Newbie question, why are only melee classes viable?

[Naxos.2503]

21 minutes ago, Cuks.8241 said:

This is so not true in any organised group play. Yes in open world, but I don't think this thread is about open world at all. Most of the time you will stack. Running away means low dmg and death and annoyance for the group.

There are ranged weapons that are competitive with melee just fine. There are very few competitive all ranged rotations. Which pretty much means optimal rotation is in melee. So unless the encounter demands otherwise, you stack in melee. 

Works pretty well in WvW for me. I'm maining a fire Weaver there and the sheer amount of fire power helps a lot in Zerg v Zerg, provided I have a zerg of my own (the size matters little) as a distraction. 

It'll either end in me denying an area to the enemy zerg, causing them make a snap decision that will give my zerg an opportunity, or deal a massive amount of damage to a zerg already engaged in battle with my camp's zerg. Ever since they revamped Retal, it is Much more viable. I play pure glass cannon as well, filling the role of field artillery essentially. I'm a quarter through to Ultimate Dominator and made this character this year. I know that doesn't necessarily mean I solo kill, and in fact my build is close to useless in 1v1, but it works pretty good in crowds.

I realize you may mean for Raids and the like, and in that case, I'd agree, my build is very mediocre for these contents.

Edited September 18, 2021 by Naxos.2503

[Gehenna.3625]

4 hours ago, Keymaster.7362 said:

With this you force all classes to use the range weapons ... but in melee. And all melee weapons are useless.

 

Because highly buffed (range-)weapons + all the buffs  are simply broken.

How is that different from now forcing people to use melee weapons and all ranged weapons are useless?

 

But like I said, this whole buffs thing I never liked. It makes ranged weapons pointless and well. So tell me this...are raid bosses so static that they stay in place or will they follow players around? I mean if they were static then I get your point but otherwise the bosses will make sure that at least some of the group are in melee range. I mean I do get your point, but this is the problem with the stacking of buffs that you actively need to maintain.

 

 

[Cuks.8241]

1 minute ago, Naxos.2503 said:

Works pretty well in WvW for me. I'm maining a fire Weaver there and the sheer amount of fire power helps a lot in Zerg v Zerg, provided I have a zerg of my own (the size matters little) as a distraction. 

It'll either end in me denying an area to the enemy zerg, causing them make a snap decision that will give my zerg an opportunity, or deal a massive amount of damage to a zerg already engaged in battle with my camp's zerg. Ever since they revamped Retal, it is Much more viable. I play pure glass cannon as well, filling the role of field artillery essentially. I'm a quarter through to Ultimate Dominator and made this character this year. I know that doesn't necessarily mean I solo kill, and in fact my build is close to useless in 1v1, but it works pretty good in crowds.

Well it really depends on what kind of zergs. Random people clouding? Sure this works. An organised group on voice against another organised group on voice? You're probably completely irrelevant unless you're part of the coordination which means you're again stacking.

You might see big numbers but unless these are coordinated huge spikes of dmg preceded by a boon strip and possibly CC you're not breaking all that enemy zerg mitigation and all your big numbers are not even a tickle.

[yann.1946]

50 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

How is that different from now forcing people to use melee weapons and all ranged weapons are useless?

 

But people are not forced to use melee weapons (or more precise lots of builds use ranged weapons in their optimum setup

) 

50 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

But like I said, this whole buffs thing I never liked. It makes ranged weapons pointless and well. So tell me this...are raid bosses so static that they stay in place or will they follow players around? I mean if they were static then I get your point but otherwise the bosses will make sure that at least some of the group are in melee range. I mean I do get your point, but this is the problem with the stacking of buffs that you actively need to maintain.

 

 

We'll if bosses move ranged weapons become inherently more usefull

 

[Angel Hunter D.5037]

Ideally you would flow from melee to range and back and forth as needed, however classes without weapon swap don't get to do that. Catalyst variable range seems the best compromise for this so far, but more stuff like that would be nice. 

