!Big Concern!: Ranged vs. Melee DPS in FPs & Ops

[Ashorian]

With melee-friendly i meant boss tactics/mechanics, melees apart from kick didn't have to move/avoid stuff/change targets.

 

If we talk about utilities then ok, ranged had way more than melee.But the encounters per-se were way easier for melees.

 

were the last two expansions for you tbc and wotlk? even in wotlk ranged had it easier, especially by the end of the expansion.

[Sraom]

I'd suggest for every boss that has a smash/cleave ability, give them some abilities that only target ranged players as well, like Saurfang and Festergut from WoW.

 

or give some abilities that are harder to avoid for ranged, like cone attack and etc.

[Perlexia]

Range mechanics are negligible, on almost all encounters you can outheal or simply not move and do maximum DPS. Nearly every mechanic for melee will result in immediate death if not avoided. Range is better in almost every encounter (pve) and some (pvp) in the game.

 

Exactly, right now the best setup would be just to stack ranged dps and just faceroll every encounter.

[Slomoshun]

Example 1:

 

Boarding Party HM Final boss

 

The Commander's missile puts melee DPS at a much greater disadvantage, due to the fact that they have to stand closer together and cant really spread out from each other to avoid the AE damage.

 

Example 2:

 

Khel Thrak (2nd boss Battle of Ilum)

 

Same thing as in example 1, with his shield probe ability. I am aware melee should avoid hitting him when he gets the buff, but ranged DPS dont really have to worry about ever taking that damage. Secondly, moving away from him when the adds spawn is another burden that Ranged DPS dont have to deal with, at all. This gives them an advantage on damage dealt as well.

 

Example 3:

 

Gharj (2nd Boss Eternity Vault)

 

His pounce ability is not that critical, but it still serves as an example of: Melee DPS have to eat dmg, while Ranged DPS do not. Because Ranged DPS do not have to run out, they have higher sustained DPS because of melee DPS travel time.

 

Example 4:

 

SOA (Final Boss Eternity Vault)

 

The very design of the fight (especially on middle & bottom platform) requires alot of running around and switching targets. Again, because of their longer travel time (even with current mobility abilties) gimp their DPS noticably. Additionally, the lightning balls are much more dangerous for melee DPS than for ranged DPS, due to the fact that they are forced to stand much closer together, while ranged can spread.

 

 

 

To alleviate this i can think of several solutions. I am aware that these bring along other balance issues in PVP. They are only suggestions, and there is more discussion required:

 

- Give melee dps higher DPS which should even out sustained DPS over a fight, because they cant DPS some bosses for the same duration than ranged can.

- Increase their mobility

- Give them some sort of AOE mitigation.

 

I'm just going to touch up on your boss fights you listed...

 

-Boarding Party Last Boss: If you do the strat where you pull the Chief out of range of the Commando your melee wont be bothered. When you kill the Chief and you go to kill the Commando everyone will take dmg, that's what defensive CD's and healers are for.

 

-Khel Thrak Second Boss Ilum: When his shield goes up he becomes immune, correct? That means he's immune to taunts too. So if your ranged just carelessly continue to DPS they can end up pealing the boss off the tank and he hurts non-tanks a lot.

 

-Gharj Second Boss EV: I can't believe you had the guts to bring this up ROFL. Ranged don't have to worry about anything? How about the fact that they get knocked back into lava and have to run through it and get back in position?

 

-SOA Last Boss EV: Ranged have to move around a lot too. Lightning Balls, Mind traps on the other side of the room. Granted melee do have to move a little more whats the big deal? The strat we use is we like to keep the melee on the boss as much as possible and let the ranged take care of mind traps. They're easy to kill and by the time a melee runs over to it it's already 3/4 of the way dead.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Slomoshun

[ddayyy]

There is no easy fix to this. Remember if you make the bosses do ranged aoe (i.e. just affect players far away from the boss) the ranged classes will just move in and fight him near the melee. The range do the same amount of damage close by the boss as far away, so it's no prob for them.

 

If the aoe is close by, the melee lose a massive amount of dps.

 

One solution here is to have all AOE with massive range ... so it affects both range and melee dps, to make it fair.

