Melee appreciation station

I've seen the sentiment expressed by a lot of people that pure melee characters are underpowered--going so far as to persuade the developers to buff a bunch of melee skills in the last patch--and I'm at a bit of a loss as to why. I pretty much gave up on straight warrior builds for being too easy (and also not having terribly much variety at all.) There's no doubt that wizards are flashier and more exciting, yeah, but wizard builds tend to have a very rough start and are frequently at risk of dying due to low health and armor, whereas you can plug in a warrior build and basically have a guaranteed if slightly tedious win. Where is the love for the humble warrior? Am I the only one that appreciates crushing enemies and hearing lamentations etc.?

 

Three questions - what difficulty level, and what skill-set, and how many floors?

 

For me, the main issue is that you cannot melee everything to death, barring some really damn good luck and finding too-good armor too early on. Basically, your build and Archetype is "get next to things and hit them." However...

Evil Chest Monsters? Can't melee them without risking death (unless it's like, a Magic Potato from a Floor 1 Evil Chest or something).

Corruption Monsters? Can't melee them without risking all your gear.

Lord Dredmor? Can't melee him without risking death.

Monster Zoos? Rarely is it possible to stand in one spot and beat every monster in the Zoo down.

Now let's contrast the other 2 Archetypes: Rogues (for this example: ranged combat) and Mages (killing with spells, again from range).

Evil Chest Monsters? Killable with enough Mana or Bolts at range, where they cannot use their deadliest attacks.

Corruption Monsters? Killable with enough Mana or Bolts at range, where they cannot use their corrupting attack.

Lord Dredmor? Safest way to kill him is from afar with Bolts or Spells. Yes, his spells can be nasty but they generally do not hold a candle to his massive melee attack power.

Monster Zoos? The easiest way to clear Zoos is with Bolts or Spells that deal AoE damage from afar. You can sometimes clear all but a few cowering casters from the doorway, given the proper skill set.

Basically the issue is that, at some point, you are forced out of your archetype to succeed as melee. However, Ranged and Magic are never forced to melee something to win.

Granted, this disparity has gotten better in the last few patches (corruption rate nerf, crit-counter-crit nerf, Dredmor casting more and melee-ing less), but it still stands that the answer to a lot of problems in Dredmor is "fire some spells or bolts at it or risk your ass" - you're forced into using Rogue and/or Wizard-ly things in order to stay safe.

 

GRPD, 15 floors. Krom demands no less!

There honestly isn't a lot of variety in melee builds in the vanilla game; you take some combination out of (Weapon of Choice/Berserk/Dual Wield/Master of Arms/Shield Bearer/Assassination/Burglary/Archaeology/Smithing.) You can swap out some of the utility skills, but you're basically relying on the same 4-6 core melee skills because that's pretty much all there are.

I question both halves of this statement! Most ranged/magic builds are going to have to fall back on melee attacks early on, but warriors rarely if ever are required to fall back on ranged attacks. The warrior archetype is comparitively limited in their options but can seriously dominate in their element; worst case scenario, a particularly nasty evil chest monster (or Dredmor) may force you to retreat and make a second pass, but you have the health and defenses that you can afford to wade in and out of melee with anything at no real risk. The main threats to a melee character are ranged ones, right up to Lord Dred, who you can quite feasibly chip to death with melee attacks, but the longer you take the more likely he is to start chaincasting Thor's Fulminaric Bolt on you--unloading your superammo on him is still the safest albeit less glorious way to kill him.

 

Oh well...

Try to make a melee build without Dual Wield. Or, if you really are up to the challenge, with neither Dual Wield nor Unarmed.
The problem there is that those two skills are (potentially) the strongest skills a warrior can take, and trying to make a strong build without them is slightly more difficult (albeit not impossible).

The solution to that one, obviously, is to get more skill trees, so that you'll have more variety. Because if you include the same "4-6" skill trees every time you make a melee character purely because of their effectiveness, then something is wrong there.

