Played a few ranged builds in test patch and they still feel inferior to both melee and casters. I have no idea what cause this fallout since 9.8 where ranged was in relatively good place. Neither of the new juicy cold, lightning or fire mods for FS or Savagery net any satisfactory results. Impaired aim havoc was supposedly tamed down but it still feels like sometimes your dmg just disappears into oblivion in SR, no melee experiences anything similar. Last build i tried was fire DW Purifier which seemingly has everything to do well, pulling 1 minute Ravager while having all WPS either areal or passthrough. But it’s a good 1 minute slower in SR than big boy builds.
Numbers on a lot of ranged builds look decent: bit lower flat and tank compared to melee for the price of range. But in the actual gameplay these numbers don’t translate into feeling good.
The main problem was and is the enemy aggro, lining up enemies is not a valid tactic in the game where enemies constantly randomly switch paths, sperg out and get behind you even visually having access to the character model. So if you can’t fix that, you automatically leave all skills that rely on enemies lining up gimped: Ranged AA, AAR, FoI, to lesser extent Forcewave and Bone Harvest.
I don’t have time to extensively test different builds these days to maybe pinpoint other problems you could actually fix, only reporting the impressions on ranged builds i tried. Has anyone had similar experience?
mainly played vit fs defiler. it’s good both damage- and sustain-wise but fighting a mobile boss like Fabius with anyone else results in a lot of repositioning. and, well, it’s not only Fabius’ case.
both cold and lightning FS Purifiers didn’t show anything special despite seemingly huge buffs to the pistols. What they did show, tho, is a total lack of skillpoints.
another thing I wanted to mention is this weapon. Desolator used to be very strong but then native passthru was removed and then it got +2 to Soldier that no one ever asked about. Weapon is a complete joke. Kinda safe to say Flashband mod is meaningless, BR mod is w/e. It would be very nice if this weapon got at least +2 to Inq instead of Soldier and then some fat mods for FS and probably global phys and chaos>fire conversions for, say, FT.
fire FS is if even not dead in cold water but definitely the most undersupported one, and 2h ranged is cucked even more than DW.
yup. I played aether FoI and despite having pretty fat numbers, it feels bad to play simply because you have to rotate yourself constantly to kill all surrounding enemies. Fire and Cold iirc are ok because of huge dots, vit one is dead, phys I guess too.
+1 for buffing Desolator as per your proposal (+2 to Inquisitor instead of +2 to Soldier, phys to fire, chaos to fire, mods for Flashbang are useless).
Isn’t this also due to the fact that melee can jump way faster from pack to pack via shadow strike/blitz (and all derivates)? Hydra getting 6% movement speed was a nice move in the right direction, but seeing how melee builds will also get +max movement speed (looking at fenris set) in FoA, I can only see the gap widening in the future.
lots of builds don’t use those skills tho
*eg non NB/Soldier melee builds still using amatok or rylok and being stronger/faster
**i do personally feel it’s weird Blitz type skills has a melee requirement, when “similar but shorter distance charge” skill VM can handle ranged fine (and blitz is already using same animation on 1h or shield)
That is a really small factor in this. It’s mostly because melee have more damage (especially single target damage) and their semi-circle/circle like wps work well against monsters behaviour while with ranged your damage comes from how many mobs you can line up which is usually harder due to monsters behaviour.
mostly
depends if you could catch a Nemesis fast with a melee or if you found good density as ranged.
I don’t really think this should be a thing. If melee is squishy it simply doesn’t work or works poorly. And I am not sure which archetype should get most damage. Feels like GD’s balance is more complex than a tug of war between different build types.
sad truth
By the way, tested my Dagallon spec in SR just now and it’s pretty good. It took some min-maxing magic for sure and it is not at the top20 level despite having quite a bit going on for it on paper, but it’s decent.
What feels a bit bad is a lack of burst, damage fall off outside of censure radius (your Storm Spread flies in all direction) and immense lags. But is basically a current version of PRM but with extra steps. Also set annoyingly lacks attack speed.
really seems like ranged is rougher to do suboptimally, like its punished more for not being proper built/min-maxed or less forgiving for being silly/memey
It’s true because it’s basically a melee but with less punchy/leechy/consistent AA. Upside of shooting stuff from distance is very small because stuff that you can shoot from distance is usually harmless to you anyway (except few slow bosses like Zantarin/Moosie). Stuff that can kill you will be in your melee range.
I think melee benefited from the last rounds of wps bumps because they can still stack more flat on average, but this is back to the biggest limiting issue as times have continue to come down in benchmark testing. Passthrough when you can reposition and create a conga line with vire is still occasionally possible, but otherwise you’re just spending more time shooting individual targets that are arcing 90-180 degrees around you, including every time you try to reposition so there isn’t even a player skill factor to take advantage of. The shotgun wps don’t really meet the need, as damage is lower per shot and when you’re swarmed you’re just hitting the thing right in front of you with all projectiles anyway. Seal of the Void ends up being one of your few AoE options, and it’s tiny/now where near what multitarget with radius melee wps can do.
As mentioned, channel casters mostly have the same issue, although they might have more points to spend on an aoe coverage skill.