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Ranged & Melee

Some classes have passives which drastically enhance your damage-output, when attacking from long range. But the boon & heal-range + the stacking mostly ruin every advantage like that. Stacking is by design fool-proof and most groups do not want to take additional risks at all. In the early years, when those things were rather unknown, we used to run group content the 'usual' way. But compared to the stack-meta, it is just not efficient enough. 

Nowadays, even classes which utilize ranged-weapons in their builds, use them in melee range. A great example is the omni-potent Guardian which has a scepter+focus in many of its meta-builds. The scepter-skills are part of the rotation, but they almost never go into range. 

I honestly doubt that a change of boon&heal range would do the trick. The community is programmed on stacking nowadays. Personally I would like to use the old 'system', as it was a lot more fun and challenge. But I do not want to force other players on playing the game like that. Efficiency > all :S. 

Note: The bounty-system in Path of Fire and LW 4 has a mechanic called Phase-Shifted, which actually forces players to swap between melee and range. It does work, but you will always find a couple of players who just stick to melee-range. Because it is too much of a hassle to change the position for them. Even if it means dealing 0 damage for a few seconds. /shrug

-

Ascended & Legendary Gear

Once again it is the icing on the cake, not the entire cake. The stat-gain from exotic to ascended/legendary is neglectable. If you run with exotic gear and play your class well, you can easily outmatch others with ascended gear and less skill. It is basically for maxing out, when you have already reached the peak of your performance. The only place ascended gear sort-of matters are the Fractals of the Mists, due to the Agony Resistance system. 

tl&dr: exotic is fine!

If you want some easy starters however, focus on the Profession collections in Path of Fire, which result ascended weapons with very little effort. Those can be done in a few hours. Heart of Thorns are also possible, but those are locked behind a few rather nasty events. That is why I advise PoF. If you do not own LW episodes, you can use the guild-missions for some easy ascended trinkets (basic stats).

Those should allow you to step further into Fractals, if you intend to do that. 

Legendary Gear is endgame for people with too much money. But you can swap stats as you please? Yes. The meta-builds vary once in a blue moon. If you are really unlucky, you have to swap 1-3 trinkets with different stats after a ground-breaking patch. That does not justify a full set of legendary gear at all. Keep in mind you have 2 build & equipment templates by design. So you can always swap between two different builds & gear-sets anyway. If you run two good builds, the character is set. If you need more, use another character? GW2 is alt-character friendly. There is no need to stack everything on a single character like in FFXIV. 

- 

Loot

You are supposed to identify and salvage every piece of gear you obtain and either use the resulting materials for crafting or sell them for profit. [fast] has a great page full of money-making methods and also has explanations about how to utilize which drops.

 

[Omega.6801]

19 hours ago, Sigmoid.7082 said:

So just make GW2 like / closer to other games is the solution you are posturing here? This just sounds like you expected this game to play like all the others you have played, and when it doesn't it confuses you so you think "hey if this was like all the other games I have played it would make more sense".

 

There is no issue to solve here, besides your own expectations and bias for certain things.

 

You may or may not be completely new but it sounds like you need to spend more time understanding the game instead of jumping to "this isn't familiar and should be changed so it is"

This^^

I love threads of the form: "Hi, I'm new here and I see that X doesn't work the way I'm used to. So let me, a new player, tell you how to fix the game."

[Apocrisy.9514]

1 hour ago, lokh.2695 said:

This^^

I love threads of the form: "Hi, I'm new here and I see that X doesn't work the way I'm used to. So let me, a new player, tell you how to fix the game."

I get your point but no, the originally designed classes of Elementalist and Ranger were meant to employ range, the thing is that boss design was made in such a way, that it's pretty much mandatory to stack up for buffs, and there's too many bosses that allow you to just stay melee all the time.

I think according to what gameplay I've had so far, this is why there's more variety in PVP and WvW compared to Raiding. I can only raid in different flavours of "warrior", when in contrast I want to raid in the flavor of ranged. I hope that at least in EoD they introduce more bosses that work with ranged. I'm at fractal 18 and so far I have a feeling these can be done with almost any build, but I am a generally hardcore focused player, investing a lot of my free time into games, so I want to do endgame hardcore things, it's just a shame that for Raids its all melee, so I might end up in general not doing them, or just doing them once a week for some gold, but I'll definitely not enjoy it very much, as the game was meant to have hybrid systems, viability of both ranged and melee, but it ended up just being stack in melee range at boss.

