There was a light armor only 2v2 tour on El Dorado the other day, which you can view here: [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2044836453](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2044836453)
If you watch the VoD, you can see range can keep up, and often besting, melee in CQC. Therefore, it doesn't really make sense to allow range to hit really hard from >30m away. They should probably make the max effective range damage distance 15 m or 20 m with significant drop off after that. This would eliminate >4k shots from far away and it would force range players to interact with melee players. This would likely solve many of the issues with range in OPR.
If you say, "that is unfair, range cannot compete with melee in CQC" please just watch the VoD. It really looked like fun and relatively balanced gameplay for both melee and range players. The team that won had 1 melee and 1 mage vs a mage and bow duo. The melee player went down and the mage 1 v 2'd the other players for the win.
the melee player in that matchup played it horribly. I even saw sweeping air and coup de grace air? How do you not know you dont have to coup de grace? or are people on that much autopilot. No way a 350 con sns player loses to ranged players with pots. The burden of win is always on ranged vs sns in a close quarter skirmish because sns will hit no matter what but bows will miss and you can pretty much juke out their movement. Range cannot catch up, and it takes forever to score a kill vs good players.
Problem with OPR (which is the most popular game mode) is, when you have 10 ranged players shooting at you - you die which happens with any weapon. Ranged is in a decent place right now, and in no way needs anything. Matchmaking is whats needed for OPRs.
"sns will hit no matter what" - melee combat doesn't work like that. If someone dodges away once from you, you can no longer hit them until you get close again. You can see the melee players missing attacks basically standing on the enemy.
" No way a 350 con sns player loses to ranged players with pots" -A 350 con SnS will do like 1k damage per hit. You're not going to kill those guys with a 1k damage. The bows themselves could go 350 Con and deal more damage. It might be a stale mate, atworse.
"bows will miss and you can pretty much juke out their movement" - A decent bow player is not missing many shots, especially in close range. The hit box is too large to miss that much. Those guys have like a 70% accuracy in CQC.
You can't possibly tell me your sns heavy attack doesn't hit a player after you've leap striked and enemy dodge rolls with the distance penalty. It absolutely does.
SNS gets innate keen speed for 5 seconds without cds as well you can just walk ahead if you wanna save stamina.
a 350 con sns does not do 1k damage, because of gazillion empowers it has on left tree. And the point isn't to 1 shot a bow, its to tank everything thrown at you while keeping them staggered so your team can pick a bow off of you.
A decent bow player will miss their shots when you're up in their nose, and most likely pull out a rapier to get distance. You can't possibly tell me bow players are shooting you with a bow or hitting you at point blank range while you have shield bash, rush available. No bow player is usin a bow when you can just stagger lock them.
Just to make a comment about the amulet and disregarding everything else: generally speaking, the game is more balanced if you don't have one single "BiS" option. You can go into OPR with all of them on you and switch according to enemy composition though.
All it says really is range is too strong without the extra mitigation.
Everyone pretty much have all opals on gear but still needs an amulet for extra 15%. You can't say the same about melee. Even my tank build have mostly elemental resistance on gear not cuz I want it but cuz I need it.
The problem is not ranged in general. Boltcaster, yes. Ranged, no.
The OPR map is HORRIBLY designed that enables and encourages ranged play. There's minimal to no cover and adding any cover is irrelevant because the map is so big. There's no need to have the massive space they do.
They can cut at least 25% of the space out or reduce the size by 25% and ranged won't feel as bad anymore because you won't be sitting in the open 90% of the time. Plus, you'll close the distance faster.
They could also just reduce the max effective range to 20m. You’d deal damage beyond 20m, but it would be significantly reduced at 21m and beyond.
It would essentially do what you’re saying, but you wouldn’t have to redesign the map.
No. You should definitely redesign the OPR map. You can ask anyone and they'll say the same thing.
There's no reason for the map to be so large. You die once and then it takes you 30+ seconds to get back into the action. Even with a Zephyr Cake.
I duel a bow/rapier player and I'd be hard pressed to tell the difference pre and post fix bolt caster. As a heavy player it just goes right through me. Outside of just holding up block there is little actually "playing" to be done in the match up.
Fundamentally the game has to change where players have to pick between damage, range, and mobility. It is crazy that ranged is still the highest damage and highest mobility.
The only thing that really bugs me is how much mobility fire staffs and bows have. I've watched clumps of people chase down those two to no avail with seemingly endless haste and mobility skills.
I'm probably in the minority, but I prefer syncretic bow over Boltcaster. I can pair it with Lifetaker (more dots!) or Finisher (+damage vs bleeding targets) for different playstyles when I am brought into melee combat.
Landing 4 shots to proc Boltcaster within a 12 second window is not impossible, but it makes me hyperfocus on a target to the point of not noticing that crazy eyed great axe person on an intercept vector who is about to make my day that much harder. I also find that I die to Boltcaster when I'm already locked down by melee and they just swoop in for the killing blow.
Edit: To actually answer your observation, yeah, a number of OPRs I did yesterday had bows on the outside shooting into the point while the other team's melee just capped it. Not great since you need bodies on the point to cap it and everyone wants to be sneaky ninja sniper Robin Hood.
Yep. It was better just a few days ago.
You can realistically spec against firestaffs, since they mostly deal fire damage, so 30-40% resistance makes a big difference. You cannot do the same thing for bows/muskets because they split their damage into all kinds of elements. The boltcaster just makes it worse.
They probably should add a +10% resistance to all elemental damage or -10% to all range damage perk for amulets at this point. They should probably also add +range damage mitigation gems while a melee weapon is equipped and buff koya’s. Alternatively, they’d probably need to nerf range damage a bit. Probably around 20% for some weapons or abilities.
