"Melee friendly encounters..."

[Murderdoll]

Any fight with significant dancing for the whole raid group sucks for ranged. Part of the reason KJC was nerfed. Look at Durumu as an example. Ranged cant do much during the maze, while melee can continue bashing his face in. Tortos? melee cannot help the turtles at all, but ranged gotta dance from rockfalls and interrupt casts doing so.

Bulldust.

The ranged portion of the maze is MASSIVE. You have ample amount of time to get to the end point cast and wait for the next part to open up and wait for the beam to catch up.

Melee also need to move from rockfalls.

[Gospels]

I just switched mains to my lock because not alot of guilds were/are recruiting melee and they especially arent recruiting rets.

[DrMcNinja]

I just switched mains to my lock because not alot of guilds were/are recruiting melee and they especially arent recruiting rets.

Unless you're in a guild where every DPS in your raid is beyond flawless, it would be stupid to assume a ret paladin is worthless. But I guess people jump the bandwagon so easily.

That being said, SoO definitely turned out to be quite melee friendly. Dark Shaman is just a clusterfuck, but aside from those adds I don't really see an issue.

[Murderdoll]

I just switched mains to my lock because not alot of guilds were/are recruiting melee and they especially arent recruiting rets.

Again, that comes back to my previous post. I dont think thats necessarily an indication of SoO, its more a building melee stigma.

[Refridge]

Except the quote was specifically 'melee-friendly', not 'favored'. Had they really said 'favored' there would be grounds to have issues with it, but as things go, those two things are not the same.

This whole conversation begets the favored aspect, seeing as the only reason it matters whether or not an encounter is friendly for ranged or melee is because in HC guilds melee or ranged will be sat for progression on bosses which favor one or the other. The reason that's important to Blizz is because they want to foster the idea that you should be bringing the player, not the class, and if Player X wants to play a ret pally, and is good at it, then by george he shouldn't be punished for it!

All that said, I don't see the big deal. I play an enhancement shaman and although we're fairly mobile, i cant think of a melee spec that's not. Warriors can charge, Rogues can SS, feral can charge/pounce, ret has movement speed talents and on judgements, monks are fucking mobile as fuck (im articulate!) and if you're losing TONS of dps because you have to switch targets often, you're more likely not playing your class efficiently, than you are stuck in an "unfair encounter".

Everyone wants to top the meters, but if you're playing with people worth playing, you're not gonna catch shit for losing to a hunter, or a warlock or what have you, on a target switching fight. The only mechanic that I can think of, having 8/14HM progression, that's prohibitive to melee dps, is oozes on dark shamans. And my guild killed it. And myself and the rogue did just fine. I was second on Heroic Nazgrim in my group, target switching for DAYS. And my fellow dps'ers are good at their class. When you have to target switch the encounters transcend just your priority and knowing what glyphs to use, you have to control your movement within the environment of the fight in such a way as to affect your priority at a minimum and not die. THAT'S RAIDING. A melee that's worth his/her salt can do this, encounter aside.

[Jibjabb]

Well, I don't think of melee-friendly and ranged-friendly as mutually exclusive. If you just consider "melee-friendly" to be "doesn't punish you for being melee", there's plenty of fights that are melee-friendly. They're just...almost always easier as ranged.

So much wrong with this. Over the past tiers I can name so many bosses where melee can simply IGNORE essential boss mechanics because they are in melee.

Iron Qon: herpa derpa dont have to move or dodge spears sit on boss
Lei Shen: Spread out for chain lightning? oh wait it cant hit us lewls. Oh look another Thunderstruck on the range again
Jinrokh: Focused lightning cant hit us sit in pool all day long
Horridon: oh no a dino is on me... after all the range already got one
Megaera: La di da sit in melee cleave the adds while range has to deal with beams and positioning all fight long
Animus: Interrupting Jolt! Oh wait it does nothing to me
Consorts: Zomfg starfall... nvr hits melee, dont have to spread, sit on boss tunnel vision

and this is just crap from last tier.

[Giscoicus]

Bulldust.

The ranged portion of the maze is MASSIVE. You have ample amount of time to get to the end point cast and wait for the next part to open up and wait for the beam to catch up.

Melee also need to move from rockfalls.

Even still, ranged had to cast, stop casting and run, then cast again, while melee could continue drilling him. When a ranged gets red beam? guess who's instant spamming as they run in circles. Melee gets it? keep beating boss as you swing the beam to position.

