Melee should out dps Range - Pve 101

Wifeaggro13 · July 2014

robertlive2014 wrote: »

The PvE in this game follows the trinity design, am I right? You have Tanks, Healers, and Damage (DPS) roles. If you run around solo, you will need a balanced build to succeed, neither 100% melee, or 100% ranged. As soon as you party up, you will need to designate roles and specialize in order to succeed. Tanks are required to do almost no damage for a party with good composition to succeed. Almost without fail, Tanks are in melee range. Healers are usually positioned just outside of melee range, but close enough for AOE heals to heal the tank. Ranged DPS will have the benefit of requiring almost no defense, and thus, often achieve the highest DPS. The Risk/Reward is shared by the party, not the individual.

Some classes have high damage skills that require melee or near melee range, such as the Dragonknight (DK) skills Searing Strike, Fiery breath, and Lava Whip. These skill have morphs for either more damage, or more sustain, depending on the role the player is trying to fill (DPS or Tank). As a result of requiring melee range for these high damage skills, the Dragonknight class also has some good "tanky" skills, which can also benefit the role of Tank. The Nightblade, Templar, and Sorcerer classes seem to have their distinct thematic balance, such as stealth, healing, and escape.

Weapon choice is secondary to class choice. For example, my DK DPS rotation uses absolutely no weapon skills beyond light and heavy attacks, all skills come from the DK class trees and the guild trees. I use a Fire Staff because DKs have a lot of synergy with fire damage. So I disagree that 2hand and Duel Wield should be out dpsing Destro and Resto staff. My DK can do the same high DPS with any weapon in the game. Many Nightblades use Resto staff for max DPS only because of a Resto passive that gives 10% damage bonus for staying at full health, something only possible in a coordinated party, their DPS comes from class skills. "2hand and Duel Wield" are not classes, and you don't balance a game around weapon skills. Some weapon skills are just not as good in certain situations. You don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

There is no trinity in this game. Its DPS with a taunt DPS with AOE DPS and Heals with DPS. And all of it ranged casting except a few fights require SNS. I suspect your not doing any End game yet as you have not seen the huge disparity between Melee weapons and Staves. The gap is massive its not small their is no balance in end game

MasterSpatula · July 2014

Commas. Please use them.

poodlemasterb16_ESO · July 2014

ferzalrwb17_ESO wrote: »

someuser wrote: »

Don't forget, most ranged options include light/medium armor which has to also be taken into account.

If melee is to be buffed, I'm fine with that (they do need it). But if you buff it, you also have to take into consideration survivability or the pendulum just swings to the other side.

Food for thought

If that food is my dinner I'm going to be hungry.

People are tanking with light armour in this game because armour is almost irrelevant as a stat on its own. It's all about the passives.

Currently a skirtwearer can take just as much of a pounding as a heavy whilst dishing out twice the dps. This makes heavy armour totally pointless. It may as well not be in the game at all in its current form as all it does is trick some players into gimping themselves.

But I can't see an easy way to alter the mechanics here so that survivability can be increased whilst dps is decreased - that is, there is no way at all to create a traditional tank and no way to make heavy armour matter. The game was designed by skirtwearers for skirtwearers. The entire game is based around that - from the mechanics of the dungeons to the fields of Cyrodiil.

I have fun using medium armour but my build is gimped. That's the price I'm willing to pay for the fun but I know I'll always be disadvantaged in PvP (which I can live with) and fairly useless in dungeons (which is a shame).

It's not so much just the armor types anyway, outside of RP.

I can wear, as a fragile, glass canon either heavy chest and pants, or just swap out jewelery. I swap out jewelery these days but spent a lot of time with heavy cheat and pants, looks cool among other things. There is no difference except jewelery slots are used up.

So I have for the vampire witch, jewelery with either 450 flame resist or 190 armor. My enchanter is coming along, in a paint drying kind of a way. I can change that around as needed and I doubt I'll go back to heavy at this point in the game.

My DK is completely different. Even he needs lots of magic regen to do well but there is so much he can survive that my witch could not. I know less about him though, a hoot at level 21.