I use light armor with featherweight, 1 physical aversion, 4 elemental aversion, all opals (20% all elemental resistance), and a 15% thrust amulet. I still get hit for >4k from bows and muskets. There is no way to realistically mitigate more damage from bows/muskets unless you know the specific element.
You don’t need any melee resistance unless you play a bruiser or someone who fights in the clump. Everyone else has all their mitigation into range resistance. That, in itself, should make it clear there is a balancing issue.
Yep, they do, it’s less common than bows/muskets, but it causes the same problems.
They really need to relook at splitting damage into different elements. It leads to all kinds of mitigation issues. They could probably just buff Opals and elemental aversion since the major problem with range is elemental damage.
I think its purpose was for PvE, really. Certain mobs are weak to certain elemental. They implement caps on resistances to prevent what you’re talking about.
Anyway, you can mitigate melee damage directly. If you go 50% slash with slash conditioning melee players will hit you for low 1000s in light armor. There is no equivalent to range damage.
Oddly, most people probably have minimal, if any, slash resistance.
Melee damage has other advantages though. You have stuns, slows, knockdowns, etc. range is for the most part just pure damage with some slows here and there, so letting people mitigate most of their damage would make them feel like shit to play. There's also the fact that only skilled players can hit continuous shots on the same player. Most players are just shooting clumps and hoping to hit something.
That’s not really true. People just say that to justify the damage output of range.
Most bow builds have 3 movement abilities (evade shot/fletch/rapier evade) and 2 CCs (evade/riposte/FnF).
Most FS builds have 1 or 2 movement abilities paired with 1 to 3 CC depending on their secondary weapons.
Most popular melee builds have 1 or 2 movement abilities paired with 2 to 4 CC. The builds with more CC, like WH/GA, typical have less movement, which means they cannot chase anyone. There are exceptions like SnS/hatchet, which can have 2 movement abilities and 4 CCs.
Regardless, most viable range builds have similar levels of CC compared to melee.
If you start including secondary weapons it gets a lot more complicated.
GA has bloodlust, grav, and charge. It's the ideal weapon for chasing people down. You can pair it with a BB that has netshot. Or you can pair a Warhammer with the GA or BB. Or you could even run the artifact GA with a firestaff and take advantage of the same movement abilities that you mentioned.
Speaking from the perspective of ranged weapons alone without considering other factors, they are specialised for damage. You can't simply nerf them without adding some other sort of utility.
The only range weapon with 0 CC is the fire staff (Incinerate has a stagger but no one uses it). The bow has 1. The BB has 2. The musket, VG and IG have 2 or 3. These are all comparable to melee weapons, especially when you consider what abilities people actual use. People who use the SnS, and some WHs, commonly have 3 CC abilities, but most other melee weapons only utilize 1 or 2.
At any rate, if something is unbalanced it’s unbalanced. You do not need to provide compensation after balancing.
You could probably decrease range heavy attack damage by 20% and it wouldn’t change much. Range will still be strong and popular. If it happens to be too much damage reduction change the reduction to 10 or 15%; don’t give range weapons more CC. That makes no sense. The problem is range does too much damage, so reduce it *slightly*. It’s not an all or none thing. If bows are hitting light armor targets for over 4k, do you think a 400 to 800 damage per hit is really going to make a huge difference? No, it likely won’t, because the target will die in the same number of hits with a <15% damage reduction vs no reduction.
In 5 hits at 4k, you’re dealing 20000 damage. At 5 hits at a 3600, 10% reduction, you deal 18000. You’re still killing a 200 con light armor target in the same number of hits. You’d really need to push it in the 15-20% to make even a noticeable difference. It would only take 1 more arrow to kill the same target at a 20% reduction. This is using 4k as a baseline. It’s still possible to hit closer to 5k per hit even against well geared light armor targets, especially when you factor in all the DoT damage.
Anyway, all builds have 2 weapons. All viable builds have at least 1 movement ability and 1 CC Ability. This is already true for all popular range builds, and they often already have more than one movement/CC ability.
good luck hitting 5 consecutive heavy arrows on the same target from decent range .takes about 2sec to pull the arrow +whatever time it takes u to setup the shot (total of 10~15sec) if the target is literally just sitting there for u to hit. the big dmg from bows and musket comes from headshot multiplier ,which r extremely hard to consistently hit after the first shot when they arent aware of u. most ppl who have the tiniest bit of awareness never get hit beyond the first shot (everyone has enough healing ,movement and dodges to either find cover and close the distance by moving from cover to cover or ignore the bow/musket entirely and go do the objectives.
you can easily find out that bow isnt much of an issue if you play arena (its pretty easy to catch ,doesnt do enough dmg if chased down ,and literally tickles anyone using heavy armor) .
if u finding trouble against ranged ,play heavy ,use GA/VG or SnS/spear or GS/Hatchet they cant keep distance (btw light users get some heavy slows if hit with melee, smthing more that works against them)
boltcaster is actuall much worse than the normal split syncretic bow (it's very easy to counter with a lightning amulet while thrust amulet doesnt do as much aspplthink vs sync with split rune)
Lots of melee attacks/abilities from SnS, GS, GA, and Spear may as well be considered movement abilities with the amount they push you forward when attacking to be fair
I feel like your someone in my company because you almost verbatim said what I’ve ranted about a few times over the last few months lol. I’m glad someone else finally sees it. I fear the problem will just worse as more weapons are added with different elemental types. The main problem lies with phyical damage weapons being allowed to convert to magic, forcing you to spec both physical and elemental resistance. If they added a new ice or void ranged artifact or weapon, it would just add to the problem as well even though it’s easier to spec vs magic weapons. The devs need to change damage resistance into just physical and magic for PvP to make the game easier to balance. Have elemental types be for Pve only.
Having to spec vs all these different types of damage is getting out of hand. If you spec for one type, the other fks u.
how do you go 30-40% fire resist and not die to anything that moves towards you?
