Casters overall better than melee, is it a question of customer retention?

It seems like your combining alot of issues into one.
Berzerker abilities putting you at 90% life has nothing to do with caster defenses. Its a horrible comparision, as no other melee needs to do that either. Its a seperate berzerker attribute.

As for AEs, they tend to have ranges large enough to hit casters as well.

The rampages? Sure it sucks, but the point of the event is to kill people. Would you rather everyone draws a number and have a lottery every 2 seconds to see who takes damage this turn? Why should everything be completely fair? Outside of ae rampage on raid mobs, your defenses are far superior to casters. Which is over 99% of the game.

If melee get a rune way to mitigate hits like casters have, melee should be second place to all casters for damage in exchange. No ifs or buts. Why get huge defensive increases yet still be top competative dps.

You don't raid so not even sure why you continue to comment on something you have no knowledge about?

Any group red named even raid geared it will destroy me, period, after it kills the tank merc (hate to see how a group geared berserker would tank a dark blue). Meanwhile my wizard alt is tanking it, while my shammy calls the berserker back to get kill credit for whatever hunters I am currently working on. So to be honest not seeing this "far superior" defenses compared to casters at all except in your imaginary posts.

This is quite frankly ridiculous. Melee by default should be PHYSICALLY tougher than casters as we are more likely to get hit by melee damage. Berserker of course have a lot of handicaps that come part and parcel of the class. The idea of the caster has always been to keep a distance between yourself and the mob. Pure melee have no business getting runes, magical defenses are not what a melee should be using and it would be a very boring solution. Berserkers Monks and Rangers should be in a position to take a few hits, and rogues always have more stealthy ways of dealing with it. As it stands from what my guildies have been telling me is that in some cases 1 round of AE ramp can total melee classes. So we are dying in 1 round of AE ramp and still have the penalty of terrible end recovery and being slowed on death? Try tanking anything on a berserker and see how you compare tanking on a wizard with runes. I think you would be very surprised at the result.

Yeah tank order is now war, sk/pal, wizard.


Edited to note sarcasm.

Gragas:

I have not seen anything constructive from fransisco so I tend to ignore his posts completely now.

When I join threads, especially those of other classes I will always try and add something to help them or at least work with them and provide alternatives for their current issues, I don't see any benefit in crushing ideas before they have been given time to mature.

Some threads make me sad, this is one of them.

I wouldn't trade my runes for anything. ever

It's always been easier for a caster to do well in my experience. Once you get the right foci items and rk 2 spells you are already ahead of most melee at the same level. They do pay the price in that most times if they get overzealous with nukes/dots they'll pull aggro and possibly splat. The biggest difference is when you move from groups to raids. A caster who has the right focus gear and rk 2 spells will be able to be productive *dps wise* straight away in raids whereas melee require a lot of gear and/or weapons to become really viable.

(I am intentionally leaving out aa's because they are easy enough to get that it should be a factor.)

Well true it's a figure plucked out of the air and I should have said "most" perhaps. In truth it's maybe more 70-80, but I really don't know that either. Anyway as you've challenged me on it I guess I'll have to iterate through the various mechanics.

However think on this. How many raid bosses have AE rampage? You avoid all of those except the rare one that is also a belly caster. How many mobs have short range PBAE attacks? You avoid all of those, except the rare belly casters. How many mobs have targetted AEs with a small radius around a player? You won't avoid all of those, but you will avoid more than us. Melee HAVE to be bunched up while caster strat for those mobs is often to spread out.

What's left that affects both equally? Personal emotes, which are fortunately decreasing in frequency back to sensible proportions. Zone wide AEs (now rare). Getting summoned through over aggro - well yes we all suffer that, but barring times when the tank dies it's under our control too.

So while it's maybe not 90% exactly, I'm pretty sure it's the vast majority. What percentage of mechanics would you say you still have to face?

I wouldn't hazard a guess but I think you are greatly underestimating it.

Casters getting magical defenses fits to me....whether they are vs physical or magical damage. These are limited. They mostly keep us from being rounded. When it comes to purely physical damage, melee can stand up to far more than casters in general. This is easily seen watching raid geared melee take on group mobs. I would think dealing with magical damage is an issue for you guys and probably needs to be addressed. Also I think wild ramp damage is too high.

Everyone complains about wizard's 320k rune. It's modeled after necro's embalmer's carapace which is far superior in it's protection. This is an activated aa with a reuse around 10 or 12 mins. It is also limited by counters that are eaten by nukes. It doesn't take long for a wiz to take that much dmg. Nor does it take long to use up the charges via nuking. Now we have a rune spell but if we are trying to tank with that, we are doing no damage as we would be casting nothing but that rune.

I'm a pretty well geared raid wiz. In group content I can still be smashed flat by mobs that raid geared melee laugh at (I'm not complaining about this).

When it comes to aes on raids, most have a big enough range that they hit us too. Also range on things like damage auras, symp procs, aa nukes, dmg potions, etc is far shorter than on our spells. When we DO spead ourselves out we become vulnerable to being out of heal/cure range as well. Between that and line of sight we have more positioning issues than most melee think.

Oh and targeted aes.....my guild is caster heavy. So I probably deal with more of those than the melees I raid with.

If you end up tanking named with the Wizard and start tanking with a merc and then a Zerk you are playing really poorly. Start tanking with the Wizard if you're telling the truth and have a reasonable degree of intelligence and skill.

Fear Tainted Tentacle and Diminutive Kromrif would be 2 examples of mob killing merc tank and berserker when first encountered. Both are very anti melee and punitive to melee players, wizard had no problem nuking them to death though and tanking them.
As far as playing poorly, like the old saying goes on opinions, they are like butt holes, everyone has one and they all usually stink.

