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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
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Melee Classes Survivability in Group PvP Needs Addressing
SmileGurney
Member, Alpha Two
...and I seem to be unable to find any acknowledgement this issue is being looked at. Based on our experience so far with class and pvp balance, stat stacking, past TTK issues, I'm frankly a bit concerned about the general problems we keep running into at this stage.
The first issue I see in the group setting is that only 3 out of 8 base class archetypes are melee centred, and 1 of those 3 is built around stealth. That means melee users are almost always outnumbered and out kited.
If you ever played MMOs with a decent grasp atm melee - range balance and compare them to Ashes will notice straight away that group pvp plays out differently. The line of contact between opposing groups is really limited, and usually just consists of a tank or few tanks fishing for easy chain pulls. Everyone else is just waiting for someone to get out of position so they can be punished for it, before they rotate and wait for major cooldowns. Coming from something like Return of Reckoning or even GW2 WvW, this feels really weird and undercooked on the fundamental level.
From the competitive pvp perspective it got so bad that any guild interested in pvp is quite likely to refuse you if you want to run a fighter or rogue in large pvp setting.
This isn't healthy for the game, pvp balance or gameplay variety.
Melee class survivability in large group setting seems to be the core issue. For obvious reasons melee classes cannot just be granted flat damage mitigation buffs, as this would negatively affect balance in 1v1, and small group pvp settings.
Potential solutions have been discussed multiple times across different social media channel.
I personally like the most the idea of introduction of passive talents which conditionally increase melee class physical and magic mitigations. This would work as a multiplayer, so basically 1 enemy player would increase mitigations by 5%, but then 5 in certain range around the player would increase it by 5% * x, where x is the number of enemy players in the engagement range (lets say 30 meters). I'm sure a lot of us have seen these ideas in other games, not even necessarily just MMOs. Numbers here are obviously nothing else but placeholders. This stuff should be crunched and balanced by the actual game designers.
Other approach I have liked would be far more time intensive as it would require melee archetypes to get far more ranged based abilities.. So these classes can play more of melee/ranged skirmisher role, but with all this ranged damage pressure I doubt this would be enough by itself.
It's just sad looking at fighters and tanks basically auto-attacking in group fights and waiting for that one perfect opening.
The first issue I see in the group setting is that only 3 out of 8 base class archetypes are melee centred, and 1 of those 3 is built around stealth. That means melee users are almost always outnumbered and out kited.
If you ever played MMOs with a decent grasp atm melee - range balance and compare them to Ashes will notice straight away that group pvp plays out differently. The line of contact between opposing groups is really limited, and usually just consists of a tank or few tanks fishing for easy chain pulls. Everyone else is just waiting for someone to get out of position so they can be punished for it, before they rotate and wait for major cooldowns. Coming from something like Return of Reckoning or even GW2 WvW, this feels really weird and undercooked on the fundamental level.
From the competitive pvp perspective it got so bad that any guild interested in pvp is quite likely to refuse you if you want to run a fighter or rogue in large pvp setting.
This isn't healthy for the game, pvp balance or gameplay variety.
Melee class survivability in large group setting seems to be the core issue. For obvious reasons melee classes cannot just be granted flat damage mitigation buffs, as this would negatively affect balance in 1v1, and small group pvp settings.
Potential solutions have been discussed multiple times across different social media channel.
I personally like the most the idea of introduction of passive talents which conditionally increase melee class physical and magic mitigations. This would work as a multiplayer, so basically 1 enemy player would increase mitigations by 5%, but then 5 in certain range around the player would increase it by 5% * x, where x is the number of enemy players in the engagement range (lets say 30 meters). I'm sure a lot of us have seen these ideas in other games, not even necessarily just MMOs. Numbers here are obviously nothing else but placeholders. This stuff should be crunched and balanced by the actual game designers.
Other approach I have liked would be far more time intensive as it would require melee archetypes to get far more ranged based abilities.. So these classes can play more of melee/ranged skirmisher role, but with all this ranged damage pressure I doubt this would be enough by itself.
It's just sad looking at fighters and tanks basically auto-attacking in group fights and waiting for that one perfect opening.
My lungs taste the air of Time,
Blown past falling sands…
Blown past falling sands…
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Comments
I've never seen a game that comes even close to having an even spread of its classes.
If there are issues with melee as you are stating (I have no reason to assume there are, or to assume there are not), starting off your post with such a poor comment does not help your case.
Fighter - melee class
Rogue - melee (but stealth based) class
Ranger - ranged class
Mage - ranged class
Bard - ranged class
Cleric - ranged class
Summoner - we dont' know, but as its a pet magic class, its likely going to be another ranged class
That's 8. Which part here is misleading?
Blown past falling sands…
You are missing the fact that there isn't an equal number of players playing each class.
If you want to make comments like You need to be talking about how many of each character type (ranged vs melee, in this csse) is actually being played, not how many options there are for each.
There could be 100 ranged options with 1 player playing each option, and 1 melee option with 100 people playing it. This would be the same amount of melee vs ranged, even though there is only 1% of the melee class options with this hypothetical than there are ranged options.
Since generally players look first at the type of gameplay they want (tank, healer, caster DPS, melee DPS etc) as their primary consideration for selecting a class, the spread of melee vs casters is a reflection of the playerbase.
The annoying thing is that you may well have a valid general notion here, you are just introducing it with a false premise - as opposed to many other posters that post nonsense introduced with a false premise.