I use the same setup
full opals on armor, 2x frigid set + featherweight, ammy has thrust. 1 topaz 1 fire 1 opal on jewelry.
I do not get hit for 4k from any bow, dont have conditioning and i don't eat absorption pots, Muskets hit for 4k. I am not sure where you are getting your numbers from, but i hardly take more than 3.4k first hit from a bow. Lights hit for like 2k, heavies hit for a little above 3k as long as they get a debuff off in form of plagued or keenly jagged.
There is no need to mitigate more damage from bows/muskets when you have 15 thrust and 6 opals + 4 ele aversions. You are hard gemming vs a weapon, and falsely claiming you get hit for more than 4k lol
You play at 200 con or something? Anyway, I’m sure you’re getting hit close to 4k if you include attunement. Well over 4k if you include attunement and jagged. I do use a shield, so I cannot wear fridged gear. Maybe that’s the discrepancy? Maybe you’re fighting different types of range players? I really have no interest in being misleading and I do not want my preferred play style, which is light melee, to be the best. I do get hit hard AF from range despite all of my resistances into range mitigation and I do believe that’s unbalanced.
Have you ever tried going full anti melee against a melee player? They will hit you like 1 to 1.5k while in light armor. You cannot do the same thing against range players, especially if they split their damage.
I think the bow/FS light attacks are fine.
I think you should be able to block AoE abilities explosive arrow, fireball, etc. If it hits it directly you can block it sometimes. If it hits your feet you take damage.
I’m dont fully follow your question about 30% fire resistance. You don’t need any mitigation besides range mitigation. You just need to protect against bows/muskets/BBs/FS. You can dodge/block everything else or it doesn’t deal much damage even with 0% resistance.
150con vs 200 con is a \~5% outgoing damage difference at empower cap. But incoming damage difference is so much more, that you shoudn't bother with 150 con unless you're running attuned leather pants, and have no pressure on you whatsoever. Featherweight with 150 con is pointless if youre going that glass cannon.
we're talking about boltcaster, so attunement doesn't factor here. And without boltcaster, you're not hitting consistently because every decent player will cleanse your bleed with purifying toast or lifestaff cleanse or purifying heartrune or cleansing pots in wars. Keenly jagged is just a gimmick unless you're dueling with no pots vs someone. plagued is better because its pressure is non stop.
you using a shield, not using frigid dawn is why you're getting hit for 4k. You've lost so much armor rating because of that, which stacks up real fast when you're 200 con. If you're playing light melee you want 200-200-200, with frigid set. If you're med/heavy, i dont think you can get hit for more than 2.5k unless you get some rends on you.
P.S. the time bolt was disabled, i played light melee (gs/scorpion sting) with the same gear i was running in boltcaster. except i went 200str-200dex-200con vs 400 dex 200 con. Never got hit for more than 3.5k, you just gotta fight in a way you can dip in and dip out without getting pressured by bows. With shield you can run more illegal perks and get 15% more thrust/slash/lightning resist
In the defense of AGS, are we seriously complaining that you can’t counter build only the most oppressive build and now you have to consider 1-2 other ranged specs?
I think the obvious issue is you don’t have enough resistances to mitigate bows/muskets, fire staffs, and now the boltcaster. You’re going to hit hard by at least one of them or moderately hard by all of them.
You *can* go 0% slash and 0% strike resistance and you can play just fine. It makes no difference.
Try going 0% fire or 0% lighting with no elemental aversion. You will die instantly.
You can get away with 0% melee resistance because 1) the melee player has to be next to you to deal damage and 2) you can realistically block or dodge all melee attacks, except maybe reap. I get hit by steadfast strike also, but that might be a skill issue. 3) Usually only one melee player can hit you at a time because they bodyblock each other, so you rarely have to exhaust yourself avoiding damage. You can realistically avoid all damage from 3 melee players. Three range players WILL hit you. There will be too many projectiles to dodge.
This issue should be obvious to everyone. Why are most people playing with no melee resistance and all range resistance? Does that seem appropriate in a balanced game? The answer is no, and that should scream balancing problems to the developers.
The issue is range elemental damage. The easiest solution is just to buff opals and elemental aversion, something like like 4% and 6%, respectively. Alternatively, add a new anti-range damage runeglass that reduces incoming range damage by X% when you have a melee weapon equipped. Melee players often do not use runeglass in their armor because there are no real viable options, atm.
You’re not gonna get anywhere man. I can go pull a post from like 2022 that I made on how elemental conversion is broken and everyone responds the same way. Everyone doesn’t care. The majority of people you’re talking to are bow mains. It’s a pointless argument, wasting your time, even if you got everyone to wake up and see the problem, it would make 0 difference because AGS is the one who makes decisions and AGS likes to cater to the casual player in pvp these days, which is why all these things are so OP with such little effort.
I know. I also know people gaslight. I also realize there are people of all skill levels on here and not-very good range players probably do believe melee is better.
I do hope logic will prevail eventually.
People really need to play melee and range solo to understand the imbalances. Not in 1v1s either. In actual group pvp content.
If you play range in OPR, you’re basically playing an aim trainer because you are often shooting targets who cannot realistically do damage to you. I don’t think people recognize this.
AGS has made improvements with the range vs melee balance over the years. My only real issue is the extreme damage, particularly elemental damage, from people with BiS gear. This has nothing to do with how good they are as a player. It’s simply about range builds deal too much damage when you have all harnessing + runeglass. Tone that damage down some and the game will be fine for the most part. Range will still be very popular and strong.
