Armed, a Thread

[Park]

Honestly? Nah. Not really.

Armed has the potential to put out a lot of burst damage all at once, but I don't know that I'd go anywhere near calling it 'consistent' or that it's the most easy to abuse tree in the game. Just look at the swathes of ice and gravity mages, for example. You are correct in that there's a lot of high damage low CD spells in the game, but I think your entire understanding of the tree, and the way some of these spells work, is inconsistent. Just to go down the list of spells you posted;

Dash Strike - Melee's only real 'gap closer' and even then, it's effectively just a second space dash. I don't think this is egregious or a problem at all when it's literally the only way a lot of melees are going to be able to land any of their spells.

Double Strike - Strong, sure. But effectively, this spell has a range of literally nonexistant. You have to be inside of your opponents sprite to land it. Maybe not the most difficult thing to accomplish, but this spell can also fire even if you're out of range, effectively making this skills counter.. Walking away from your opponent.

Sweeping Cleave - This spell is actually so broken that I honestly have never seen a melee outright use it unless they were a combo build. 19 seconds of CD for 12 spell damage might seem like a lot until you realize the entire damage box is a small box in front of you. And that moving in diagonals sometimes causes it to miss. And that sometimes it just misses in general. It being GCD also makes this required to be a 'finishing' move to a combo, of which there are much better options in the game currently, even in mage trees. Honestly, this is comparable to spells like Blood Whip(which is better by the way even after nerf) but don't require such an awkward set up to land it. If it's just the CD to Damage output you're looking at.. Realize, again, this is pretty close to what the bog standard "melee range big damage" looks like for quite a few other spells.

Fatal Strike - A good spell that's extremely easy to punish. Press a beam or a knockback and watch as the spell, in its entirety, falters. This isn't always the case and it's not always applicable but 14 Spell Damage on a 20 second CD, but is comparable in many ways to a beam or javelin spell. The beams may look as if they have lower spell damages, but with how many times they tick, in a lot of ways, in a 1:1 scenario where a beam and fatal gets launched at the same time, the beam is going to do more damage.

Of course, this doesn't actually explain /why/ Melee seems to be so strong, then. Surely if all of those spells alone are outright worse than mage spells, then surely melees should never win, right? The answer to this one is pretty simple; Certain melee spells being GCDE allow combos much easier and often times makes it appear that specific spells are the problem. For instance, you can dash strike into double strike into fatal pretty easily. Or you could chain a slow into your combo as well, almost guaranteeing that you hit it. That said, it is pretty apparent to me that melee becomes very reliant on these sorts of things, but I don't even necessarily think it's in a very oppressive place at the moment.

Maybe I'm wrong and this is just me, but I feel like with the tools given to most magi right now, and with how easy it is to dip into other trees after the constant attunement RPP nerfs, that answers to these problems are more common than ever. Even with mistform being changed(and honestly, this impact probably impacted melees too given they now don't have an easy way to avoid CC!), I think saying that melee, on average, has an advantage over mages is a kneejerk. That you've seen one or two fights, or you've lost to a melee who has a good combo against your build, and the instant response was to make a thread about it.

Not to call you out or anything; I digress, I just thought I should address this from my point of view as you gave it from yours.

Moving on, your secondary problems are with Powersmash and Phantom Strikes, and you say that both of them are guaranteed hits. To this, I agree with you, but only halfway. Powersmash, until its range buff, was atrocious to hit without Garuda. Sure, maybe therein itself lies the problem, that most melees are garuda because it covers melees most awful downside(its range), but Psmash was definitely /NOT/ a guaranteed hit until last night. Pstrikes? Yeah, sure. Pstrikes has been a problem for a while. But this is a separate point.