[Munx]

Tried to make a similar post in the past, and was meet with the same idiotic arguements we are seeing in this post.

 

"Oh, but other games also punished melee's more then ranged"

 

Etcetc..

 

other gamers also generally ended bellyup, or adapted, games such as wow which alot of you obviously love to use as a refrence, did just that, adapted.

 

This can and could have been made less noticeable by devs, but instead they have added alot of bosses that directly PUNISH melee's the boarding party boss being the most extreme.

 

SoA is another big big issue, because guees what, our gap closer has a cooldown timer, and the amount of mindwarps he spawn is absurd, and even then for some INSANE reason some drunk out of his mind developer out there decided, guees "Want to charge SoA when hes damage-able? HA, jokes on you, Immune to charge"

 

In the case of swtor it dosnt just look like they fail at coming up with ways of getting around this, but in certain cases it looks almost as if they purposely design theyr encounters to punish melee's.

 

And with the TIGHT TIGHT enrage timers bosses have atm, most teams simply cannot afford to lose the damage that they lose from avoiding various effects.

 

People keep saying that Melee / Marauder dps is so much higher sustained then other classes, its a absolutely fairytale, infact marauder dmg if anything is RNG, "crap activated my gore just as the boss is about to do his non avoidable aoe"

 

I am fine with Melee's requiring more skill to play then ranged, but with such requirements there also needs to be a payoff, or else its not a punishment just to the poor melee, but also his entire team.

[Perlexia]

I'm just going to touch up on your boss fights you listed...

 

-Boarding Party Last Boss: If you do the strat where you pull the Chief out of range of the Commando your melee wont be bothered. When you kill the Chief and you go to kill the Commando everyone will take dmg, that's what defensive CD's and healers are for.

 

-Khel Thrak Second Boss Ilum: When his shield goes up he becomes immune, correct? That means he's immune to taunts too. So if your ranged just carelessly continue to DPS they can end up pealing the boss off the tank and he hurts non-tanks a lot.

 

-Gharj Second Boss EV: I can't believe you had the guts to bring this up ROFL. Ranged don't have to worry about anything? How about the fact that they get knocked back into lava and have to run through it and get back in position?

 

-SOA Last Boss EV: Ranged have to move around a lot too. Lightning Balls, Mind traps on the other side of the room. Granted melee do have to move a little more whats the big deal? The strat we use is we like to keep the melee on the boss as much as possible and let the ranged take care of mind traps. They're easy to kill and by the time a melee runs over to it it's already 3/4 of the way dead.

 

I know all this. The point still stands: Why should it be harder for melee DPS? Sure, you can optimize your strat, but you still wont hit the DPS that you would have with all ranged DPS. Regarding gharj, i dont think you have experienced his pounce on nightmare, where it becomes an issue. The knockback is just a nuisance.

 

Additionally, in hard/nightmare, enrage timers also become an issue, and guess what, its noticably easier with all ranged. Very easy to notice with the gear levels right now.

[ddayyy]

Actually the best fix for this is quite simple.

 

Simply make the bosses who do close-range aoe dps weaker towards melee DPS.

 

That way melee DPS will do more dps to that boss than range, and it should balance out the overal damage they do, since the melee will have to be running out of the close range aoe while the ranged dps don't have that disability for that fight.

 

By doing it this way, you won't unbalance the game by simply making melee dps do more dps than ranged in all fights.

 

 

If the developers haven't thought of something like this, they haven't been thoroughly testing their encounters. Ranged shouldn't be superior to melee in any fights, unless there are an equal amount of fights where melee are superior. Otherwise you're asking for trouble, it's not like melee dps can respec to ranged at 50 ...

[HansoSoloo]

100% agree@TE.

 

Melees need to get buffed. Hope BioWare can adress this issue.

Edited January 5, 2012 by HansoSoloo

[Corran]

'm not sure what version of wow the pundits were playing, but up through cataclysm most wow raids heavily favored melee who - thanks to such a large portion of their damage being auto attack - had no problem moving around mechanics while still delivign 100% of their dps - or close to it. and even then melee has been the highest source of dps up until cata launched.

