Nice observations there.genzod23 wrote:What's not balanced is your character is spec'ed very poorly......
melee is way overpowered but most of you don't see it, because you all chose to gimp yourselves......
One day along time ago a man in open beta who was well respected starting using 2-handed melee, and he claimed that all who did not use 2-handed melee were gimped............ so the entire server starting spreading the lies of 2-handed melee, and so the "un-balance" began......
My character is 1-handed melee, if you compare the best 1-handed weapon with the best 2 handed weapon you will find 2 things, the 1-handed weapon does 30% less dmg than a 2-handed weapon but swings 50% faster so when you do the math 1x.3x1.5 you will see that per minute i do more dmg than you, next you must realize that I can now as a TANK <GASP!!!!!> use a shield so now i'm doing more dmg than a 2-hander and taking 25% less dmg than you are......
Then you need to understand that a nice excellent shield will not only give you great dmg resists but boost your parry by 25-35 points, this means you parry is if you were 20-35 lvls higher..... that alone is amazing.........
Once you are parrying as if you were 35 lvls higher then the "Attack after Parry" credit becomes a very nice option and once you max it out you realize wow i can drop 3 mobs in a row 40 lvls higher than me, and only use 25% of my total stamina..... because you pay with parry credits and not stam credits
Follow that and you'll see how powerful melee really is...... it's 2-handed melee that's gimped not melee in general.........
Watch any great ancient era movie, where they fight with melee weapons, you don't see many 2-handers , but what you do see is fighters with 1-handed weapons and shields, do some research before you start whining.....
Your comment about movies depicting melee combat got me thinking...
Putting movies aside (which are notoriously inaccurate) and looking at documented history, you'll find that a common infantry formation was comprised of several types of soldier. In front, you had the shield wall. This was typically made up of units with large shields and short swords. They weren't big damage dealers. They're there to protect. Behind them, you had the polearms (spears, pikes, etc.). Their job was to hide behind the shield wall and dish out damage with their long reach. Then well back from them would be the archers.
Yes, there are tons of variations on this throughout history but this is probably the most common setup.
It'd be cool if this could be reflected in Ryzom. Of course, as you've described, right now the total damage/time output is favoring the shield user which isn't too accurate. Also, there's no real way to keep people in any kind of formation and prevent mobs from just walking through the shield wall to the other people. But I still have visions of being able to pull this off and I hope they'll give us more mass combat tools to help with this in the future.
But, it looks like it might work. Id hate to have to level my 1h just to find out. But right now I dont have much choice. 