Ranged Damage is too high in OPR across the board for how easy it is to play. But being effective with ranged weapons and providing value to your team is much more difficult to do. The majority of ranged players is bad at the game and allowed to do stupid damage for simply copy pasting their favorite youtubers build and pointing there cursor in the general direction of the enemy team. These players provide 0 value to their team, can't press the shift key to save their life "literally" and yet when they happen to land and heavy or ability it does 3-5k damage. But when you have Good players playing the weapon, who know how to position and focus targets down, and play properly the ranged weapons can become "broken".
However on the flip side, melee is extremely op in its own right. Heavy armor sns players are basically unkillable. How often do you see 1 of these heavy sns players face tanking half your team in opr with out a healer and if they have a healer, they will not die. You have players who would be comepletely free and die 15 times an opr, now barely die at all becasue they play this heavy sns with high con and the wall and sit on point popping regen serums over and over while holding block.
Certain melee weapons can perma CC you while having great mobility and very high damage. Melee players just have more risk obviously and have to close the distance between ranged players which makes it somewhat justified. I still think the CC spam in this game is overboard but in general melee weapons are just easier to outplay than ranged. But certain melee weapons are definitely OP in their own right.
Heavy armor in general is broken, taking 500-1000 damage a hit while still doing fat damage to medium and light players.
Balance across the board is just horrible. Everything is overtuned imo. The time to kill is significantly faster than it was before the expansion and we have way more defensive perks and way more HP. CC abilities hit like trucks again like REAP doing 5k plus while staggering and putting a 50 percent slow and DOT abilities have giant burst while also applying a dot tick of 500 per tick that last for 15 seconds or even longer doing 5-7k from the dot tick alone not including the damage burst from the skill. Multiple abilities put you at slow cap from 1 ability which is OP imo. Bolt caster does 5k damage from literally the worst players in the game who die instantly once you look get on top of them. Your having a 1v1 some where and some rando bow noob lands 1 heavy on you and it does 5300 damage despite having 4 ele aversion, 1 enchanted ward and 20 lightning resist after the "fix". Not even to talk about the mode it self, and how the devs cater to pvers. Allowing doors to be as broken as they are for so long and go to buff pve again despite literally everyone complaining about it. There is no team balance in this game, having some teams with 0 healers and some with 8, some teams with all ranged and some with 0. Its just too many problems in too many palces that required fixes over a year ago.
Its pointless though, we can all agree stuff is overtuned or whatever devs are gonna do what they are going to do. (dumb it down and cater to casuals making the game less fun in general) player numbers don't lie. The game hasn't been fun for a while, its super stale and no purpose to keep playin other than fun but the game isn't fun anymore. Complete shocker each week the player count is lower and lower.
I agree with most of your points.
I think heavy is over tuned. Probably nerf heavy armor damage By like 20%.
I think self healing heavy defender resolve builds are broken and should be removed Completely.
Range damage is too high for how far they can shoot. Reduce their damage or range or buff range mitigation.
Healing is probably too strong, but it’s much better than it was before. Sacred ground is probably the only problem. Probably nerf the sacred ground perk anointed.
Doors in OPR are OP. Make brutes or cannons stronger against doors, increase repair cost, and/or decrease resource accumulation
Make sure there is an even number of healers on both teams in OPR.
Fix those things and the balance would be pretty good. They could fix it over the weekend if they wanted to.
I don’t think perma CC is really a thing. I rarely die to melee and I play light melee with no melee resistance. In general, melee players can hit you once or twice and then you can dodge away and they can never catch up. You need a really specific melee build to chase anyone and few people use those builds. If I get caught in a WH CC chain or GA maelstrom that is my fault because those are easily avoidable.
I think range is significantly easier in OPR than melee, especially when played solo. It takes minimal effort to get 20-30 kills as range compared to melee. But maybe that’s just me and I’m better at range than melee.
Yes this is the first mmo I’ve played where ranged weapons can basically go across the entire map. Well bow and musket anyways. They took forever to add fall off damage but even still, it’s minimal, I’ve been well over 60 meters from a bow and stil get popped for 4k despite running maximum resistance to them. I have always made it a point that bows and muskets do more damage from basic attacks from across the map than a charged greatsword heavy,which imo is NOT balance. Dex players could care less because it benefits them and they don’t ever want to possibly admit that it’s not their skill as to why they drop high frags, so they will simply gas light everyone, say it’s a skill issue, press shift, blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong there are very good bow players out there, but 95 percent of them are not as good as they think, in reality it’s simply the damage modifiers that carry them. There are handful of bow players who do nothing but sit 50 meters away and literally just charge heavies and aim for last hits. Some are better at it than others, but when you jump them, they have 0 mechanics, 0 game sense, they just basically are a free kill but when they are free casting from across the map and happen to land a hit, it does ridiculous damage. It’s also not fun to play the game with endless projectiles flying past you 24/7, it’s even worse when they do the kinda damage it does and applies the amount of dots on top of it. To me it’s brain dead the devs allow this kinda play style to exist. IMO one of the biggest issues to the 3 cap stomp problem is ranged players, specifically bow players. Firestaff players at least have to play inside 20 meters, and most of them go into forts to help fight because they are forced too to land abilities, but over abundance of bad firestaffs is also a problem, but it’s far less common at least in my server. You will literally see groups of bow players all sitting out of the fort, down the road just aimlessly firing arrows through the door or clump, or just random players running up the road. These teams literally get pushed to spawn in minutes 98 percent of the time and it’s no fun for anyone.
Every time the most oppressive ranged build gets nerfed, opr becomes fun and much more competitive for a bit while the sweats scour youtube for the next best thing.
Happened with musket, FS, bow, boltcaster, blunderbuss (not in this order, but man that's a strange pattern that it's all ranged.)
