Balance request; show melee heros some love
The tl;dr is there is way to much melee/martial weapon hate in PvE and very little counter options for it.
Unfortunately the reality is with how effective caster-based damage (cough mesmers cough) is against literally everything in the game, if even 30% of the areas in the game are filled with melee hate, it makes it somewhat pointless to use martial weapon heroes over casters.
This realization came to me really after working on a 7 hero build trying to utilize some of the new buffs, particularly mystic twister + weapon of fury. The thing is this issue is less noticeable for melee PLAYERS because of the access to things like asuran scan, but heroes don't have this. The only exception is prophecies - it's relatively mild, however most the other campaigns are packed to the brim with blind, cripple, blocking stances & enchantments, hexes that slow, give miss chance, or reduce atk speed. In some areas its manageable, in others it's a hellscape for weapons. Most of those things are counterable, however it's so much variety of ways to fuck Koss over that no build can bring enough of to cover all bases (especially when you can go with casters and skip all that hassle). Combine with the lack of stance/block removal and the fact that most of the hexes/enchantments/conditions are low cd/cast and the time it takes to remove it already neuters a characters DPS, and it's no wonder melonni is sitting on the bench. I think ranged weapons suffer a bit less because they can easily switch targets, and daggers have decent unblockable skills. Scythe and warrior weapons suffer the most
Anyway thank you for listening to my Ted talk.
Posted May 5, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC