Are melees too strong in r10 at level cap?

[Teh_Troll]

TL;DR:
It's very easy to compare, say, perfected melee builds vs. average builds and take away that melee is overpowered, but realistically this is a consequence of the churning meta hitting a bunch of other playstyles with the nerfstick and the solution isn't to cry about melees being too strong but maybe ask why no other builds are as viable and how to help them perform. Unless you think R10 should be impossible, in which case you can go run R10 without spending your reaper points and have the experience you want.

SOME melees MAY be over performing. But if ANY melee is nerfed while the abomination this is Inquisitive is still in it's brokenly over-powered state, the only solution for the devs involves a pair of pliers and blowtorch.

 

[zandoe]

After ranged nerfs the next logical move is to nerf melees.

 

[Shear-buckler]

The primary cause for this is the massive buff to active attacks. Everyone is a burst damage dealer and as a result any pack of mobs dies soon after it is engaged.

Contrast this to before when melee where mostly single target DPS and burst damage was the role of casters (who had limited resources).

 

[Mechgraber]

Out of the three broad categories of melee, ranged and caster, I don't think it's immediately clear that melee are greatly ahead of both. Ranged is still very powerful, particularly arti/inq.

It is abundantly obvious that many caster classes are behind ranged and melee. The r7+ nerf to caster damage was probably never needed, and is now a bit silly. Their burst DPS is behind and it's not as sustainable.

Should that nerf be removed? I would rather see that same curve applied to all, as r10 is indeed too easy in many cases. The only real challenge left is trying to push higher skulls in raids, or maybe some specific higher skull solos like the last one in TOEE or those Sharn mind flayer challenge quests.

They decided a while ago that they wanted DDO to be a solo game, on most classes. Casters got SLAs so they wouldn't run out of SP, melee and ranged got self healing, AOE damage and CC. Everyone gets everything, thus there is no real need to group at all in any situation when leveling, and even most situations at endgame. The issue is that melee and ranged just got more overall, and now there's just no need for casters at all.

DPS (and survivability) has gotten very high FOR THE BEST PLAYERS, so they have to have high HP mobs to make things not die in a matter of seconds, but for the average player this results in a boring slog. The gap between ultra-geared-uber-completionist-perfect-build-mythic-reaper-p*mped-out-character and someone who doesn't really know what they are doing is truly massive, that's a far more important issue than the overly simplistic question of caster vs melee vs ranged.

 

[AMess]

I was just running some R10s 4 melees no healer and everything littterally melted so fast it was a complete joke, we all know ranged is still insanely strong atm but what about melee?

some year back, when fewer folks had maxxed reaper trees and r10 was more of a challenge, one of my favorite dungeon crawls was all melee, it was a blast, i wish i could replay it

IMO all the classes are op compared to mobs now, and the recent fix has been to scale up hit points, but that doesn't add challenge, it just prolongs it. i've also seen folks solo r10s or 2-3 shooters and they might be slower, and it also varies a bit by what specific dungeon, and varies by the skill of the players for short man, but the vast majority of 6 player pug groups are gonna win r10 on any content and that's b/c the bar is low now.

i think it's time we got a new reaper at r10.

 

[Lotoc]

The sheer fact that people repeatedly ad nauseum insist dragonlord is op and does too much dps but ignore the existence of Kensei and nobody is addressing shuri dragon disciple builds right now is perhaps the biggest indicator that perhaps the players don't really know what is OP and they just want stuff nerfed because they don't like seeing things be popular.

Keep in mind just how long Razorclaw was insanely overpowered and people were still calling it useless.

 

[Alpha Tester]

The developers should open DDO audit.

See from the less played races and classes and move from there. Probably it's unplayed because it is outdated and this does not mean to break (or nerf) what is working that will always be the most playable and famous builds in a server.

Yes, reaper needs a revamped but there is one problem: everyone should have the same difficulty to max it and won't happen since lvl 34 made an R10 to be an R7 because of bad design and bad eyesight to read what players ask.

 

[Lominal]

Keep in mind just how long Razorclaw was insanely overpowered and people were still calling it useless.

Razorclaw is still a top DPS despite having two major bugs that hinder it (superior reinforced fists doesnt work on RC and the racial magic fang doesnt work at all).

