See Fennin Ro 1-round a tank and proceed to rampage plow all clerics in a 2 second span is equally beautiful.
People underestimated melee damage in PoP. If anything, PoP was fairly balanced, not lopsided in favor of casters. AK didn't have augments, but LoYkesha came out a mere 3 months after PoP's launch, so back in 2003 rogues got to put in +damage augs in their weapons. The top DPS on god kills was often a (competent) rogue-- the difference between a wizard and (a not-stupid) rogue being #1 was generally the AC level of the target. I still have my old raid logs. Rogues could do 300 DPS easy. Not only were they often pulling wizard numbers on raids, but they CRUSHED wizards (as always) in things like exp groups, LDoN dungeons, etc. AoE ramp was usually avoidable by levitating and staying at max melee range. Casters almost always ate the spell AoEs too. Wizards are supposed to be the kings of burst, and rogues the kings of sustained, but all too often they were beating wizards at both. The difference in PoP was the numbers were neck and neck instead of rogues /disc deulisting 32k dragons for 5k+ damage while the wizard casted three lure spells and died from aggro.
Sure, the DPS end of things got a lot better in the LDoN era, with augments, +accuracy mods, as well as a sweeping round of melee revisions intended to bring them more into line with caster DPS. That's almost a year after release, though, and not really the PoP I'm thinking of. On Al'Kabor, top-tier melee types were lucky to break 200 DPS on a raid. Which isn't nothing - it's not on par with wizards, but it's approaching what a chain nuking enchanter can put out (~205-215 DPS for roughly 5 minutes on a full bar of mana). The real problem was more in the number of encounters that disadvantaged non-ranged DPS, which included all the big elemental progression encounters and a significant number of the minis. Time was a bit friendlier to melees, it's true.
I clocked rogues with a phase 3 dagger doing 300, let alone innoruuk dagger rogues. It's been awhile, but I don't think augments alone are going to give a rogue 50% more damage, so other variables might be involved. My guild favored rogue apps over wizard ones because phase 3 daggers were basically free, and there were other daggers before Time. Fennin Ro died fairly early into the expansion. Although my guild had a fairly balanced ratio of DPS classes. (which I still think is a good idea) Augments were also a big deal for MT aggro. My warrior used to proc 12 times per minute in the LDoN era because I geared for aggro first, tanking second, allowing casters to all but ignore the need for aggro reduction spells. I imagine AK wizards had to hold back more. I think most people would say the PoP era really ended when GoD launched. LDoN was a side-act. Guilds didn't really start getting into Time until around June-July. LDoN came out one and a half months after Quarm was first killed. Fuck vie spells. I would still argue that robe wearers should be doing top short term DPS anyway, not just because it's logical but because rogues and monks had other important jobs like corpse dragging, pulling, scouting; let alone being better at long-term DPS. The other important job of a wizard was a translocate box. Ironically rangers I felt were balanced by being so situational due to archery bugs-- there was a trade-off of not cornering a mob and doing great damage or not. I felt that cornering is worth the loss of ranger DPS 9 times out of 10.
My numbers were without duelist or Rizlona's. We also never saw an Inny dagger drop on Al'Kabor (only killed him once). The old Steel Warriors site had some comparative parses from later PoP, and it showed a rogue with an Inny/P3 dagger combo hitting ~255 DPS. I doubt an A'K rogue would have done quite as well with the same gear, but the rogue from the SW parse had +30% accuracy and a +20 backstab damage augment, so that might have made the difference. Some of the issues with melee DPS were probably specific to our situation on Al'Kabor, though. Nobody could ever seem to outrange AE ramp on anything, despite it having often been possible on PC. The only elemental plane in which it was possible to corner *anything* without calamitous geometry issues was PoEB. Limited resources meant a 50-person Rathe raid couldn't afford to task anyone with heals/cures to allow melee DPS to function inside the 100' range AE of the councilmen; not when just having the rog/bst/mnk contingent play healers or nukers for the event instead was an option. And so on and so forth. I do agree that casters should put out the highest burst DPS. And I loved the burn-'em-down-quick nature of the most of the fights in PoP, especially compared to Luclin snoozefests. I would just have liked less AE rampage, less short-range AEs, less fast-refreshing AE slows, and so forth.
I used to post on the Steel Warrior, and argue with people there. One of the things I argued over was how bad their rogues were. Here's a post from me there (I'm Torrin) with some of my raid parses: https://web.archive.org/web/20070824051 ... -3896.html I still have the logs I parsed to get that data actually. Sadly that forum went down recently. There were some good posts on game mechanics over there-- some of which may be lost now. AoE ramp actually working on AK by itself is a huge deal though. Also my rogues always had bards. At the time we concluded that bards increased melee dps more than wizards, so they got bard #2 after the MT. We certainly had more than two bards though.
The key to melee DPS was to have both a bard AND shaman in the group. You had to time epic's of the bard and shaman with the melee disc's.
AK had notoriously bad wall checks, the moment a mob moved just a few pixels into the wall my bow became useless. Needless to say it would cause my DPS to falter.
