05-30-2012, 11:07 PM
Diablo had only one melee class, and it was generally the most gear dependent of the classes. I greatly enjoyed playing the ranged classes in D1, with teleport positioning and all manner of finesse, but the most fun of all was playing melee and getting in there toe to toe. When I would pull more than I could safely handle, the strategic fallback would begin. Use this corner to reduce the number that could swing at me to two, until some could walk around, then fall back to the next corner, or to that barrel, or use the impaled villager briefly, and so forth. Tactical bliss!
Diablo 2 had zero melee classes, because melee itself was not viable. The mobs hit too hard, compared to the health recovery options. You could not stay in toe to toe. As Barbarian you would whirl whirl whirl your way through them. Paladins would throw a lot of hammers. Etc. You stayed at range or you died. This was Epic Fail on behalf of the designers -- the worst shortcoming of the game, bar none.
I pinned most of my hope for Diablo 3 on the talent, experience and skill of Blizzard designers -- with the lessons of Diablo 1 and 2 on hand, plus their successes with World of Warcraft, where melee is eminently viable.
Well the verdict is in, and the grade? Fail.
This is D2 all over again, as far as melee mechanics. There are some significant differences (mainly the addition of crowd control mechanics) and some minor improvements, but at the core of melee design lies one simple principle: Basic Math. If the incoming damage per second overwhelms the character's available healing per second, the character cannot remain engaged at melee range and must retreat or die. A little of this is good, as I described with my tactical fallbacks as a D1 warrior -- but too much is fatal. D2 was fatally unbalanced, rendering melee unfeasible -- and D3 is almost as bad, or its even worse, depending on whether you are talking about Hell or Inferno. The balance is fine in Normal and Nightmare, but that was true in D2 as well.
So how do I draw this conclusion? What's my evidence?
I am playing mostly coop, with my wife and a few select friends who have been progressing at about the same pace as us. My toon is melee, a barbarian. My wife's toon is wizard. The others have been demon hunters. No one in this group is using the AH for gearing up, as yet. I'm leading most of the time, and I've been able to tank for the group (which varies from two to four in number) through Normal and Nightmare. Some boss packs in Nightmare were a strong challenge. We are playing casually, not taking any extreme care, but deaths in Nightmare were quite low.
Skills I am using are almost all defensive in nature. I used Frenzy at first, but as the game forces me ever more increasingly to disengage from melee and "Run Away Little Girl, Run Away", I switched to Bash, because it works better if there are frequent time gaps between my swings, and it has some knockback inherent to it. Right mouse button is the Slam, which rumbles the ground and knocks trash mobs (but not bosses? wtf) back and controls them briefly. When it came available, I started using the glyph that cuts the Fury cost of the skill in half, because being able to chain more of these in a row is more valuable than the other options, at least from a tanking and fighting-from-range perspective. Defensive skill is the AoE stun, glyphed for double range and pull-them-to-me effect. War Cry for maximum group incoming-damage reduction, which was 40% Armor boost most of the way, but recently switched to 20% Armor 15% Dodge, and perhaps switching to 50% Resists when I get to it. (Not 60 yet, but that's not important to my argument here). For a hard hitting cooldown, I was using the ground-based AoE, but since I can no longer tank for that, I have switched to calling in the three heroes instead. My last skill was underutilized for a long time. I tried a few things there, including a second long cooldown power spell, but that left me too weak between cooldowns. I finally settled on Overpower, with the glyph that gives Fury for each enemy hit. This helps me power more Slams, which has become my most-used skill. Passives are all defensive: extra health globes and double health from them; longer shouts and self-heal for first minute; 20% reduction of all non-physical damage. Gear is not great but is decent. Health around 17k, DPS quickly climbed to 3k with a 315dps 2h weapon (works a LOT better than lower DPS 1h and shield), and is up to 3.7k by the end of act 1. That may sound ridiculously low to DH and Wiz players, but kill speed isn't really a problem here. It's playable -- and more vitality/health and general gear isn't actually going to change the core mechanics in play in Hell difficulty.