The game has never been remotely balanced, the only difference now is that more players are aware of the meta and paying attention to what builds are good (and more player are playing r10). A few years back, r10 was reserved for strong, balanced groups that wanted a challenge. Currently, its kind of the default setting for many at cap. In my opinion, there needs to be a global nerf to melee /ranged damage in r10s, it's too easy atm. In general though, I don't think a blanket nerf to melee(or ranged or casting) will ever function as desired because as we saw with the caster nerf, all it would do is kill off any non-meta melee dps (The blanket nerf I'm suggesting is to bring all damage down to the spell dmg level for 7-10, rather than nerfing a specific play style).

There are also quite a few melee classes/trees that need some love/bug fixes (qstaff attack speed being broken, mechanic tree, ravager, etc).

 

[kmoustakas]

I was just running some R10s 4 melees no healer and everything littterally melted so fast it was a complete joke, we all know ranged is still insanely strong atm but what about melee?

Breaking news: Good players are good at playing the game, bad players complain about "builds" because they suck.

 

[Jeronimo]

The developers should open DDO audit.

See from the less played races and classes and move from there. Probably it's unplayed because it is outdated and this does not mean to break (or nerf) what is working that will always be the most playable and famous builds in a server.

Yes, reaper needs a revamped but there is one problem: everyone should have the same difficulty to max it and won't happen since lvl 34 made an R10 to be an R7 because of bad design and bad eyesight to read what players ask.

DDO audit doesn't show any statistics on which classes are played at different levels, so even if a class is not played much, but is mostly played at end-game, it could still be very powerful at lvl 34. The same goes for some classes that might be mostly played by newbies mostly at low levels only.

Hopefully SSG has better statistics of their own than what DDO Audit collects.

 

[FVSHasBeenEvenMoreGutted]

glad to see the "OP has no idea about any game mechanics" threads continue

 

[Jack Jarvis Esquire]

At this point, I'm just gonna say a flat out "nope" to any build balance discussion that doesn't start with: let's nerf Inq.

 

[Pano]

I was just running some R10s 4 melees no healer and everything littterally melted so fast it was a complete joke, we all know ranged is still insanely strong atm but what about melee?

You don't need 4 melees for mobs to melt fast TBH. Almost all playstyles are capable of solo DPS a R10 if build for that. If you think those players were way too OP, it is usually about a specific build not a whole play style.

Why you guys complain when SSG nerf something from an orbit with a nuke (looking at casters) and then you want to (checking OP's post) nerf melees? Please dont give SSG those ideas, rather pinpoint broken abilities and combos.

 

[DBZ]

Physical should have the same penalties as casters thats just parity

Still won't fix the massive hp meat bag purples and raid bosses only 1 thing will fix that another squish

 

[Exolus]

what a stupid poll

 

[Vox]

Still won't fix the massive hp meat bag purples and raid bosses

100 million hp for the Lamordia raid bosses or bust

 

[Denis Iron]

Devs just need to add dynamic difficulty - if party do 5kk damage per minute, just buff all mobs (HP and damage boost)...

 

[Raedier]

Thank you everyone who decided to answer this poll! Note that this was not meant as a complaint or a call for nerfs to melees, mainly a congregation of thoughts in my head needing clarification.

Atm i believe the best course of action to balance this game would be to :
Adjust and increase reaper player damage reduction across R1-10 and standardise it among all damage types.

Increase the damage dice on caster epic strikes.

Slightly nerf the effectiveness of quick cutter because it is truly the jack of all trades melee epic strike and it's at "pre nerf dragonbreath" levels of power.

Nerf crossbows ofcourse.

Fix all of the bugs surrounding RC/casters etc

Buff underperforming trees like archmage, arcanotechnician, tempest, all rogue trees and several more.

I'd like to see somewhat of a return to the days where people (most people) walked around in a group together, used a guy for CC, a healer and some guy to hold aggro and several people for dps.

 

[justin credible]

I think it has less to do with melee too good or inquis too good and more to do with being able to have ZERO threat generation with ranged and melee

 

[justin credible]

Devs just need to add dynamic difficulty - if party do 5kk damage per minute, just buff all mobs (HP and damage boost)...

aoe stun that works on everything + massive aoe damage that adds a stacking DoT and if the mob survives that it will attack a summoned pudding instead because the party generates no threat and has 95% dodge