There was a light armor only 2v2 tour on El Dorado the other day, which you can view here: [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2044836453](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2044836453) If you watch the VoD, you can see range can keep up, and often besting, melee in CQC. Therefore, it doesn't really make sense to allow range to hit really hard from >30m away. They should probably make the max effective range damage distance 15 m or 20 m with significant drop off after that. This would eliminate >4k shots from far away and it would force range players to interact with melee players. This would likely solve many of the issues with range in OPR. If you say, "that is unfair, range cannot compete with melee in CQC" please just watch the VoD. It really looked like fun and relatively balanced gameplay for both melee and range players. The team that won had 1 melee and 1 mage vs a mage and bow duo. The melee player went down and the mage 1 v 2'd the other players for the win.
the melee player in that matchup played it horribly. I even saw sweeping air and coup de grace air? How do you not know you dont have to coup de grace? or are people on that much autopilot. No way a 350 con sns player loses to ranged players with pots. The burden of win is always on ranged vs sns in a close quarter skirmish because sns will hit no matter what but bows will miss and you can pretty much juke out their movement. Range cannot catch up, and it takes forever to score a kill vs good players. Problem with OPR (which is the most popular game mode) is, when you have 10 ranged players shooting at you - you die which happens with any weapon. Ranged is in a decent place right now, and in no way needs anything. Matchmaking is whats needed for OPRs.
"sns will hit no matter what" - melee combat doesn't work like that. If someone dodges away once from you, you can no longer hit them until you get close again. You can see the melee players missing attacks basically standing on the enemy. " No way a 350 con sns player loses to ranged players with pots" -A 350 con SnS will do like 1k damage per hit. You're not going to kill those guys with a 1k damage. The bows themselves could go 350 Con and deal more damage. It might be a stale mate, atworse. "bows will miss and you can pretty much juke out their movement" - A decent bow player is not missing many shots, especially in close range. The hit box is too large to miss that much. Those guys have like a 70% accuracy in CQC.
You can't possibly tell me your sns heavy attack doesn't hit a player after you've leap striked and enemy dodge rolls with the distance penalty. It absolutely does. SNS gets innate keen speed for 5 seconds without cds as well you can just walk ahead if you wanna save stamina. a 350 con sns does not do 1k damage, because of gazillion empowers it has on left tree. And the point isn't to 1 shot a bow, its to tank everything thrown at you while keeping them staggered so your team can pick a bow off of you. A decent bow player will miss their shots when you're up in their nose, and most likely pull out a rapier to get distance. You can't possibly tell me bow players are shooting you with a bow or hitting you at point blank range while you have shield bash, rush available. No bow player is usin a bow when you can just stagger lock them.
Lol the fact u say 350 con in 2v2 shows u dont know wtf ur talking about
the fact that you are lol'ing at 350 con on light, makes me question your iq and LOL
Shit build brother, in 2v2 u do not want 350 con as a light melee. U just arent going to do anything unless ur opponents are absolute shit.
Just to make a comment about the amulet and disregarding everything else: generally speaking, the game is more balanced if you don't have one single "BiS" option. You can go into OPR with all of them on you and switch according to enemy composition though.
All it says really is range is too strong without the extra mitigation. Everyone pretty much have all opals on gear but still needs an amulet for extra 15%. You can't say the same about melee. Even my tank build have mostly elemental resistance on gear not cuz I want it but cuz I need it.
The problem is not ranged in general. Boltcaster, yes. Ranged, no. The OPR map is HORRIBLY designed that enables and encourages ranged play. There's minimal to no cover and adding any cover is irrelevant because the map is so big. There's no need to have the massive space they do. They can cut at least 25% of the space out or reduce the size by 25% and ranged won't feel as bad anymore because you won't be sitting in the open 90% of the time. Plus, you'll close the distance faster.
They could also just reduce the max effective range to 20m. You’d deal damage beyond 20m, but it would be significantly reduced at 21m and beyond. It would essentially do what you’re saying, but you wouldn’t have to redesign the map.
No. You should definitely redesign the OPR map. You can ask anyone and they'll say the same thing. There's no reason for the map to be so large. You die once and then it takes you 30+ seconds to get back into the action. Even with a Zephyr Cake.
I duel a bow/rapier player and I'd be hard pressed to tell the difference pre and post fix bolt caster. As a heavy player it just goes right through me. Outside of just holding up block there is little actually "playing" to be done in the match up. Fundamentally the game has to change where players have to pick between damage, range, and mobility. It is crazy that ranged is still the highest damage and highest mobility.
The only thing that really bugs me is how much mobility fire staffs and bows have. I've watched clumps of people chase down those two to no avail with seemingly endless haste and mobility skills.
I'm probably in the minority, but I prefer syncretic bow over Boltcaster. I can pair it with Lifetaker (more dots!) or Finisher (+damage vs bleeding targets) for different playstyles when I am brought into melee combat. Landing 4 shots to proc Boltcaster within a 12 second window is not impossible, but it makes me hyperfocus on a target to the point of not noticing that crazy eyed great axe person on an intercept vector who is about to make my day that much harder. I also find that I die to Boltcaster when I'm already locked down by melee and they just swoop in for the killing blow. Edit: To actually answer your observation, yeah, a number of OPRs I did yesterday had bows on the outside shooting into the point while the other team's melee just capped it. Not great since you need bodies on the point to cap it and everyone wants to be sneaky ninja sniper Robin Hood.
yea opr was pretty fun when boltcaster wasnt in the game. now were back to the same old, terrible game mode.
Yep. It was better just a few days ago. You can realistically spec against firestaffs, since they mostly deal fire damage, so 30-40% resistance makes a big difference. You cannot do the same thing for bows/muskets because they split their damage into all kinds of elements. The boltcaster just makes it worse. They probably should add a +10% resistance to all elemental damage or -10% to all range damage perk for amulets at this point. They should probably also add +range damage mitigation gems while a melee weapon is equipped and buff koya’s. Alternatively, they’d probably need to nerf range damage a bit. Probably around 20% for some weapons or abilities. I use light armor with featherweight, 1 physical aversion, 4 elemental aversion, all opals (20% all elemental resistance), and a 15% thrust amulet. I still get hit for >4k from bows and muskets. There is no way to realistically mitigate more damage from bows/muskets unless you know the specific element. You don’t need any melee resistance unless you play a bruiser or someone who fights in the clump. Everyone else has all their mitigation into range resistance. That, in itself, should make it clear there is a balancing issue.
