QUOTE(Maximum_Joe @ Jul 2 2014, 05:55)

Congratulations on noticing the exact purpose of something.
Inflationary pressure was never exactly huge unless something slowly crept up while I was in my hiatus.
Anyways, I thought about the state of melee:
- 1-H is supposed to be the
safe style. You have two sources of defensive hax, parry and block, and you also have counterattacks and Overwhelming Strikes to work with.
- DW is supposed to be less safe, but more offensive to compensate. The offhand has the sweet 50% parry bonus, and you have probably the better set of melee skills to use.
- 2-H is supposed to be the "balls deep yolo" style that has AoE and raw damage at the cost of no innate defensive statistic bonus (besides the 2H parry skill at level 250)
How it ends up being appears to be:
- 1-H ends up doing the most damage because you have permanent Spirit Stance because of counterattacks granting OC
- DW's limitation to pure single target damage makes it difficult to work with outside of Frenzied Strikes
- 2-H, with no defensive statistic bonuses and a piss-poor bonus from 2H parry, ends up being forced to spam cure every time it's up or die like a bitch.
I know that buffing things is annoying for the adminpony, but can we get buffs to the level 250 abilities? A better DW crit would enable (in the long run) a faster clear speed, and a better 2H parry would make it less annoying to deal with higher-leveled mobs.
Or you could just crank up the offensive stats of every weapon under the sun to try to increase the offensive power of every style but moreso DW and 2-H. That also works.