I'm sure he fully understands, but maybe casters do not realise how harsh the melee rez effect is right now. That coupled with the fact that melee are MUCH more likely to die than casters due to so many spell effects that penalise based on proximity to mob or other players, makes it a double whammy. I think the suggestion is the wrong way though. Somewhere in the middle makes more sense - weaken melee rez effects and maybe add something different to the caster version so it matters more. (It does for SOME spell users, but it's completely irrelevant to others.)
I'm not opposed to a middle ground, but I would be disappointed to see death penalty weakened honestly. I feel it impacts melee's in a notable way currently, and I just wish that experience was universal so that everyone tried to stave off dying as much as the melee's I raid with regularly. I really do want it to matter in such a way that death isn't just an inconvenience (oh no I have to rebuff now... boohoo), but that there is in fact a notable downside for all classes.
Isn't the penalty for dying, the loss of xp? Weren't rez something added to the game, not originally part of it. I think it was a reaction to the zerging of mobs or something. If so, there you go, death has a penalty, even if they remove revival and rez effects.
Historically it was more about preventing Zerg tactics too, no? Stuff hits so hard now that even with the fastest zone times, though, if your raid is wiping by the time you finish zoning back in, a lot of the time you're already smoked and down. Really agree with Brogett's take though - the combo of a harsher rez penalty, much higher risk of death, and more reliance on buffs/adps is a bad combination for melee in raids. Every time I cast shield of fate I wonder why exactly casters needed the ability and melee didn't get anything similar.
a smaller death penalty for melee, yes. a middle ground for both? no. You cannot have a harsh death penalty when today raid mob can: Target random people with multiple 80k AoEs ( or people next to you) Can 1-round tanks, or can AE rampage + AoE to 1-round melee next to it. Caps your health at 65% and/or severly hinder your ability to heal while randomly summoning you into a large AoE aura that snare you along with, if you are lucky, a puddle of death poping on you (jackpot if you get stunned while running). Teleport all over the place spitting out massive AoE with adds that snare/stun you Mem blur, or a moreorso uncontrollable aggro table ( Hi sparx worker!) Or, as a general rule, when various random mechanic can drop a non-tank within less than a second. There's only soo much you can do for your own safety when RNG stacks the odd against you... I pity the melee who don't have 150k+ HP worth of rune to hide behind (or worse, the zerkers who actually damage /root/blind themselves on top of being in melee range).
Can we get rid of summoning then? Or at least amp up caster AC/defensive abilities when getting summoned. And also make spells uninterruptible if summoned.
Incorrect. Melee die the may be able to spam those abilities but are worthless as even with spamm7ng the abilities their dps is GREATLY reduced due to the melee slow on rez effects. Add to this the fact melee are more likely to die and there are alot more anti melee mechanics melee deal with and they are FAR more common.
They started all this crap a while back with the talked about endurance changes. At which time it was clearly put by all active melee that post how stupid rest changes were without a full scale endurance re balancing, this was in June. It got put off because of the expansion and quite frankly there's no telling how long it will be before there's any significant change to any of it. The thread is still there in the test server update forum.
Of course we can, because that will definitely help out the balance between classes and the likelihood of casters vs melee dieing... Seriously, try counting the number of deaths in your raids or groups next time and see.
I did some calculations and parses, but I forget what they were! I could go hunting, but IIRC it was of the order 15-20% dps comes from the spam clicking abilities. I agree on the anti-melee issue. Whether intended or not, most mechanisms that raid bosses use are far worse for melee than caster. Even in the case where we do manage to get some way to avoid them, melee end up losing dps to do so while often range dps does not.
So when you created your melee character, you did not think you would be close to mobs when fighting? That's odd. When I created my Druid, I did not think I would be a tank - but that's what I am most of the time when not raiding. Summoning mobs make playing "like a caster" a waste of time, I play just like a melee does, pop my healer, run up and attack mobs toe-to-toe. Even the non-summoning mobs because it's much faster and I have a healer merc up anyway. The difference is I don't have the AC or defensive capabilities of melee. I also disagree that melee in raids, other than MT's and OT's, die more often than casters. Melee DPS should die no more often than caster DPS. And most deaths during raids occur during wipes. A balancing factor here is the classes that do die more often (tanks) are absolutely essential for a raid. I've never had a raid called off because we didn't have enough Druids ... Lots have been called for lack of Tanks.
So you agreed with what I said, in-so-much as melee can die, click rest/breather then go about spamming their abilities as if they hadn't died... But you start by saying I'm incorrect? Lol. I never said Melee can stand back up and do 100% of their fully raid-buffed adps-supported DPS. Just that standing up and autoattacking at 95% of normal attack speed is not the only thing a melee class can do. Just like harvesting once or twice doesn't let a caster throw out their full dps lineup for several minutes after, it's a guessing game at how many activatable abilities you choose to pop, how mana-preservation-centric your line up you choose to use in conjunction with those, and when you're next death, or event completion occurs. Auto attack damage is a very small portion of a melee classes overall contribution to DPS, however the hasted attacks that are augmented by damage or speed or proc that the rez effects is what is hampered most. But another aspect of melee dps is their spammable abilities. Last I checked a monk can stand up from a rez, hit Breather/Ironfist/Synergy/Zan Fi's/Crane Stance and do over a million damage in a matter of seconds. Then he's going to limp along with just thunderfoot procs, FK dmg, Stunning Kick procs, Zalikor's.... you get the point. But that same monk shouldn't really waste any more disc's until rez effects wear off but it's something. There's a penalty, and it's not as crippling as we're all making it for either side of the coin. They're just penalized differently.