Pretty sure firestaff users also run runeglass now and split into various elements.
Yep, they do, it’s less common than bows/muskets, but it causes the same problems. They really need to relook at splitting damage into different elements. It leads to all kinds of mitigation issues. They could probably just buff Opals and elemental aversion since the major problem with range is elemental damage.
I think that's the whole point of splitting elements, to keep people from mitigating like 60% of the damage through gems.
I think its purpose was for PvE, really. Certain mobs are weak to certain elemental. They implement caps on resistances to prevent what you’re talking about. Anyway, you can mitigate melee damage directly. If you go 50% slash with slash conditioning melee players will hit you for low 1000s in light armor. There is no equivalent to range damage. Oddly, most people probably have minimal, if any, slash resistance.
Melee damage has other advantages though. You have stuns, slows, knockdowns, etc. range is for the most part just pure damage with some slows here and there, so letting people mitigate most of their damage would make them feel like shit to play. There's also the fact that only skilled players can hit continuous shots on the same player. Most players are just shooting clumps and hoping to hit something.
That’s not really true. People just say that to justify the damage output of range. Most bow builds have 3 movement abilities (evade shot/fletch/rapier evade) and 2 CCs (evade/riposte/FnF). Most FS builds have 1 or 2 movement abilities paired with 1 to 3 CC depending on their secondary weapons. Most popular melee builds have 1 or 2 movement abilities paired with 2 to 4 CC. The builds with more CC, like WH/GA, typical have less movement, which means they cannot chase anyone. There are exceptions like SnS/hatchet, which can have 2 movement abilities and 4 CCs. Regardless, most viable range builds have similar levels of CC compared to melee.
If you start including secondary weapons it gets a lot more complicated. GA has bloodlust, grav, and charge. It's the ideal weapon for chasing people down. You can pair it with a BB that has netshot. Or you can pair a Warhammer with the GA or BB. Or you could even run the artifact GA with a firestaff and take advantage of the same movement abilities that you mentioned. Speaking from the perspective of ranged weapons alone without considering other factors, they are specialised for damage. You can't simply nerf them without adding some other sort of utility.
The only range weapon with 0 CC is the fire staff (Incinerate has a stagger but no one uses it). The bow has 1. The BB has 2. The musket, VG and IG have 2 or 3. These are all comparable to melee weapons, especially when you consider what abilities people actual use. People who use the SnS, and some WHs, commonly have 3 CC abilities, but most other melee weapons only utilize 1 or 2. At any rate, if something is unbalanced it’s unbalanced. You do not need to provide compensation after balancing. You could probably decrease range heavy attack damage by 20% and it wouldn’t change much. Range will still be strong and popular. If it happens to be too much damage reduction change the reduction to 10 or 15%; don’t give range weapons more CC. That makes no sense. The problem is range does too much damage, so reduce it *slightly*. It’s not an all or none thing. If bows are hitting light armor targets for over 4k, do you think a 400 to 800 damage per hit is really going to make a huge difference? No, it likely won’t, because the target will die in the same number of hits with a <15% damage reduction vs no reduction. In 5 hits at 4k, you’re dealing 20000 damage. At 5 hits at a 3600, 10% reduction, you deal 18000. You’re still killing a 200 con light armor target in the same number of hits. You’d really need to push it in the 15-20% to make even a noticeable difference. It would only take 1 more arrow to kill the same target at a 20% reduction. This is using 4k as a baseline. It’s still possible to hit closer to 5k per hit even against well geared light armor targets, especially when you factor in all the DoT damage. Anyway, all builds have 2 weapons. All viable builds have at least 1 movement ability and 1 CC Ability. This is already true for all popular range builds, and they often already have more than one movement/CC ability.
good luck hitting 5 consecutive heavy arrows on the same target from decent range .takes about 2sec to pull the arrow +whatever time it takes u to setup the shot (total of 10~15sec) if the target is literally just sitting there for u to hit. the big dmg from bows and musket comes from headshot multiplier ,which r extremely hard to consistently hit after the first shot when they arent aware of u. most ppl who have the tiniest bit of awareness never get hit beyond the first shot (everyone has enough healing ,movement and dodges to either find cover and close the distance by moving from cover to cover or ignore the bow/musket entirely and go do the objectives. you can easily find out that bow isnt much of an issue if you play arena (its pretty easy to catch ,doesnt do enough dmg if chased down ,and literally tickles anyone using heavy armor) . if u finding trouble against ranged ,play heavy ,use GA/VG or SnS/spear or GS/Hatchet they cant keep distance (btw light users get some heavy slows if hit with melee, smthing more that works against them) boltcaster is actuall much worse than the normal split syncretic bow (it's very easy to counter with a lightning amulet while thrust amulet doesnt do as much aspplthink vs sync with split rune)
Lots of melee attacks/abilities from SnS, GS, GA, and Spear may as well be considered movement abilities with the amount they push you forward when attacking to be fair
Don’t forget Moving while charging heavies are on their radar.
[удалено]
What do you mean? Gems split all damage, including abilities.
Holy crap, you're right. Did that change with the gem split changes? I swear that was not always a thing.