 

It's not so much a matter of pure effectiveness, though, so much as those being pretty much it for core melee skills. You can drop out any of those skills and find replacements that will yield a perfectly effective build--but you are, by definition, moving away from the melee warrior archetype towards a hybrid character. If you pick up a couple of melee trees but spend the majority of your skill picks on rogue skills, is it any surprise that you can no longer hack it as a purely melee character?

 

I don't know, personally I enjoyed stomping on creatures with Clockwork Knight skills and whacking away with Tactical Mod skills.

But then again, I'm the sort of person who doesn't mind a fair challenge when playing, so I don't stop at the "recommended" skills when I create my character, and just take whatever seems fun at the moment.

 

1) CoEs are far, far, far more beneficial to a melee character than any other archetype. By DL15 a Lv. 30 character with five warrior skills and two non-warrior skills will have about 15 before any bonuses from skills or equipment. He can reasonably have another 10 from other sources (clockwork stuff, bonus Burl, ect) frequently more.

I've never found a CoE below DL 10, so let's say they don't spawn deeper (they might, but you'll see that that's not really a problem for my viewpoint.) 10* weapons deal about 15-20 damage of various types. A CoE weapon on DL 10 tacks another 20 damage of an exotic type on top of that.

Oh, and they get some other stuff, like stats and resists.

So, let's say I find an awesome Royal Beatdown in a Chest of Evil on DL 10. 25 + 14 + 6 + 20 = 65 damage. On the low end, because honestly, 25 sounds more and more like a melee player who wasn't trying to me. I know I've had 30-40 most runs. And the real rub? Everything but can be doubled by dual wielding. A high crit chance takes care of the rest. 130-155 damage, minus no more than 20 damage from AA or resists (and there's nor as much of either as you might think on lower levels.) 40 of that comes from CoEs.

There's no other way in the game to get that kind of single target, single turn damage.

So the monster in there? Yeah, it's a fair trade off for melee. Huge potential gain, or maybe I have to tiptoe away and shoot the thing for a bit? Sounds good to me. And frankly, by DL 8 you should have the dodge, counter and block to be OK in melee even with them. Just make sure you're at full health when you open the thing and heal up again before you leave the room.

Did I mention that CoEs are optional, and so if you don't want to run the risk you don't have to? Brings me to...

2) Corruption only effects enchanted equipment, I.E. things with a unique, randomly generated name. I've never seen an item that didn't have an enchantment get corrupted, not even items with a base artifact value like Dual's Possible Sword or Savvarius, Greatsword of the whatevers.

DoD is not like a normal RPG. The balance curve is not created with enchanted items in mind, or at least it doesn't look that way to me. People who get a powerful enchanted item suited to their archetype are above the power curve already, corruption just serves to nudge them back down to normal again. If you get caught with a corrupted weapon and no backup, well, welcome to the Dungeon. Rerolling is that way.

But wait! You say mages and rogues still don't run the same risk of corruption that warriors do? They get to keep their enchanted gear and warriors don't!

Look at the loot tables. Ask yourself, who gets more and better high end gear? Yes, that's right. Warriors do. And most mages won't want to wear their enchanted suit of Imperial Boiler Plate just for whatever its piddling artifact bonuses are. Rogues might, and that's a problem I'll admit. But Rogues have numerous other difficulties, so I don't hold it against them. The nimbleness penalty does hurt them a little.

In short, warriors are favored by the available base equipment, and probably should remain so, while mages and rogues are balanced by having weaker pieces of equipment that have a bunch of little magical tricks tacked onto them. Warriors can get those magic tricks to, but it puts them at greater risk because they'll get corrupted on occasion, unless their is beastly. (But remember will ignore even that!) The equation seems balanced to me.

