I always thought of melee chars more like a tank class while ranged are DPS. Melee is slow, steady and safe, while ranged is fast, high damage but squishy.
With access to leech and other mods unavailable to casters, and a higher base life why do melee chars complain about ranged being overpowered? Isn’t it offset by ranged being 1 teleport away from death at all times?
Anyone mind explaining why melee suck compared to ranged? Is it really more dangerous than playing any sorc?
That’s the traditional view of tanks and spank games, unfortunately D2 doesn’t really have that aspect. Everything it kyte and kill. Other games sure, your melee can hold agro while the casters sit back and cast spells that do all the damage.
Melee has to deal with many things to make it work, Attack Rating, mods like Crushing Blow, Deadly Strike, Open Wouds, Life Leech, Mana Leech etc. They have to worry about getting hit so you need high def, a good chance to block and damage reduction. For all that they get to hit 1 target at a time.
Casters don’t need any of that, they do AoE and sit and laugh at the melee guys.
The only time melee does better is the Ubers.
Underpowered until top top top end gear is acquired.
Diablo 2 is about clear speed, not tank and spank. You can build defensively and it is possible to build in a way that you will most likely never die, but you will also struggle to kill anything in a reasonable amount of time. There is just something unfun about being swarmed by 50 monsters and spending 5 minutes killing them.
Also, Melee requires heavy investment in top-tier gear to even have a chance at competing with casters wearing subpar gear.
The AR calculation makes them pretty bad in the begining. Melee can miss big time, while casters always hit.
Agree with this 1000%.
Casters are already have an advantage that they keep their opponents at distance. Melee doesn’t have that choice.
It’s not that melee is underpowered
It’s that it’s clunky in multiple ways
If it takes 10sec to kill a monster and 2sec to walk to it, then 85% of your time is spend killing
But if monsters die in 1hit that that’s 0.2sec but still have to walk 2sec… you spend 10x more time closing the gap than actually fighting
I would love some sort of chance to splash on some melee skills
Not on zeal/fury/kick, they already have a multiple target function
Stuff like vengeance should have a chance to cast spell on striking
So by end of game with gears it would kinda look like
Melee - lacks aoe, slower clear speed, higher single target damage against high hp enemies, higher survivability. Damage is most likely mixed physical/elemental so less affected by immunes and less physical immune creatures overall. Ultimately stronger at end game with optimized gear. Suffers early game-mid game
Ranged - Has aoe spells built into kit, has more innate mobility and safety due to the flexibility of attacking at range, has lower life points and less access to defensive tools like leech or curse on hit effects to reduce and recover from damage. Spells are more likely to be single element so are less effective in hell with immunes. Best at mid game but has clear disadvantages at end game.
Only if by ‘end game’ you are meaning bosses/Ubers. Casters are the best overall, no matter what. The only place they are not the best is the Ubers. End game is still full of places you can farm or kill with casters without any issue. Most bosses go down fast enough to a caster.
Lower life, defensive tools etc don’t matter if you aren’t getting hit, which is the case for most casters. On my trapper, I can open a door throw traps in the room, close the door and wait. Open the door again and things are dead, no need to expose myself to danger. On my zealot, I have to open the door find out that it’s a might enchanted extra fast boss pack of bone archers that I can’t leech from. Then I need to charge into them, not die in the process and Zeal away while sucking on heal pots.
Yes
/seventeen chars
Well, squishies are actually safer than melee, because squishies have high mobility, summons, or just ridiculous damage that blows everything to pieces instantly.
Melee in D2 is the most dangerous, lowest damage route you can go.
I wouldnt say underpowered (try to beat Smiter in Ubers), they are just good at things that hold little value - killing single targets in the game which is basically about killing maximum amount of mobs in minimum amount of time. Also fact that Blizzard pretty much removed any relevant mana cost for casters doesnt help.
But there’s no point in trying to farm Ubers. Torches are worth barely anything after the first few days of a new season. And ubers are the only thing melee is actually good at. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to farm keys with melee.
I think most melee builds I have made are on parity with my ranged ones. They do some things a bit slower, some things a bit faster. But I always use a bit of leach and tap on my life so IDK depends on build I would guess.
Melee builds are better for bosses, but would take more time to get in there. So in the end would be worst.
D2 doesn’t have endgame. Anything could be done between lvl 60-75, even ubers.
The game it’s an endless grind in the same regular zones. Some folks would try to level up to about 93 for better gamble and craft.
Other than that, would do the same task several times.
Sorc gets lvl 18 and Just start skipping content, others would use wands/staffs to do the same with 1/2-1/4 efficiency while some wouldn’t use and take like 10-30 times slower.
That, increases a lot the time spent and overall efficiency. Which mostly is what d2 are about for most folks.
Melee builds are fun, sometimes stronger in particular scenarios. But can’t compete with efficiency, making them bad choices or just restricted to a few farm zones and reliant on gear like enigma for it.
That’s why hammerdin often surpasses sorc on farms, with enigma. Even without stactic field.
Casters are faster and often have better overall damage per sec, even if some melee builds have better damage per hit couldn’t compete with the damage per sec from those.
If you build an smiter without open wounds and cb, most likely would lose against a sorc doing the same without stactic field on ubers.
Melee have some tools against bosses, but often takes too much time and are reliant on those tricks. While casters/ranged often has better time without much gear requirements.
The only viable way to solve it in my point of view, would be increasing the manacost, make energy a need(required for certain gear) and maybe some tweak either on animation duration or delay/cooldown in certain skills.
Would fixing the next hit always misses bug make a significant difference? I know the devs think it’s part of the D2 “flavor,” but this seems like it would boost melee and fix an annoying and long-standing bug.
hammerdins and javazons are excellent range attackers and they are far from squishy.
Is melee inferior compare to casters? can caster farm Ubers? and is any balance in it - that is the questions isn’t it? 
In simple terms yes they are. The damage out put is fine in some cases. The problem 8 find is they can’t really tank. The mercs are better at that.
In my other thread I was wondering what the defence stat was and to my surprise it was rubbish.
If it caused some damage reduction, block chance and resistant to curses the we are talking melee characters are fine.
Well all of the above IMHO.
I would say it’s more about your gear and the way you choose to farm than melee being underpowered.
If you are melee and using an enigma then you certainly have the same mobility as a caster, just not the aoe, but if it only takes you a split second to be on top of the next monster then there’s no walking time. Melee chars usually have plenty of run/walk speed as well and are probably better suited for going from rare pack to rare pack and quickly taking them down ignoring the trash mobs. There’s a good argument that can be made for how this is a better way to farm than doing full clears.
Casters also have to worry about a lot of immunes, while physical immunes seems to be fewer, and almost all melee builds have ways of beating those immunes. Either way there are places in the game that you just wouldn’t want to take a cold spec because of immunes, or fire or physical or magic etc etc. Even hammerdins have limits, how many times have you seen hammerdins farming act 2 tombs with all the magic immunes in there.
The point I’m trying to make I guess is that all builds have their strengths and weakness, It depends what you are trying to accomplish with your character be it magic finding, rushing, chaos/baal runs, ubers etc. That is why we have all the choices of characters, gear, and skill trees.
You can spend ages trying to perfectly balance games but in the end there’s always going to be some things that stand out as the best no matter how much tweaking you do, some skills/gear/characters are just popular.