Why choose? Play a Summoner and have it all- melee pet, ranged pet and nukes, all with magic! So, MAGIC!
But seriously, I advocate for trying all three. I have played most of the major and not so major MMO’s and I have found each to be enjoyable and suitable for my playstyle due to the unique spins of those class types in the different games.
Generally? Magic, because it's both non-melee and ranged.
It breaks down like this, in my experience: magic has exactly one resistance, typically. Spell resistance, or resistance to it's damage type (cold, heat, acid, divine, poison, disease, lightning, etc). You overcome that resistance, you win.
Ranged or melee? First, you have Armor, then skill checks for Block, Parry, Riposte, Evade, Dodge, Shield, Mitigation, Deflection, Resilience, Defense, Absorption, Positional (front/back/sides), plus in games that have it: melee damage type resistance like bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing, then stats like CON, STR, DEX, and AGI to potentially deal with or get past stat checks. And of course, a built in minimum 5-15% Miss rate, based on level disparity for melee, too.
Mathematically, with ranged/magic you can typically (without things like root and snare) do more than 1% damage to a creature before it reaches you, reducing TTK on every fight. Compared to melee, where you can do exactly 0%, because you have no ranged abilities. So you take more damage, and recovery time is longer.
If you can snare/root, you can kite or root-rot, or root-n-nuke, or scoot-n-nuke. Generally impossible with melee. Might be possible with ranged, depending on consumables or other skills/components, like traps, or nets.
Finally, unless designers take the easy way out and make +ranged bonuses on abilities pointless for bosses/raids, taking +ranged bonuses on non-magic and magic ranged means you can stand outside the range of AE's and still perform your role. With melee you get to joust. Yaaay jousting.
So, for me, in the past 20+ years of MMO's? It goes: Magic (Ranged) > (Non-Magic) Ranged > Melee.
Define "best".
Most powerful? Easiest to play? Most fun? Most versatile?
I prefer ranged dps these days. Its easier and my vision and hearing and reflexes aren't what they were even 10 or 20 years ago.
But I will quite likely level-up a tank and healer solely for use in guild groups when they really need one and a mediocre tank or healer is better than none at all.
Kilsin said:Community Debate - What is best - Melee, Ranged or Magic? Asking for a friend ;) #MMORPG #communitymatters
So while Magic is seen as best by many, for long term play Melee is king. You can do far less in any MMO without melee than you can with it. Melee is what gives you that consistent long-term damage output. Magic damage is spiky. Big hit folllowed by long period of nothing. Melee just keeps plugging along with little to no interruption. If a melee misses an attack, the next attack is quickly behind it. Magic has cast times, fizzles and risk of being interrupted. Melee also receives far more benefit from other classes than Magic. Basically a melee benefits from the cleric healing it, the shaman buffing it, the enchanter hasting it while the magic user relies pretty much on only itself. Sterngth buff on a magic user? Irrelevant. On a melee? >10% increase in DPS. A melee can get better weapons (and a greater variety) and every stat has some use. Magic only gets new spells every so often and the only stat that usually matter is that which increases their manapool. Lastly, melee suffer far less from level differences than magic. A melee can still consistently hit a red con mob while magic will see resist after resist after resist. While my primary character in EQ1 was a Shaman, I did level up a wizard to 70 and against bosses, even with debuffs like Malo on a target, full resists were dramatically a more common occurance than a full hit.
If given my choice of having a melee heavy group or a caster heavy group I would take melee every time: More consistent damage output in the long term; greater survivability due to higher AC, hitpoints and mitigation; less affected by PC-NPC level differences; access to more buffs to more stats.
I remember hearing someone in the military saying: You don't have infantry without tanks, you don't have tanks without artillery, you dont have artillery without air support, you don't have air support without ships, you don't have ships without ICBM's.
So I suppose for this, you wouldn't have magic without Melee, or Melee without ranged.
Magic alone would get crushed. Melee alone could withstand a little but would need magic to take the target down before they die. Ranged alone would... stay alone. May not kill anything and still be running.
So ranged would need a Melee to intercept and get attention while ranged picked targets off and used melee with magic to triangulate targets. If things got hairy, magic is near melee to unleash, and ranged can concentrate fire from above while melee locks target down.
Likewise Magic and ranged can annoy a target enough to draw a target into Melee to give a finishing blow and cut off its head, like two sides of a wall with melee in the center rear.
hey friend ^.^
so tell me about yourself. when you see someone getting robbed, do you call for help? you should play a magic class then ^.^ what's that? you'd throw rocks at them? O.o then the best class for you is a range type. oh my... you'd just rush in that and beat him up? okay.... melee is the best choice for you you crazy sob.
Melee is far more exciting than anything else, even if it's only a matter of gameplay and adrenaline.
Of course if you're asking "what is the most efficient (ie : easy) way to play", it usually ends up beeing ranged magic user for safety and the toolkit. But even if it's effective, easier and usually safer, I prefer to play on the edge and having to care due to limited tools, survival and no distance for safety net.
Assuming you're talking about DerPS, I've only ever remotely enjoyed one melee class design ever across quite a few games and plinking arrows into something is pretty visually uninspiring so clearly the correct answer is magic.
That said, DPS is the worst role to play ever...
Best is obviously a magically summoned sword, directed from range by the summoner, slashing away at an opponent! :)
For me, magic is the way. I have played melee classes, and liked them, but in serious play, I prefer a little more distance to the opponents. Ranged physical classes like ranger somehow have never interested me much though, although I also like their versatility.