So here is how it works for us in 4player Act1 Hell with a modestly geared group. CC, CC, CC, CC. If the Crowd Control runs out and stuff is not all dead, our line collapses and it turns in to a chaotic retreat, with healthier players trying to cover for the wounded while they wait on health orbs to drop and/or healing potions to cool, or occasionally healing wells to refill. I can take a lot more licking than the ranged toons, from higher armor (Str stat focus), more defensive passives, general 30% damage reduction for being a melee class, and plenty of past experience playing Diablo melee.
Nevertheless, regular trash mobs are hitting me for 3k a pop. If I take as many as four hits, I'm already almost dead. (Four hits? Are you serious?) If I had higher vitality or thicker armor, we could add a couple of hits to that, but this would not make an iota of difference in the wider perspective. The math, the Basic MATH of melee combat, is unbalanced and unsustainable. The only way to play is not to get hit -- even as a melee class! This is patently ridiculous. ... Yes, it can be made to work. Yes, I can stun everything near me, pulling it all to me and Controlling it for four seconds while my DPS Corps blasts away at it. Yes my wizard can Slow Time to further help with this, and present some mirror images to lure away some attackers briefly. Yes, for trash (trash ONLY, because the skill does NOT work on bosses, champs or minions) I can Slam the ground over and over and over and over, controlling ANY size pack of trash mobs if they are reasonably grouped, for as long as my Fury lasts. Yes, I can refresh my Fury a bit with a new War Cry if it is cool, or an Overpower hit (which can fully refill my Fury globe in a crowded situation) and Slam a bunch more. But Slam does not work on bosses. Why the hell not? Damages them, yes, but no CC effect. Boss packs blow through our line like it isn't there. I get off one stun and summon the Three Stooges, then it's "Run Away Little Girl, Run Away" all over again.
The boss packs get a few too many immunities, a little too much speed boost, and hit a bit too hard -- but these are tweakable. Trash should not be killing me in six blows. I SHOULD be able to go toe to toe with two or three of them for several seconds, but I cannot. If I melee even one of them with Bash, and there's no CC from my teammates, it will hit me a couple of times and my health is down near half already. Health globe drops could be increased a bit for Hell and probably Inferno, and that too could help, but isnt enough cure by itself.
I have thought about this extensively over the last 24 hours. Is this really so different from D1 Warrior? If so, in what way?
D1 warrior could be badly undergeared, while progressing through Nightmare. Especially if one did not farm a bit for levels and gear along the way. When undergeared, the game could be almost unplayable, melee unviable. You'd have to resort to some elite tricks and tactics to get by. (For a clinic on that, see King of Pain's epic Ironman run.) ... Is my D3 barb similarly undergeared? Perhaps, but only up to a point. D1 also had mobs that could never outrun your toon, and tons of doorways and other choke points, the likes of which mechanics do not exist in D3. So D3 melee NEEDS a bit more sturdiness, to make up for the lack of tactical options other than CC.
The main difference, though, from D1, is the healing.
This where Basic Math applies. In D1, your incoming damage rate could spike very high at times, but you had a belt full of instant-effect potions you could chug one after the next. If you couldn't overcome the immediate threat before your belt ran dry, you could technically open inventory and click potions from there, but that was not as quick and easy as hotkey use, and this was never done in casual, general play. So the belt capacity was the limit of your healing. It was NOT unlimited, but it did allow the player to choose when, where and how much of that limited healing capacity got applied.
I agree with the D3 devs that healing options must be limited, but they have limited them WAY WAYYYYYYYY too strictly. It's Basic Math. If you can't pull out enough health recovery to stand toe to toe with a few trash mobs for a small period of time, you cannot call it melee. Melee is as dead in D3 as it was in D2, as far as high difficulty goes. The CC options make things significantly better, but this is short-range CC-chaining, NOT melee. And I do not think it is recoverable under the current model of 30-second cooldown on potion use.
