In a recent webcast, Kander mentioned that everyone melees in the high end game now. And, he would like to see ranged auto attack become viable for mages and furies, etc. As a raiding fury for a while now that has used ranged auto and melee extensively and having 3 priests that are CoE HM capable (fury, mystic, templar), I'll say that ranged auto can be fixed a number of ways and I will present them here in the hopes that Kander or someone else can use this info. The disparity between melee auto and ranged auto damage is huge at the moment for a number of reasons. 1) Melee blue bonuses are much easier to soft cap than ranged blue bonuses Just about all raiders who melee (doesn't even require high end) have 600+ MA, 200 DPS/Haste, alot of AE auto, etc. This is easily obtainable with raid gear and reforging. The reforging ratios on ranged auto (RA) blue bonuses ( RA MA, RA DPS, RA Haste, RA AE) are terrible compared to melee blue bonuses. 2) Melee weapons have much higher base damage than RA weapons Melee-ers almost always use 2H for the higher crits or DW for those that can't use 2H. RA weapons have inferior damage ratings to 2H and their 4s base delay means that they don't crit as high. 3) Melee hit rates are higher than RA hit rates Melee-ers focus on increasing hit rates through weapon skills, accuracy, strikethrough etc. RA weapons still require "Ranged" skill to improve their hit rates.The classes that would/should traditionally use RA do not get weapon skills via gear nor buffs nor AA. Casters will typically focus on casting skills to improve their spell DPS and they do nothing for their RA dps. The combination of these three differences contributes significantly to RA being underwhelming. For example, on the same fights in Harrow's End with both my fury(w/RA) and mystic(w/melee), my fury's RA dps is about 20k. The mystics melee auto attack is about 160k. Just to be clear, RA has two advantages over melee in the following ways: 1) it fires independent of your casting status. In other words, it will fire while casting something else. This is marginal though because melee fires at the end of the current spell casting. 2) You have freedom to position yourself wherever you want and continue auto attacking with RA. This can be very useful on some fights, but it's useless on most fights because everyone can stand behind the mob(s) and swing. Here are some suggestions to address each of the disparities above: 1) Improve the reforge ratio on RA blue bonuses allowing blue bonuses to reach the same potential as melee blue bonuses. 2) Improve the damage ratings on RA weapons. This would allow then to hit harder. 3) Increase the delay on RA weapons. This would allow them to hit harder. 4) Change the RA hit rate(and damage bonus) to use the disruption skill instead of ranged skill. This would make more sense for a number of reasons, namely that classes using RA have no other use for Ranged skill but they do already work on spell skills. You may or may not want to do all of these to offest the (very marginal) benefits that I mentioned above. But, some combination of these 4 suggestions should be considered to make RA a viable option for high end playing. Thanks
While I wouldn't mind if it used disruption, spell autoattack doesn't use the Ranged skill but Focus.
One of the easiest things to do would be to combine spell ranged auto-attack stats with 'regular' auto-attack spells. Among other things, this would put mages and priests on par with scouts and tanks, being able to swap between ranged and melee auto-attack w/o having to spec for both.
Oh yeah, forgot about that. That's even worse because there are no +focus adorns. I have 738 focus skill at the moment but the hit rate is still terrible.
Because ideally you'd need over 1k of whatever skill you're going after, which most people will have in disruption once buffed.
