Digimonk wrote on Mar 22
nd, 2017 at 2:31pm:
You know, I keep seeing people say Reaper is easier for ranged and casters than melee and that dumb BS is getting old. I expect that level of stupid on the mobos, but not here. The issue is that reaper has changed what qualifies as a meta melee build whereas it did not change the qualifications for ranged and casters as much.
Why do people not realize that high skull reaper is "meta builds only" mode?
This is true for the mid levels of reaper, but not the high levels. And the low levels of reaper are just the new
EEblack.
Snipped for brevity:
Digimonk wrote on Mar 22
nd, 2017 at 2:31pm:
The only thing reaper really changed for melee (but really all build types) is that glass-cannon is no longer viable. A melee build that balances DPS, CC options, and defense is the new meta for melee in reaper.
Prior to reaper, most of the popular melee builds mostly dumped defense in favor of DPS options because the baseline/default defensive stuff they had just by virtue of being melee were good enough.
You can't roll some full-retard glass-cannon melee build that dumped defenses for "MOAR DPS!" in high skull reaper because that's not meta build in Reaper.
There are melee builds that work in Reaper. they don't get 1-shotted by anything that sneezes in their direction.
Tell all of that to the tank here:
Prior to reaper a good tank could turtle up and let a healer keep them alive while doing his job of keeping Z and the pups on him instead of roaming around killing the party. You know, that team play that reaper was supposed to enhance.
Now? All he could do was hop around like a grasshopper and if Z landed a single hit on him he would die. That qualifies as 'sneezes in his direction,' yes? And then he'd blame lag, which I thought was funny. All the while eating a pile of festivult cookies which if they aren't duped are a limited resource you can't even buy with TP.
That's not 'team play,' he didn't need any support except for a rez when he died, and that's exactly the same for any other character.
Tell me this guy isn't running a meta-build. Tell me he sacrificed defenses for DPS. I've watched a couple other vids from this guys pov, he does a lot of shield blocking and clearly has a great tank build. He isn't killing anything. He isn't a glass canon build, but that doesn't matter.
The meta is that at high reaper levels one hit is a kill, and any melee dps build must by their very nature deliver their dps within the danger zone of 360 cleaves and many other mechanics that ranged/casters do not have to deal with in most cases to deliver their dps. Claiming that melee builds are bitching without justification is overlooking the actual meta.
As an aside, the meta actually pushes a lot of ranged/casters
away from the build strategies you cite where they had "40% dodge, 25% incorporeal, 120+ AC, etc ." in favor of more dps. Not entirely, but I've seen it many times and their justification for low HP and low PRR (and AC, lol) was that it simply did not matter at the levels they played. One hit = dead.