Caster have the advantage that the skill directly do damage and all you need is plus skill gear and the correct build using the correct synergies. Melee skills only increases damage by a percent on top of the weapon damage. This is inherently very gear dependent.
The only way out of this is to make melee skills add some damage directly just like caster skills and not just add percentage damage. This amount can be tuned. Otherwise it’s pratically impossible to start ladder with a melee character. The fact that you have to play caster first in order to farm gear just to play melee is a detriment and an inherent inbalance between the two.
This is a very big change and would need to be balanced with existing weapons. In general I think melee needs a major overhaul including hit chance and/or base weapond damage.
Well we have a nice experiment going with the Blade Fury sin. She gets + to damage, weapon damage and +% damage through synergies. We will see how that goes.
That’s also a lot of power creep, they would need to re-do the whole damage system.
its amazing every one of these posts, someone thinks they have this great unique idea and they are always about making the game easier and often ignoring the intent. i cant think of many if any games like this where melee chars arent weapon dependent moreso than casters.
I think caster vs melee itemisation balance needs to be addressed, but this can happen without radically changing the gear dependent nature of melee builds.
Types of gear/mods is one aspect, but the more severe part is the rarity of items associated with good melee gear compared to the much more common gear associated with casters.
I’ll try and show a side-by-side gear spec for say a top-tier hammerdin vs a bowazon later on to show you what I mean.
I think i had good suggestion in past. If you add passive + damage based on character level or for every point of strength, it will make melee chars stronger as they level up and then they can choose from more weapons also because weapon is not their only dmg source.
Ladder is a race in the same way an ultra-marathon is a “race”. So not really a race at all, more of an extended endurance test. And there are many different ways to win that test.
I dont agree, its a race. If not for first places, its race to have good items first to make profit by selling what you find while it has very high price.
It’s actually both. There’s time spent playing the game but also the efficiency of the time used, which is heavily dictated by which characters/builds you play with.
Which means either remove tele from the sorc completly or make it a 3-5 second cd and conc not working with hammer anymore, then I’d say we can somewhat look to balance things rightfully.
Technically, you’re right, it’s technically a race. In practice/reality through, it’s not. People generally don’t stop races to sleep, eat, do other things, mess around, etc. And never forget, the tortoise is the one who beats the hare. Slow and steady…
The current state of melee can be summarized as simply acquiring grief. (I know there are fury druid builds etc but this is true for most melee builds. I don’t see how much dumber it can really get.
It’s so ridiculous that the fastest way to level a barb is by war-crying. So the way to efficiently level the melee-est character is by turning him into a caster. Don’t we all agree there is something that is broken about this? The other way to level melee characters are holy fire paladin, ice/immolation arrow for amazon, all skills that add flat damage (albet elemental.) Is it really so revolutionary to have a skill that adds flat physical damage?
I mean there many ways to do this. For example, currently little used low level skills such as bash can get a flat physical damage boost. This way no matter what gear a barb has, he can bash his way through NM in reasonable time. You can still tune the math such that this is no where near the damage for late game builds with frenzy/whirlwind with grief. You can keep those late game skills can be only % damage increase with no flat physical damage if you worry about late game power creep.
I see a lot of flat out rejection without any offer of alternative when we all know there is an issue which is why a barbarian is running through NM shouting at mobs in the face like a maniac.