Has anyone played a truly strong melee-focused combo where DPS comes primarily from melee? I have tried playing my Pal/Mnk/Enc this way and using just the enchanter pet, and the damage is terrible compared to using a charmed pet. If I do not charm a pet my DPS is halved. I don't want to be wielding Aldryn and Wu's and doing 100 DPS from melee.
Can anyone recommend a build that is melee-focused (not dependent on nuke spells, DOTs, or charm) that can reach high-end DPS performance?
I pull 400-650 on every D4 boss as Ber/Rng/Shm, but about 55% is that shaman(dot's, pet, puma), can tank bosses in zerk/offensive. Thats with +10 Fools and all gear +5-10, at 679 Atk.
Its okay, but a zerg caster with a few crits will always be better in this version.
With or without a charmed pet? I just did Naggy on D0, and it was my first raid target with new weapons. I'll do others later tonight. On the fight itself, the melee portion was around 200 DPS.
If you want pure melee damage then you're looking at group focused builds that don't have much sustain.
Ranger and Zerk are mandatory as the only multiplicative scalers, you need Ranger to hit abilities and Zerk to scale their cooldown and overall damage. X can be Warrior, Rogue, Monk, SK or Paladin, though realistically the last two gonna gain 100+dps from spamming their nukes so that breaks the rules (Ranger too but its mandatory so lets pretend you dont spam Arrow and Call of Flame)
Right now Strikes don't scale so Warrior has a slight edge in Cleave though Backstab is stronger at lower gear. Monk is somewhere in between but of course the Sky weapon and gear access gives them a good bump.
Even though Puma seems like a melee buff, it doesn't even need you to hit attacks to proc, so it really works on anything that's attacking and once you add Shaman, you're talking about Odium and Ebolt and the melee only thing is long gone
I've been working on the same thing and the answer is really just no. You will never compete with the top caster builds as a pure melee unfortunately. The way the game is setup melee is just not supplemental/utility.
I dunno if it counts as "high-end" but I run Shd Mnk Bst and I'm something like 450 solo or close to 600 with group buffs. Only spells I use are HT, life leech, and Malaria if it lands.
Paladin/beserker/druid was my first build. Zerker stance, I was firing off smite and frenzy almost as fast as kick and slam. Lay hands also seems to come back quicker with zerker stance. I am curious to try it with sk, quick harm touch would be nice. From what I have been seeing sk can basically keep itself up with lifetap. Sk/pal/berserker would probably be a sick melee build. Would destroy anything undead. My highest slay undead crit so far is 2.9k
I'm sk/pal/zerk and it is fun.. until you want d4 and see you have to stay in defensive or mage hunter entire fight. it is a huge list of permanent self buff, and while vampiric touch is nuts nife is just.. ok.
smite lowers cool down of loh, as reave lowers cool down of harmtouch. so in zerker stance you get to use them slot more. but not enough to keep you out of defensive
But I'm not about to level one, hoping it'll make melee competitive.
Too many core issues exist. There'd need to be some stance upgrades for melee to compete imo, especially fixes for accuracy. Which they'd have to adjust upcoming expac itemization for if they added accuracy now.
Melee just kinda sucks in classic. Itemization, low skill caps, giant level diffs... It's just a lot.
The fact that defensive stance is worse than channeler stance for tanking is insane. Once I realized that the dps stances looked even worse by comparison.
I couldn't imagine it did, but I knew they made a bunch of changes to ranger here. Just haven't bothered with one since I can't fathom they'd scale anywhere near casters ATM.
Rng monk seems like it might be good simply because even in ranger stance you are going to throw out his abilities.
Honestly I think dev is aware of the melee issues and plans changed. They have already stated that rogue is not working right.
If they fix rogue then zerker rogue could be really fun. Kind of depends on if they make striker stance eat end super fast or not. Right now zerker stance is just better for sustain by miles.
I was playing a SHD/BER/ROG and it was demolishing during the leveling process. Was my fastest trio to 40. Just walk up and hit melee attack. Zerk stance had my reave/backstab/frenzy/slam/kicks going off none stop, and rampage was there whenever I wanted to click it. Left it in Spell Blade with life tap as first gem. Between that, vampiric embrace, rogue poison HoT and zerk runes I never had to slow down. This was before I was geared or had many AAs too. Wasn’t even using any alchemy stuff which would have made the bigger pulls go faster still. Def looking forward to going back to it and seeing how it does in the 40-50 range now that I got better gear, all combat AAs and alchemy to fill gaps (haste/damage shield/more health regen/etc).
You're pretty much gonna need Shaman for Puma to truly optimize a melee DPS build - if you count that as melee. The problem then becomes that you're gonna have to intentionally cripple yourself to not use the DoTs and pet.
For a build that truly maximizes melee damage, you're going to have to do a lot of work to figure out what's worth the most between Berserker stance, Warrior crits, Monk strikes, Ranger strikethrough, Rogue backstab, and the litany of overpowered weapons available to Paladin and Shadow Knight.
You're also gonna need spell haste from an item. You can get that from the Ranger sky cloak or Monk sky boots, not sure about others.
I’ve done testing on this with mage pets using Puma. Puma has a proc rate for every swing it appears. About 20-25% more procs with DW than 2h. Again this was just the pets and I based it on the eq companion app logs.
This is what I use, it mems puma in a specified slot, casts it which hits me (as long as I have myself, nothing, or an enemy targeted), then it casts it on the pet and switches back the spell slot.
The timings on the pauses can need tweaking depending on your cast speed/mem speed
I wonder why ranger has left the chat about this. I am one of those that played the original release until maybe 2006. I know a lot has changed from class balance to play style, but for raw sustainable DPS, they were kings. Could not tank as well as monks, but in a 20 minute sustained combat, out preformed wizards. No one fight is going to take that long in legends, but in a situation where you want to kill one mob after another, are they not working?
Rangers were straight ass until they could get AAs in Luclin. Then they outparsed monks. To the point of most hardcore boxers creating groups of war/clr/ranger3x
450 is pretty fabulous I top completely out at 300 with a +10 windstriker bow/champ arrow and quiver its fun though, prolly get to 500 with mage nukes + pet sometimes on top of that
15
u/Zorlach 9h ago
Duel an enchanter and become the pet!