World of Rangecraft: Round 2 (Firelands: Analyze)

[Findme]

I don't think that's what people are complaining about. I don't think anyone expects for a group of all melee to work.. but then a group of all ranged shouldn't work either. I believe we're mostly looking for a balance so that raids have an incentive to take both melee and ranged.

For example, to me, it would seem more balanced it if it were something like:
0% melee = near impossible
~20% melee = difficult
40-60% melee = ideal
~80% melee = difficult
100% melee = near impossible

But currently it's appearing to be more like:
0% melee = easy
~20% melee = easy
40-60% melee = okay
~80% melee = difficult
100% melee = near impossible

So basically, there are plenty of mechanics which imply "if you don't have at least X ranged, it will be difficult", which I'm fine with, but very few/none which imply "if you don't have at least X melee, it will be difficult." A raid typically requires x tanks, y healers, >z ranged... but there's no requirement of w melee.

(On a somewhat unrelated note, to answer a question in the first post, I will continue maining a melee anyway. And in our current 10-man roster, I'm the only melee..)

exactly

The problem is, there is no downside of having a complete ranged dps setup while having a complete melee setup is near impossible to do something.

I know that complete ranged or complete melee setups are extreme cases and aren't happening often. But the encounter design is empowering the complete range setup too much. If a guild is fighting for first or very early kills to get a better rank, they are forced to use these ways.

[P4R45171K]

Pull Ragnaros, move to the left or right. LOOK AT THAT IT'S A BACK!

[Findme]

Pull Ragnaros, move to the left or right. LOOK AT THAT IT'S A BACK!

The problem is, the encounter body is really big, if you place your tanks to the one end of the platform, the melees are standing in the opposite end. You have to put some healer for the melees. The fight mechanics aid the spreading of the members. It could work in 25man but in 10man fights you can't park a healer for melee(s).

[ptwonline]

I suspect Blizzard intended melee to be more valuable because of interrupt mechanics. But naturally they forgot that 10 mans don't always have enough melee/interrupts and even if they did Blizz didn't anticipate how much trouble these mechanics would cause. So they gave almost everyone interrupts and made them as reliable as they could. But...this means that the anti-melee mechanics were no longer balanced against the pro-melee interrupt mechanics.

I think this is another example of the left hand (the content team) and the right hand (the class balance team) not really knowing what the other is doing.

Really, the main problem is that Blizzard is over-reliant on "get out of it" and "don't let the mobs hit you" mechanics, which usually favor ranged players since they have more freedom to move, more freedom to keep a distance, and the ability to snare at range. A lot of the PvP mechanics are causing PvE balancing issues.

[Jandeira]

I know that complete ranged or complete melee setups are extreme cases and aren't happening often. But the encounter design is empowering the complete range setup too much. If a guild is fighting for first or very early kills to get a better rank, they are forced to use these ways.

Complete ranged raids do happen, not even rarely. It is very possible to happen in 10 mans, since in the current expansion you HAVE to have ranged dps.
I can tell from my own expirience and guild that currently we have 3 melees (warrior, dk, pala) in our raid group and two of them only raid once in a while; which means, if our warrior takes one day off, we're pure ranged. All other melee class players we have play tanks. We don't have any active rogues, and we're not looking for any either, while every other class will gladly be welcomed since rogues are the only ones forced to be melee.

This just makes me sad.

[Findme]

Complete ranged raids do happen, not even rarely. It is very possible to happen in 10 mans, since in the current expansion you HAVE to have ranged dps.
I can tell from my own expirience and guild that currently we have 3 melees (warrior, dk, pala) in our raid group and two of them only raid once in a while; which means, if our warrior takes one day off, we're pure ranged. All other melee class players we have play tanks. We don't have any active rogues, and we're not looking for any either, while every other class will gladly be welcomed since rogues are the only ones forced to be melee.

This just makes me sad.

