What can be done to prevent ranged from owning the meta?

Every successful player/BG atm, outside of perhaps minotaurs (who do the same thing in a different way) runs off of getting your board control setup via massed range. Not just any kind of ranged attacks, but dots.

Ranged ranged/dots is a bit too strong atm.

Watch any high ranked player. Every strategy revolves around establishing dominance via passive play and picking off the opposition at range. Take a look at the leaderboard, and what those folks are running.

 

Actual TL;DR GitGud

 

a manual reduction in base damage?

 

Dont think will solve. I suggest increase the AP needed to make ranged attacks. But we gonna get into one question: how much more AP? How much range a unit would need to have this? More range will spend more AP?

 

Hey! There are always experimental FW decks in the works which play with very low amounts of range. They might be good. We'll see.

Like what DMR said, this is all about AP, and the AP cost to disengage from melee will never outweigh the benefit of working at high range.

It's also an issue of damage allocation: ranged attacks allow a champion a greater variety of choices when picking targets, which means a deck can more feasibly focus fire, while a more melee-heavy deck can't do that. Therefore, successful decks which rely on melee will have some way to solve the damage allocation problem. This can come through alt ranged attacks, powerful individual units that can kill on their own and thus solve the allocation problem by themselves, high mobility, (notice how all of those apply to Minos), really low-resource environments (where units are going 1v1 and can't expect to use their range as much), and more. FW often gets by through having really damn HP-efficient units, which are melee, but can soak enough fire to push forward -- see Essence Devourer (doing this over time) and Zombies (doing this in a single push).

So, ranged will continue to be good until there are more options, in more factions, to make melee-heavy decks viable, in ways that do not promote using those same melee units as tanks for ranged options.

 

Can't it just be that all minimum ranges are set to 1 and every ranged unit gains dissipate at -1 damage of max per square away?

 

Ye , dealing with range has a lot to do with the enemy mis-positioning, and you forcing/baiting such a thing.

That being said skilled opponents make this really difficult.
But they don't exist so just gitgud
#JustPoxAdvice#NewYearsNewTears#201620rangedchamps#hashtag

 

Just give everything evasive 3 dodge 3 counter attack: ranged and remove block and reflex from the game.

obviously if i can do 10 dmg from 6 square away im gonna do that rather than spend 6 ap walking in, 3 ap attacking then 6 ap running back or dying, im gonna use ranged.

 

I've found that since they reduced range spread (6-7 range instead of 2-6 etc) ranged have become far easyer to engage into.

 

no issues with ranged

 

IS/KF player found

 

UD player that doesn't utilize Arrow Eater champs or demon shield found

 

I am waiting for them to discover Mindslicer Oblisk

 

Most KF ranged units only do 8 or 9 base damage....or cost 90+ nora.

The highest base range unit in the faction is centaur archer, which is pretty bad since its 2x2.

Healing, cleanses, tough ranks, regeneration, enduring aura, purified, resilient. Lots of things counter dots, and are good abilities against ranged units anyways. Then there are lots of abilities that just shut range down in general. Arrow eater, absorb, righteous deflection, dodge, NKD, stealth, Melleeing them.

 

They know of it but it also affects psuedo range.

 

No bg I make in UD is done without it. Including Breath of Ash. Yeah, both affect me, but they penalize my opponents more.

 

What about axing mid/max range and just having 1 stat for range?

In other words Lich king would no longer have a 6-8 range he would just have a range of 8 period.
Eventually you could also pair this with going through alternative attacks and upping the disengagement cost to further penalize range.

 

I always thought that it'd be fun to address range via map design as well the addition of a line of sight requirement for attacks to get through. Currently obstacles in Pox serve to impend movement and to push things against them, so there would be plenty of space to mess around with it.

Then again, I believe it does fit within that category.

 

Yeah that's what I figured, since it's just addressing tiles to be targeted and whether attacks go through or not it seemed simple enough and a change that would open a lot of design space for both champions and maps. It would also add another layer of strategy and a potential fix for the whole range issue.

Though admittedly I have no idea of how much work it entails nor if it's a possibility.