Idea for melee characters balance

I red the manifesto on melee balance, and I remember a good feature from Hellgate London.

Melee templars had aura scaling with the number of ennemis in the aura range.

Like
- adding 1% armor by ennemies in the aura
- adding life regeneration...
- adding resistances.


That can be a good way to add survivability for melee players.
Ranged chars can use it too, but adding armor for a glass canon that need to be surrounded by ennemies is not a good idea,

And using chain gem or passive to augment ennemis affected.
And this way can give a good reason to get better quality aura (to increase the range)


The fun fact with that kind of skill, is that sometime a character can be very resistant when surrounded with weak ennemies around him an tanking a boss, but very weak to a strong ennemi if he kill those weak ennemie too quickly.

After playing a Ranger Tank with evasion armor & shield & sword

I tried a melee evasion 2H sword.

And it's hard after act 1.
Because of evasion based on the system we have to take no more than 2 hits in a row get back wait a bit, and the 2H weapon able to kill a single enemy in 1 or 2 hit, it was really doable in act 1, but in act 2, start to be difficult, with more archers, more elementals damages and enemies with more life I think.

I see some reasons.

1- The server Lag, with more than 5 enemies the server is really unsynch with us, leading to swings into nothing, or worst hit by enemies far away.


2- The evasion system himself no hit or full hit. The pb is, it's really difficult to stack life, and if we stack some armor, we evade less and then take more hit. At distance range we can manage that because of the entropy reset, but at melee range, we get hit at least 1 or 2 times, and archers have good precision so hit easily so we need more evasion.

3- Gear dependent seems obvious but we need really good stuff, we need damage to get less time in close range or kill enemy before he can hit us. Lot of life to survive full damage hits. Lot of evasion or armor, and resistances... ranged characters can bypass some kind of protection by just moving around. In melee range it's quite impossible because of the server lag.

4- Energy shield are dependent of the armor (as far as I know) if you have a lot of armor the damage to the shield come after the armor mitigation. That's a problem with an evasion build, ES can't be used to really absorb damages without stacking a lot of ES boost.



Maybe it can be a way to give a better survivability to evasion builds, adding
Glancing blows in the game.

If an evasion roll fail, add a chance to do a glancing blow (reduct damage), scaling with the evasion value and enemy attack value and let's says reduce damage by 50% or more.


Acrobatics : give 20% chance to dodge, it's just another chance to take no damage, but if the roll pass we will be OS.

Iron reflex : transform evasion into armor. But without an armor/evasion build it's really hard to survive long if more than 10 enemies.



I think, that modifying Acrobatics to transform it into : giving your evade % into a chance to get 50% reduced damages if evasion roll fail.

Or adding a new keystone for something like that (the better is to gain a constant glancing

For ranged players it won't change really, because it's really easier for them to avoid all damages with high evasion if they get hit few times.


(I hope my english is understandable :) )