to use them while attacking. They would have to invest ressources into such mechanics which they likely want to invest into playstyles players have more interest in.


As a rather small company it is totally reasonable that they focus on what players actually enjoy. This is likely also the reason why they are not bothering much with the old single target attacks. Heavy Strike, Burning Arrow, Glacial Hammer etc. have for long been neglected. They made some adjustments to them in numbers and released some jewels for them, but they basically require a complete overhaul to fit in the meta or you just replace them with new skills like Blast Rain, Ice Crash or Earthquake.

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And my point was that exactly. If playstyle A (bow) has higher range and AoE, than playstyle B (melee), then it should have proportionally lower DPS to even odds. Or have some other benefit. Or A should have other drawbacks...
Anyway, you CAN balance that out. IF you WANT to do this, of course. The question is - do GGG WANT to balance melee VS ranged?

No, actually you cannot balance it out. If we have two scenarios we always will have a clear win. Wide open area will always benefit the ranged char, since he can more easily hunt down stray enemies and evade attacks. A small tiny arena on the other hand benefits someone that fights at closed quarters, since the ranged char basically loses all his advantages. Right now there is a lack of situations that benefit melees, there are some and some where there is at least no disadvantage for them. But you can't make their strength the same in every situation, that is impossible you have to ensure that there are frightening situations for both playstyles. And GGG kinda did that but there are still a lot more melee unfriendly scenarios then there are scenarios that punished ranged chars.

Sure you can balance it out. I gave example already 2-3 years ago. But then whiners like in this thread who play even marauders with bows start to complain and create walls of text why ranged should stay as it is.

E.g. chain, gmp, lmp and probably even multistrike could have a reduced critical stike chance or damage multiplier on it so that going for the mass aoe has a clear dps disadvantage. They prefered to create legacy crit multiplier items instead and nerfed the crit dmg gem which many crit builds dont even utilize.


When I sayd one hitted, I mean visually one hitted within a fraction of a second. Probably it were still 2-4 hits every time from several enemies, which however visually appear as one single hit.

So another option is to give melee the ability to have more life and especially max resistances.


The way to even out spike dmg:
Increase basic damage of all enemies and reduce damage increase rolls of maps. Goal: Normal map rolls should get a bit harder to play and increased damage rolls should create a bit less spiking damage. Then harder map rolls get a bit more rewarding to play.

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Emphasy wrote:

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And my point was that exactly. If playstyle A (bow) has higher range and AoE, than playstyle B (melee), then it should have proportionally lower DPS to even odds. Or have some other benefit. Or A should have other drawbacks...
Anyway, you CAN balance that out. IF you WANT to do this, of course. The question is - do GGG WANT to balance melee VS ranged?

No, actually you cannot balance it out. If we have two scenarios we always will have a clear win. Wide open area will always benefit the ranged char, since he can more easily hunt down stray enemies and evade attacks. A small tiny arena on the other hand benefits someone that fights at closed quarters, since the ranged char basically loses all his advantages. Right now there is a lack of situations that benefit melees, there are some and some where there is at least no disadvantage for them. But you can't make their strength the same in every situation, that is impossible you have to ensure that there are frightening situations for both playstyles. And GGG kinda did that but there are still a lot more melee unfriendly scenarios then there are scenarios that punished ranged chars.

You CAN balance it. There's a major difference between "ranged chars have 10% higher clear speed" and "ranged chars have 200% higher clear speed". Former is acceptable while latter is a clear imbalance.

Learn math. If you have function f() and x>y means f(x)>f(y), then for any K f(x)>K>f(y) there exists z so K=f(z). That means, if x makes ranged OP and y makes melee OP, there should exist z which makes them even.

GGG make so poor tries to balance melee VS range that it's laughable sometimes. After testing new bow skills Shrapnel Shot and Blast Rain for 2 minutes each (with fresh character in new league), i was 100% sure that Srapnel Shot is a total bullshit, while Blast Rain is OP as fuck. Isnt it clear, that an AoE skill for 160-190% base damage (at 1-20 lvl) without serious drawback is OP? It's actually so powerful that is used as single-target skill... It took 2 minutes for me to realize that, but GGG couldnt find it out for 2 months of testing! Good job!
Same for new Bladefall spell. It takes just few minutes of testing to realize that this spell is OP and deals absurd damage with very little investments. While some other spells (Ice Spear, for example) are still useless.

And the last - if GGG really focus on what players enjoy - why they keep Exalt droprate so low? Why they dont implement Auction House? Why they dont make inventory 300% larger?
I dont think they care for players' wishes only. They do what they like themselves.

Hey guys, you've got it all wrong. Melee is actually pretty OP - I've been playing ranged Lightning Strike and everything is a breeze! Yup no more facetanking Atziri trio, I just dance away like a bow guy and DPS from safety.

Ezpeezee. Nothing touches me.

No this is NOT a ranged build! It is a melee build because the Lightning Strike gem says "Melee" on it.

So melee is still very good actually.

/sarcasm. #Yoji.