- - - Updated - - -

So much wrong with this. Over the past tiers I can name so many bosses where melee can simply IGNORE essential boss mechanics because they are in melee.

Iron Qon: herpa derpa dont have to move or dodge spears sit on boss
Lei Shen: Spread out for chain lightning? oh wait it cant hit us lewls. Oh look another Thunderstruck on the range again
Jinrokh: Focused lightning cant hit us sit in pool all day long
Horridon: oh no a dino is on me... after all the range already got one
Megaera: La di da sit in melee cleave the adds while range has to deal with beams and positioning all fight long
Animus: Interrupting Jolt! Oh wait it does nothing to me
Consorts: Zomfg starfall... nvr hits melee, dont have to spread, sit on boss tunnel vision

and this is just crap from last tier.

Exactly. it is rough on range when they have to dance. Melee being expected to dance? NOT FAIR. They can keep their dps up WHILE dancing.

[Verain]

Is the statement "melee friendly" or "ranged hostile"?

Here's the things Blizzard has tried:

1)- Melee does more damage. The fights are designed to allow varying levels of melee uptime.
2)- Melee does less damage, but can interrupt. The fights are designed to force endless fucking interrupts oh god why
3)- Both do similar damage. Ranged are poor at movement. The fights are designed to allow varying levels of movement.
4)- Both do similar damage. Special ranged-only mechanics allow melee to tunnel boss whilst the ranged have to actually do the fight.

I think 1 is their best design by a lot, and 2 is their worst, narrowly edging 4. They have hinted that they will try a 5- where melee are given a similar edge.
(3) would be a pretty solid setup, and they are mostly on that now. The problem is that you really need to force ranged to move- you have to be aggressive with fight design, and many end up similar. I don't think it's a bad setup as long as the ranged are actually hampered on the movement heavy fights.

The other situation that makes this all the more important is multitarget versus single target. Very few melee can multidot at all, and none come close to a balance druid, affliction warlock, or shadow priest. Meanwhile, "cleave" abilities are present on some ranged, and the ability to employ these powers is often dependent on compliant tanks and strats. Blizzard often provides reasons why you can't cleave, or bribes you not to.

We saw a lot of the "this mechanic will choose a ranged or a healer: if you didn't bring enough, then it will pick a melee". A good example here is heroic bladelord, where I wanted to bring as many ranged as possible to this "melee friendly" fight. What this design does is turn the melee into LEECHES who cannot help with mechanics (another example of this from ICC is the "beatyfaceman", aka Deathbringer Saurfang).

In both of these fights, your damage crew could be entirely ranged. For every ranged that becomes a melee, you force more mechanics to other ranged, or even healers. On the blade lord fight, he was GOING to throw out a tornado. The tornado would select based on spec. So as ranged become melee, your existing ranged have to handle the mechanic more and more, as do your healers. Your meter- which is the MAP not the TERRITORY- shows your melee as doing more damage, so you MIGHT think, if you were naive, that it is a melee fight. That is lie! You want as many ranged as possible on fights like these. If all your dps were ranged, each dps and healer would share an equal and low chance of being tornadoed. Since it's a two tank fight, you would have 8 targets in a 10 man that are valid tornado targets- or 7 if you brought a monk, who is considered melee as mistweaver by this mechanic. But if you brought a rogue (all specs), and a ret, suddenl your team has 6 targets (or only 5), and two of them are healers. It's the same number of mechanics, but now everyone appears to do less damage. You didn't add dps, you scooted it to the melee, who can't do the mechanic!


The first tier of Cata featured a million interrupts on fights. The interrupts were consistently fast casts that required extensive setup preraid. Nefarion, for no reason at all, required three melee on each platform to frigging kick in a circle (only 2 in 10 man). Absurd and hateful. Tanks counted, at least, and mysteriously shaman were always best at this game (the cast featured a lockout timer, so everyone's kick was like 7 seconds, even the ones that received benefits for being shorter duration, such as shamans).


Anyway, 1 is best, 3 works but only if you are aggresive at designing encounters that are ranged hostile and make you want to stack melee, and 5 we are waiting on.

[Deleted]

You don't really want melee's in your setup if you have a choise. They just take much more avoidable damage compared to range and often the damage is worse.

[Giscoicus]

You don't really want melee's in your setup if you have a choice. They just take much more avoidable damage compared to range and often the damage is worse.

Then the melee need to learn to dance.

