Originally Posted by icedwhitemocha

By not bringing any melee, you're going in with a distinct advantage in that you're rendering several skills on the opposing team's skillbars completely useless (read: bsurge, bflash, pof, sof, reckless, inept, etc etc).

Originally Posted by icedwhitemocha

Also remember that melee is the hardest character on your team to keep clean, and team energy and resources have to be devoted to keeping your melee's dps capabilities up.

Originally Posted by icedwhitemocha

When I used to TA more, my friends and I would occasionally get fed up with antimelee, roll a 3 hexer build, and steamroll glad points... but that was a long time ago.

Originally Posted by icedwhitemocha

So, is it worth it to sacrifice the melee threat and dps usually tipping the odds in your favor before a match has even begun?

Originally Posted by icedwhitemocha

Yes, I know melee is the best source of damage and presents the biggest damage threat in the game... But the key here is counters.

Originally Posted by Ensign

In reality a Warrior will have a lot of his damage mitigated. An unmitigated Warrior with a couple of attack skills can pump out close to 3000 damage per minute, and you'd be a fool if you let him do that. So you mitigate his damage. You use snares to limit his mobility and kite away when he gets close. When he does close you use Guardian and other protective effects upon whoever he's attacking to mitigate even more of his damage. Maybe you'll set traps in the back and force him to run through them, or have a Blinding Flash guy babysitting him. With proper attention a Warrior can be reduced to a shadow of himself, perhaps only kicking out 800 damage in a minute on whomever he can get a blow in on.

On the other side of the equation you have something like an Offering of Blood powered blood nuker. He can cycle Dark Pact and Vampiric Gaze upon the other team all day and there's very little they can do about it - the skills are non-trivial to interrupt, the packet size is small, and each attack ignores a lot of defenses (or all defenses in the case of Vampiric Gaze). Because of the short cooldowns and the energy provided by Offering of Blood, this character can dish out around 1200 defense ignoring autohit damage every minute.

Side by side you look at the Warrior dishing out 800 damage and the Necro dealing 1200 and you conclude that the Necromancer was more effective, right? After all he dealt 50% more damage, that's a lot better!

Dead wrong.

The difference is that while the Warrior only dealt 800 actual damage, the extra 2000 damage that wasn't dealt to HP went directly into the other team's attention, energy, and skill usage. It is not a trivial job to constantly pre-kite the Warriors to keep them from getting hits in, especially if there are multiples operating independently. But being forced to kite can be incredibly disruptive. Sure your energy continues to regenerate, but you aren't casting, and every time you stop to cast you have to balance that against the hits you're going to take from doing so. Sure it's an effective way to mitigate some damage, but it's not free by any means. Following a Warrior around with Guardian and maintaining that on his target requires a good amount of attention and is not cheap by any means. It will stop a good amount of damage and frustrate the Warrior but it's still energy that isn't going to be spent healing. Snaring or Blinding the Warrior work on similar principles, it's damage that isn't dealt but it's time and energy that has to be spent to control that damage. Aegis isn't attention intensive but it chews up a lot of energy. Etc, etc, etc. The net effect of all this is that while the Warrior only does a fraction of his damage potential, the amount of trouble he caused his opponent is a whole lot higher. Why? Because of the threat he posed if they didn't address him. In short, the damage he dealt might have been mitigated, but *the threat, largely, was not*.

Originally Posted by Divineshadows

By not bringing melee you're also going in with the disadvantage of not posing as much of a threat to your opponent.

Originally Posted by Blame the Monks

I don't believe this is necessarily correct.

While Ensign's was illuminating back when he made that post, ele nuker power and nonelite eman has been drastically buffed.

Originally Posted by X Cytherea X

when i melee in TA, it's nice to have a non-melee-anti-anti-melee-teammate. or an anti-melee-resistant-melee to shut the anti-melee up while the main melee attacker kills shit. (did u get all that?)