 

most fights were punishing to ranged who need to stand still and channel/cast abilities. very few allowed anyone to just sit there and spam or move very little. i've watched videos and i see people moving - often more than they need to - in this game.

 

i have a feeling two things will happen when the combat log is put in

 

1) sages/sorcs will parse as the highest dps out of all of the classes

 

2) raids will just stack consulars. shadow tanks, sage healers, sage dps.

 

 

nothing else neeed. shadow tanks are very good. sage healers have absurd aoe heals and with enough crit, sustainability. sage dps played properly has no force issues. sage dps is combining 2-3 dots with a crazy good channeled ability and many procs to allow cast time nukes to be instant and hit harder than normal. their dots hit harder than any other classes dots.

 

 

if bioware wants their game to be a place for competitive raiding they need to look beyond pvp when balancing their classes (which they didnt even do right - why is it scoundrels healing crit talent is 15% but operative is 30%? why is scoundrel flash grenade 90s cd but operative version is 30? why do imperials get a higher boost from the warzone buff t han republic)

[-Arcane-]

Totally agree OP

 

 

When progressing Nightmare mode bosses stacking ranged makes the job so much easier.

[Hammerskyne]

This always happens, sure, but it seems to be especially egregious in TOR. The mentioned ability in the battle for Illum stands out; why only have the shield burst hit melee? What possible problem is that ability solving that doesn't include the ability of ranged DPS to keep hitting him? Think about that, if the design is "Stop hitting this guy, give the fight a little extra time, push the enrage a little closer because of these gaps" why doesn't it hit ranged too?

[Sicknss]

'm not sure what version of wow the pundits were playing, but up through cataclysm most wow raids heavily favored melee who - thanks to such a large portion of their damage being auto attack - had no problem moving around mechanics while still delivign 100% of their dps - or close to it. and even then melee has been the highest source of dps up until cata launched.

 

I could count on one hand, mangled by fireworks, the number of times I've heard "looking for more melee..."

[RoyalAlkesh]

Part of the reason I think this issue isn't getting more attention is because of the lack of damage meters. At the moment, many raid leaders are bringing their most trusted DPS, regardless of Melee/Ranged. If they could actually quantify how much damage is being lost because they brought melee instead of ranged (and the subsequent benching of melee in decent progression guilds), I think you would see a much sharper spotlight brought to bear on this issue.

[JackMinn]

I cant say that I have done any hard mode FPs, however I am a jedi guardian DPS specced in full champion gear. My guild has done 16 man EV which I partook in as a dps role.

 

Its very clear to say that mdps is worse than rdps however with good play thats all fine and you can keep your dps on par or "not far behind" while avoiding the mechanics which hinder you such as aoe etc. The issue then came when facing the last boss of EV; Soa.

 

Between the 7 balls of lightning which spawn in 16 man its very hard for me as a mdps to do my job, I need to constantly watch the entire map from a zoomed out perspective while comboing, my combos require me to execute leaps which means my camera angle constantly changes. Thats all fine as well, then Mind Traps spawn around the encounter which need to be taken down, with a bit of map awarness I find these fast and leap to them and burn them down, I obviously cant leap back to the boss in case he uses a cleave and my leap puts me infront of him its a 1 shot kill more or less. However in the final stage at 25%, Soa gets a shield, which needs to be broken to hit damage. So my job in this case is to dodge all lightning, make sure mind traps are down, stay clear of the boss in case pillars fall... okay sounds doable with some micro... then you realize in Soa's vulnerable state YOU CANT LEAP TO HIM. For some reason the mechanic works such that your leaps are disabled... so let me get this straight, I need to make sure I keep people out of mind traps by killing them, I need to make sure to be out of melee range of the boss for the pillar to fall and make him vulnerable else I take 20k damage... but I cant leap to him during the 10s I have to DPS him.

 

Basically the encounter is built such that the last 25% of the boss fight is a dps race... except melee arent allowed to dps because they cant use their gap closer but they are NOT allowed in melee range untill hes vulnerable. The time it takes for me to run to Soa already means ive lost at least half of my damage if not more. This is a pathetic concept and was not thoroughly thought out at all and is one example of Bioware's complete incompetence with planning. At least make our gap closer usable for the love of god.