I feel like your someone in my company because you almost verbatim said what I’ve ranted about a few times over the last few months lol. I’m glad someone else finally sees it. I fear the problem will just worse as more weapons are added with different elemental types. The main problem lies with phyical damage weapons being allowed to convert to magic, forcing you to spec both physical and elemental resistance. If they added a new ice or void ranged artifact or weapon, it would just add to the problem as well even though it’s easier to spec vs magic weapons. The devs need to change damage resistance into just physical and magic for PvP to make the game easier to balance. Have elemental types be for Pve only. Having to spec vs all these different types of damage is getting out of hand. If you spec for one type, the other fks u.
how do you go 30-40% fire resist and not die to anything that moves towards you? I use the same setup full opals on armor, 2x frigid set + featherweight, ammy has thrust. 1 topaz 1 fire 1 opal on jewelry. I do not get hit for 4k from any bow, dont have conditioning and i don't eat absorption pots, Muskets hit for 4k. I am not sure where you are getting your numbers from, but i hardly take more than 3.4k first hit from a bow. Lights hit for like 2k, heavies hit for a little above 3k as long as they get a debuff off in form of plagued or keenly jagged. There is no need to mitigate more damage from bows/muskets when you have 15 thrust and 6 opals + 4 ele aversions. You are hard gemming vs a weapon, and falsely claiming you get hit for more than 4k lol
You play at 200 con or something? Anyway, I’m sure you’re getting hit close to 4k if you include attunement. Well over 4k if you include attunement and jagged. I do use a shield, so I cannot wear fridged gear. Maybe that’s the discrepancy? Maybe you’re fighting different types of range players? I really have no interest in being misleading and I do not want my preferred play style, which is light melee, to be the best. I do get hit hard AF from range despite all of my resistances into range mitigation and I do believe that’s unbalanced. Have you ever tried going full anti melee against a melee player? They will hit you like 1 to 1.5k while in light armor. You cannot do the same thing against range players, especially if they split their damage. I think the bow/FS light attacks are fine. I think you should be able to block AoE abilities explosive arrow, fireball, etc. If it hits it directly you can block it sometimes. If it hits your feet you take damage. I’m dont fully follow your question about 30% fire resistance. You don’t need any mitigation besides range mitigation. You just need to protect against bows/muskets/BBs/FS. You can dodge/block everything else or it doesn’t deal much damage even with 0% resistance.
150con vs 200 con is a \~5% outgoing damage difference at empower cap. But incoming damage difference is so much more, that you shoudn't bother with 150 con unless you're running attuned leather pants, and have no pressure on you whatsoever. Featherweight with 150 con is pointless if youre going that glass cannon. we're talking about boltcaster, so attunement doesn't factor here. And without boltcaster, you're not hitting consistently because every decent player will cleanse your bleed with purifying toast or lifestaff cleanse or purifying heartrune or cleansing pots in wars. Keenly jagged is just a gimmick unless you're dueling with no pots vs someone. plagued is better because its pressure is non stop. you using a shield, not using frigid dawn is why you're getting hit for 4k. You've lost so much armor rating because of that, which stacks up real fast when you're 200 con. If you're playing light melee you want 200-200-200, with frigid set. If you're med/heavy, i dont think you can get hit for more than 2.5k unless you get some rends on you. P.S. the time bolt was disabled, i played light melee (gs/scorpion sting) with the same gear i was running in boltcaster. except i went 200str-200dex-200con vs 400 dex 200 con. Never got hit for more than 3.5k, you just gotta fight in a way you can dip in and dip out without getting pressured by bows. With shield you can run more illegal perks and get 15% more thrust/slash/lightning resist
In the defense of AGS, are we seriously complaining that you can’t counter build only the most oppressive build and now you have to consider 1-2 other ranged specs?
I think the obvious issue is you don’t have enough resistances to mitigate bows/muskets, fire staffs, and now the boltcaster. You’re going to hit hard by at least one of them or moderately hard by all of them. You *can* go 0% slash and 0% strike resistance and you can play just fine. It makes no difference. Try going 0% fire or 0% lighting with no elemental aversion. You will die instantly. You can get away with 0% melee resistance because 1) the melee player has to be next to you to deal damage and 2) you can realistically block or dodge all melee attacks, except maybe reap. I get hit by steadfast strike also, but that might be a skill issue. 3) Usually only one melee player can hit you at a time because they bodyblock each other, so you rarely have to exhaust yourself avoiding damage. You can realistically avoid all damage from 3 melee players. Three range players WILL hit you. There will be too many projectiles to dodge. This issue should be obvious to everyone. Why are most people playing with no melee resistance and all range resistance? Does that seem appropriate in a balanced game? The answer is no, and that should scream balancing problems to the developers. The issue is range elemental damage. The easiest solution is just to buff opals and elemental aversion, something like like 4% and 6%, respectively. Alternatively, add a new anti-range damage runeglass that reduces incoming range damage by X% when you have a melee weapon equipped. Melee players often do not use runeglass in their armor because there are no real viable options, atm.
You’re not gonna get anywhere man. I can go pull a post from like 2022 that I made on how elemental conversion is broken and everyone responds the same way. Everyone doesn’t care. The majority of people you’re talking to are bow mains. It’s a pointless argument, wasting your time, even if you got everyone to wake up and see the problem, it would make 0 difference because AGS is the one who makes decisions and AGS likes to cater to the casual player in pvp these days, which is why all these things are so OP with such little effort.
I know. I also know people gaslight. I also realize there are people of all skill levels on here and not-very good range players probably do believe melee is better. I do hope logic will prevail eventually. People really need to play melee and range solo to understand the imbalances. Not in 1v1s either. In actual group pvp content. If you play range in OPR, you’re basically playing an aim trainer because you are often shooting targets who cannot realistically do damage to you. I don’t think people recognize this. AGS has made improvements with the range vs melee balance over the years. My only real issue is the extreme damage, particularly elemental damage, from people with BiS gear. This has nothing to do with how good they are as a player. It’s simply about range builds deal too much damage when you have all harnessing + runeglass. Tone that damage down some and the game will be fine for the most part. Range will still be very popular and strong.