It's similar in my guild, till cataclysm the melee setup of our guild were our major power, they were the reliable base for our setup, we had very good cleave, dps (most in the top10 WoL logs) and interrupts. Since cataclysm the numbers of our melee dps have dwindled. Now there are a few melees left, the most of these very good players have stopped raiding and/or changed games

[Grimsdott]

Pull Ragnaros, move to the left or right. LOOK AT THAT IT'S A BACK!

stack those melee up on his "back" (lol 5y maybe) OH LOOK ITS HIS KNOCKBACK ABILITY WHICH HAPPENS TO HAVE AOE DAMAGE

Some people should pull their heads out of their asses cause seriously thinking that Cataclysm isn't very punishing for melee is living in massive denial.

In t11 we at least had interrupt mechanics (which in itself is extreme fail, to bring certain classes only because of them having kick of some sort). In t12 apparently there are none and what is more, 6 our of 7 bosses have mechanics that literally shit on melee while having 0 impact on range. It was extremely apparent on Method's Shannox stream where ranged didn't really even move and melee had to run like street whores just to squeeze some uptime on the dogs one of which has no aggro table and randomly switches targets and the other one has to be pulled away because of exploding spear. And no, it's not possible to just put melee on boss cause he will go down too fast.

It's annoying and shows extreme lack of professionalism from Blizzard, not to mention blatant lies in the case where Q&A said that melee will be better at handling Ragnaros adds (rofl, "better at handling adds", keep going there Ghostcrawler) while it's nowhere near the truth.

[Findme]

I have a quote from the us wow forums, it's short but explains the situation very well.

Alright kiddies. Time for some lateral thinking.

It's Saturday Night, and you still have no date to the local sockhop. You think, "well, at least I have my WoW friends!" No dice. Your whole guild is on a corporate retreat and nobody told you. You jump on your disc priest and decide to pug BoT 10 man. In this alternate universe, you're able to get two tanks and three healers off the hop. Then, you get whispers from the following classes:

Rogue
DK
Warrior
Feral Druid
Enh Shammy

No dual specs. That's your raid. Do you go?

Alternatively, you get

Hunter
Spriest
Mage
Lock
Ele Shammy.

How about now?

This is the argument of the thread. It has nothing to do with melee wanting it easy. It has to do with the fact that there are mechanics in raids that melee CANNOT deal with, while nothing of that nature exists for ranged.

[Deleted]

This is the argument of the thread. It has nothing to do with melee wanting it easy. It has to do with the fact that there are mechanics in raids that melee CANNOT deal with, while nothing of that nature exists for ranged.

Kinda. Wrath and TBC also had mechanics that only ranged dps could manage. Kil'jaeden's shadow orbs and the Lich King's frozen orbs of massive knockback could only be dealt with by ranged too. But in those situations you only needed a modest amount of ranged dps to deal with it, and bringing an all ranged dps raid wouldn't have made things much easier. Melee could ignore those types of adds and get on with their own thing. But they still had fire blooms and defiles to worry about, it wasn't complete faceroll and tunnel the boss stuff like on Saurfang.

Someone mentioned the issue of chasing Shannox's adds around the room as a melee dps. If that had been designed as a Wrath or TBC fight, it would have been balanced around ranged dealing with the adds while melee go on the boss, but still dealing with some ability to avoid it becoming another Saurfang.

[Thickasabrick31]

I think the real problem with melee in tier 11 has little to do with losing DPS; it's that they take a crapton more damage than the ranged this tier. Nothing the OP said has anything to do with damage taken, so the whole argument is null.

[Grimsdott]

I think the real problem with melee in tier 11 has little to do with losing DPS; it's that they take a crapton more damage than the ranged this tier. Nothing the OP said has anything to do with damage taken, so the whole argument is null.

What? On which fight? In entire t11, maybe on Halfus melee take extra damage because of meteor shower thing. It's all about losing uptime man. Hell, on Ryolith it's both losing uptime and taking more damage because of knockback + lava on the ground. Same with Ragnaros. Knockback which deals damage and causes melee to lose uptime while range casually stands there and only needs to avoid big fucking shadow crashes.

Developers are playing fast and loose with encounters lately and while providing some interesting mechanics, they lose sight of what consequences those mechanics have.