So are melee screwed this expansion?

[Jekerdud]

If your raid is ten man, of course you aren't being brought. If your raid leader has raid makeup in mind, they would generally try not to bring more than 2 melee. The ideal 10 dps makeup man is 2 melee, 3 ranged. If your group already has 2 melee, then taking you on fights that are hard on melee might not be such a good idea. That's not saying a group that is 100% melee (including monks and paladins to heal) is a group that is impossible, but most raid leaders take raid makeup into account. Blizz can try "bring the player, not the class" but it will NEVER fully happen.

[Nakkí]

Admittedly MSV mechanics are often more or less unfavourable to melee. HoF & Terrace, not so much luckily.

[Deleted]

There are two melee DPS spots in a 10 man. If you take any more than two you are simply making your life harder than it has to be, in-fact having a ranged heavy raid is optimal. Ranged DPS do the same (if not more) damage than melee and have none of the restrictions. The only thing I prefer melee for is interrupts. Outside of that.... Why bother?

tanks can interrupt as well as melee, and so can a number of ranged. as a rogue I am not assigned to interrupting Spirit Kings, because other do it better, without resource cost, and sometimes even from range.

---------- Post added 2012-10-31 at 12:14 PM ----------

Biggest problem as I see it right now is there are three times as many people playing melee as there are ranged dps. Every time i put out a call to recruit for my guild, 3/4 of the people that respond are melee. I want to keep things balanced plus nobody wants too many people to roll against for their gear. I would guess most other guilds are in the same spot - already full on melee.

I think it is more that 3/4 people are not in a guild AND are melee, which is not surprising since there are more ranged spots than melee spots in a raid. so there are more ranged having a spot, while melee has to look hard for a good spot.

[Keske]

Melee always seem to have it harder.

Guards - mines cause trouble as well as chains when they get linked to a healer or ranged.

Feng - Have to run from epicentre if its not interupted, lose dps when resonance is on them

gara'jal - Not the preferred choice to dps adds in the spirit realm

Elegon - less time on boss when they have to run to reset stacks

All of these aren't impossible to overcome but it's certainly not the path of least resistance.

Only Elegon out of that has any sort of validity to it.

Guards - Chains are a much bigger hassle for ranged.
Feng - then you're not doing it right.
Gara'jal... beeeeecause?

[Deleted]

If your raid is ten man, of course you aren't being brought. If your raid leader has raid makeup in mind, they would generally try not to bring more than 2 melee. The ideal 10 dps makeup man is 2 melee, 3 ranged. If your group already has 2 melee, then taking you on fights that are hard on melee might not be such a good idea. That's not saying a group that is 100% melee (including monks and paladins to heal) is a group that is impossible, but most raid leaders take raid makeup into account. Blizz can try "bring the player, not the class" but it will NEVER fully happen.

Sorry but that is bullshit.

The ideal raid set up is :

-enough tanks for the fight
-enough healers
-your 5-6 best DPS, and it doesn’t matter if they are melee or ranged.

Since that is not the case, there clearly is something wrong with the advantages of ranged, and the encounter design.

I remember T11, and we had 3 melee DPS that were better (by a significant margin) than the ranged, but the ranged were brought, and 1 melee had to sit, simply because you had to be masochistic not to do so. This is poor design if you ask me.

[meteo]

Guards: Mines are negated by proper positioning by tanks. Chains are dependant on the range DD or healer to be able to get in meleerange.

Feng: better for melee than range. The explosion only targets range (monk healer excluded. they are counted as melee).

Gara'jal: For clearing Adds Dot classes > melee but melees seem to scale better with the buff down there.

Spirit guards: looks like both are equal here.

Elegon: this one is a bit melee unfriendly but with good movement prediction a lot of movement can be reduced.

Will: I'd say they are equal again.

[Deleted]

Only Elegon out of that has any sort of validity to it.

Guards - Chains are a much bigger hassle for ranged.
Feng - then you're not doing it right.
Gara'jal... beeeeecause?

try to be linked to a healer, who refuses to come into melee range...

[Kakera]

Sorry but that is bullshit.

The ideal raid set up is :

-enough tanks for the fight
-enough healers
-your 5-6 best DPS, and it doesn’t matter if they are melee or ranged.

Since that is not the case, there clearly is something wrong with the advantages of ranged, and the encounter design.

I remember T11, and we had 3 DPS that were better (by a significant margin) than the ranged, but the ranged were brought, and 1 melee had to sit, simply because you had to be masochistic not to do so. This is poor design if you ask me.