So until Raiding can accomodate more than just one playstyle, I'll stick to WvW and PvP, maybe an occasional fractal.

[Asum.4960]

It's not just the boon and heal sharing either, it also largely comes down to boss control. 

Many bosses have switching aggro mechanics, teleport to furthest player mechanics, etc. (which I imagine many newer player's might not even know anymore, always having stacked) - and static bosses allow for the highest DPS uptime with ground effects and static AoE's. 

You don't want to lay down all your AoE's and then have the boss walk away and chase/teleport to someone who decided to RP a longbow ranger or long range caster. 

GW2 just doesn't have the same tank aggro mechanics as holy trinity games.

 

The reason players stack in group content is because just about every core game system tells them to (from boon share to healing to boss control), and reworking all contributing factors would require a massive game rework (the result of which may not necessarily be better or more fun). 

 

But as other's have mentioned, ranged weapons are by default superior to melee as they allow for increased DPS uptime, to balance that they often provide less Golem/Benchmark DPS - that doesn't mean they are useless in many Raid bosses, let alone the rest of the game though.

[Vayne.8563]

Only replying to the grind part of your post.

In every other game, you never stop grinding. You grind literally forever. IT takes longer to get ascended gear because A) you don't need it for most content and b) you don't need anything else ever. So it's okay if it takes longer.  You're grinding for it, because you want it fast. What's the difference if it takes a little longer. It's the last stop on your journey.

It might be faster to get X piece of gear in another game, but it's only temporary until you have to replace it. To me this is a lot better.

[Apocrisy.9514]

17 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

 

You don't want to lay down all your AoE's and then have the boss walk away and chase/teleport to someone who decided to RP a longbow ranger or long range caster. 

 

LMAO.

I merely guess that popcorn 300aoe auras and boons were in general implemented to make the game feel more action based, so you pick up things as you roll through them, instead of targeting team mates to buff (like classic WoW had blessing of whatever in paladins)

But seriously, to balance the raids for ranged alike maybe i t wouldn't even take much effort, I suppose the following would do:
1. Make aggro toughtness based all the time, as that attribute makes sense for this.
2. Make aoe boons in raid have 2000+ range, but only for that game mode. The balance in other gamemodes seems to be more in check, so there seems to be no need to overhaul the entire combat system, just the combat system in the area in which it doesn't work like designed (as an example, in FFXIV you have different skills in PVP, that games combat system still feels.. slow and laggy, but they addressed imbalance by changing skillsets only in one game mode)
3. Make being in melee in general more dangerous. There need to be un-dodgable attacks that force an occasional move out of melee circle, that would promote the "switching of melee and ranged spec" fluency that I think the game was aiming at, or at least largely advertising such a gameplay in general.
Or: Remove sharing boons in Raids, as every class has high self sufficiency in general.. though this one maybe seems more extreme.

But on the topic of just in general class balance. I would rather have only 1 or 2 playstyles per class and have that be balanced, than 5 options of playstyle and sometimes even not having the class viable for endgame because all 5 are sub par. I don't think adding specs creates balance, it just changes current meta, and the idea of being able to play any playstyle as any class is appealing but it's really hard to pull off balance wise.
All that said, not being in general an active player in the past, I am not sure how often things get balanced, are the balance patches fairly regular? like every 3-4 months? How long has scourge been imbalanced?

[Asum.4960]

14 minutes ago, Apocrisy.9514 said:

LMAO.

