Yep, another game where melee gets the short hand of the stick, how surprising!
When you read the DC Universe Online forums you sometimes have the impression that people forget that they are playing a game, and that games are made to have fun. I have seen several people complaining about the impossibility for them to use their favorite weapon or playstyle in raids, and when I started the game, I was among those people, choosing Martial Arts for obvious reasons (.... I'm Batman....), and for less obvious ones, such as playing a Rogue in World of Warcraft for over a year.
One very important aspect of MMORPGs, and RPGs in general, is that people like to play their "archetypes". Some people have dreams of sneaking behind someone and backstabbing them silly. The same way another person would loathe the idea of "cowardly" attacking someone and would prefer a more "in your face" playstyle.
This choice is very important for a large majority of players, it dictate how they will have fun in a game.
In the case of DC Universe Online (DCUO), the selection of a weapon is one of the important choices you make for your character. The weapon you select determine the basic attacks that will be available to you. Some weapons have an obvious melee theme, for example staffs, two-handed weapons, and martial arts, while other have a more ranged theme, such bow, dual pistols, or rifle. To put it simply, people expect to play melee if they choose a melee weapon.
Where the game did it right is by giving all weapons the capability to make melee and ranged attacks. You can melee with dual pistols, you can attack from range with a two-handed weapon. This ensure that wherever you are on the battlefield, you can still dish out some damage.
However, where things start to get a bit "salty" is when you discover that some weapons are better at ranged or melee. Sure you can melee with a Rifle weapon, but good luck with that. A very important point is that you CAN do it if you really want to, the game doesn't remove the melee button when you select a Rifle weapon. And another important point is that regardless of your power set (the equivalent of classes in the game), the game let you choose any weapon you want.
Now, take the case of someone who choose a weapon with a melee theme because he actually wants to play melee. At first, the player has a blast, however quickly as you start your first alerts, you start noticing something: Melee sucks!
Most boss have a close AOE attack that WILL deal a lot of damage to anyone in range other than the tank. I have not experienced raids yet, but from what you can read from guides and people on the forums, it gets worse.
Now if you are someone who actually enjoying playing melee, you are basically gimping yourself. You will take way more damage than anyone else, and if you don't die you will be a strain to the healers. In a sense, you would be betrayed by your weapon choice. A melee weapon would be useless simply because you cannot justify playing your favorite playstyle at the expense of your raid.
Another problem is how some parts of the community are enforcing this restriction by pushing aside people who actually want to melee without being a tank. Now, in a sense they are right because they are mostly looking at it in a number-crunching way. If they let an odd melee healer in the raid, they increase their chance of failing, and no one want to fail!
Now, what they are failing to realize is that they are enforcing an aspect of the game that does not involve any skills. The game and the raiders are punishing a player for choosing its preferred playstyle, something that mostly involve fluff and no amount of skills. Something that people cannot tweak or enhance in a fun way. In a sense they forget the fun aspect.
Of course, this kind of behavior exists in all MMORPGs. How many times the "hardcore" community has justified something that was truly just an unfair advantage or disadvantage using the fact that "it was in the game", not seeing that the game is something that is made and can be changed for the sake of fun. In the case of raids, the fun comes from overcoming a challenge through teamwork, coordination, and determination. Does any of those involve choosing the right weapon at character creation? If it does, should it really be so?
The answer is obviously no.
Now what is the solution? On paper it's very simple. Use the Weapon Trees!
Currently the weapon trees allows you to unlock your melee and ranged combos. Now instead of just being essentially a leveling mechanic, they should be used to customize your playstyle with your selected weapon. A skill tree that will be able to accommodate YOU.
One branch of the tree allow you to enhance the melee playstlyle, another one give you the tool for an hybrid playstyle, and finally the last one customize your ranged experience.
The melee side would obviously need a consequent Armor/Defense buff to enable melee players to be at the thick of things, and a dps increase to balance out the fact that you will eventually need to block incoming nukes.
The ranged side could benefit from movement buffs to enable them to be mobile enough to avoid damage.
The hybrid side could simply be a mix of the two, taking some aspects of both trees and giving an average version of them.
This would need some major reworking of the weapon skills trees, and could indeed be a lot of work to refactor the game to implement it. However it would remove what is one of the core problems of DCUO (that and the controller role), making the game able to profit from its unique advantage of being the only viable console MMORPG, which has the potential of making the game thrive even with the arrival of the phenomenons that Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2.
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