3) Lord Dredmor's melee attack is beastly. Unless you have beastly AA and 100+ block. Then it typically does less damage than his Fulminaric Bolt spell. Also, Dredmor doesn't stop spell spamming even when you're in melee with him, so unless you've silenced him, for some absurd reason, you're far more likely to get nailed with Lingering Dullness missile (a totally dud turn for Big D) than his admittedly formidable melee attack.

In fact, Dredmor has an 80% chance of casting each and every one of his spells, so the odds of him working his way all the way down to "swing at the hero" are small, and then there's that 40-60% chance that he's actually just given you another chance to hit him in the face because of your monster counter chance.

Dredmor's a monster, it's true. But if you've done it right, you'll be even more of a beast.

4) The weakness of a melee build is large groups. It's true, and it should pretty much always be that way. Zoos do mean the melee fighter will have to maneuver for position some, but there's nothing wrong with that. A high enough counter chance and some solid healing options (coral wand, sandwiches and delicious egg dishes, or even *gasp* healing spells) can keep you tanked up while allowing you to make multiple attacks per turn, which will put you ahead in the end.

No, you're not going to be dealing damage as fast as Obvious Fireball or Tenobrous Rift. But then, you're not a glass cannon, either. You're a warrior, not a mage, so of course you don't play the same way.

In short, after extensive play as a warrior I've found that these four objections to melee, which are the ones almost everyone raises, are pretty much groundless. Melee is harder, under some circumstances, than ranged. But it's also easier under almost as many circumstances. Its just a little more random than ranged combat. I'm OK with that.

 

Well said, and high fives for creativity! As I laid out in my first post, I too find the basic melee build to be a bit too easy and generally avoid using it nowadays. But our shared preference for unorthodox melee builds fails to explain why core melee skills are widely considered underpowered. Dual Wielding just received a substantial buff, even though it was already one of the most powerful melee skills in the base game!

 

I've personally never beaten the game with a warrior. Sooner or later my defenses just don't hold out.

I have finished the game (pre-Diggle Gods) with A Pyro/Psionics/Alchemist that was basically a drunken Jedi with a mean streak.

 

You are absolutely correct - Dual Wielding is the real rub here.

I myself have crushed Lord Dredmor with all-melee builds. It's totally possible. I have also killed him with spells and bolts.

However, my successful rogue and wizard builds have been all over the map - lots of options there for success. But my successful melee builds? They have to pretty much follow the path laid out above - Dual Wield, Weapon Master, Master of Arms, Smithing, etc.

I have beaten Dredmor without Dual-Wield, but it was an unpleasant grind.

So, either you go all-warrior and use the one effective strategy, or you play literally any other combination. That's why people complain about melee - not because it's impossible to win with, or even hard to play that one effective strategy - people complain about melee characters because they lose the inventiveness and flexibility all other characters have - which is a big part of the reason I love DoD so much.

There are lots of clever folks on these forums, so I don't want to imply that my suggestions are the only way forward, but I study and implement game balance for a living, and I will tell you without hesitation that melee is not balanced in DoD. It is viable when you use Dual-Wield, and dramatically underpowered without DW. Beefing up melee skills to match other skills would make DW character OVER-powered, so we're pretty much stuck with the balance problems unless we are willing to nerf DW's ability to double weapon damage, or we come up with some other clever solution.

So that's the other reason so many people complain about melee - because we don't have a straightforward way to fix it. (Because DW would increase the value of most fixes to the point of being overpowered.)

The new (small) bonuses to the melee trees is actually a small concession here - because doesn't double. That's a tiny change though, since wielding 2 weapons still means you get the bonus twice!

 

Well, the point of buffing Dual Wield was that people rarely took levels in it and instead left it as a 0-point skill tree just for the damage bonus. Yeah, it's not the best solution, I admit.

Technically speaking, it would be better to decrease the chances of hitting the target (EDR decrease) when you take Dual Wielding, and then mitigate that penalty when you put points into it. For increased damage, you would get decreased accuracy, and even though later that penalty would be insubstantial, that would only be if you put points into the skill tree.