I merely guess that popcorn 300aoe auras and boons were in general implemented to make the game feel more action based, so you pick up things as you roll through them, instead of targeting team mates to buff (like classic WoW had blessing of whatever in paladins)

But seriously, to balance the raids for ranged alike maybe i t wouldn't even take much effort, I suppose the following would do:
1. Make aggro toughtness based all the time, as that attribute makes sense for this.
2. Make aoe boons in raid have 2000+ range, but only for that game mode. The balance in other gamemodes seems to be more in check, so there seems to be no need to overhaul the entire combat system, just the combat system in the area in which it doesn't work like designed (as an example, in FFXIV you have different skills in PVP, that games combat system still feels.. slow and laggy, but they addressed imbalance by changing skillsets only in one game mode)
3. Make being in melee in general more dangerous. There need to be un-dodgable attacks that force an occasional move out of melee circle, that would promote the "switching of melee and ranged spec" fluency that I think the game was aiming at, or at least largely advertising such a gameplay in general.
Or: Remove sharing boons in Raids, as every class has high self sufficiency in general.. though this one maybe seems more extreme.

But on the topic of just in general class balance. I would rather have only 1 or 2 playstyles per class and have that be balanced, than 5 options of playstyle and sometimes even not having the class viable for endgame because all 5 are sub par. I don't think adding specs creates balance, it just changes current meta, and the idea of being able to play any playstyle as any class is appealing but it's really hard to pull off balance wise.
All that said, not being in general an active player in the past, I am not sure how often things get balanced, are the balance patches fairly regular? like every 3-4 months? How long has scourge been imbalanced?

It's not even about how much or little effort it would take. 

Many people play GW2 because it is not another holy trinity tab target game like the rest, where you wait hours to find tanks and healers who have to do all the work while the DPS semi-afk at range (and yes, ofc that can be made more interesting too, but it's not what GW2 is designed and promised to do at it's core). 

 

By making everything Toughness tanking and increasing boon share radius, you would massively dumb down the game in terms of personal responsibility and movement. 

 

The fact that at any moment you can become the designated tank at for example Sloth and have to know how and where and when to move the boss, and many other's like that, down to the core gameplay of where to stack for boons while avoiding mechanics, when to apply boons before/after mechanics, etc. would simply become lost skill elements - in favour of a more passive and generic game just for the sake of allowing people to pew pew at range optimally. 

The amount of intricacies you'd delete from the game just with those two first lines of suggestions is immense. 

 

As for 3., such mechanics exist like on Gorseval. The powerlevel of healers is just so high that these mechanics go largely ignored these days.

Edited September 19, 2021 by Asum.4960

[Kondor.2904]

I don't get it, so you want to both pew pew the boss from a safe 1200 range and also contribute to the fight the same way melee's do, although they take way more risk having to deal with the encounter at close range ? Half of the meta builds in the game already incorporate ranged pressure in their kit, which allows them to have a more efficient dps uptime on certain encounters than those builds that are 100% melee.

Moreover, all the classes in the game either have a viable ranged weapon option, or straight up use it in the main meta builds, or have ranged aspects incorporated in their class mechanics. You have a pretty straight forward risk/efficiency trade-offs when choosing between melee and ranged options.

You can totally stay out of the boss range and pewpew him, but you have to accept the trade-off of having/providing less boons or less support from/to your group unless you build a specifically fully ranged comp. I don't get how that's not balanced.

[Apocrisy.9514]

16 minutes ago, Kondor.2904 said:

I don't get it, so you want to both pew pew the boss from a safe 1200 range and also contribute to the fight the same way melee's do, although they take way more risk having to deal with the encounter at close range ? 

No, like almost any other MMO, bosses should have mechanics both melee and range have to deal with. With no holy trinity, and no predictable aggro system, this is kind of different in GW2, it feels like Raids are not part of the same ecosystem for which the game was created, if the bosses aggroed only on toughness,  it would make entry much easaier, and difficulty could be set from motes, for example 3 or 4 dificulties, each increasing the rewards and challange. I mean.. if most buffs werent popcorn small AOE the playstyle might drastically change to allow for more freedom in the game modes, the game would feel more fluent and at the same time easier to learn

I watched a vid by MightyTeaPot titled difficulty in games and Guild Wars 2's biggest flaw

It puts the words to what I've been experiencing, hours upon hours of wiki and youtube surfing to understand some basics, one million currency systems and the like 😄

[Dante.1508]

Well Rangers are full blown ranged.. but both Gaurdians and Mesmers are both great options and Engineers Flamethrowers builds are amazing ranged.. I feel some necromancer builds are viable ranged as well.

