Melee vs Ranged - Possible Sollution

introducing buffs with arbitrary stacks and timers etc. reeks of WoW style band-aid fixes:
it makes the game more complex without adding any kind of fun, makes interface elements unnecessarily important and forces you to optimize your play style around timers.
On top of that it would also be a nightmare to balance given the different attack/crit rates with different weapons, skills, passive tree builds.


there are still plenty of ways left to improve melees before something like this should even be considered.

Dear Scrotie,

As you said you didn't manage to get to Merciless on any of your Melee chars, I will not comment your suggestions on how to 'fix' melee. It would resemble a blindman leading a blindman through a pedestrian crossing.

I noticed however an interesting pattern to your suggestions:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Four changes that would fix everything melee:

• Life Leech (and Mana Leech) supports changed to only work with physical attack damage; however, Life Gain on Hit (both support and from gear) changed to work with both non-attack hits and Ghost Reaver. (Damage effectiveness still applies, so Incinerate doesn't become OP.)
• Add a new skill that's pretty much Tempest Shield, except it requires dual-wielding and executes a free automatic basic attack when you block. Since it actually makes attacks, you'd be able to support it with Life Leech if you desire.
• Add a new keystone that allows you to wield two-handed axes, swords, and maces in one hand... but the drawback is "You can't use Spell, Totem, Trap or Mine skills." That means no more Curses or Auras for you either.
• Add a new item type. Whatever you call them, these would work like the jewels from Diablo 2; instead of socketing your items with active skills, you can socket them for passive stuff like +life.

You said you use Cleave in your races.

1) Beneficial for Cleave (two weapons - double LGoH, and one uses fast weapons for Cleave - even more life gained per second)
2) Beneficial for Cleave (free attack while wielding two weapons, and synergizes with 1))
3) Beneficial for Cleave (cleaving with 2h swords anyone? more AOE, more damage)
4) Beneficial for every build

As far as switching LL only to work with physical damage, why not just buff LGoH? Therefore slow-hitting or elemental builds are not screwed.

As far as your suggestion the LL should not apply to spell si concerned, well lets say this aint WoW and every party member gets hit for comparable amount of damage. There are no tanks here that would take the heat of casters, so everyone needs to be able to facetank.

"

Jackdaniels2377 wrote:

introducing buffs with arbitrary stacks and timers etc. reeks of WoW style band-aid fixes:
it makes the game more complex without adding any kind of fun, makes interface elements unnecessarily important and forces you to optimize your play style around timers.
On top of that it would also be a nightmare to balance given the different attack/crit rates with different weapons, skills, passive tree builds.


there are still plenty of ways left to improve melees before something like this should even be considered.

All my suggestion does is reward you for Attacking in melee.

If you find Attacking too complicated, I feel sorry for you.

"

entropus wrote:

Dear Scrotie,

As you said you didn't manage to get to Merciless on any of your Melee chars, I will not comment your suggestions on how to 'fix' melee. It would resemble a blindman leading a blindman through a pedestrian crossing.

I noticed however an interesting pattern to your suggestions:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Four changes that would fix everything melee:

• Life Leech (and Mana Leech) supports changed to only work with physical attack damage; however, Life Gain on Hit (both support and from gear) changed to work with both non-attack hits and Ghost Reaver. (Damage effectiveness still applies, so Incinerate doesn't become OP.)
• Add a new skill that's pretty much Tempest Shield, except it requires dual-wielding and executes a free automatic basic attack when you block. Since it actually makes attacks, you'd be able to support it with Life Leech if you desire.
• Add a new keystone that allows you to wield two-handed axes, swords, and maces in one hand... but the drawback is "You can't use Spell, Totem, Trap or Mine skills." That means no more Curses or Auras for you either.
• Add a new item type. Whatever you call them, these would work like the jewels from Diablo 2; instead of socketing your items with active skills, you can socket them for passive stuff like +life.

You said you use Cleave in your races.

1) Beneficial for Cleave (two weapons - double LGoH, and one uses fast weapons for Cleave - even more life gained per second)
2) Beneficial for Cleave (free attack while wielding two weapons, and synergizes with 1))
3) Beneficial for Cleave (cleaving with 2h swords anyone? more AOE, more damage)
4) Beneficial for every build

As far as switching LL only to work with physical damage, why not just buff LGoH? Therefore slow-hitting or elemental builds are not screwed.

Leech will always be better than life gain on hit, because LGoH is flat and LL is percentage-based, thus scales upwards beyond any balanced value LGoH could have.

In terms of Cleave, anyone who races at all knows that Cleave is the most OP skill in the game (with the sole exception of endgame) and desperately in need of a nerf. We need to give other melee skills a chance to compete, and I think the way to accomplish that is to buff melee in general (in particular non-Cleave dual-wield), since we were going to do that anyway to help melee, and then give Cleave some long-delayed justice.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

In terms of Cleave, anyone who races at all knows that Cleave is the most OP skill in the game (with the sole exception of endgame) and desperately in need of a nerf. We need to give other melee skills a chance to compete, and I think the way to accomplish that is to buff melee in general (in particular non-Cleave dual-wield),....

I second this !! For example dual daggers is really inferior ... the choice of skills for such a setup falls down on only 1 skill - dual strike.

Addendum (#6) for ES users, since ranged have a clear advantage regarding ES, due to the fact they will take hits alot less often, and thus the shield will be more consistently recharging.

On the other hand, melee is pretty much incapable of recharging the shield due to frequent hits.

As such, each of your melee hits should subtract a flat amount of seconds from the remaining Energy Shield Cooldown.
This amount would be based on your "attack time", or the "delay between attacks", so that there isn't a clear superiority for Energy Shield melee.

If your attacks have a 0.25 animation (4 hits per second), you reduce 0.25s per attack from your ES CD.
If your attacks have a 1.25 animation (0.8 hits per second), you reduce 1.25s per attack from your ES CD.

Bump

More.

You also need 20-25+ node investment just to get an acceptable life pool to be able to tank face on, that's not including IR/AR Nodes. ES on the otherhand, you can take 5-10 nodes and be anywhere above 6k ES depending on your gear.
It would help if AR didn't have such a diminishing return, it's like you're forced to stack so many life nodes if you want to go down that route.

That's why I said this in my suggestion.

"

Nurvus wrote:

This means in order to try and have the same chances to stay alive in melee, than ranged do from afar, you must invest alot more into survivability.