Test Discussion GU46: Rage Advanced Mechanic Update

The Rage specializations were backwards and will be updated to match what is currently listed in the UI. The Fire trees appear to be working correctly.

1. They don't want to give rage another range combo ability so we can have two.
2. They aren't even considering to increase our survivability in the dps stance.
3. They think it's easier to pick every piece of content apart and tune it down.
4. You can be 100% sure they will never make melee rage the strongest.
5. And last but not least this thread was a waste of our time and effort.

you got that right my friend you took the words out of my mouth they came here to say there are not going to do a thing ...better if they would ignore it like they did with earth

Have you taken a look at the precision versions of Violence, Lacerate, and Galling Eruption?

The base damage is so much lower that it appears they were balanced around the fact that Bloodlust used to grant 45% precision. With the decrease to 15%, a 26% boost to the precision versions would make it so that combined with the 15% precision from Bloodlust it would be 144.90% of the current damage, just under what they were with the old Bloodlust.

To add a little to the post I made earlier, some boss attacks are so large that they will still one shot you even if you've successfully rolled out of the way. Maybe there could be more of a gradient added to the boss AoE that extend to mid range or larger so that if you roll out of melee range, you just take damage instead of being one shot. I'm mainly thinking of the staff slam that the minion boss does in lab, it's such a large aoe that sometimes a dps at mid range is killed from it. I'm not sure if you have the tech in game to really do that, though.

Some attacks can probably be nullified by running fortified block in your neck mod instead of esc might, assuming you adjust the attacks so that you have enough time to block out.

Oh, could you please add the ability to block cancel the last part of Dreadful Blast, I don't think that Dreadful Explosion can be block canceled and, if someone chooses to run DB in a melee loadout for the BB, I could see the fact that you can't block cancel it being problematic unless you are maybe running a consumable to clip out of the combo. This might not be that big a deal since if you run DB in melee you're at risk for eating a counter because of the interrupt vulnerability that DB has on it but allowing it to be block canceled will at least make DB more of a contender for a slot on a melee loadout than it is currently.

you BARELY do more damage, you can compete with quantum but then again, quantum is RANGED and out the sight of the danger that melee DPSing has. what good is the damage if you're dead?

as it stands now mepps, whether you like it or not, there is no reward for this high risk high reward system... you said it yourself, you can't stand back and hit your rotation without risk or fear - well, actually, you can, but you will do LESS damage.

unless you buff the melee damage back to something near what it previously was, it will not be worth it. it should be doing more damage than quantum does at range, atleast.

You're efforts are truly commendable my friend, but do you really think they are going to pick apart every piece of content and tune it down so we could properly melee dps with rage!? They wont do much if they are going to tune down only the content from the last dlc. What about the new players and the content appropriate to their combat rating. Will they be able to melee dps with rage? No of course because the whole game is based on doing damage from a safe distance.

What gives rage the possibility to dps from a close distance...hmm let's see...two healing buffs which expire after 6 seconds and also instantly kill you if the bosses don't do it first. Without those buffs rage is just like any other power set with no means of surviving at close range. Are those buffs good enough to keep you alive at close range you wonder? Well my kind sir nobody needs to be a genius to figure that one out.

If the developers really think that by tuning down a couple of bosses here and there will be enough for rage to have better chances at doing damage from close range, then i cannot stress enough how wrong they are. By doing this you will solve absolutely nothing if you're not even going to consider some minor changes to our healing buffs. Even if you're going through with this in high end content rage dps will always need to have one of the healing buffs active to be able to survive, unless of course you're going to tune down the content so hard till the point where every power set could possibly melee dps.

At least for the sake of everyone who took their time to help improve this power, please consider these minor changes to Relentless Anger and Severe Punishment. Or don't and leave Rage just a tanking power that's not even half of what Hard Light is.

- increase the healing buffs cooldown and duration to 12 seconds so we could actually do some damage before having to activate them again. Leave them as they are in pvp, we don't want to cause an outrage.
- give us some sort of immunity to rage crash if we are in savage state and the healing buffs are active. Why...because if i need to block a lethal attack and cancel my rage crash at the same time i will die anyway without having any choice.
- give Relentless Anger +10% control resistance and +10% defense increase because as you know crowd control effects in this game happen so freaking often and it's very counterproductive for the dps.

No matter how you look at it a rage dps will need its friendly neighborhood healing buff to increase its chances of survival and to take advantage of its cool mechanic not only in tank stance but also in dps stance. I know it probably wont happen you guys pretty much made that crystal clear but i tried it anyway for the sake of all rage fans out there.