Talking PvE i don't do anything else.

Edited September 19, 2021 by Dante.1508

[kharmin.7683]

I'm sure I'm wrong, but aren't buffs also granted to those within a squad, regardless of proximity?  Wouldn't ranged players, in a squad, also benefit from them?

[Klowdy.3126]

23 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

After nine years playing the game I have one character kitted out in ascended and that's only so they can do higher tier fractals. The other characters have done everything else just fine in exotics.

At the end of my first two weeks I doubt I had progressed past blues!

If you have trinkets/amulet/rings ascended, which I super easy to do, as long as you log on, that covers a huge chunk of stats. You'll still be behind, but it won't be that noticeable unless you start doing top end content.

[Sobx.1758]

23 hours ago, Apocrisy.9514 said:

but none are viable in raiding

That's not true, you seem to be confusing "viable" with "meta" or "optimal".

[Kaliwenda.3428]

2 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Only replying to the grind part of your post.

In every other game, you never stop grinding. You grind literally forever. IT takes longer to get ascended gear because A) you don't need it for most content and b) you don't need anything else ever. So it's okay if it takes longer.  You're grinding for it, because you want it fast. What's the difference if it takes a little longer. It's the last stop on your journey.

It might be faster to get X piece of gear in another game, but it's only temporary until you have to replace it. To me this is a lot better.

I agree. This is one of the main reasons that GW2 became my primary game. 

[Xanadrine.4352]

22 hours ago, Apocrisy.9514 said:

It would be great fun if raids could accomodate ranged classes is all.

Wont happen, anet barely has the manpower to put out this expansion, they have dropped raids completely for strikes. You can see there are no raid wings in EoD, its a shame they toyed with the idea of raiding and designed some really nice fights for 2 expansions then decided to chuck it all. There will be a good amount of the raiding community leaving, that will leave that legendary envoy set sitting there to rot because no one will be able to get them once the raiders have left. I like this game a lot, but things like this take a toll on me. You get a whole community dedicated to raiding for 2 expansions, then pull the rug out from under them. I have not ordered the xpack yet not sure I will. Its more than content being cut, its just seems the direction they are going is not my cup of tea, more melee im sick to death of melee. No variety of combat playstyle is getting old. 

Edited September 19, 2021 by Zuldari.3940

[Gehenna.3625]

17 hours ago, yann.1946 said:

 

But people are not forced to use melee weapons (or more precise lots of builds use ranged weapons in their optimum setup

) 

We'll if bosses move ranged weapons become inherently more usefull

 

The whole thing revolves around maintaining buffs, so you have to huddles together to benefit from the buffs, because their range is limited. So you are forced to huddle together and ranged weapons generally don't do enough damage to keep up with melee weapons. I think you can take it from here yourself.

[yann.1946]

2 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

The whole thing revolves around maintaining buffs, so you have to huddles together to benefit from the buffs, because their range is limited. So you are forced to huddle together and ranged weapons generally don't do enough damage to keep up with melee weapons. I think you can take it from here yourself.

I really want to be snarky, but i understand where confusion comes from.

Yes you want to hurdle up, and as their are melee characters those hurdles are at melee distance.

BUT quite a few bosses move around or force you to go at a distant making it so ranged weapons have an higher damage uptime then melee weapons. This is one of the reasons scourge is so good. 

Thus ranged weapons get advantages on specific bosses (mathiass is the easiest example).

 

Also some bosses have specific ranged strats (deimos had a complete one, and vg with running greens also used ranged weapons, etc..)

 

And this is on top of the fact that people can run suboptimal builds.

 

[Loules.8601]

1 hour ago, Zuldari.3940 said:

Wont happen, anet barely has the manpower to put out this expansion, they have dropped raids completely for strikes. You can see there are no raid wings in EoD, its a shame they toyed with the idea of raiding and designed some really nice fights for 2 expansions then decided to chuck it all.

Strikes = Raids, but with 1 boss. In many games we have similar raid-locations with only 1 boss. And strikes would better introduce raids for newcomers - which profitable for raid-community 

[Kondor.2904]

52 minutes ago, yann.1946 said:

I really want to be snarky, but i understand where confusion comes from.