Totally avoidable damage, if the melee is good they avoid it. Melee is bad they dont. bring good melee. Bad ranged arent going to be helpful either.

[Refridge]

So much wrong with this. Over the past tiers I can name so many bosses where melee can simply IGNORE essential boss mechanics because they are in melee.

Iron Qon: herpa derpa dont have to move or dodge spears sit on boss
Lei Shen: Spread out for chain lightning? oh wait it cant hit us lewls. Oh look another Thunderstruck on the range again
Jinrokh: Focused lightning cant hit us sit in pool all day long
Horridon: oh no a dino is on me... after all the range already got one
Megaera: La di da sit in melee cleave the adds while range has to deal with beams and positioning all fight long
Animus: Interrupting Jolt! Oh wait it does nothing to me
Consorts: Zomfg starfall... nvr hits melee, dont have to spread, sit on boss tunnel vision

and this is just crap from last tier.

There are a few mechanics that we have to avoid sure but just for the sake of argument...
Iron Qon: We as melee cant dps out of windstorm, big dps loss, lines over the boss, potentially a dps loss.
Lei Shen: We CAN be hit by chain lightning, if we're close to ranged, everyone needs to watch where they are, even melee, when healers are close. (But I get your point.)
Jinrokh: If we're talking about maximizing dps, normal you're kind of right, on heroic ranged got to dps when they left pool to drop debuff, we didn't. (we being melee)
Horridon: The end of the fight... when melee get dinos, IS WHEN EVERYTHING MATTERS!!! Have you even gotten a dino, breathing down your face, while you're trying to do MAXIMUM DPS. If you macro an ability to knock it back, you're losing single target (potentially), if you're swapping to the dino, you're getting facefucked. That end portion, the hard part, is shit for melee.
Megaera: Limited movement if your healers are good. I'll give you this one.
Animus: Also easy for us, depends on your group's strat really. But a good strat this fight is easy for melee.
Consorts: That room is huge, it's a joke fight for ranged too, so, not awarding that to either spec.

- - - Updated - - -

On another note, which ranged can't move and dps at this point? Icy floes for every mage, KJC for everylock, Hunters, yeah, Ele Shamans, yeah, SPriests, yeah. If anything this discussion should be " Are encounters HEALER friendly?"

[Koji2k11]

well since our group hit heroic content last ID i cant say immerseus is very melee friendly we basicly sorted most melees out because of space issues with the shit on the ground that is quite annoying we just got 2 rouges and rest were ranged DPS and we managed to kill him after of couple of wipes the protectors idk is okay'ish i would say it's just hard to multirupture cleave and watch where you stay all we did was kick shit and just cleave as much as we could but well still affliction WL were realy OP this fight >_> basicly all classes with multidot and cleave were kind of favored there

since we had some wipes on norushen already i would say he's the more melee friendly encounter right now since we got our melee trials first, then everyone else was doing their trials rotating healers and DPS and tanks our best try was at about 100m left but i think we can do dis, this week

[Refridge]

well since our group hit heroic content last ID i cant say immerseus is very melee friendly we basicly sorted most melees out because of space issues with the shit on the ground that is quite annoying we just got 2 rouges and rest were ranged DPS and we managed to kill him after of couple of wipes the protectors idk is okay'ish i would say it's just hard to multirupture cleave and watch where you stay all we did was kick shit and just cleave as much as we could but well still affliction WL were realy OP this fight >_> basicly all classes with multidot and cleave were kind of favored there

If your melee are causing problems on immerseus, you're doing something wrong. Go watch some top tier videos, there are probably better strats, message me if you want a detailed explanation.

[Aboubacar]

Melee won't consider a fight melee friendly or be happy until they can tunnel the boss the entire encounter and every mechanic ignores them... The problem is that the majority of melee don't play a ranged alt at the same level or understand that every time ranged has to move they lose damage and more boss mechanics target ranged than melee in general.

Every time I hear a fight isn't melee friendly there's some sort of void zone to dodge in melee range of the boss that braindead melee are dying to and exclaim "ranged have it so much easier".

With the exclusion of hunters, ranged have just as much if not more mechanics to deal with that cause boss downtime and damage loss. SoO is one of the most melee friendly instances and bad melee are still complaining that bosses aren't "melee friendly". Basically, you need to get better. It's another learn to play issue...

It's actually ridiculous how enormous boss hit boxes have become to please the bad melee players. When you can melee a boss from halfway across the room while ranged have to cancel casts to dodge mechanics a boss isn't favoring ranged...

