Yesterday I was running some legendary runs with a friend and two randoms. Me mage, friend dwarf with flame cannon weapon, one random was elf that you start as, and the other was Kruber’s second form. To start off Kruber would run in while the 3 of us would shoot and we stutter our shots to try and not hit him. Then he realized killing was going slower when he ran up so when we would have a horde coming he would stand at the choke point crouch and hold block till they were all dead allowing us to clear faster. When we would hold a hallway and had to defend 2 points he would sit right side and one of us would sit left and the other 2 would do the same the other way. Most games at the end of the game the score screen would have him lowest but not one of us carried b/c to be honest him blocking and keeping the horde off of everyone at a choke point was 10x better for the team. Besides the first five minutes every run went smooth. It’s ppl like this that i want to run with (I do the same thing he does when I’m the melee champ.)
TL:DR Melee don’t worry about stats and block for your ranged at chokes b/c if you allow them to murder everything without worrying about getting hit or hitting you then you’re the real MVP no matter what the score screen says.
edit remove the damage stats from the score screen so ppl don’t care about it
kill the stuff that get’s close but sitting with the team is the best thing for the team. i usually watch my range ppls back if they are handling the horde and i’ll make sure none get to them from the sides and behind.
in my experience, this game is all about killing things. the faster you kill stuff, the easier the game gets. tanking is great, enables you to have battlefield control and protect your teammates, but ultimately, you need killing power.
i am experienced enough in this game to understand how everyone is performing while in the mission itself. i can tell if the sienna in my party is underperforming, or whether the bounty hunter in my team is the true MVP because he’s wiping any elites that come our way. I can tell if my kruber is controlling bosses well by saving his ult for when people get grabbed by bosses, or just chainstunning him to oblivion.
after observing all that, the scoreboard at the end gives weight to the observations. a dorf may be burning every single horde to a crisp, but somehow his damage isn’t high, which leads me to believe that player needs help with all other types of threats. a sienna taking massive amounts of damage but dishing out much more will correlate to me prioritising assisting her more, because she’s obviously trying to dish out max dps but is lacking in defensive moves. seeing my damage at the top while taking the most damage is an indicator for me to be more defensive as well, and look at the mistakes i’m making in melee combat.
seeing players playstyle and correlating it to the stats screen is a very important thing for me to learn and improve.
please don’t ask to take it away because you don’t know how to use it well.
That depends on if you want to just rush in and kill things or if you want to play as part of a team.
If it’s the former, well, either play with bots and/or go down a difficulty or 2 where that sort of thing (rushing in, ignoring your team) is viable, though that’s probably not going to make you many friends there either. Perhaps a different, non-team focused game is more to your liking?
If it’s the later, you should already understand that melee has a role of watching the ranged guys backs while they thin the horde early on, keeping an eye out for specials when they’re not engaged in melee and killing things once the range closes, just like ranged’s job is thinning hordes for the melee guys, watching the melee guys back once the proper fighting starts and keeping an eye out for sneaky specials trying to ruin the party.
How is saying that melee has a distinct yet different role to ranged contradicting what the OP said? OP specifically said that once the melee guy started to work with the ranged guys and not rush in, life was good.
OP also pointed out (and I couldn’t agree more) that green circles on the board don’t mean squat.
YOU were the one who appears to want to focus on kills as a melee character.
It’s a team game and nobody gets different rewards based on anything they do in the game. As a Sienna main, I’d much rather have a melee guy stand off to one side and let me thin the horde for him and then keep his back/flanks clear of stragglers while he does his thing in the choke instead of having him rush in and get surrounded where it’s difficult to help while also letting the stragglers come and melee me.
I love a Foot Knight Kruber hitting the boss with an interupt when I get aggro, it lets me build space and continue nuking or gives me a chance to shake some adds. An Ironbreaker who uses his taunt to pull a crowd when things have gone poorly and we’re getting surrounded is a godsend. A Zealot who can batter through shielded stormies or a Slayer who can melt CW’s is priceless.
Having someone watch my back while I pewpew and having me do the same for them while they go to town results in a huge increase in success rate. I think ~90% of my failed runs have come from the team getting surrounded, usually due to a melee guy not holding position because they want to swing their thwacking stick. Anytime I get a melee guy who knows how to hold a choke, they’re worth their weight in gold.
Just because you’re not rushing into melee range at the drop of a hat doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for you to kill, the same way that just because there’s bad guys on the map standing around doesn’t mean you need to kill them to finish the mission.
I read it as the melee guy simply standing to one side until the horde got close and then engaging (including CC knockdown from push/stab). If the OP infact meant that the sole purpose of melee is to be a roadblock and let the ranged guys do all the work, then no, I totally disagree with that.
Knowing if someone is taking a lot of damage/doing a lot of damage is easily doable without a score screen. Sorry if you aren’t competent enough to figure that out during a game and need a number screen to tell you that.
Exactly this. Remember, the stats at the end are not just for randos, it’s for friendly competitions between friends. It adds to the engagement and fun of the game. It’s not a problem, PEOPLE are the problem. But having more stats for players who are playing defensively would also be a good thing. Things like “damage blocked” and “stagger caused” would be great additions to help flesh out the contributions of folks that are doing more than just straight killing.
You are right. People are the problem. And you can modify their behavior by removing these pointless green circle stats that reinforce their negative behavior.
I don’t think adding “damage blocked” will help anything. These types of players are still going to be chasing kills, even to the detriment of their team, because the online gaming community is largely dps-obsessed and only care about those offensive stats.
Problem is that alot of people like those stats. They help foster community and byplay between friends. Basically they help foster enjoyment of the game and increased engagement more than they encourage toxicity. Much more.
Likewise I don’t think taking away the score will really help anything. Without a score screen the toxic people can simply claim they did most of the kills. Know how I know? MOBAS and MMORPG raids. You cannot stop toxic people from being toxic and guess what, people are DPS obsessed in those games too. Even when building glass cannon is literally detrimental to them they will build glass cannon in PVP in an MMORPG and then complain that it’s everything else’s fault like class balance.
Meanwhile all we recommend is add more recognition for other roles. So that even people that normally do not notice things other than DPS/kills, which is what most people look for according to both of us, will notice a bit more.
But hey, I love how you think you have the magic answer to DPS focus and toxicity that hasn’t been solved in 20 years of gaming. Also while tearing down ideas to make other gameplay more visible because apparently you know better. Quite humble of you.
This might be alien to you: but maybe there is no known fix as to current knowledge based on decades of game design. This is why Blizzard and Riot and Twitch are teaming up to try and find an answer. Because they’ve all failed individually and acknowledge they do not have an answer. That specific kind of cooperation just doesn’t happen in gaming lol. Usually companies hate teaming up in the way they are doing.
MOBAs and MMORPGs do have the exact same problem with the exact same kinds of stats though. It shows how many kills you have in dota. Everyone stares down dps meters in MMOs. If these did not exist, the issues these cause would likely be greatly mitigated.
People weren’t like this when we had no DPS meters back in EQ1. People weren’t like this in Guild Wars 1 or 2, which also had no dps meters. But you go into modern WoW and every meter-obsessed idiot stands in the fire and endangers his group/raid to get a leg up on the other dps that he’s ostensibly supposed to be working with. Stat chasing causes this negative behavior. A desire for some arbitrary number to tell you that you are better than your peers, even if pursuing it makes you detrimental on the whole.
Maybe some people do like stats. What minor enjoyment they get out of looking at numbers is not worth what it does to the game’s community at large.
Get outta here with your pointless ad hominem attacks, by the way.
