Personally, I think casters are harder to play well as casters. Yes, you can play them as one-button easy sauce (shiradi), but it's tough to use them in such a way to make use of all of their spells - and that's the fun part.

Melee are harder to prepare. They take a lot of gear planning and then, despite the changes, there are trade offs between self-reliance and raw dps. I keep choosing dps on mine and it's not quite working. I still haven't figured out how to make an EE solo pure fighter yet.

Yet playing melee is probably easier. You just don't have as many abilities - dps is done via weapons. Yes, you can swap them out, but at the end of the day, you have one button to make dps happen (plus cleave/gr.cleave, and other swing weapon buttons). Casters, you press different buttons for each spell you use - and many of them do different things.

But the hardest to play, as far as my experience goes, is a pure fleshy artificer. Not only do you have their spells, their weapons, and the rune arm, you have all the little clickies you've save up that make or break your survival.

I think anyone can play a high-save wf/bf because of the easy healing. Fleshies take work! And at the end of that day, that's more rewarding (at least, to me).

You can play caster in DI and it is still easier than melee on ee.

Yea, paladin which got buffed like crazy, what split is ranger?

Totally. I use two elements to get around that issue and a tiny bit into the off element just in case mobs are immune to both my mains. But it is very sp draining to use the off element.

Get the fuck out of town! A healer? Who thawed that out of the ice?

Hey, I run a healer.    .  When I'm feeling masochistic.

There are still some people who need us....

During my draconic lives, I did lightning and cold, but for shiradi, I respecked to max force over cold.

Now I'm thinking to ditch cold entirely for fire. The number of cold immune mobs went up dramatically with Enecro and fire synergizes more with shiradi yet the biggest problem is that respecking in force almost entirely killed my cold dps output.

I solo'd a lot during DI, trying to learn how to do EEs on my own, so cold was quite helpful in slowing enemies down - used to even run with sleetstorm, but have dropped it now as it is not party friendly. If you sleetstorm + icestorm, mobs slow down to very killable speeds and you don't take much damage.

Because running backwards and casting spells while jumping up and down like a Kansas city faggot takes so much skill.

I've been running Cold and Acid and found it pretty effective.
Acid spells aren't quick kills, but Acid Energy Burst hits nearly everything.
Even though Fire is my weak element, I still find Wall of Fire and Meteor swarm to be effective enough against Cold creatures, despite the penalties.
Cold is good for direct damage with the various rays, cone and Otiluke's.  I liked Cold because you can project damage at range.  You can land multiple spells/SLA's before a mob has a chance to close.
And the various SLA's allow you to do decent damage very cheaply - although admittedly, conserving SP's isn't a focus anymore.
I used ice storm occasionally thru Heroic, but never sleet storm - next time thru, will try that combo.  I usually just use Dancing ball to group up mobs for Energy Burst.

DI is how all the ED's should be!
Too many good choices such that you can't have them all.
It forces you to make choices and choose a style.

I was surprised that Cold was still ok in eOrchard.
But I switch to Acid and untyped damage spells (Force missiles and Disintegrate) as needed.