Version 1: Any group red named even raid geared it will destroy me, period, after it kills the tank merc

Version 2: Fear Tainted Tentacle and Diminutive Kromrif would be 2 examples of mob killing merc tank and berserker when first encountered

Can you see the difference? I can see the difference.

I don't believe wizards are better at general tanking than melee (although rog and zerk aren't nearly as strong as you think either). However I believe that wiz are better at taking 1 or 2 large rounds of hits, eg a round of rampage, a round of hits from a raid mob between the main tank dying and the second tank taking over, or even taking a large AOE spell... provided their rune is up. Once it's down the tables turn of course.

That means their survivability can be good as the unexpected accidents that usually kill melee only sometimes kill the wizards. We both die of course.

I don't see every message of course due to range, but I'm normally at the mobs I'm attacking (ie I'm not a range dps class!) and so I'll see a summoned player being squished. If the mob charges a player I'll mostly see that, depending on how fast I react, but not always. So I expect a bias as I may not see a distant player who dies to a badly executed emote, a dot, a nuke, etc.

So I hunted for "have been slain" and "has been slain" messages in a month of logs and totalled per player the death counts. Mostly I haven't been grouping and deaths aren't so common there as in raids either. The list went Rog (me - bias there obviously to self), Ber, Pal, War, War, Mnk, War, Pal, SK, SK, Mnk, Enc, Mnk, Ber, Mag, War, Ber, War, Brd, Bst, War, Enc, Rog, Rog, Mnk, Pal, Clr, Nec, Clr, ... for ages, then finally Wiz.

Now yes there will be biases, but actually I'm seeing tanks most risky for obvious reasons, other melee sprinkled in, and enchanter being the most dangerous caster - again for obvious reason as they're routinely getting AoE agro. Even accounting for range dps being biased lower down that list due to distance from myself, our primary mage dies twice as often as the most death prone wiz we have. We have a lot of other caster dps but they very rarely die. Put simply *it's FAR safer to range dps* and add in a rune and you're golden.

Actually I realise there's a less biased way to do it, which is to check how many /gu Dead! messages I see. We announce to the guild when we die in a raid, so rez team can do their work. Not everyone bothers, and I suspect a lot of tanks announce in their joint tank/heal channel as I don't see them turning up often. Some will probably also get a call before they've bothered announcing anything, but I'd expect that sort of noise to even itself out.

Over 2 months the list then becomes me (bias of course as I'm not normalising for raid attendance), mnk, ber, pal war, pal, mnk, ber, pal, war, brd, pal, shm, clr, brd, bst, ber, mnk, sk, shm, mnk, war, sk, wiz, rng, bst, enc, nec, sk, dru, war, bst, brd, clr, nec, mag, (down to about 10% of the top death count by now)...

Similar pattern emerges basically. Melee die more often, MUCH more. If you want to keep arguing this point do your own analysis and prove otherwise. Until then I'm done

Do we really need to demonstrate what is obvious to any people raiding?, i mean it's way more dangerous to be a melee than a caster in raid. Im tempted to say yes, so thank you Brogett, but only because some people don't know the word "objectivity".

Melees need some protection against AE rampage, single target rampage etc... or these mechanics need to be lowered in frequency and damage , PERIOD.
Now if you want harder raids let things like that but give some mechanics "love" to casters too.

I have some pretty ridiculous reflexes when it comes to hitting mend/fd when I start taking damage in raids but there are a lot of times that I'm down so fast that it's impossible to avoid it. Granted I'm pretty lowly geared right now so that's part of it, but I see our top monks drop pretty regularly also. I'm not sure how it could be argued that being a caster doesn't has a lower mortality rate.

Yup butt hole for miles.

Come now Brogett, you know better than this.

Let's make a list of Raid mechanics casters have to face and count them:

• Single Target nukes: Check
• Target AE nukes: Check
• PBAE nukes: half-check (Mages and Necros have pets, it also depends on the range of the PBAE, some are large range and/or the mob pulls you in before nuking)
• Blind: quarter-check (depends on if the mob moves / we move and there are obstructions to line of sight, which happens more than you would think).
• Charms: Check
• Fears: Check
• Mezes: Check
• Stuns: Check
• Mana Drains: Check
• Silences: Check
• Spell Slow: Check
• Spell Interrupt: Check
• Gravity Push: Check
• Gravity Pull: Check (I split the gravity effects because both cause problems for Casters, while pulls do not always have a negative effect on melee since afaik they can still attack while being pulled, if I'm mistaken let me know).
• G-Flux: Check
• Increased Mana Costs: Check
• Spell Reflect: Check
• Spell DS/Feedback: Check
• Spell Immunity: Check (Depending on the nature of the immunity).
• Single Emotes: Check ($name do this, or die)
• Raid Emotes: Check ($everyone do this, or die)
• Damage Shield: half-check (Mage/Necro pets)
• Melee immunity: half-check (Mage/Necro pets)
• AE ramp: half-check (Mage/Necro pets)
• Single ramp: no check (its possible, but only if your tanks fail to set it properly, so I'll say no).
• Endurance drain: no check
• Add aggro: Check (By this I mean when facing an event with multiple small adds like WK, it is far more likely for a caster to pull aggro than a melee since our damage/aggro is spiky and unpredictable, melee have a much smoother curve).

I'm sure I'm missing several more mechanics, but from just what I have listed here, it *totally* looks like we avoid 9070-80% of raid mechanics.

Now, you can maybe make an argument about how often and how severe certain ones are vs others, but don't ever try and suggest casters simply avoid them all, or "most" of them, it's disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at worst.