Armed, a Thread

[Park]

I'm going to start this out with the whole point, Armed is -still- a bit crazy.

Despite the game having twenty-six spell trees to select from, there is a reason that 80% of the game is Armed Melee anyway.

dash strike - 6 second cooldown
double strike - 13 second cooldown
sweeping cleeve - 19 second cooldown
fatal strike - 20 second cooldown

While psmash and phantom strikes have moderately normal cooldowns, they are both busted moves that cannot be missed, and still reward with -tons- of damage and utility despite it.

These cooldowns are.. insanely low making this easily the most consistent tree in the game. I know they have been dabbled with in the past, and people complained, but the fact is that this is the highest dps tree in the game with the lowest cooldowns, and highest potential to stack AP within this tree. Not only are these cooldowns insanely low, the damage does not reflect such a convenience. Not to mention the mobility, which is easily one of the trees most valuable qualities, one that almost every other tree lacks.

Armed easily has the advantage over mages again simply because they can throw three rotations in the time a mage can throw one, because there are generally very few mage spells with suck low cooldowns unless they are a skill-shot.. which none of these abilities really are, aside from fatal which can generally be set up fairly easily. 

The damage is pressing, the mobility is pressing as well. 

Phantom strikes.. 13.5 S.D or 18 SD ((idr if it's 3 or 4 damage ticks)) on a homing ability that also conveniently works as a skillless dodge. This alone is busted. 

While armed does have it's disadvantages, namely slow stacking, the solution isn't to buff armed damage and cooldowns. There are various ways to go about tackling that issue, but the decisions made in the past to balance armed have essentially become a back and forth effort, repeating the same efforts in hopes that it will work the second time around as it's effectiveness depends on the trees it's combined with, making it seem either over or underwheming generally. Mostly overwhelming. 

I don't mean for this to become a 'salt' thread, more-so a discussion if anything. I feel personally that armed is the most consisistent tree in the game, has the most damage and utility easily.. and the hiddens... Again, there is a reason this is the most popularly selected tree in the game. A bit OD imo, despite a back and forth of trying to balance this tree, ultimately ending it essentially in the same place it started.

Thoughts?

[Dreamspeaker]

No, you fool...

Did you not hear about the legend of Boguidance?

He never recovered from that rep nuke.

Run. Run right now.

[tetsuochii]

downvotes!

[Park]

i welcome the downvotes but i also welcome constructive criticsm.

[Arrow]

bro have you even fought wellspring/water/ice builds

or lightning mages

or gravity builds
or illusion builds

mages are ok where they are now and can for sure deal with most armed users at the moment....

[Park]

i'm not posting this to take away from any issues other trees may have. i'm not agreeing with stunlocking or slow stacking or a passive heal which brings you from 10% to 100%.

my point is that no tree is as consistent as armed, and either that's an armed issue or an everything else issue. perhaps you all agree that it's fine and i'm wrong? that's fine too.. but some constructive criticism..

[Shadovarn]

The issue with balancing the melee trees is a long standing one from the early days of Eternia.

Because of the nature of how they work, melee characters need to do everything they can to get in close and deal explosive damage. However... that's about all they can do. Keep in mind that it isn't just slow stacking that'll knee cap melee characters, but also knock/push backs, roots and general terrain hazards. Or just exist as a sustain build. Or body block with summons.

There is plenty in the trees to punish melee while there is also very little utility to save them. One of the most common tools, mistform and cleanse, have been stripped from the touch of most dedicated melee. Cleanse being moved to the Wellspring and Mistform being an intermediate in water. Which means an investment of 40-60 rpp to get one or the other, and 100 for both. The only true cleanse they can get with ease (in armed at least) is Garuda which just makes you slow immune for six seconds with a long, long cooldown (except against Frostbite apparently).

The reason you see a lot of the server going melee isn't because it's some potent tree that is unstoppable, but because it is far cooler to RP as a swordsman than it is as some wizard. Most shonen involved close combat and generally just slapping your opponent's shit with a weapon or your open hand. Even the mass array of hiddens were because melee was hot garbage in the past and needed some serious boosts. As it is right now? It's in a pretty solid place but I wouldn't say it's overwhelming.

