Fight Club: The Joy of the Melee Class

You are not a master of the arcane. You are not shielded by your faith. You are not your freaking Khakis. The only thing you are: is very, very good with your blade. You are the Melee and your one true moment of Zen is when you send a piece of metal through the body of your opponent. Other classes can do the casting or the healing but you are all about instant gratification and the high damage that follows it. You own YouTube and thousands watch and groan as you show off your critical strikes and best damaging attacks. After all that's what online games are about: kicking ass.

The three most played classes in World of Warcraft are Hunters, Rogues and Warriors. If you split the data by alliance/horde lines then the hybrids: Paladins and Shamans make a entrance. But in general the classes that can dish out the instant damage with their weapons tend to be the most popular in the game. You have to wonder why these three classes are so often chosen over the others. Is the joy of meleeing just so much better then the required timing of playing a caster? Recently I am starting to notice that on my long raid nights its the casters who start getting tired and wanting to log off early. The melee classes seem to be having fun as if the 145th run of Molten Core is still a new experience for them. This is leading me to believe a couple things about melee classes.

1) Melees are FUN.

2) Melees feel Important.

3) Melees are more affected by Loot.


The Fun Factors:

A) Direct Interaction
I've mention this before in my healer posts so I am not going to go so far into a explanation. I'll simply summarize that directly tracking and delivering damage to the "badguys" is a rewarding experience. Offensive casters also get the experience but they are limited in that spells cause more agro and require mana.

B) The Downtime tradeoff
Melee classes have no downtime when in groups with healers. Instead the healers sit down and drink and refill their mana while making sure the melees stay alive. In a single group smart melees wait until the healer has completed the downtime before fighting but in raids with several healers they just keep going and going and going. Believe me the feeling that you are an unstoppable killbot is a very fun thing indeed.

C) NO Buffing
This is a short and sweet example. Melees are not bothered by having to improve other classes with buffs every hour, half hour, or 15 minutes if your an unlucky paladin. The stress of coordinating buffs while trying to heal and crowd control can get a bit wearing especially in a large raid format.

The Importance Factors

A) The High Damage Attacks
The best thing about being a melee is that you can see your contribution to winning. Its right there in front of your face as bright yellow numbers which seem to appear above your enemies head as a sign of weakness. Melees are even given special attacks just for the sole purpose of causing big numbers. Execute, Eviscerate/Ambush, and Aimed Shot are all about delivering those massive numbers that make you feel all fuzzy inside. How often does an execute crit for over 4k when the mob only had 900hp left?

B) Solo Ability
You are not just a cog in the big raid machine, you can actually do quite well on your own. Warriors are great on taking out multiple targets at the same time and will often explore dangerous areas by themselves. Rogues can deliver damage so fast that they are the preferred farming class. Throw in the ability to vanish and stealth and they also have very little risk in exploring new areas. Hunters are the best soloers in the game with their pets to draw agro while they deliver damage.

The Loot Factor:

A) Weapons are oh so nice
Melee classes are practically the weapons they carry. Their ability to deal damage is directly dependent on the quality of their weapon unlike other classes whose damage is limited by the damage range of the spells they use. The improvement a melee experiences with a upgraded weapon tends to be twice what a caster would experience from that same zone. Compare a rogue and a mage going into ZG after getting blues from single group dungeons. The mage gets the Wand of Chaos from Hakkar while the rogue gets the Fang of the Faceless. Which one has improved the most from the weapon upgrade?

B) Armor Envy
Melees are more dependent on their armor then other classes. They get near the "badguys" and as such they must be able to survive the "badguys". Thus they have a desire to upgrade which is a little stronger then most casters. A blue equipped priest can heal just fine in MC while a blue equipped warrior would get yelled out for trying to tank. It seems as if casters could wear nothing but jewelry with intelligence and stamina on it and would be fine. But for melees they need the armor class on each and every item they can lay their hands on. Unfortunately, this has often created an impression of greed which is why melee classes are more often accusing of ninja like practices.

With all these reasons you can seen why fighting as a melee class is more popular. There's more direct stimuli on your when you play and your responsibilities are more relaxed in a group environment. You don’t have to worry about buffing, healing, or even handling the downtime. Instead you get to do what the majority of game players find most fun, fighting.

PlayOn Data on Class Popularity