Melee fighters in World of Warcraft are shouting out. They feel disadvantaged – and hardly anyone wants to take them along.
For just over two weeks now, players have been running mythic dungeons in WoW: Shadowlands. While this is still relatively easy at normal mythic difficulty, there are additional challenges in “Mythic+”. Particularly, melee fighters are currently unpopular.
What’s going on? Many melee fighters are currently complaining in the official forum and on the WoW subreddit. Despite good equipment, they are often not included in dungeon groups. Again and again, there are descriptions stating that they simply do not want any melee fighters in the party. For example, the user Korgozz writes a bit cynically on reddit: “If you have item level 200 but don’t play a ranged character”:
PoV: You have a 200iLvl but don’t play a ranged dps from r/wow
Other users also repeatedly post images of groups that simply don’t want any melee fighters – aside from the tank, of course.
The shocking state of melee in Shadowlands. from r/wow
Why are melee fighters unpopular? This is mainly due to two reasons that reinforce each other. In Shadowlands, there are again quite a few mechanics that cause problems primarily for melee fighters. These can be whirlwind attacks or areas that force melee fighters to keep their distance.
As a result, melee fighters either deal significantly less damage or take a lot of damage themselves, which stresses the healers.
Especially in the last week, there was a whirlwind caused by the affixes that always appeared within melee range. This knocked players back and dealt damage to them. Ranged fighters had virtually no issues with this, as the whirlwind only appears close to enemies. Ranged fighters can therefore continue to deal damage without any problems and only have to deal with the usual boss mechanics.
How could this be solved? Finding a comprehensive solution is difficult. If negative effects impacted melee fighters less, all players would simply flock to melee – including ranged players. It might help to modify the affixes so that ranged and melee fighters are equally affected by all affixes. However, this is not so easy to achieve due to the very different play styles.
However, the problem is not really new. Almost every expansion there is an outcry that melee fighters are particularly hard hit and thus lose performance – this time, it’s just particularly evident.
In addition, melee fighters also bring quite a few useful traits with them, as they can usually interrupt enemy spells much more often. Just this alone is a good reason to have at least one or two melee in the group.
Do you see a good solution to the problem? How could we make melee fighters more popular and valuable in groups?