Sorry, but that's bullshit. In a scenario where we consider everyone equal skill melee are sat for ranged in every scenario no matter what.

[Ryme]

You would always replace your melee with range given equal skill level, sometimes even if the melee are better. You would never want to replace your range with melee given equal skill level, sometimes not even if the melee are better.

It just mechanics. Why take someone who has more chance of getting hit or effected by mechanics.

[Blackmist]

There is always a lot of competition for melee spots. A 10 man guild will typically take 2 to a raid, and I think it's fair to say that there's more than 20% melee toons out there.

Then you have to take tanks into account. Some encounters need only one, and a tank will typically respec to melee for those. No fights are going to need 1 tank and 4 healers. Melee has always been in an awkward position. It's harder to see where you're going, more chance of being insta-gibbed by boss abilities. Then there's the fact that as a druid, there are 3 other roles you could be doing. A rogue has melee. A warrior has melee/tank. Same with DKs. Paladins can only DPS in melee. Now you've got monks added in there as well.

Your best chance of being in guilds is to either pick a big one or join as something you don't want to do in the hope that eventually you'll be able to migrate over to that role. That takes time though.

[Hayro1]

Chains are dependant on the range DD or healer to be able to get in meleerange.

It's dependent on people not being dumb and melee meeting up with ranged, with a grand total of maybe 1-2 seconds of lost DPS time, to help out your healers.

---------- Post added 2012-10-31 at 09:02 AM ----------

Sorry, but that's bullshit. In a scenario where we consider everyone equal skill melee are sat for ranged in every scenario no matter what.

If they're bad, sure. Are melee sat on any of the bosses so far? I don't think I've heard of a guild sitting any, or a great deal of them.

[kaiadam]

Are you guys serious? There's so many anti-range mechanics that have been put in through the expansions it's not even funny.

For MSV alone, melee are better at:

1.) Stone guards (better cleave)
2.) Feng (no movement or risk of failure during staff phase; can dps on the move for shield phase)
3.) Elegon (significantly stronger energy charge dps - our heroic kill had 6 range and 13 melee which allowed us 15 stacks in p4)
4.) Will of the Emperors (hi, permanent 50% damage buff)

The only fight where they are at a true disadvantage is spirit kings, and it's not even by that much considering how much range have to avoid volley/rain of arrows/kite adds/run into melee for MC.

---

If you can't get into a guild raid, either your raid leader sucks or you do, and my bet's not on the raid leader.

[wariofan1]

Not as bad as Cata release. All fights favored ranged there big time, even om some world first kills, like Elemental Council, they completely discarded their melee dps and brought in only ranged ones.

I think we're sitting pretty nicely atm. We have always had it tougher than ranged, that's only natural granted our position, but we seem to also have a lot of other various uses. For example, the majority of interrupts come from Warriors' Pummel, Rogues' Kick and Death Knights' Mind Freeze. There's a good variety of abilities we don't have to watch out for, granted there are some that we have to watch out for that the ranged don't have to. Sometimes we have more time to react, like the Flanking Attack in the Spirit Kings encounter, and that fixating skull. We have an easier time moving away from some abilities, like, again, Spirit Kings with Annihilate and Volley, it's really easy to just move behind the boss.

We have our downsides, but I'd say that there's some things that makes it worth being a melee DPS.

[eijin]

4.) Will of the Emperors (hi, permanent 50% damage buff)

I agree with most of your post, shy of this part. this fight is an RDPS fight if anything. the gas only happens for a small portion of the fight and its what gives us the damage bonus. with most raids the melee will end up running between adds, time spent doing 0 dps. the gas and oppertunistic strike work to help against this.

i agree melee have an advantage on SG and feng. elegon is probably even if not ranged prefered (melee taking more damage due to harder stack resetting). range can just as easily have burst as melee, its based on the spec. spiritbinder is pretty even as is spirit kings. so far from the first 4 bosses of the new dungeon i dont see any ranged benifit while melee has a few

[Tinsoul]

Being a druid melee dps isn't going to help. Raids may already have druids in other roles which may be a disincentive.

Might just be my perception, but with the addition of monks agility gear in general seems to be under more pressure. In our little guild we've got as many people clamoring for agility necks/rings/trinks as intellect.

[mercutiouk]

I'm actually doing fairly scarey dps as ret pally at the moment. All things considered if they are able to rock the meters I don't think many other melee should be too scared. Just LOTS of melee around as always.