bosses, elite mobs, events and lack of trinnity

is the game a range weapon game?

The more I play in events, bosses, etc the more I see people attacking the boss from distance. Not sure what is the purpose of melee or close range weapons.

However, sometime in solo situations on personal story. the scenario wants you to play close range and penalize you if you are long range. It takes a bit to figure out sometimes.

is this a good thing?

Laziness.

Melee is perfectly viable in 99% of encounters, but it requires actually using blocks and evades/dodges whereas you can literally go AFK and just using a ranged auto-attack just fine.

World Bosses ppl prefer to go on cruise control w/ ranged. People who do melee however, have a hard time seeing tells with all the graphical spam.Open world content is fairly casual except with a few meta events such as HoT metas, and caters to "play your own way" without much repercussions.

The Trinity does exist, but for raiding, and to some extent. T4 Fractals. And 99, 100 CM fractals.