Keep in mind that the melee character has to be up front and personal. They cannot just duck away and plink with homings when half their bar has ranges of 2-3. They are rewarded for getting up front and the opponent punished. With the... three or four spells that matter, compared to most having full bars. Those cooldowns might seem short but I can promise that the time between them feels like an eternity. God forbid you whiff on a fatal or dash strike into hazards/beams.

[Park]

The issue with balancing the melee trees is a long standing one from the early days of Eternia.

Because of the nature of how they work, melee characters need to do everything they can to get in close and deal explosive damage. However... that's about all they can do. Keep in mind that it isn't just slow stacking that'll knee cap melee characters, but also knock/push backs, roots and general terrain hazards. Or just exist as a sustain build. Or body block with summons.

There is plenty in the trees to punish melee while there is also very little utility to save them. One of the most common tools, mistform and cleanse, have been stripped from the touch of most dedicated melee. Cleanse being moved to the Wellspring and Mistform being an intermediate in water. Which means an investment of 40-60 rpp to get one or the other, and 100 for both. The only true cleanse they can get with ease (in armed at least) is Garuda which just makes you slow immune for six seconds with a long, long cooldown (except against Frostbite apparently).

The reason you see a lot of the server going melee isn't because it's some potent tree that is unstoppable, but because it is far cooler to RP as a swordsman than it is as some wizard. Most shonen involved close combat and generally just slapping your opponent's shit with a weapon or your open hand. Even the mass array of hiddens were because melee was hot garbage in the past and needed some serious boosts. As it is right now? It's in a pretty solid place but I wouldn't say it's overwhelming.

Keep in mind that the melee character has to be up front and personal. They cannot just duck away and plink with homings when half their bar has ranges of 2-3. They are rewarded for getting up front and the opponent punished. With the... three or four spells that matter, compared to most having full bars. Those cooldowns might seem short but I can promise that the time between them feels like an eternity. God forbid you whiff on a fatal or dash strike into hazards/beams.

I do agree with a lot of this as far as there being very obvious abilities that exist as melee counters. Though just as much as these moves can counter melee, melee is just as capable of baiting or avoiding these things. The entire issue, in my opinion, comes in the fact that even though these counters exist, their cooldowns are almost double what armed cooldowns are. God forbid you miss, because you're liable to take a quick 20k damage within three seconds if so.

I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that melee is a class that promotes being up-front, but at this moment they are -consistently- in your face, and as a mage even having repellant spells, you'll likely not be able to keep up with avoiding them in the long run.

It's certainly a controversial subject but I did want to see how people feel about it's current state more than anything, after giving my own personal opinion.

[Mouse]

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.

[Shadovarn]

It's controversial because most everyone in the server has played melee at some point in the past. Almost everyone can tell you that melee used to be a life of suffering where you were little more than a punching bag. While there were builds that could compete and do well, they were often only viable in the hands of the best of players.

And even now? I'd say that melee has lost a lot in the recent changes to cleanse and mist form. Was it needed? Yeah, probably. But now it is very hard to avoid being slow locked or generally caught in some at range combo. When your opponent has to come at you, it becomes very easy to set up your own counter plays. The melee player has to prep the buffs and set up for the ideal time to strike for maximum damage. Because if they don't? Suddenly a lot of buffs are on cooldown and it's another 10-20 seconds before the next big spell is up.

Especially once you learn how easy it is to force the pathing on dash as the opponent. Suddenly, your skill shots are just bait shots. Or have AoE all over the field.

And you cannot block in dash. I've tried. Your only hope is to P Strike to avoid the sudden explosion of aoe death but that only lasts a couple seconds. I understand the frustration of having a melee character just absolutely delete your health bar in a span of seconds...

But you have no idea the insane set up that went into prepping that combo. How many buffs had to be stacked and debuffs applied for a short window to optimize one of two primary hits. And much like Combo decks, a solid counter spell will absolutely ruin that day.