Matt Miller on Balancing Ranged vs Melee

Pravius

Today, we ask Cryptic Studios' Bill Roper about balancing casting and ranged classes against melee classes.

MMO combat suffers from balancing casting vs. melee classes. What methods do you use to balance these two class types?

In City of Heroes we had to take great strides to make a melee classfeel like they are not over-shadowed by ranged blasters. Being able tostrike from range is an advantage that is difficult to put a numericalstatistic to, but we increased the damage that a pure-melee characterdoes over a ranged one. This is an area where we decided to err on theside of the player, as that damage increase is probably too strong, butin the end having it as strong as it is gives a real incentive for aplayer to try out a melee archetype.

Ranged characters also have the worst defenses in the game as well.This is a common MMO design tactic to encourage the playing of meleebased classes. Our players use the term "Squishy" to describe any ofthe ranged classes that will go down in just a couple hits. Even ourmelee-DPS classes like Scrappers and Stalkers have respectable levelsof damage mitigation, over the ranged-DPS classes like Blasters andCorruptors.

We also allow players to queue up their attacks andhave them execute as soon as they are within range. This way you canactivate a melee-range power and the character will "hold it" untiltheir target gets within melee range, then immediately strike. Thisgreatly helps out melee characters as they can automatically executeattacks if their foes are doing "drive-bys", or they are doingdrive-bys themselves.

Of course, in City of Heroes we have theability for every character to fly and fight at the same time. This ledto some exploitation of enemies who didn't have ranged attacks simplygetting farmed with no way to fight back. Nowadays all enemies aregiven some sort of ranged attack, and if it's a weak one it will carrywith it a -FLY attribute which will remove the ability to fly andground the offending character. Another thing we've done is avoidingthe use of flying enemies. Flying enemies are pretty much somethingonly a ranged character can combat, so a pure-melee character can onlysit there and get hit. Where we do use flying enemies, we give them astrong "melee-centric" AI, which will have them swooping into meleerange quickly, after taking only a couple pot-shots at range.

Now PvP can be really tricky. With nothing to counter a rangedcharacter, especially one that can fly and stay forever out of meleerange, then you end up with a one sided battle that is no fun for themelee guy. Due to this we incorporated two things. First, we've addedthe same -FLY that some enemies use to a lot of the player charactermelee powers, which will remove the flying attribute from the enemy ithits. This really can ruin a flying ranged character's day when theysuddenly find themselves on the ground next to a guy with twolaser-swords! Second, we have the concept of "movement suppression"where our super-fast travel powers lose their effectiveness for a fewseconds after you make an attack. While this won't ground a flyingcharacter, a smart melee character can make them maneuver towards themto get the shot, and hit them with a -FLY attack before they can speedback out of range, and then go to town.