The Hate on Melee

In my time off I've had a chance to reflect on my adventures in Azeroth. Growing up pre-BC as a Boomkin was amazingly fun despite that I barely understood the game mechanics. I just knew I absolutely loved the hybrid Druid class. Then comes raiding and MC which meant only one thing: resto. Along comes Burning Crusade, I get Finn to 70, get frustrated trying to heal 5 mans as resto--back when we were all in greens and blues. I started Stoney and fell in love with the enhancement tree. End game for Stoney proved to be a challenge of running in, running out, and always running around. In Karazhan Prince was the only "run away bravely" fight so I didn't know what was in store for me until the night we hit High King and Gruul's Lair. To this day, not a Gruul's fight goes by on Stoney that I don't either a) get decimated by a Hurtful Strike or b) have to run out of melee range and sit back to let the OT's catch up on threat.

Looking back now I wonder why the hate on melee? Melee is not a minority spec by any stretch of the imagination. If you consider the 27 talent trees (9 classes x 3 trees) 10 of the choices require melee range: feral druid, prot pally, ret pally, 3x rogue, enhance, 3x warrior. That's over 1/3 of the spec choices, 5 of 9 classes that can be melee, 2 fully dedicated to melee 100% of the time. I can understand pre-BC where your raiding role was predetermined by your class and the only ones within melee range were the prot warriors and rogues. Yet one of the intentions of BC was to break classes out of that strict end game spec determination. One would think the boss fights would reflect the new possibilities. But they don't.

The largest problem facing melee dps is of course the 10% threat threshold. Ranged dps has to pass 30% of the tank's threat in order to pull aggro, however in melee range that cap is reduced significantly to only 10%. That is a pervasive problem regardless of boss. That problem aside, melee faces four challenges that do not haunt ranged:

1. Run In / Run Out - when you have to get out of melee range to avoid the boss' phase/talent, e.g. High King or Leo's whirlwind.
   
2. Hurtful Strikes - "2nd highest on threat" sounds like a great idea, until the OT's rage runs out. I also consider aggro drop & target switching abilities
   
3. Minimum Distance - any splash or AoE effect; ranged has far greater space to work with while melee is cramped around a hit box not big enough to avoid splashing everyone.
   
4. Run Around Like an Idiot - Kill this, then change targets and kill this, then change targets again. Ranged just has to turn, maybe, whereas melee has to run around like an idiot.
   

Let's take those four problems and see where we as melee face them. For this I'm only considering 25 man raid instances and only up to Black Temple. In fights where everyone (ranged and melee alike) are affected by one of these problems I do not count it (i.e., RI/RO on Solarian is everyone's problem) What follows are the list of bosses by instance and what problems melee faces with each.

Raid	Boss	RI/RO	HS	MD	RALI
GL	High King	X			X
GL	Gruul		X
Mags	Mags	X
SSC	Hydross
SSC	Lurker	X	X*
SSC	Tidewalker
SSC	Fathomlord
SSC	Leo	X			X
SSC	Vashj	X		X
TK	Al'ar	X
TK	VR		X
TK	Solarian				X
TK	Kael	X		X	X
MH	Rage	X
MH	Anetheron
MH	Kaz'rogal			X*
MH	Azgalor			X
MH	Archimonde			X
BT	Naj'entus			X
BT	Supremus	X	X
BT	Akama
BT	Teron
BT	Gurtogg	X
BT	RoS	X	X
BT	Shahraz
BT	Council	X			X
BT	Illidian	X			X
Total		13	5	6	6

* Lurker doesn't technically have a hurtful strike, but when the tank and the OT get whirlwinded out of range and you happen to resist it... the results are bad.
* Kaz's war stomp is not a splash effect but can be easily outranged by all but melee

Did I miss anything, or overestimate on any fight?
By far the biggest problem melee DPS faces that ranged DPS does not have to face is the Run In/Run Out scenario. Nearly half of all bosses (13 out of 27) require melee to play the hokey pokey.

The only boss fight which I can say explicitly favors melee over ranged is Phase 3 of Zul'Jin where everyone gets the Energy Storm debuff: cast a spell and take 1250 in damage. One phase on one boss that punishes casters. That's it. Rough times mages and warlocks, rough times indeed.

I would love to see a little more melee love in the next expansion. Maybe bigger hit boxes on bosses, and absolutely more caster-specific hurdles such as in Phase 3 of ZJ. What other ways could the developers balance the fights to make challenging for both melee and ranged?