Arenanet's Response on Melee vs Ranged Combat:

[Loggahead]

This is a copy / paste from an Arenanet post by Jon Peters on their beta forums:


Hey all. I wanted to talk about this a bit since it is a hot topic here and also on the internets. The intention is that both styles are viable. Certainly right now Melee is more difficult than ranged. There are some things we will try to do to address this, but I think the more you play you would find they are closer than you think.

First what’s already there:
1) Melee does more damage. Melee damage is simply higher than ranged damage across the board.
2) Melee has more control. With a few intentional exception Melee has a lot more control than ranged.

What Melee needs:
1) defensive tools on more weapons, particularly on lower armor professions.
2) ai needs to favor Melee a bit less than it currently does.

What else:
Finally because of the more action based nature of combat Melee needs to be taught better. Effective Melee requires skills that translate over from FPS games which are notoriously harder on casual players. You have to wasd to move, constantly aim with your mouse camera, and hit skills on 1-5.

Some tips:
If you have learned any good Melee tips that you think we should pass on to newer players feel free to post them here. I’ll start with a few tips of my own.

- If you don’t have mouse look on when using a skill you will turn to face. I sometimes let go of mouse look as I activate to help me aim through the chaos and then click it back down in between attacks.

- Melee has a lot of hard hitting skills and good setup. Utility skills Can really help set up big Melee attacks. Bulls charge on warrior, scorpion wire on thief, judges intervention on guardian.

- know when to run. No matter what you are not a tank. You have to move in and out avoiding damage. If you have to soak damage try and bring boons like Protection and Regeneration or conditions like Blindness and the very undervalued Weakness.

Thanks for reading this all. Rest assured we will keep working on this and just keep in mind the subtle differences in GW2 combat that take a while to sink in.

Jon

[wraithguard]

Yea, soooooo many people were commenting about how melee sucked on the beta forums. I, on the other hand, had a blast! Granted, this is probably because I was a Ranger and I used a bear pet to tank for me but...ranger + greatsword = awesome.

[Loggahead]

I loved playing as a ranger as well! Though I stuck with tradition and mainly used a longbow or shortbow.

I heard that using a greatsword with Ranger was clutch but sadly never tried it...

[morgwath]

my necro with 3 minions (2 of which were melee and drew the aggro) had no real problems with melee...except for the big boss types. Dual weilding daggers was awesome. for range an axe with dagger offhand or 2h staff was fun.

My guardian died....a lot. in a matter of 1 hit on many bosses. But on normal mobs he was a lot of fun. I especially like weilding a hammer, although whirlwinding with a 2h sword was fun as well.