I don't need to see Inferno difficulty to know that melee isn't viable there, because it isn't viable in Hell. The class is viable, but it's viable as a CC master. Monk has to be the same, as they have no more ability than barbarians to take a hit. Monks have more self-heal power, but overall I think they're in the same boat. CC or die.
Mobs hit too hard. Characters' options for health recovery are too thin. Both must be addressed for melee to become viable. The math has to be aligned to a sustainable level. Yes, you should have to retreat some of the time. Yes, you should be out of health recovery SOME of the time, but not like this. This is almost all of the time.
I am having fun as the main tank and CC enabler for my group. It is tactically interesting to blow all our CC cooldowns and chew through trash mobs. Enough stuff cools quickly enough for us to progress without heavy waiting around... unless we have taken damage and no health globes drop. Then it's another useless run to town to see the healer, because hey, these health pots are NOT full heals like in D1, and they cost a pretty penny, and it takes less time to run to town than it does to stand around waiting. Plus, it actually costs us LESS to die than it does to buy ONE healing potion. Go figure. We still buy the potions and use them every time they are cool when a boss pack is on us, because dying is less fun and we're here for fun, but still. A LOT of tedium attached to health recovery: runs to town, and with EVERY Hell boss pack, lots of running in circles waiting for health pots to cool down or health globes to drop. This tedium surrounding health recovery is only going to get worse as we advance to the end of Hell and if we move on to Inferno.
D1 had the tedium of loading your belt and reloading it and reloading it, which was subpar. But that was between fights and only took a few moments. It was a cost worth enduring for the benefit of being able to spike your healing potion use when incoming damage spiked, instead of being forced to run in circles and kill time waiting on cooldown mechanics. THAT is patently NOT FUN, the running in circles waiting on potion cooldowns. I can do without that. And if I must endure it (and endure is the right word, because it is most clearly a punishment mechanic), my patience for it will wear out and the frustration will drown out the fun, sooner rather than later. Months or maybe only weeks, then it will be time to play something where most of my time I'm having fun, not running around in circles unable to play my class the way it ought to play.
- Sirian
Diablo 2 had zero melee classes, because melee itself was not viable. The mobs hit too hard, compared to the health recovery options. You could not stay in toe to toe. As Barbarian you would whirl whirl whirl your way through them. Paladins would throw a lot of hammers. Etc. You stayed at range or you died. This was Epic Fail on behalf of the designers -- the worst shortcoming of the game, bar none.
I pinned most of my hope for Diablo 3 on the talent, experience and skill of Blizzard designers -- with the lessons of Diablo 1 and 2 on hand, plus their successes with World of Warcraft, where melee is eminently viable.
Well the verdict is in, and the grade? Fail.
This is D2 all over again, as far as melee mechanics. There are some significant differences (mainly the addition of crowd control mechanics) and some minor improvements, but at the core of melee design lies one simple principle: Basic Math. If the incoming damage per second overwhelms the character's available healing per second, the character cannot remain engaged at melee range and must retreat or die. A little of this is good, as I described with my tactical fallbacks as a D1 warrior -- but too much is fatal. D2 was fatally unbalanced, rendering melee unfeasible -- and D3 is almost as bad, or its even worse, depending on whether you are talking about Hell or Inferno. The balance is fine in Normal and Nightmare, but that was true in D2 as well.
So how do I draw this conclusion? What's my evidence?
I am playing mostly coop, with my wife and a few select friends who have been progressing at about the same pace as us. My toon is melee, a barbarian. My wife's toon is wizard. The others have been demon hunters. No one in this group is using the AH for gearing up, as yet. I'm leading most of the time, and I've been able to tank for the group (which varies from two to four in number) through Normal and Nightmare. Some boss packs in Nightmare were a strong challenge. We are playing casually, not taking any extreme care, but deaths in Nightmare were quite low.
