I suggest Sneakattack cooldown to be lowered

[xtremsniper]

suggestion : Lower sneakattack cooldown to like 12-13 seconds, same as the AS/ fullauto on xan weapons

why? because SA is atm capped at ~40 seconds, with 1800 sneakattack skill

FA/AS are both capped at around 12s, hurt WAY more then sneakattack


How do you think Melee professions are supposed to pvp fairly with those recharges?

i would understand if we(enforcers) had 3-5% heal every 2s, unles the new mongo who does 500hp/2s and two times 3% every 10s

while soldiers got a 30% one hit heal, yeah 3 mins cooldown, but 30%???? with tms??? FULLAUTO too, hotswap for AS, possible

/rant for ALL melee classes

[xtremsniper]

Since nobody responds on this, i'm pretty sure it's going to be skipped again, so bumping this thread as long as possible

[McKnuckleSamwich]

I'll have a crack at this.

melee weapons have higher min damage, higher max damage, larger critical (in general)
ranged weapons have lower min damage, lower max damage, smaller critical (in general)

Lets just compare a few weapons to ensure this observation still holds true:

Troa'ler: 225-225(100)
Peh'wer: 261-348 (247)
envy: 268 - 408 (288)
Lust: 225-350 (225)
Avg: 245 -333(215)

X1-R4: 307-472(550)
Hatred: 325-358(325)
Improved hacked medi-blade: 315-360(500)
Kur'ush mallet: 369-468 (330)
Avg: 329-415(426)

Anger of Xan: 320-560 (350)
Gan'kar Rifle: 350-580 (350)
Avg: 335-570(350)

Pride of Xan: 441-558 (444)
Bhan'zor: 465-568 (466)
Avg: 453-563(456)

Ok, so, basically, comparing the averages (I know they are incomplete but these were just a sample of the weapons I see most often)

1h range weaps are lowest of the bunch at: Avg: 245 -333(215)

And 1h melee weapons will offer approximately 30% better base damage at: Avg: 329-415(426), a significant crit improvement of 50%.

So, in comparing ranged and melee 1h options, it's clear that melee weapon users will benefit significantly more from boosting critical rating.
We also know that since ranged users benefit from more hits/minute (with burst/FA especially) that add damage benefits them more (generally).

Basically what we can glean from this observation is that ranged users would need to make up at LEAST 30% more damage right off the top in order to equal melee user damage just based on normal and fast attack/fling damage.
That damage is, broadly speaking, made up by burst.

Then, on top of that we got to take into consideration full auto and AS. And I sense this is where some of the more serious discrepancy will come in... But there's one more thing that we should take into consideration before we get there... and that's crit rating.

Crit rating firstly, is the primary DPS balance feature of melee users vs ranged users in PVM - And, to a large extent it works. Most mobs and most venues do not disproportionately discriminate against critical hits, but towers do.. and so do PEOPLE. And this is where there starts to be the first murmurs of imbalance. Obviously Towers with 100% crit resistance disproportionately discriminate against:

1. MA's (by far and away the worst off in this regard with almost 50% of their damage coming from criticals
2. Agents - the heaviest critical user of the ranged variety
3. Crats (Carlos is usually the heavier hitter and accounts for a lot of damage done, but with 100% crit resist this significantly reduces crat damage)
4. Shades - hard to say if shade should be #2-3, but generally shades setup for PVP won't be crit heavy which is why they aren't.

The next venue where significantly high crit resistance or mechanics to reduce crit are in play, is in Player vs player or PVP. PVP has built in mechanics to reduce ALL critical chance vs another player by 50%. That means that your static 40% crit rating is only worth 20% in PVP.

I have heard, but afaik it's unconfirmed, that MA's "fist" weapon is excepted from this rule.

Since we aren't comparing fist weapons, but melee weapons, we can ignore MA fist rules.

Since melee weapons are subject to a 50% reduction in crit landing rate, AND critical is not a "good" modifier in PVP (the reason for this is that you cannot raise critical rating significantly in setup and significantly raise AR/Defence, and thus by all PVP standards, critical is generally a not sought after modifier (in comparison to AAO, AAD, weapon skill/special skill, NR, HP, add damage and evades).

So, what we must conclude is that in PVP melee users will broadly perform less well from a DPS perspective, based on the primary defining PVM regulating weapon stats.

That means, more emphasis must be placed on sneak attack, perks, and other available means to do damage.

Luckily, there are a few more tricks that help regulate/boost melee damage in PVP:

1. Sneak attack, broadly speaking will out damage AS on most weapons against most players significantly
2. Sneak attack can't be dodged while FA can be
3. Brawl can stun
4. brawl/FA/SA can proc vs fling, AS which can proc but not burst or FA.

The last one is least significant but is still worth a mention. But it really comes down to this: Sneak attack, as a special will cap far far more than AS will for most AS users (traders using silverback, MA's using 300 tiger, agents using anything will do very well on AS damage, but soldiers, fixers, crat, doc, engi and advy will do less well- or should do less well).

18.7 however results in a few fairly significant boosts for some profs, the 165 AS buff does quite significantly boost the chances of a high multiplier, or more importantly reduce the chance of a low multiplier (advy, for example gets to 2k AS skill which means zero chance of a 2x multiplier, all multipliers for AS damage will be 3x and higher)

The bottom line is, in order to balance specials, a really thorough analysis on damage both in PVP and in PVM and even PVT is probably in order, and I don't really think that just jumping into a special CD reduction request is a valid way of balancing melee.

I personally think that higher damage weapons paired with a 40s SA is better than a 20-30s SA with lower damage weapons - put it that way - if you want to lower SA CD, you'd also need to lower the weapon damage and that's a big can of worms to get into.