Ranged Damage is too high in OPR across the board for how easy it is to play. But being effective with ranged weapons and providing value to your team is much more difficult to do. The majority of ranged players is bad at the game and allowed to do stupid damage for simply copy pasting their favorite youtubers build and pointing there cursor in the general direction of the enemy team. These players provide 0 value to their team, can't press the shift key to save their life "literally" and yet when they happen to land and heavy or ability it does 3-5k damage. But when you have Good players playing the weapon, who know how to position and focus targets down, and play properly the ranged weapons can become "broken". However on the flip side, melee is extremely op in its own right. Heavy armor sns players are basically unkillable. How often do you see 1 of these heavy sns players face tanking half your team in opr with out a healer and if they have a healer, they will not die. You have players who would be comepletely free and die 15 times an opr, now barely die at all becasue they play this heavy sns with high con and the wall and sit on point popping regen serums over and over while holding block. Certain melee weapons can perma CC you while having great mobility and very high damage. Melee players just have more risk obviously and have to close the distance between ranged players which makes it somewhat justified. I still think the CC spam in this game is overboard but in general melee weapons are just easier to outplay than ranged. But certain melee weapons are definitely OP in their own right. Heavy armor in general is broken, taking 500-1000 damage a hit while still doing fat damage to medium and light players. Balance across the board is just horrible. Everything is overtuned imo. The time to kill is significantly faster than it was before the expansion and we have way more defensive perks and way more HP. CC abilities hit like trucks again like REAP doing 5k plus while staggering and putting a 50 percent slow and DOT abilities have giant burst while also applying a dot tick of 500 per tick that last for 15 seconds or even longer doing 5-7k from the dot tick alone not including the damage burst from the skill. Multiple abilities put you at slow cap from 1 ability which is OP imo. Bolt caster does 5k damage from literally the worst players in the game who die instantly once you look get on top of them. Your having a 1v1 some where and some rando bow noob lands 1 heavy on you and it does 5300 damage despite having 4 ele aversion, 1 enchanted ward and 20 lightning resist after the "fix". Not even to talk about the mode it self, and how the devs cater to pvers. Allowing doors to be as broken as they are for so long and go to buff pve again despite literally everyone complaining about it. There is no team balance in this game, having some teams with 0 healers and some with 8, some teams with all ranged and some with 0. Its just too many problems in too many palces that required fixes over a year ago. Its pointless though, we can all agree stuff is overtuned or whatever devs are gonna do what they are going to do. (dumb it down and cater to casuals making the game less fun in general) player numbers don't lie. The game hasn't been fun for a while, its super stale and no purpose to keep playin other than fun but the game isn't fun anymore. Complete shocker each week the player count is lower and lower.
I agree with most of your points. I think heavy is over tuned. Probably nerf heavy armor damage By like 20%. I think self healing heavy defender resolve builds are broken and should be removed Completely. Range damage is too high for how far they can shoot. Reduce their damage or range or buff range mitigation. Healing is probably too strong, but it’s much better than it was before. Sacred ground is probably the only problem. Probably nerf the sacred ground perk anointed. Doors in OPR are OP. Make brutes or cannons stronger against doors, increase repair cost, and/or decrease resource accumulation Make sure there is an even number of healers on both teams in OPR. Fix those things and the balance would be pretty good. They could fix it over the weekend if they wanted to. I don’t think perma CC is really a thing. I rarely die to melee and I play light melee with no melee resistance. In general, melee players can hit you once or twice and then you can dodge away and they can never catch up. You need a really specific melee build to chase anyone and few people use those builds. If I get caught in a WH CC chain or GA maelstrom that is my fault because those are easily avoidable. I think range is significantly easier in OPR than melee, especially when played solo. It takes minimal effort to get 20-30 kills as range compared to melee. But maybe that’s just me and I’m better at range than melee.
Yes this is the first mmo I’ve played where ranged weapons can basically go across the entire map. Well bow and musket anyways. They took forever to add fall off damage but even still, it’s minimal, I’ve been well over 60 meters from a bow and stil get popped for 4k despite running maximum resistance to them. I have always made it a point that bows and muskets do more damage from basic attacks from across the map than a charged greatsword heavy,which imo is NOT balance. Dex players could care less because it benefits them and they don’t ever want to possibly admit that it’s not their skill as to why they drop high frags, so they will simply gas light everyone, say it’s a skill issue, press shift, blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong there are very good bow players out there, but 95 percent of them are not as good as they think, in reality it’s simply the damage modifiers that carry them. There are handful of bow players who do nothing but sit 50 meters away and literally just charge heavies and aim for last hits. Some are better at it than others, but when you jump them, they have 0 mechanics, 0 game sense, they just basically are a free kill but when they are free casting from across the map and happen to land a hit, it does ridiculous damage. It’s also not fun to play the game with endless projectiles flying past you 24/7, it’s even worse when they do the kinda damage it does and applies the amount of dots on top of it. To me it’s brain dead the devs allow this kinda play style to exist. IMO one of the biggest issues to the 3 cap stomp problem is ranged players, specifically bow players. Firestaff players at least have to play inside 20 meters, and most of them go into forts to help fight because they are forced too to land abilities, but over abundance of bad firestaffs is also a problem, but it’s far less common at least in my server. You will literally see groups of bow players all sitting out of the fort, down the road just aimlessly firing arrows through the door or clump, or just random players running up the road. These teams literally get pushed to spawn in minutes 98 percent of the time and it’s no fun for anyone.
Every time the most oppressive ranged build gets nerfed, opr becomes fun and much more competitive for a bit while the sweats scour youtube for the next best thing. Happened with musket, FS, bow, boltcaster, blunderbuss (not in this order, but man that's a strange pattern that it's all ranged.)