Skills I am using are almost all defensive in nature. I used Frenzy at first, but as the game forces me ever more increasingly to disengage from melee and "Run Away Little Girl, Run Away", I switched to Bash, because it works better if there are frequent time gaps between my swings, and it has some knockback inherent to it. Right mouse button is the Slam, which rumbles the ground and knocks trash mobs (but not bosses? wtf) back and controls them briefly. When it came available, I started using the glyph that cuts the Fury cost of the skill in half, because being able to chain more of these in a row is more valuable than the other options, at least from a tanking and fighting-from-range perspective. Defensive skill is the AoE stun, glyphed for double range and pull-them-to-me effect. War Cry for maximum group incoming-damage reduction, which was 40% Armor boost most of the way, but recently switched to 20% Armor 15% Dodge, and perhaps switching to 50% Resists when I get to it. (Not 60 yet, but that's not important to my argument here). For a hard hitting cooldown, I was using the ground-based AoE, but since I can no longer tank for that, I have switched to calling in the three heroes instead. My last skill was underutilized for a long time. I tried a few things there, including a second long cooldown power spell, but that left me too weak between cooldowns. I finally settled on Overpower, with the glyph that gives Fury for each enemy hit. This helps me power more Slams, which has become my most-used skill. Passives are all defensive: extra health globes and double health from them; longer shouts and self-heal for first minute; 20% reduction of all non-physical damage. Gear is not great but is decent. Health around 17k, DPS quickly climbed to 3k with a 315dps 2h weapon (works a LOT better than lower DPS 1h and shield), and is up to 3.7k by the end of act 1. That may sound ridiculously low to DH and Wiz players, but kill speed isn't really a problem here. It's playable -- and more vitality/health and general gear isn't actually going to change the core mechanics in play in Hell difficulty.
So here is how it works for us in 4player Act1 Hell with a modestly geared group. CC, CC, CC, CC. If the Crowd Control runs out and stuff is not all dead, our line collapses and it turns in to a chaotic retreat, with healthier players trying to cover for the wounded while they wait on health orbs to drop and/or healing potions to cool, or occasionally healing wells to refill. I can take a lot more licking than the ranged toons, from higher armor (Str stat focus), more defensive passives, general 30% damage reduction for being a melee class, and plenty of past experience playing Diablo melee.
Nevertheless, regular trash mobs are hitting me for 3k a pop. If I take as many as four hits, I'm already almost dead. (Four hits? Are you serious?) If I had higher vitality or thicker armor, we could add a couple of hits to that, but this would not make an iota of difference in the wider perspective. The math, the Basic MATH of melee combat, is unbalanced and unsustainable. The only way to play is not to get hit -- even as a melee class! This is patently ridiculous. ... Yes, it can be made to work. Yes, I can stun everything near me, pulling it all to me and Controlling it for four seconds while my DPS Corps blasts away at it. Yes my wizard can Slow Time to further help with this, and present some mirror images to lure away some attackers briefly. Yes, for trash (trash ONLY, because the skill does NOT work on bosses, champs or minions) I can Slam the ground over and over and over and over, controlling ANY size pack of trash mobs if they are reasonably grouped, for as long as my Fury lasts. Yes, I can refresh my Fury a bit with a new War Cry if it is cool, or an Overpower hit (which can fully refill my Fury globe in a crowded situation) and Slam a bunch more. But Slam does not work on bosses. Why the hell not? Damages them, yes, but no CC effect. Boss packs blow through our line like it isn't there. I get off one stun and summon the Three Stooges, then it's "Run Away Little Girl, Run Away" all over again.
The boss packs get a few too many immunities, a little too much speed boost, and hit a bit too hard -- but these are tweakable. Trash should not be killing me in six blows. I SHOULD be able to go toe to toe with two or three of them for several seconds, but I cannot. If I melee even one of them with Bash, and there's no CC from my teammates, it will hit me a couple of times and my health is down near half already. Health globe drops could be increased a bit for Hell and probably Inferno, and that too could help, but isnt enough cure by itself.