Pstrikes is 3 ticks of 4.5(presumably, if the tooltip is correct) damage that occurs over a second or two. This adds up to a total of 13.5 damage, in which the caster is essentially invulnerable, and then sets up for a potential combo(or avoids the danger of being punished). This has a cooldown of, tested at 170 agi, around 16 seconds. If you're curious, blood beam does more damage on a shorter cooldown than this. If they respond properly, almost every single beam in the game does more damage on a lower cooldown than this. A lot of spells do a lot more damage than this on a shorter cooldown. The only reason why this spell is viewed so poorly is because it's essentially free damage that you can't punish out of, that avoids other spell casts. It's rough, but there's an easy solution for it that Hoovy posted the other day, and I thought was a clever idea.

Lower the amount of time it takes to cast. Seriously. Instead of the second or two it takes now, just have it go off almost instantly. It'll look more crazy because of the burst, but it'll give more of a chance for those involved to get a spellcast off to stun or punish them out of it. Which, IMO, it doesn't need because it's really melee's only 'guaranteed' damage(ignoring dash strike ok...), but it's whatever. If thats the route we go, that's how to fix it.

Armed is a strong tree. I'm not trying to deny that. However, I think that in most scenarios, against a mage who has the proper tools to deal with it, it's maybe not a 50/50, but pretty close. I think most of the recent wars that I've watched have promoted this as well. When melee is good, it's very good. But there's a lot in the game that makes melee not so good that people will just pick up normally. Slows, stuns, almost every status effect in the game, mistform, cleanse. Not to mention that Melee has slowly been getting phased out when it comes to CC immunity or damage mitigation, I think we're still in a place where armed is.. Fine. Maybe a little worse than fine. Maybe a little better than fine.

But I don't think sending melee into another 'balance spiral' like has happened so many times is the right way to do things, especially when I think most melee spells line up almost exactly where you'd want them. Weaker than normal, very low range, but easy to combo.

: mouse :

edit: P.S. the 'oh no i talked bad about melee pls don't downvote me!' meme is bad and i hate it.

First of all, thank you, seriously, for such a detailed response. A lot of what you said has clarified things, and I agree and disagree at various points, but I mostly do agree.

I don't think armed needs to be run through the mixer again, i think for the most part it is as you said, a bit more or less than fine. I didn't scramble to the forums to make this thread upon losing to armed builds (though i did lose to several) but rather I was very reluctant to make this an outspoken point. Not that I care at all about downvotes, especially considering every single one has been from an armed user. 

Anyway..

Fatal Strike, I'm really not complaining about too much. Very low cooldown, very high damage, and as you said, for a good verber it's very easily tied into their combo. I wouldn't really mess with it.. besides maybe cooldown tbh.

Dash Strike.. well, I have to disagree. It is a -very- useful ability. GCDE, 6 second cooldown, insta mobility. Like you said, it's a second dash essentially but gcde and can be comboed into immediately. Now, can it be punished? Of course. That is the gimmick of armed. Still, punishing it only does so much when 3-6 seconds later they are trying again, meanwhile your counter is still on cooldown for 20 more seconds. Better have dancer I guess? I don't honestly think it's bad as it's essentially arms entire gimmick aside from burst damage, but it's certainly the ability that makes me say that this is the most consistent tree because of it's short cooldown into what is essentially an auto landing combo now. I've played armed before, and I would say that it's a stretch to say that missing double strike or psmash is something that happens often. And if it fails? Ten seconds max.. and you're trying again.

Phantom Strike, not much to discuss here because I entirely agree with what you said about it.

Honestly I'm not here to say I even have answers as to what to do with armed without spiting it's entire gimmick, but I think that with it's low cooldowns and high damage, it can generally outclass most builds simply be being off cooldown much earlier. Of course, there are other issues with the combat as well, I'm an Ice user and I agree that things such as the uncleansable slow are no bueno. 

Admittedly calling it busted is an overexaggeration, but taking 20k+ damage from a combo on a 20 second cooldown MAX is what makes them so strong. Even if they eat a shockwave, or are slowed. That's okay, because they can try again in 3 seconds. 

Again, thank you for the constructive criticism Mouse. I was definitely hoping for more of that, and less memeing.