Edited January 6, 2012 by JackMinn

[Hessen]

It would help if MDPS were significantly less squishy than the ranged, but there's little difference between them when it comes to boss level damage. And the variety and usability of MDPS abilities vs RDPS doesn't give them any more of an advantage.

[McDaniels]

I dont see how you can even argue that melee DPS is as effective in raids as ranged OVERALL.

 

As the OP Mentioned, in 2/5 eternity vault fights melee dps suffers HUGELY from mechanics that are just built in to shaft us... On Gharj having to move out of melee range for pounces, and getting pushed back cuts my DPS severely.

 

And as the OP mentioned, on SOA melee dps again suffers significantly. In melee heavy raids lightning balls will constantly be coming through the center of the raid because all of the melee is stacked up, this means that people using target of target frequently and calling out the balls' targets needs to be spot on throughout the entire fight and that obviously takes significant effort from someone, additionally kiting balls when you're in melee range is difficult because its naturally heading towards the center of the raid if you're a melee class.

 

Melee needs to be super aware of lightning in the Soa fights, more so than ranged.

 

My DPS as a sentinel is probably about the same as the ranged classes averaged out, maybe a little lower than gunslinger but probably a little higher than sage or commando, but so many of the boss mechanics cut my dps so heavily that I'm not really a logical choice for raids because I don't have higher dps than other classes to compensate for the fact that i can't do damage for significant portions of the fight.

 

That said I'm one of the better geared players in my guild and luckily my class has the inspiration (heroism from WoW) buff that gives me another role in the raid.

 

But yeah, I don't know why Bioware decided to shaft melee so hard with multiple mechanics on all of these fights without giving them more dps to compensate.

 

WE DONT NEED MORE DPS that will mess up PvP balance... They just need to make mechanics that screw ranged as much as melee or don't screw anyone at all because when a mechanic just makes a specific type of character useless its not a working or well designed mechanic... Nobody wants to see 4 gunslinger + commando 8 mans... diversity ftw...

[ErnieVega]

I definitely know what you are talking about OP. However, i dont think that having melee dps makes the fights beyond reasonable difficulty (as far as i have seen). What i mean to say is that in my experience the fights are easier with ranged dps, and appropriately challenging with melee.

 

Not really sure what the answer would be, just buffing melee or nerfing ranged sounds too simple to be effective in my mind... im sure that would just throw the balance off elswhere.

[Requimo]

Most other games compensate by making melee dps greater than ranged dps. Not with a system already in place trying to equate the two under perfect situations.

 

But but then who will wipe the tears of countless ranged dps'?

[SunwindIon]

95% of the forum posters will troll this thread or add nothing of worth, SWTOR forums, among the worst in history.

 

give it a few months and all the whiners will be banned/left for something else, and it should be up to at least WoW standard.

[gingtastic]

All of this can be sorted by changing the way the encouters work not the classes. If the aeo is happening around the melee dps, change it and make it more random, targeting groups of ranged etc. Cleverer design of the encouters may well come in time?

[Teslamatic]

This really seems to be a concern for the boss design, I do not get all the people saying "every MMO has the same problem, l2p, reroll, etc.". If designers considered this during boss creation, there should be little need for class tweaking whatsoever. This can no doubt still be implemented, if enough people ask for it.

In order to make encounters tougher for ranged DPS:

 

all it takes is implementing abilities that target people who stay out of boss melee range, such as damaging roots for stationary people, long-range only boss attacks, stacking dots for people who stay at a long range too long, huge AoE that would hit outside of boss melee range, cast-slowing debuffs that would require the ranged periodocally to run to a point to lose them... there must be countless possible mechanics to choose from. It should be noted that healers may be hit as well, and most of the aforementioned abilities do require careful thinking in order not to make healing a nightmare.

 

Either all will have to hug the boss and run as the melees do, or the ranged will have to learn to deal with hindering mechanics similar to the melee. It is really a matter of boss design, nothing else.