Yes you want to hurdle up, and as their are melee characters those hurdles are at melee distance.

BUT quite a few bosses move around or force you to go at a distant making it so ranged weapons have an higher damage uptime then melee weapons. This is one of the reasons scourge is so good. 

Thus ranged weapons get advantages on specific bosses (mathiass is the easiest example).

 

Also some bosses have specific ranged strats (deimos had a complete one, and vg with running greens also used ranged weapons, etc..)

 

And this is on top of the fact that people can run suboptimal builds.

 

This.

Ranged in this game doesn't function in a way that you can just afk at 1200 ranged away from every single aoe and pew pew (I mean, you can do that, but your efficiency drops drastically), ranged comes into play when encounters provide mechanics where bosses move, where you have to move, where you are blinded/can't attack the boss or the boss is invuln at close range, and yadayada. And that's when you have an advantage as ranged over melee because your dps uptime is higher. 

Yes, you still have to stick to your group for boon support, which adds another layer of group coordination, along with encounter mechanics, but the boon range is in most cases rather forgiving and it's not like you have to stand within each others hitboxes unless a certain mechanic forces you to. 

I do agree that it might be not as intuitive, compared to other games. But asking for a rework that redesigns half of the game's encounters and combat mechanics is also quite unrealistic at this point. 

Edited September 19, 2021 by Kondor.2904

[Armen.1483]

On 9/18/2021 at 6:50 PM, Apocrisy.9514 said:

I see, so raids were added ad-hoc and it seems like they did not keep in mind the ranged much.
Well, it must be hard balancing skills to fit both PVE and PVP and not be too strong in one or the other (scourge) cough cough...

The two weeks grind is since I returned back to GW2, I purchased the game on april 2020, got it to 80 and stopped playing til now, so I'm not exactly really new, did unlock my masteries and got gliding, mounts etc.. but never did endgame content, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me, that it's all just melee-centric.
Still I must say that I do enjoy the PVP and WvW aspects, as they do seem to allow for a little bit of more freedom in builds and range and whatnot, but I wanted to get into raids and this is a bit of a bummer. I mean, it's still fun to a certain degree, but it's not what I like playing in my games.. might try a shortbow ranger as gw2metabattle says its "viable", though if I'd have to stack up with the rest of melee, i'm not sure if it'll feel any more satisfying other than maybe for the last boss of w4, which until now was the only raid I ever tried.

It would be great fun if raids could accomodate ranged classes is all.

First of all I would like to advise you against metabattle as that site is always outdated and has nothing to do with the META for high end pve content. If you are looking for serious raid builds look in snowcrows or even better look into luckynoobs website for fractals look for discretize.eu . I honestly wouldn't play shortbow condi ranger on Deimos even on Ranged Cheese strat, go at least for the power one.

Melee vs Randed. I am not going to mention other arguments that are obvious and have been noted in this post like boons etc... Let's talk about the mechanics. Here is the thing we don't have many raids sadly but most of them are designed around melee builds in mind. If it were possible to be out of range of the raid boss it would mean we would be out of danger and just aa the boss to death without any effort. For instance the last boss of w4 is kinda badly designed as a certain "ranged cheese strat" is possible there when a tank and a black kiter just kite the boss on one side letting the raid group to just press 1 with ranged classes and go make some coffee. It is cheap and not fun at all. The whole fight is about dodging the blacks and pizza attacks, what is the fun of just standing away of reach and autoattacking ? The whole idea of raiding is the challange it offers. I know of 3 other bosses that are trivialized like that, but I am not gonna mention it so ppl don't abuse it for "profit". However I should mention that there are a few bosses that are designed in a way that playing some ranged classes is necessary or at least handy to beat the boss. Examples are QTP pylon kiters, Qadim kiter,  The Broken King, or even destroying the orbs on gorseval while not vital, it is always handy having one ranger to pew pew a little to cleave those orbs before they become too big.

In the end I agree that having some more raids that are designed around ranged classes could be fun, but we would be happy to get any raid with the expansion, considering we haven't got any raids for a very long time already.