The only question is, how to make that work without making EDR negative when you start (since I'm pretty certain the game would not allow that to happen)?


PS. Yes, I know that doing that doesn't make sense if you take a look at real sword-fighting (wielding two smaller blades isn't much difficult than wielding one bigger blade, unless you have massive coordination problems or want to use the two weapons equally when you have one "dedicated" hand), but in a game where we have drill-ducks (diggles) running around, realism is not required.

 

Re: Strange and Lorrelian

I guess it's not so much that those four points make (pure) melee builds underpowered (although I'd argue that they used to, back in the 1.0.4-ish days). My gripe is that you generally have to rely on tools outside your archetype to succeed. As a non-melee, your archetype can carry you through anything and everything, and using melee is actually a detriment. As melee, using Ranged (and sometimes, even spells) is oftentimes the "correct answer" to a tough situation, and is (again) often a better option than taking a swing at something. That's what I don't like.

I'd love to see some way of making Bolts and AoE wands and suchlike less powerful for melee stats/builds but making the Activated Weapon Attacks the equivalent to a decently-powerful AoE bolt/spell instead of the mediocre attacks that they are now - that way, you could rely on your Weapon Tree Skill(s) to deal your AoE damage instead of having to rely on Crossbow Bolts (Rogue archetype) and AoE Wands/Spells (Mage archetype) to deal with certain situations.

Also, Evil Chest weapons are just silly in general, as we discussed in that other thread. I had a Pyromancer/Psionisist with almost all Mage levels and absolutely no or who did more damage with an EC Weapon then she was able to do with a 90+ Gog's Tactical Pyre.

 

I've played melee, mage, and gish, with minimal rogue - and I prefer my melees single wielding and my gishes single wielding - tomes and shields well and truly make up for that loss in damage. I find that the 'traditional' route for melee isn't as effective as going deeper into magic and rogue trees - because the abilities and spells more than make up for the small bonuses from warrior skills.

 

On DW: While not the point I was trying to make, it is probably throwing off the whole melee issue a great deal. I do think there is one very logical solution to its problems that I've never actually heard mentioned around here. Namely, make some weapons two-handed.

Really, I think that being able to use two weapons with "Greatsword" in their name is just ridiculous, on a WoW level. I know that DoD isn't exactly realistic, but plenty of unrealistic games have two handed weapons and no-one blinks. Make some weapons two handed, make some new two handed weapons and some new one handed weapons, make a Heavy Melee skill that buffs your melee power more when using a two handed weapon, push damage for two handed weapons and maybe reign in damage for one handed weapons and give them other abilities like secondary stats or procs, give two handed weapons a different set of stats/procs... all of a sudden the melee play experience is getting more varied. Dual Wielding doesn't really have to be touched at all, just stop letting people swing sledgehammers, greatswords and quarterstaffs one handed.

Note that this is logical not simple. I know it would probably take a lot of coding work to do, but I think it would ultimately be more satisfying to the community than trying to employ some kind of clunky nerf for the Dual Wield skill.
[Aside]
Kazeto is right, though. An accuracy penalty for Dual Wielding is totally on flavor and would make it less immediately useful. I was in a fencing club for a year in college, and after this one party we all went to the workout room and hauled out the equipment. A lot of strange things happened there, including fencing with two foils and fencing in a cow suit. I can tell you from personal experience that, even if the weight isn't a big deal, coordinating the two weapons is. You have to think about two angles of attack, two different points (what normal people think of as the tip of the sword), two different sets of feints possible and making sure one set of movements isn't cutting off the path for another.
And you might be drunk in the middle of all of this.
And in a cow suit. Not that I did that.
[/Aside]

As for the whole ranged issue, that's never going to go away, I'm afraid. It's why every modern army in the world now uses guns instead of melee weapons. Fact is, having more opportunities to hit and/or kill the enemy is more effective than having less, so a ranged weapon will always drastically increase the kill power of its user, much more so than a melee weapon. The thing about medieval ranged weapons is they are slow and inaccurate. I think crossbows and thrown weapons should really come with some sort of EDR penalty, so they hit less often, and then there could be an "aim" skill to let you offset it at the cost of a turn.

