by The Letter X Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:36 pm
Latitoast wrote:You look so mobile, so why would melee not be viable?
If you have high mobility in a game melee can be one of the strongest ways to play.
And that was a big factor in helping me with using melee builds. As far as I know, only me and the person that posted nonsensical comments on the video moved in ways that made it hard to hit us, even though there is no true dodge mechanic in the game.
Basically, if you're in range of the attack, it will hit you. There were ways of reducing the damage through powers you picked for the build or the equipment you wore (which had no aesthetic influence, thankfully), but that did not make up for closing the gap on a melee build. You'd spend most of your time chasing people down while they were backpedaling and still dealing damage. And once you finally caught them, your one chance at attacking would fail most of the time due to lag or a power that could interrupt other powers.
To fight that, we learned to move in a way that would keep us out of range of their heavy damage dealing attacks and moving in while they were recharging to kill them on the spot. That may sound like a simple tactic that everyone would pick up on right away, but since most people died so quickly from the OP ranged powers it proved to be harder than it looked.
We also had to learn how to make builds that could actually kill our ranged opponents once we finally caught them. Most melee powers weren't even as strong as the ranged powers. The strongest melee powers in the game required heavy set-ups to achieve their full potential, yet they still only did 2/3 of the damage of the better ranged powers. And melee powers couldn't be charged until you were in range of your opponent and stayed in range, which was hard to do. So we had to make builds that locked down our opponents in some type of way while we were closing the gap without sacrificing too many offensive or survival powers to gimp us too badly. It was much harder to do that on a melee build.
I still had a very low success rate against the best ranged builds because it was simply impossible to beat them, even for other ranged builds. I did manage to get respect from most of them, however. That was my only goal.