Samadhi · July 2014

Soliss wrote: »

DeLindsay wrote: »

Mykah wrote: »

Melee should out dps Range - Pve 101

Nope that's just your OPINION and not remotely the way is should or has to be to make sense. If anything ZoS IS trying to bring Stamina based builds in line with Magicka based builds for DPS. It's a good start (the 1.3 set bonus changes) and only time will tell if they need to do even more. BTW, have you bothered to look at the PTS changes to soft caps? Like where Physical damage cap is WAY higher than Spell damage cap. It's like 185 compared to 131 or something close to that, which in itself is a soft nerf for Magicka DPS builds.

Unfortunately from the damage calculators that I have seen the contribution from Weapon Damage is about half of what Spell Damage contributes

For example:

Magicka based Class skill damage:
( ([Magicka] / 20) + ( [Spell Damage] ) ) * [Skill Coefficient]

Stamina based Weapon skill damage
( ([Stamina] / 20) + ( [Weapon Damage] / 1.9 ) ) * [Skill Coefficient]

Skill Coefficient is an individual number for each skill that determines how the skill scales for damage.

So 185 Weapon Damage will contribute about what 97 Spell Damage would.

Which probably stems from Weapon Damage scaling more easily than spell damage.

robertlive2014 · July 2014

Wifeaggro13 wrote: »

There is no trinity in this game. Its DPS with a taunt DPS with AOE DPS and Heals with DPS. And all of it ranged casting except a few fights require SNS. I suspect your not doing any End game yet as you have not seen the huge disparity between Melee weapons and Staves. The gap is massive its not small their is no balance in end game

Dude, I'm in a top raiding guild. I get undaunted coffers every week for being on the leader board. Please read what I wrote a little more carefully as I said nothing about end game, and the OP said nothing about end game. OP said "Destro/Resto out dpses 2h/DW" and I said my melee range class skills out DPS any staff skills, ranged or otherwise.

Kiljaz · July 2014

Khajit NB with 2H can uppercut from stealth for 2.4k lol... That's one seriously underpowered melee skill.

Rodario · July 2014

Mykah wrote: »

Duel Wield

Dual Wield.

This is bugging me almost as much as "of" instead of "have", or the general "their", "there" and "they're" confusion.

R0M2K · July 2014

Agree with OP... Its about time.

Vahrokh · July 2014

Mykah wrote: »

Risk vs Reward. Pretty simple stuff here. In every situation 2hand and Duel Wield should be out dpsing Destro and Resto staff. Why? Because they require melee range to land attacks.

A couple of MMOs have tried that approach because it sounds fair indeed, and they failed hard.

ANY disparity in DPS results in the loser class to get automatically excluded from any competitive end game.

Look at what happens right now with certain classes and builds being sub-par: they get excluded. If you just "flip" who is sub par, you just change who will be excluded.

In ancient times you could go your route, bosses were still "classic".
These days, actually since several years, encounters are:

- dynamic, that is nobody is "safe". Roaming adds, damage "holes" in the ground etc. hit everyone.

- DPS race: what once was rare now is common, bosses tend to come with soft and hard rage times, therefore every progression guild I have been in the last 13 years left out the under-performing classes expecially on new encounters. If "funny gnome with pink beard" has the highest DPS, then, be it hard / risky or not, they SHALL bring in those funny gnomes and leave the others out. Because in my long hard core raiding history it's always been possible to find players for any role (including melee) skilled enough to survive the encounter challenge.
On the other side, if you basically cap another class to perform worse (that is, your plan), that other class will just sit out. And then the forums will become very, very hot.

maxilaub17_ESO wrote: »

And you forgot to add the Cyrodiil designed Zerg style PvP requires melee to stand in the thick of the zerg (and their damage). They (melee) should at least be able to dish out more damage in the short time they will survive up there.

In a well made game, being a ranged class in PvP is irrelevant, other classes get either gap closers or stealth + high backstab damage.
If ESO is not up to high PvP standards enough to support this, then those have to be improved, not classes be made worse.