The real problem with ranged attacks is time- one ranged attack per turn gives you more turns to damage the enemy than they get to damage you, provided they only attack in melee. Steal time from the ranged attacks and you reduce the power level of the ranged attacks.

I just don't know how this could be accomplished for magic, short of giving spells cooldowns in addition to mana costs. Particularly AoE spells.

 

Lorellian: You seem to have your aside tags the wrong way round, it should be more like
[aside]
[/aside]
cow suit story
[aside]
[/aside]

 

I think my personal beef with how melee works can be summed up as such:

Correct Answer to many difficult situations in the game is "get range and use ranged or AoE attacks to avoid things that could kill you."

Said Ranged and AoE attacks are the exclusive domain of the Rogue and Wizard archetypes. Making this worse is the fact that Warriors using things like Bolts of Squid suffer no penalties to damage even though they have 0 investment in making such weapons effective.

Now consider that the Melee Weapon Trees all give you an on-use attack - that does solid damage to the foe you aim it at and next to nothing in the "bonus" squares that are targeted.

So basically, melee have no viable AoE attacks to compete with Bolts and Spells. That's the big issue for me. I hate having to whip out my crossbow when that Named Muscle Diggle appears, or when I open up that 100-monster Zoo that's half caster mobs. Why don't melee have some sort of crowd control or AoE options in any of the Warrior Level Skill Trees?

 

Their loss. Beelining up Dual Wield has always been one of the most effective ways to start a melee character; Combat Momentum is amazing. I do approve of the initial boost to counter getting moved back to Ambidextrous Defense though, since that was always kind of a dead level.

I feel like this may be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. If you say "hmm I don't think I can rely on melee to carry me through the game, I'd better drop a few melee skills and pick up some magic" then sure you'll wind up having to use magic to get through dangerous situations--because you sacrificed the stats and skills you needed to survive those situations in melee in order to get magic! The problems you list with melee builds are problems that I only experience with hybrid characters, who are much flimsier and either can't kill dangerous enemies fast enough or can't take hits well enough to go toe to toe with boss monsters or zoos the way a pure melee character can.

But again, this isn't an inherent problem with melee so much as it is a problem with skill selection. Let's take say Master of Arms, Shield Bearer, and Berserker Rage. Most successful non-magical melee builds are going to take at least one and probably two of these. If you decide you're not taking any of them, what are you going to replace them with? There aren't enough pure melee skills in vanilla Dredmor to fill out a build without taking most or all of these core ones. You can make plenty of effective melee-oriented builds that forego these skills, but they are by necessity going to be hybridized, and as I mentioned in my reply to Marak taking a mix of melee and ranged skills pretty much guarantees that you're going to need those ranged skills because you no longer have enough skills to melee through everything. The issue is not that there aren't enough good options, it's that there aren't options period.

Even Dual Wielding is to some degree an extension of the same issue. Ever since the addition of tomes, you can in theory just about make up for the loss of the second weapon with a combination of the tome's base damage + the tome's proc + the fact that you now have an extra skill slot to spend elsewhere. But a full melee dual wielding character can already take every single melee skill in the game--so skipping Dual Wield only enables you to pick up an alternate less-melee-oriented skill in its place. Which can work fine, there are lots of good gish builds that forego DW in favor of tomes + an extra magic tree, but again at that point you're probably not going to be able to go 100% melee anymore.

 

There's also only like 3 ways to go pure mage or pure rogue - if you go pure X, there's going to be some sodding obvious choices.

 

LIES

My gish character would like to speak with you.