Overview
cynical explanation as to why ranged is the best build and you can really only use melee/magic builds effectively at early and end game
Why anything that isn’t ranged is bad
So you have 3 possible pathes when it comes to builds, technically speaking you can go into multiple subtype builds, but at the end of the day you’ll be way more focused on a few particular stats than others regardless, and ironically all builds are going to be using a bow, at the very least, as a utility
Melee, Ranged, and Magic
this is the trifecta of the D2ED standard, and the game wants you to invest in all of them, albeit with differing priorities, but because of how the game’s mechanics work, you’re just gonna stick to two stats because it’s most effective.
To contribute to all 3 priority stats would be slow gains, whereas investing in your primary and secondary would boost you quicker in gains.
First, Melee problems
Melee tends to have the best burst dps when you take into account that you can dual wield or greatsword, obviously with magic attack added. Sword n Board provides the best generalist melee endgame because you can sacrifice defensive investment in exchange for focusing your stats more into offense while using the stats of your shield+sword and shield passive to cover you. Usually, you will focus melee and ranged defense, since you can just dodge magic. Dodging sucks though, because dodging means you’re not dpsing and just gives your opponents more time to zone you in packs, and melee can’t kite. They have to put more effort into CC and burst if they want to survive packs. Melee in early/mid game sucks because defense sucks, and it becomes more an endurance fight than anything. Hope you deal more damage than your enemy or you’re screwed. You can also just eat food and drink regeneration while you fight to give yourself more endurance in the fight, but at the end of the day you’re putting a massive amount of effort in comparison to the other classes.
Second, Magic problems
Being resource intensive sucks. Even worse is that mage builds aren’t truly going to be mage builds. You will primarily only be able to do one type of damage. Mage builds are the only ones that truly suffer from just how split resistances work.
First off, you have 3 types of damage. Ranged, Melee, and Magic. They are all treated separately, so even if you attack with a melee weapon that has magic, the individual attack values are applied against the enemy with a flat percentage cut off the damage you put in. This is more noticeable at endgame, because numbers are bigger, therefore percentage reduction has bigger impact.
For example
Lets say you’re fighting an enemy with 20% melee damage resistance, but only 5% magic damage resistance.
before resistances, your melee weapon deals 72 dmg.
After reductions, you now deal 58 damage. (rounded up from 57.6)
That’s a whole 14 damage lost, which is a big deal at around level 15-20.
Lets take the same mob, but now we have a weapon that deals both 42 melee damage, and 46 magic damage.
After reductions, you deal 34 melee damage (33.6) and 44 magic damage (43.7).
On melee, you only lost 8 damage, and on magic you only lost a negligable 2 damage.
Combined, you deal 78 damage. Notice how you took a lesser reduction on melee because the number was smaller, and was able to exploit the fact that the enemy was low on magical resist without requiring to commit fully to said stat.
For a build to be good, you MUST be able to exploit two resistances. It will always be your primary stat (strength or dexterity) and then your secondary stat (intelligence.) This is why Mage builds are bad, because mage builds will feel weaker in offense and will have to eventually just become an ordinary melee build if they want to be optimal and not just kissing a bajillion damage in the mouth and sending it on it’s way.
Mage builds can be both ranged, melee, as well as having minions. But the other builds can have the strongest minion via necromancer pet anyway, so it’s a bit redundant. The other builds also aren’t mana intensive either, so the threat of it taking half your mana isn’t really a threat.
Last, ranged
Ranged sucks in close quarters. the animation to attack is decently long, and getting to a decent range to defend yourself is not always possible. In these situations, you’ll simply do better off just using a melee if you’re built for such, otherwise you waste a LOT of time repositioning yourself or cheesing via geometry, which isn’t the easiest in the world to do since A.I. has really good pathfinding, all things considered. Otherwise, Ranged literally has no other downsides beyond being lower dps on weapons. This is countered by the fact that ranged builds crit all the time, however.
Why ranged is the best, and will take your girlfriend, your sister, and your mom.
Let’s fully list the Pros and the Cons to ranged.
Pros
– It’s got really good kiting capability. In open areas, it’s extremely easy to survive entire packs without taking a single pip of damage, no matter what stage of the game you’re in.
– Takes advantage of first strike, always. Because you have the element of “””surprise””” i.e you can deal damage from really heckin’ far you can take out a lot of health on your enemies before they can even reach you, and after they do reach you, you can just backflip or roll away to max range and do it all over again.
– Has the best generalist skill tree when it comes to exploiting debuffs and attack buffs. If you were to only work on the Ranger tree, you could still sleep through the entire game. It doesn’t hurt to take some perks from Priest, obviously. But ranger has the most offensive buffs in the game that cost little resource (i.e mana), compared to the other builds. For example, Warrior can get ridiculous damage but this makes them extremely squishy. Very ironic, considering they are melee suddenly becoming extremely weak to melee and magic. Mages have literally no defenses if they decide to buff up, which is supposed to encourage using your minions and what not, but still, the exchange is ridiculous for what you get out of it.
– You can completely ignore your third priority stat, i.e Strength, as well as ignore melee resistance and completely stack 1:1 Dex and Int. You’re ranged, you can kite. Nuff said. And the other two damage types you deal with will be extremely weak to you anyhow, plus you can take advantage of better crit chance and crowd control resist due to stat investment being primarily Dex and Int.
– Glass Cannon when it comes to melee. Titanium Cannon when it comes to ranged and magic.
– Plenty of crowd control from the get go, being poison which gives an initial stagger for about a second, and a stun shot which stuns for a minimum of 4 seconds on investment, to which you can upgrade further.
– Priest and Mage skills work very well with Ranger builds at around 10+.
– Lots more spare gold since Rangers are cheap to fund.
Cons
– Fighting in tight spaces is not easy, and melee will have advantage.
– No real melee resistance.
– Good bows are rare. This is what usually causes original ranger builds to divulge into Melee-Primary/Ranger-Utility builds. Don’t do Melee/Ranged hybrid, the builds are scuffed and you’ll stretch stat points too thin.
– Fighting on uneven terrain makes your shots extremely inaccurate, and you might whiff skills and shots which wastes time and dps. It also gives you less room to exploit your range advantage. Reposition to flat terrain asap.
– subpar dps compared to mid-endgame melee.
– dex armor looks dumb and all the bows look whimpy as hell like look at all the melee gear they’re chads what the hell Larian studios
conclusion
man why can’t melee be good what if I wanna be a heavy armoured badass who shoves his big sword into people’s faces and stuff optimally
dammit larian. at least you can respec at the battle tower. but man…
