Basic Math - The Failure of Diablo Melee

[Sirian]

And yet I defeated Hell Diablo...on Hardcore with a sword and board zealot. Tell me again how it was crap and unplayable?

Yes, yes. I did my share of extreme challenges, too. Entirely beside the point. (What's the ratio of players who did anything comparable to that with melee, compared to the total number of Diablo 2 players? ... Same question for ranged builds. ... Case closed.)


You keep asking what "viable" means to me. Is it really that obscure? I thought I was pretty clear in the first post, even if I gave a lot of detail for context.

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.

That is not viable. Doable, yes. Viable, no. ... Fun? Definitely not.

Spending the vast majority of my time babysitting an unbalanced damage to recovery ratio is not viable. Spending far more time on the run than I can spend engaged, that's not viable. If I want kiting to be the main activity, I'll choose a ranged class and/or skill set.

I am not stumbling through all manner of stupidities (like charging blindly in to darkness pulling two to five times the number of mobs it was safe to pull in D1, or anything along those lines), and when I am making rather effective use of my skill set, I do not welcome the idea of spending a moment engaged in the fun part followed by tons of time kiting. Nor do I consider the idea that an entire class is unplayable past a certain point unless a specific skill is used to be viable.


There are so many garbage stats on the items. I prioritized Vitality and Strength on my gear as I progressed through Nightmare, in a fashion aimed at balancing my DPS/Armor with my health pool. One can have an ideal about which five stats to prioritize, but getting all five of them on the same item just from drops or crafting is like winning the Lotto: it ain't gonna happen. Resists come only in single types and fairly small numbers, at that gear level. I had some, but getting more with what I had available in terms of drops, crafting or merchants would have required a major loss in DPS or health. That seemed unwise. And since then, checking the AH, I don't see perfect gear there, either. If you can get three stats on a rare that you are happy with, you are doing pretty well and should buy the item if it's fairly priced.

I didn't start Ember until many months after D2's release. Until you learn the game, you don't know enough to craft a well-designed variant, unless you stumble in to it by dumb luck. Relying on knowledge from the previous game is a ticket to failure. Each game has its own balance, its own set and setting. Each game has its own flavors of fun, and finding those then building variants around them is a better formula than shooting in the dark, in my experience.

Variants aren't JUST about making do with what the game offers. Some mechanics are poorly designed and/or implemented, are not fun no matter how much lipstick is applied to the pig. These are not worthy of devotion.

Just because Blizzard puts it on the menu doesn't mean I'm going to eat it and smile, even if it tastes like dishwater. There's a lot of goodness in D3, but the core mechanics of melee at the upper levels is not among them -- and to me that's the canary in the coal mine.


- Sirian