 

Alternatively, if we cannot have bosses that are balanced regarding melee/ranged difficulty, we could at least have an equal share of bosses favouring one or the other DPS approach. I do play ranged btw, but this seems like a perfectly legimate request.

[CHRISGG]

SW:TOR's endgame is a mess of horrible design, bugs, etc. Don't expect much.

[Vid-szhite]

I think you say this, just because it's the nice thing to say about a raid or a game. I've seen this issue in another MMO(and im sure it happens in dozens). Make casters too weak and they feel like buff bots. . .make them too strong and you have all caster raids/epics.

 

Yep. Both these extremes happened in FFXI. At the outset, Ranged DPS was MILES above melee DPS, supposedly because they used resources for their abilities while melee did not. Rangers paid money for ammo, so they were god tier, while BLMs used mana with no inherent regeneration (you had to take a knee to recover MP, which took ages). Most raid groups used mainly them for their primary DPS, while melees stood around building TP so that the mages could further increase their damage by bursting off their skillchains--two weapon skills (limit breaks) used back to back to create warps in reality that vastly increased the damage of any same-typed spell timed to go off when the chain animation finished.

 

Parties made entirely of black mages were fast and easy because black mages had the sole monopoly on AoE damage, so they could drop dozens of EXP mobs at once. Eventually, that got nerfed so that more mobs = less damage, and mobs getting hit with spells in rapid succession would give that monster rapidly increasing magic resistance.

 

Given the fact that leveling in FFXI involved forming groups to set out to a random location to endlessly bash away at whatever overleveled mobs you could find, finding the best mob to get exp chains off of was left to min/maxers and theorycrafters, and the masses would follow that one formula to the end of time. In that regard, SE made a combination of errors with their third expansion that totally ruined BLMs completely. First, they created a continent where, with a very cheap NPC-acquired buff active, EXP gain was astronomical. So far so good. They placed, on this new continent, a very easily-killed but annoying type of monster that stole food effects, erased melees' TP at random (promoting weaponskill spam, preventing coordinated skillchains), and learned any spell you threw at it while having insane resistances against all magic. (This sounds intimidating--it was a freaking normal-sized Toucan).

 

Black mages were literally less than useless against these mobs. The chances of being fully resisted was very high, the most damage you could ever do with a 7-second cast time spell was no more than a SINGLE melee autoattack, and even then, that monster now knew your spell and would cast it at the tank, who would probably get one-shotted by it.

 

These annoying mobs were found to be the fastest way to level by far for everyone else, sadly, so melee DPS, tanks, healers, buffbots, and Rangers would rocket to max level, while BLMs died out altogether. The only way Black Mages could level was with full groups of other black mages in the middle of freaking nowhere, and with their abilities nerfed to hell, it was subpar and difficult to coordinate. One mistake and the entire group died, with no rez in sight for miles, and with a 10% max EXP loss and potential to level down on defeat. This lasted the entire final third of the leveling game, which required more experience points than all the previous levels combined. Oh, and experience gain never went up in FFXI, while experience TNL rose sharply after level 60. If you killed a monster that conned +3 or more, it gave you 200 experience points, didn't matter if you were level 1 or level 74. It was horrible.

 

The worst part of it was, BLMs were still useful endgame. They just had no way to get there because you were at the mercy of parties to do ANYTHING in FFXI, even leveling. Soloing didn't exist.

Edited January 6, 2012 by Vid-szhite

[Feshnak]

After doing Eternity Vault as infiltration shadow I have noticed what OP and several others have mentioned. My only gap closer is force speed on 30 sec cd which is what all consulars have (sages have it also and are ranged dps). With the reduced aoe damage take and the resilience which lets you resist various attacks the spec seemed to be ok at first, it's really hard to tell with no dps meter to show how everything compares.

 

Then, Soa, the Infernal One *sigh*. On this boss it becomes very clear how much melee dps gets gimped. I actually switched from infiltration to balance because you get couple instant cast spells with 30m range to cast while running. You still cant do good dps from outside melee range but it's a bit more flexible. I generally love playing melee and would play infiltration but currently it simply doesnt seem to work.