Basic Math - The Failure of Diablo Melee

[Archon_Wing]

I can't imagine how often I'd die *as a ranged class*, let alone a melee class if I only had 16K health, as Sirian had when he originally posted that the game was FAIL.

This wasn't about dying. I never once did any dying against trash mobs, which is the situation I analyzed. There wasn't much dying against boss packs either, except for certain spiky trait combos. The problem is what I had to do to avoid dying: it wasn't very much fun. The low gear I had is what makes my analysis relevant, because gear level wasn't masking the other game mechanics. And I came up FAR short of posting that the whole game is fail.

I'm more disappointed with how unproductive my thread became than I am with the cracks in D3. An honest discussion on a topic like this was the main attraction for me here. Oh well. Never mind then.


- Sirian

Dead characters do 0 DPS, so to speak. Now if you feel that melee characters sacrifice too much damage output in order to merely survive that would be an issue. Coming in undergeared and/or underleveled for a certain difficulty is going to lead to difficulties without grinding earlier levels again. It's fairly typical for most video games of this kind.

But in that case, the main problems as I've highlighted before are that drops suck too much and that's just not specific to melee characters anymore.

It's just that you have below average health for even ranged characters with a character that is melee.

Your assumptions about melee flaws aren't inherently wrong! It's just that the example you used to prove it is up to debate. Imbalances exist, but sometimes it can be confused for user error. When someone succeeds and I don't, I have to ask why. We simply don't have enough info about the metagame to really claim anything broad about the game just yet, as we can for d1 or d2.

I've been hearing complaints that all classes are having severe difficulty in the higher levels, so the problem may lie deeper.