Aglorenzini asked me to post this.

So the problem is to survive as well as being able to deal damage.
What it there was some sort of temprary health or defense buff based on the damage you deal with a few specific power (these powers being the melee ones only)? Like a buff that stacks but for 3 seconds or something like that.
You wouldn't be able to roll back and start using range and still have this buff because it doesn't last long enough, but as long as you keep attacking with melee powers you are able to survive.

Saybro asked me to post this.

Would it be possible to speed up dreadful blast and rage blast animations as well as increasing their damage? Simple changes.

Yesterday they were dictating to us that we'd have to take what they gave us with this update; today they've at least made an appearance of asking for specific feedback and indicate that something might happen if we do so. I'd much rather spend a little of my time trying to think of and to list attacks that nullify melee dps and of things that might boost melee survival than to simply just post that the Devs don't get it or don't listen to us.

If we post the things Mepps asked about, they might make changes, it might take a while to do so, but there's a chance it will happen, if we don't post anything, then it's more likely that nothing will be changed. A chance at improvement is much better than no chance, and if all it takes is a bit of my time in thinking about the game's content and making a few forum posts, I figure why not, I wasn't doing anything better with my time yesterday when I thought they were unwilling to even consider making a change based on our feedback.

Also, melee DPS was viable in nearly all content, against nearly every boss before T5 and the Origin Crisis DLC. In T3 and T4 melee dps was often a simple matter of being on the back of the boss while the tank was in the front, watching for skulls and blocking or rolling when you needed to. OC is what started the focus on ranged DPS in raids because of the way the raids, bosses, and mobs were designed. Melee is much more doable in T6 raids than it was in T5 but it's still not as viable as it was in T3 and T4. Maybe it'd be easy to make melee viable again, maybe not; maybe T7 will be designed to fully allow melee because we pointed out everything that currently prevents it.

Maybe I'm optimist, though, who knows.


Anyway, Dual Wield using bosses and adds are also problematic to melee because the encircling throw of such NPCs is usually a one shot to a dps and has no real tell. Dreggs in HoP1 used the encircling throw attack more often than the punisher or other adds in AF2, though, not sure if anything but the punisher uses DW in AF2, off hand, though.

I don't have nothing to add!

You can compete with quantum, just assuming you are in a perfect environment, meaning you arent killed and can melee the boss freely without dying.

I think if you increased the survivability for rage dps alone would help.

In the past before T5 there were soft spots in bosses. places where you could attack without harm. Avatar of meta back in FOS2 for example. However with T5 and going forward it seems many bosses have 360 degrees AOE, whether its a stomp, doom spin, reflection, or charge up large damage move.

Certain bosses even have mechanics for all melee possibilities. Take the hydra for example who has 360 body slam. 45 tail swipe and a 45 fire breath. You cant possibly melee with that unless you hit->run->hit->run.

It would take alot more to adjust each boss rather than to just increase rage survivability.

This is an awesome idea. This may be a way to have people melee at end instances!

Franchise asked me to post this.

While in a savage state and relentless anger is active, the rage dps will take in half damage when those conditions are active at the same time. So when Ares will normally hit you for 10k, being in savage state and relentless anger at the same time will make you get hit for 5k.

How do you melee in elite when you only get two deaths?

At this point this thread isn't even about rage anymore. They made it clear that they are not going to consider any changes for the power itself or its advance mechanic. I suggest they create another thread where we can discuss what changes need to be done to the content to improve our odds of surviving close range encounters. Nonetheless everything you've pointed out will hopefully help the developers redesign the current content or design the future content to fully allow melee dps.

There's nothing wrong with being optimistic only the fact that you'll be very disappointed when reality will kick in. There are many npc abilities that they would need to change in order to make melee dps more viable. It's a lot of work and that's why i don't think it will happen anytime soon...

I'm also really wondering how you really make melee viable without trivializing the content for tanks.

That's exactly the way i see it too. Even if in the future they manage to adjust each boss it will not only take a lot of time but rage will still need an increase in its survivability unless they plan on making melee possible for every power which is fine by me. They could learn a thing or two from Tera Online on how to properly execute that plan.

Answer is simple my friend, you can't ! There's no way they are going to change so many boss attacks just for one power to be able to do damage as intended. The content will get too easy and while we're on this subject can you please remove the immunities from bosses and ads, we're not in pvp you know, just sayin...

While you are "fundamentally" changing the raid mechanics to accommodate currently-impossible melee for Rage AM, be sure to include the next Survival Mode's bosses.

Man can I simply not wait to melee round 13 bosses, gonna be a blast from the past!