Sure I knew when I created the melee character that I'd be close to mobs, but back then it wasn't anti-melee effect after anti-melee effect. Things somehow felt more balanced. Playing close to the mob shouldn't equate to most likely to die. In theory that's why we get better armour (lol, really?). Your defensives really aren't much worse than mine you know. It's rather close. As for you playing a tank when using the druid. You *choose* to do that. You could of course group as was originally intended, but because you can, you choose to solo. Shrug, your choice really. The summoning mobs were put in specifically to prevent casters from being too powerful. It's not some innate right that casters should be able to solo everything while melee should not. True most deaths occur during wipes, but for non-wipe deaths it's most definitely a melee or tank heavy thing in my experience. Maybe it differs for your guild, but try looking through logs to see. I just looked at a month of slain messages (which obviously includes wipes) and see the tally from most common to rarest as: Rog, Pal, Rog, Rng, Pal, War, War, SK, Rog, Pal, Rog, Sk, Enc, War, Pal, War, Brd, Rng, Pal, Mnk, Enc, Mnk, Mnk, Mnk, Bst, Nec, War, Brd, Bst, Bst, Clr, Brd, War, Pal, Mnk, Ber, Rng, Brd, Mag, Enc, (yawn 5 more till first caster dps), Wiz, Enc, Brd, Nec, Wiz, Clr, Wiz, Rog, Clr, War, Clr, Dru, Nec, Mag, Clr, Shm, Shm, Clr, etc None of that was normalised for the number of times people are online, and clearly I don't have logs when I wasn't online, so it biases me to be up and it also means there are some "rare spawns" (eg our one and only berserker) much lower down, but overall it is very very obvious. Tanks & melee => death. Healers & caster dps => mostly alive. It's really not rocket science why, but it's a bit unfair to then also punish the melee classes more for dying.
'auto attack damage is a very small portion of a melee classes overall contribution to DPS' - this is a ridiculous statement - have you ever looked at a melee's parse breakdown? Using rogue as my primary example I can tell you that piercing (or for all intents & purposes 'auto attack') generally accounts for anywhere from 52%-56% of my total damage. There are exceptions to this in the form of activated procs that display in the form of a weapon damage (i.e Hidden Blade etc.) This would fall into the category of 'spammable' stuff. 'another aspect of melee dps is their spammable abilities.': are you under the impression that backstab refresh is not impacted by my haste being capped while under rez effects? Because I can assure you that the refresh for a backstab with haste capped at 95% is nearly double the refresh of a backstab while hasted by v1 (worn) haste alone.. ..if I went out of my way to cast v3 haste on myself prior to reengaging, that takes an additional second off of the timer.. and if I were to cast a v2 haste mid-fight (will vary between self/shaman/enc) that would cut the refresh timer of the v1 only backstab by 33% (6 to 4)... this is all completely moot since none of it takes effect until after the arbitrary 3 minutes in which my timer is defaulted to 10 seconds due to the haste cap) I'm not really interested in getting into the business of suggesting what should, or should not be done to fix the issue, hell, I'm not even presently stating that this is a problem in need of an imminent solution... What I do feel is worth posting about is when popular misconceptions about by which means melee (specifically rogue - I can't claim to know all the in's and out's of the other two) go about dealing with sustaining their damage for the 3 minutes whilst penalized by the haste cap.. on top of correcting assumptions about our damage type as a % of total dps.
Esero, certainly you can't be suggesting that the class that relies on speed of attacks to do most of their damage, and other classes that rely on speed of big hits might take a significant dump in usefulness if slowed...
What anti-melee abilities? Random death touches (sort of what summoning is to a group geared caster)? I would argue things have improved markedly for melee. No more enrage, dozens of click effects - invulnerability, dps auras, self-healing, you can even port all over the place! I do not "chose" to tank. Its tank or don't play. Its not just named or quest mobs that summon - its trash. And even if they don't summon, lots of trash can't even be snared/rooted. So basically, like you point out, its find a group or tank myself (please don't tell me about tank mercs, for a Druid they are worthless). One of the reasons I chose a Druid so long ago was their ability to solo - once possibly the best soloing class in the game made arguably the worst simply because of summoning mobs. So I'm not too sympathetic to melee characters who are not 100% optimal for a couple minutes after they die. Also, I'm no stranger to being less useful after dying. Druid's have for years been basically useless after death because we had no mana regen abilities. It's only been in the last few months where we finally have gotten our little mana bear and joined the ranks of every other caster class in the game able to recover mana after death.
