I want to get this posted before my forum time runs out.

One of the most frustrating things I have been running into is the badly broken melee range on many mobs, which totally negates the purpose of using crowd control abilities.

I understand the ranged blade-throw type abilities, and that isn't what I am talking about. I am talking about standard melee abilities like "Slap" (troll) or "Bite" (giant snake) which seem to have a greater than 10 meter range.

This is simply unrealistic. If you want to give mobs a ranged ability than do so. Make the snake animate a coiled spring bite, or have the troll pick up a rock when CC'd and throw it at you. This would at least introduce some aspect of actual SKILL into the gratuitous damage scaling.

But please, don't make lazy shortcuts like giving a troll's arms an imaginary 10 meter range just for the sake of a ranged ability with no animation, and no realistic contact with my character. It completely negates CC mechanics, removes any aspect of skill from game play, and just feels cheap.

In a game like this, one endeavors to feel immersed. For this to work the behavior of the NPC's you encounter has to be realistic in appearance and logical in the way the mechanics function. By giving a close-range ability a "magical mystery damage" component that you have neither bothered to take the time to animate nor given any thought to how it could possibly make practical sense, I feel we have instead taken a step back into some turn-based console game dimension where damage is scripted and linear, and doesn't take any of the game mechanics into account when applying itself.

What is the point of adding dodge roll to the mix if you are going to add mechanics with no visual cue, no animation, no ground telegraph, and no logical sense as to why it should be able to hit you from 10 meters away?

I would blame this on lag, but the NPC's in question were CC's by Restraining Prison (Sorcerer Dark Magic CC) at the time, so it isn't that they had moved into melee range and my client just hadn't updated visually. They were definitely 10 meters or more from me.

I will make a video of this tomorrow as I have simply no interest in logging back in tonight but seriously, this gimmicky damage scaling is just getting tedious combined with these sorts of what I consider to be cheap mechanics.

You guys can do better! I hope you revisit the two mobs specifically I have mentioned: The troll world boss in Deshan, and Veteran 2 giant snakes. There are many other examples of this, but melee range abilities for these two are definitely out of whack.