State of the Melee or How the devs flipped me back to liking melee toons.

spinnytop

I've always generally preferred to play melee toons in games; if there's a choice between long range or close range, I tend to pick close range. However, due to the state of melee powers in CO when I started playing it the game steadily turned me more and more towards ranged characters. There were two main reasons for this:

1. Melee toons were leashed to their target. Wanna charge something? You need to be in your target's face both when you start and when you finish.
2. Combos felt awful. Mashing combos felt unrewarding because combos were weak and didn't really do anything useful.

Because of this by the time of Cryptic North just about all my toons were ranged - the exception was a might toon, and that was because might knocks were fun. Ranged toons were way more mobile than melee toons and did a much better job of satisfying my desire to use my WASD keys constantly in combat. They were also less frustrating to use - an NPC suddenly moving at the wrong microsecond rarely meant my charged ranged attack would fail. Fast forward to the modern day and all my top most favorite most fun toons are all melee again. For two specific reasons:

1. PBAoE melee moves that require no target letting me charge something as I'm approaching a target.
2. Combos are now all aoe, which makes them a lot of fun to spam while running through a pack of npcs. On top of that, combos now feel strong - many of them now do things that are very strong offensively and/or defensively.

It didn't even occur to me until very recently that this had happened, when I realized that my Might toon had become crazy fun again. Then I thought about it and realized that my melee toons are the ones that I really look forward to playing now. Even Bestial once I settled for the fact that this set is a bit more specialized in what it's good at.

So good job Devs, you put melee back on the menu!

nbkxs

Melee's dps is also vastly higher than ranged. The caveat is that you have to push, and shove, and force your way into the pile to get the room that you need, and often have to deal with hazards a lot more because of the other people in the pile. On the ape in particular, I find this battle to be a nightmare to melee when there are too many other melee there. Sometimes there's so many meteors you can't find a safe place to stand, and end up having to block for ages. Or you get clipped by a meteor you didn't see from all the fire flooding the screen, and get ally oop'd over the ape, and punched in the face before you can get up. So, it's a trade off really. How much can you be assed to deal with that, for all of the extra dmg that it gives?

spinnytop

nbkxs wrote: »

Melee's dps is also vastly higher than ranged. The caveat is that you have to push, and shove, and force your way into the pile to get the room that you need, and often have to deal with hazards a lot more because of the other people in the pile. On the ape in particular, I find this battle to be a nightmare to melee when there are too many other melee there. Sometimes there's so many meteors you can't find a safe place to stand, and end up having to block for ages. Or you get clipped by a meteor you didn't see from all the fire flooding the screen, and get ally oop'd over the ape, and punched in the face before you can get up. So, it's a trade off really. How much can you be assed to deal with that, for all of the extra dmg that it gives?

Well, if there's so much pushing and shoving going on, then it seems a lot of people found reasons to be assed to deal with it I stand on top of people and use flight personally

lezard21

The reason: It's a lot harder to screw up a melee toon into not contributing than a ranged toon.

Some people still manage though, bless them.​​

spinnytop

lezard21 wrote: »

The reason: It's a lot harder to screw up a melee toon into not contributing than a ranged toon.

Some people still manage though, bless them.​​

I'm still not entirely comfortable with how naked your avatar looks...