Casters have pets or roots or snares or some combination of those 3, and they should be using them. If a Caster is getting beat on & stands there eating hits like a mannequin they deserved the dirt-nap, stay alert and maybe switch off the ****-hub/Netflix/etc. Yes a melee can take a hit better than a caster because they are built to, but every class has active & passive defences and used well the difference between the two archetypes is "who was paying attention & who fell asleep at the wheel". But when it comes to dealing damage, casters have all the aces up their sleeves for taking no damage while dpsing.
Casters do even better in group setting, they can simply chain cast their melee mitigation spells. Melee's AA and discs of the same nature have a much longer recast, its not even close. As a previous poster mentioned, they have plenty of options that melee simply dont have.
Melee pay attention to their surroundings. They have to....to survive. Casters stand in one spot, casting. In my experience, casters die because they have poor situational awareness. Not because they have less survivability. It's sheer laziness that gets casters killed.
Well to be fair, as far as melee damage goes (thanks to AC and mitigation), melee do take less damage than casters. Although I do agree with the low situational awareness. Glass turrets and their tunnel vision
Melee actually take more damage (even things like AE Rampage damage) then Casters do, due to the rune/absorb line casters get that melee have no equivalent of Casters also get more out of all AC effects then melee do (only beaten by the Tanks)
I would like to point out that a certain percentage of mobs in every zone are immune to root/snare/mez. They are not reliable. Note - assuming you mean live and not tlp.
There's a reason that new players are overwhelmingly encouraged by the community to roll pet classes. A longstanding and systemically unaddressed class balance problem rooted in EQ's damage/healing math makes soloing impossible for melee classes, or at best very dangerous for melee classes that aren't endgame-equipped AND supported by a dedicated healer, merc or otherwise. Basically, we need a level one through max overhaul of HP recovery. And use the potion belt! Innate HP regen aimed at fully healing a player in ~1 minute. Regen buff potions ~3x innate for 30 minutes, cost close to mercs or haste potions. Healing potions for 50%+ HP at 15-30 sec timer and not prohibitively expensive. Cure-ALL potions with 10-tick HoT for rough spots - same timer, ~5x cost of heal pots. Numbers are estimated, but you get the idea. We don't need Rogues soloing T4 missions in bazaar gear, but melee need to be able to solo some degree of meaningful content without dragging a box crew or group of guildies around every time they need to kill something that, say... a pet class or SK could otherwise pop a heal merc and burn down.
Let me introduce you to Shield of Inevitability. 1: Absorb Spell Damage: 60% over 30000, Total: 299000 2: Absorb Melee Damage: 75% over 30000, Total: 228000
yup. Works for a couple hits, then casters get pulverized. Which ignores the lack of parrys, ripostes, reduced hit due to much higher ac, and everything else melee have going for them. Anyone who plays this game knows that melee take damage better overall
Because of how high strikethrough is basically none of those avoidances work in raids and they don't work like 3/4 of the time in the group game
theres a whole group game out there too. Not just getting hit by raid mobs. Raiders tend to forget that. This is where the difference REALLY shows up. Casters in group gear get pounded by group mobs much harder than melee do
I play a lot of classes but I'm not saying I'm top tier. The zerker class is the one that I raid with when I can and I can absolutely say zerkers need help which hopefully it looks like they might. The mangling timer has to get reduced and more burn options introduced pretty please. On a group situation he performs decently with raid gear (group geared is sad) but does awesome once every 26 minutes. This really is disappointing and very different from other classes.
I'm curious if this was ever fixed. And if so, any idea what the cap was? I'm interested to know, if it is fixed, at what point on a late-game TLP, it will have effect.
I don't play melee. From what I have observed in raids... Melee DPS isn't as bad as it's really put out to be. Melee really have a problem in raids with emote moves stopping them from doing damage. Plenty of raids have emotes that only affect melee. I know this is a huge problem from playing Diablo 4 recently. My melee Zerker had to constantly stop doing damage to avoid spell damage while other classes continued to do huge range damage. There is no viable way to keep melee DPS doing melee damage on raids without changing how raid damage is dealt to melee, which would completely change the fundamental way raiding works/designed. (Melee used to survive Ramp with AC and healing, but too many raid emotes are basically death touches.) The first step to the melee raid problem is giving melee ranged DPS abilities. Zerkers were sold as a throwing class. Give them endless quiver. Give Monks and rogues endless quiver. Give BST a summon type ability for ranged weapons. This is easy to tune. Completely remove the current throwing calculations for these classes. Just use their melee calculations ZER = 2H * 0.90 MNK = 2H * 0.80 MNK/ROG = 1H * 1.6 BST = 2H 0.70 BST = 1H *1.4 (1H = calculate primary only, or use the 2H multiplier and let both melee weapons be calculated in throwing) An alternative solution is to make these raid emotes hit melee less hard so they can eat them and keep doing DPS. I personally don't like that solution as much. Fix melee range abilities immediately and then re-evaluate raid performance. Another big problem is that Melee have shot themselves in the foot with Assassinate, Headshot, Decap. Even rangers who don't melee are hurt by the tuning problems caused by this. They can be absolute monsters in groups so they can't have high DPS. Who can out DPS a ranger with hDEX headshotting? Having the high DPS abilities in raids means they would be insanely over powered in groups. A potential solution is stances. Turning off the ability to headshot / decap / assassinate increasing their DPS would make them perform better in raids without performing insanely in groups. Rangers certainly do well against humanoids in raid. Give them a stance ability that requires OOC to change. This would increase their DPS against non-humanoid but stop their ability to headshot / etc. Then they make a decision before going into combat which way they want to DPS. High DPS with no proc or low DPS with huge procs.