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

IMO target switching and AoEs are the two worst things for melee to have in a fight. Because both carry a high risk that they drop to 0 DPS for an extended period of time.

Ranged use to have a similar issue any time movement was involved in a fight, and that was what kept them somewhat close to melee.

Starting in Cata, Blizz began removing the movement penalty for Ranged, without any similar penalty removed from melee. The result? Ranged became unstoppable DPS machines, while Melee continued to be at the same state they were in the days of Vanilla.

[l33t]

Then the melee need to learn to dance.
Totally avoidable damage, if the melee is good they avoid it. Melee is bad they dont. bring good melee. Bad ranged arent going to be helpful either.

Dance, shmance, you don't get it do you? Nobody will wait till melees master your dance studio. It is simple: if melee is dying all the time, we switch it for ranged. And BAM: a miracle - a boss suddenly died because we have no melee burdens to carry on. I'm sorry, if by melee friendly devs mean melee players with reaction times equal to ones of a professional drivers/racers, it is not a melee friendly at all.

[Refridge]

People who post: Have some frame of reference, melee are in a great spot, Blizz is doing a good job designing fair encounters. Maximize uptime, know your class, stop kvetching, improve your gameplay, that's melee. Stop bitching.

[Aboubacar]

IMO target switching and AoEs are the two worst things for melee to have in a fight. Because both carry a high risk that they drop to 0 DPS for an extended period of time.

Ranged use to have a similar issue any time movement was involved in a fight, and that was what kept them somewhat close to melee.

Starting in Cata, Blizz began removing the movement penalty for Ranged, without any similar penalty removed from melee. The result? Ranged became unstoppable DPS machines, while Melee continued to be at the same state they were in the days of Vanilla.

There was a mistake that was made with warlocks and imo ele shamans. That has been nearly removed for warlocks.
Hunters are the only outliers. Ranged dps that do 100% damage on the move w/ 0 penalty or thoughts given to positioning.

You actually have it a bit backwards in a sense. They moved up warlock mobility and casting(now gone), but at the same time increased all melee mobility w/ double charge, burst of speed, short shadow step cd etc. and now melee are unpeelable by most classes in pvp and can leap across 100 yard boss room in 2 seconds...

What melee have trouble target swapping? ferals? that's about it. All melee have great clump aoe. The only thing they don't have that some ranged have is multidot spread cleave.

[Giscoicus]

Dance, shmance, you don't get it do you? Nobody will wait till melees master your dance studio. It is simple: if melee is dying all the time, we switch it for ranged. And BAM: a miracle - a boss suddenly died because we have no melee burdens to carry on. I'm sorry, if by melee friendly devs mean melee players with reaction times equal to ones of a professional drivers/racers, it is not a melee friendly at all.

Oh no, an encounter isn't easy for bad players who cant dodge bad stuff.

Praytell, how does swapping in an unaware ranged help on Dark Shamans? Is it somewhat easier for good ranged than good melee? Yes. An encounter that is hard for bad players isnt a problem. The problem is that your melee is bad at being melee.

- - - Updated - - -

IMO target switching and AoEs are the two worst things for melee to have in a fight. Because both carry a high risk that they drop to 0 DPS for an extended period of time.

Ranged use to have a similar issue any time movement was involved in a fight, and that was what kept them somewhat close to melee.

Starting in Cata, Blizz began removing the movement penalty for Ranged, without any similar penalty removed from melee. The result? Ranged became unstoppable DPS machines, while Melee continued to be at the same state they were in the days of Vanilla.

I wouldnt say Blizzard didnt add a bit more ranged usage to melee. Rogues can spam shuriken if they really want to/need to. Deathknight ranged isnt bad at all. Warriors are even more capable of moving quickly. Paladins are...paladins. But hey they can still do some ranged dps.

[Verain]

All combo point guys face a pretty harsh swap penalty, but it's certainly not ludicrously high. Many of the really punishing rogue mechanics were fixed (bandit's guile being the big one) or addressed (a 10 second redirect minimizes but certainly doesn't eliminate CP destruction).

As for hunters, I don't count them. Blizzard has given them BOTH the advantages of melee and ranged, BUT they have also reduced their patchwerk damage. Hunters have a niche, and a quick glance at WoL for Thok shows this clearly. You may not LIKE that niche, but it's clear that they are a third thing- weapon class but lower damage than melee weapons.