Asheras wrote on Nov 14
th, 2011 at 7:18pm:
I think eSoS is out of sync with the rest of the epic weapon options. Even the eChaos Blade. But nerfing it instead of boosting the other epic weapons is the wrong path. Most epic weapons yield less benefit than GS and have a tougher grind. The progression should be clear: Loot Gen --> Cannith Crafted ---> Raid Loot ---> GS ---> Alchem ---> Epic.
How fucking hard is it?
And if melees get a bit of a buff in the process, who gives a care. Melees are underpowered atm.
First, I think it should be
Loot Gen-->Cannith-->Raid/GS-->Alch (tier 2)-->tier 3/epic
Raid items aren't necessarily any easier to get than greensteel, and some should certain eclipse GS. Alchemical weapons are a sort of GS+(the simplified edition). If ToD Elite were dropping weapons, I would expect them to end up better than GS.
Anyway, I don't think the solution to the current melee::caster imbalance is to overpower the rest of the weapons in the game to match or exceed the ESoS...not all of them anyway.
For one, the game needs to first get adjusted so that THF can stand on its own merits at endgame without relying upon an incredibly difficult to acquire weapon to bring it even with TWF.
Second, the imbalance between casters and melees has shifted back and forth over the course of DDO's history, where casters were, at the low end, relegated to being largely buffbots, gaining one slot in a raid for buffs and a tiny bit of crowd control while melees dominated everything. Yes, self-healing casters have always been rather strong, and casters while leveling have always been pretty powerful, but for a lot of the game melees dominated, and they did so for several reasons. Rampant immunities and new content with a lot of action between shrines/beginning to end taxes casters more than melees.
Recently, though, we've seen casters gained more self-healing options, more efficient spells, and a revamp to their options in general, along with a removal of many of the immunities that kept casters from dominating the endgame a couple years ago, in addition to more abilities that improve their spells.
Casters have simply been the focus of much improvement for about a year now, and, yes, melees now need to be brought in line with them, but indiscriminately buffing melee combat in excessive ways will just end up leading to more problems down the road. Right now, caster DPS is pretty close to high-end, but not top-notch, melee DPS. The big problems are that they can apply this damage from a safer position and can lay down crowd control/instakills as well, allowing them to move fast and freely in a lot of content.
Simply buffing melee DPS isn't going to solve the issues at hand.