I have thought about this extensively over the last 24 hours. Is this really so different from D1 Warrior? If so, in what way?
D1 warrior could be badly undergeared, while progressing through Nightmare. Especially if one did not farm a bit for levels and gear along the way. When undergeared, the game could be almost unplayable, melee unviable. You'd have to resort to some elite tricks and tactics to get by. (For a clinic on that, see King of Pain's epic Ironman run.) ... Is my D3 barb similarly undergeared? Perhaps, but only up to a point. D1 also had mobs that could never outrun your toon, and tons of doorways and other choke points, the likes of which mechanics do not exist in D3. So D3 melee NEEDS a bit more sturdiness, to make up for the lack of tactical options other than CC.
The main difference, though, from D1, is the healing.
This where Basic Math applies. In D1, your incoming damage rate could spike very high at times, but you had a belt full of instant-effect potions you could chug one after the next. If you couldn't overcome the immediate threat before your belt ran dry, you could technically open inventory and click potions from there, but that was not as quick and easy as hotkey use, and this was never done in casual, general play. So the belt capacity was the limit of your healing. It was NOT unlimited, but it did allow the player to choose when, where and how much of that limited healing capacity got applied.
I agree with the D3 devs that healing options must be limited, but they have limited them WAY WAYYYYYYYY too strictly. It's Basic Math. If you can't pull out enough health recovery to stand toe to toe with a few trash mobs for a small period of time, you cannot call it melee. Melee is as dead in D3 as it was in D2, as far as high difficulty goes. The CC options make things significantly better, but this is short-range CC-chaining, NOT melee. And I do not think it is recoverable under the current model of 30-second cooldown on potion use.
I don't need to see Inferno difficulty to know that melee isn't viable there, because it isn't viable in Hell. The class is viable, but it's viable as a CC master. Monk has to be the same, as they have no more ability than barbarians to take a hit. Monks have more self-heal power, but overall I think they're in the same boat. CC or die.
Mobs hit too hard. Characters' options for health recovery are too thin. Both must be addressed for melee to become viable. The math has to be aligned to a sustainable level. Yes, you should have to retreat some of the time. Yes, you should be out of health recovery SOME of the time, but not like this. This is almost all of the time.
I am having fun as the main tank and CC enabler for my group. It is tactically interesting to blow all our CC cooldowns and chew through trash mobs. Enough stuff cools quickly enough for us to progress without heavy waiting around... unless we have taken damage and no health globes drop. Then it's another useless run to town to see the healer, because hey, these health pots are NOT full heals like in D1, and they cost a pretty penny, and it takes less time to run to town than it does to stand around waiting. Plus, it actually costs us LESS to die than it does to buy ONE healing potion. Go figure. We still buy the potions and use them every time they are cool when a boss pack is on us, because dying is less fun and we're here for fun, but still. A LOT of tedium attached to health recovery: runs to town, and with EVERY Hell boss pack, lots of running in circles waiting for health pots to cool down or health globes to drop. This tedium surrounding health recovery is only going to get worse as we advance to the end of Hell and if we move on to Inferno.
D1 had the tedium of loading your belt and reloading it and reloading it, which was subpar. But that was between fights and only took a few moments. It was a cost worth enduring for the benefit of being able to spike your healing potion use when incoming damage spiked, instead of being forced to run in circles and kill time waiting on cooldown mechanics. THAT is patently NOT FUN, the running in circles waiting on potion cooldowns. I can do without that. And if I must endure it (and endure is the right word, because it is most clearly a punishment mechanic), my patience for it will wear out and the frustration will drown out the fun, sooner rather than later. Months or maybe only weeks, then it will be time to play something where most of my time I'm having fun, not running around in circles unable to play my class the way it ought to play.
- Sirian
![[Image: ember-mini.gif]](http://sirian.warpcore.org/ember-mini.gif)