User:Hoopy Froodle/Melee tactics

This tactics guide is geared toward low-level melee characters, especially solo players. For a different perspective, see:

• Barbarian tactics
• Fighter tactics
• Paladin tactics

You might think that playing a melee character is all about running headstrong into every situation and attacking everything that moves. Indeed, that can be an effective (and fun) approach for an easy adventure. However, on a tougher challenge, even melees benefit from sound tactics. Whether pure DPS barbarian or paladin tank, the principles are largely the same.

Protect your team

Contrary to what you might think, your primary function isn't to destroy things. Rather, it's to keep you and your teammates alive. (This assumes you're the tankiest member of your party, which you are if you're solo.) To this end:

Be a hate magnet

You want the enemy to attack you instead of your friends, because you can take it, and they can't. Intimidate loudly and often. Go after any enemy that's aggroed on someone other than you (who is not, themselves, a tank), even if it means ignoring enemies on you for the moment.

Stay alive

You're no good to anyone if you're dead. If you're in over your head, it's often better to cut and run, even if it means abandoning your friends. If you survive, you can come back for their soul stones. If you die, someone else has to come back for you. (Besides which, death is a traumatic experience, best avoided.)

Protect your healer

The healer keeps everyone else alive, and can even resurrect others when they fall (at level 9 or higher). If your healer goes down, the rest of the party often follows soon thereafter. You don't want that to happen.

By the same token, if your healer does go down (and no one can resurrect them), your best move may be to grab their stone and head for a shrine. If you wait too long to decide, you may not get the chance.

Care and feeding of hirelings

If you're running solo, you may have a healer hireling. Consider planting them back from the battle, out of harm's way. When you invite them in, leave them on defend unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. They may not heal you as quickly as they would on aggressive, but they're also less likely to get aggro.

Protect squishies

A typical caster is a glass cannon. If you're in a party with one, they probably get more kills than you do. Suck it up, swallow your pride, and keep the enemies off them so they can do their job.

Choose your targets

If you're soloing, or otherwise have protection under control, you want to direct your attacks where they'll do the most good (or harm, depending on your point of view).

Target healers

Particularly if you're soloing, enemy healers can make you work twice has hard to take down a target. Get the healers first, and the rest become easy pickings.

Target casters

Casters of all sorts are the most likely to one-shot and/or immobilize you, and are also usually the easiest to take down. They'll try to hide behind their own melees, but you ought to be able to jump right over the defenders. (You did take Jump skill, right?)

Target shooters

If you're fighting a mix of melees and ranged attackers, go for the shooters first. Assuming you have aggro, the melees will follow you around and get caught with your cleaves and glancing blows; whereas the shooters stay out of reach until you to come to them.

Target weaklings

Perhaps counter-intuitively, you're often better off targeting the weakest opponents first. It's a quick way to reduce incoming damage, and makes it easier to draw aggro, avoid being flanked, etc. This is especially true for bosses who summon a new wave of minions when they pass a certain damage threshold.

Fight smart

Divide & conquer

Unless you really enjoy dungeon alerts, you're better off fighting as few of the enemy as possible at once. Charging blindly ahead is likely to draw the attention of all nearby groups. Sometimes it's better to get the enemy to come to you, by getting their attention with a ranged attack (or <shudder> Bluff).

Don't get flanked

Being flanked is bad because (a) enemies are more likely to hit you, (b) you're less likely to hit someone who is behind you, and (c) you can get penned in and unable to escape. You're generally better off with your back to a wall or corner, or running around so fast that no one can pin you down.

Avoid takedown

If you happen to be fighting minotaurs, wolves, or other creatures that like to charge and knock you over, don't give them the opportunity; never stay in one place. Sometimes you can even gain the upper hand by charging the charger head-on, taking them off guard.

Use terrain

Walls are one of the more common terrain features, but sometimes there are other features you can use to your advantage. For example, position yourself behind a pillar to protect you from archers while you dispatch nearby melees.

Wait for your trapper

There's nothing more annoying to a trapper than for a colleague to die in a trap that could easily have been disabled. Second most annoying is for everyone to charge past and engage the enemy before they have a chance to catch up. Be kind to your trapper, let them do their job.

Of course, sometimes you just have to zerg.