Why the hate for melee Incarnates?

I really enjoy melee characters. My Scrappers and Brutes have invariably been my favorite characters throughout the game, and that continues through the incarnate content. I have two characters that have maxed out their incarnate abilities (not including hybrid, since it just came out) and both are scrappers.

That being said, running incarnate content on melee characters is a huge pain in the ***. I'm not sure if the devs are doing it intentionally, or if they simply don't realize that it's happening, but a lot of the gimmicky fight mechanics in the incarnate content screw melee characters over heavily. And there are no similar mechanics targeted at ranged characters that I can think of. Some examples:

Apex TF: This is the one that started it off, with the blue auto-damage patches that for a large portion of the Battle Maiden fight make it extremely difficult for melee characters to actually get into melee so they can do damage.

Lambda Sector: This one isn't as bad, but Marauder's Nova Fist is still more detrimental to melee characters than ranged.

Keyes Island: Another trial that has the large colored patches of insta-death, forcing melee characters out of melee so they can't do damage.

TPN Campus: Maelstrom and his marked for death ability, which is avoided by, you guessed it, moving out of melee range, so melee characters can't do any damage.

Minds of Mayhem: Another trial with big auto-hit damage patches that make melee characters unable to do damage.

Magisterium Trial: Yet another trial that includes auto-hit damage patches forcing melee characters to leave melee range.

Are you seeing a pattern yet? I understand that the mechanic was originally introduced to make fights more 'dynamic' and less about just standing in one spot and hitting each other, but it doesn't really serve to do that very well. The enemies still mostly just stand in place. All it serves to do is make melee characters unable to do what their characters are built around doing. And its being horribly overused. The mechanic exists in too many trials, and the ones that it is in, it is used too frequently.

For future incarnate content, PLEASE abandon this mechanic. I'm sure the devs can find something else that makes the fights fun and interesting that isn't unfairly detrimental to melee characters.

It's not hate - it's just a new challenge for us

I would hardly say that being forced to leave melee range for 5 seconds constitutes being "screwed over". It forces you to actually move and be intelligent instead of just sitting in front of the bad guy and mashing your face into the keyboard until he dies.

Alternately, keep the mechanic but add an extra thing to it where the death patches appear randomly but only on targets not in melee range of the AV. Just to make it more evenly annoy people.

Really, a lot of the problem with it as it is is they flat out spawn randomly. Which is fine, but when half the league is melee and all clustered together in one spot, the chance of a damage patch not appearing there is so tiny as to be functionally impossible. Assuming it uses player positions as possible spots to drop one, which I'm pretty sure it does.

Also worth noting:
- Several melee sets and all epic pools for melee ATs have ranged powers, so you're not completely useless when forced away from the AV.
- In the Apex TF, Battle Maiden can be pulled out of the damage patches easily if not immobilised. Taunt powers have a -range effect specifically for this reason, to stop targets just standing there and using ranged attacks and instead force them to actually come to you. I'd imagine the same would apply to most of the others, too.
- In the Marauder fight in Lambda, there's an orbital bombardment that specifically hits targets more than a certain distance away from him, IE: all the ranged players. That does next to no damage, though, especially compared to Nova Fist. It does happen constantly, though.

Personally I think that last one needs to be used both more often and more effectively. We need more things that we have to hug the boss to avoid, so every fight isn't just 'everyone out of the death patches, sucks to be you if you're melee'.

Why not just consider it an advantage of range? Most ranged ATs have other disadvantages that occur throughout the whole rest of the game that melees get to shrug off and I'm sure other situations are far worse off than melee...I'm imagining it's annoying for Masterminds to recall their pets from specific ranges and/or resummoning them when they inevitably bite the dust, control powers don't often have a use in such fights, so on and so forth.

Or Hurricane - that can annoy anyone at range.

Put it this way: The alternative is Reichman.

Why the hate for control incarnates? We can't hold Tyrant no matter how much of it we stack on him!

I look at it this way: when a Melee-based Incarnate goes back to the real game, they're going to be that much better than everything else anyway, so the raids are set up to temporarily force them to rely on teammates as a way of turning the tables for a bit.

Melee characters can carve through 98% of the rest of the game solo like a hot knife through warm butter. For the 2% of the normal game they can't, it's just a bump in the road.

Frankly, I'm not surprised the Incarnate content is designed to give them a challenge.

As you point out, this patches-of-death problem has existed for almost two years now. If teams would learn to taunt the targets out of the death patches, instead of just standing there, it wouldn't be a problem, now, would it?

In fact, that's been part of the learning curve for Magisterium. Leagues I've watched have discovered, miraculously, that you can do a lot more damage per second to Tyrant if you taunt him out of the lightning patches and keep fighting instead of scattering, letting him heal back up, and starting in again.

It's not my job to tell other people how to play their characters, but I hold in silent contempt any tanker, and just about any brute, that can't fit a level 10 power, that requires no slots, into their build somewhere by level 49. For it to be so common not to do so that none of the tanks on a 24 person league have it? Inexcusable. It'd be no different, in my opinion, if you skipped all of your defensive toggles and then complained that the game was hard. Taunt isn't just an aggro management power, it moves mobs around the map. Learn to use it.

In my opinion, Devs hate masterminds more.

Fire I agree with you that because of those patches playing melee toons on trials is not anywhere near as fun for me as playing ranged damage/support toons. I get my tiers up and don't bring them back.

As you can see there is a crowd here that will immediately jump you telling you moving for five seconds is not a big deal among other straight up lies as it is not just five seconds etc....

You are not going to get anywhere with individuals like that since they refuse to understand what you were saying in the first place and try to dismiss and minimize it...SOP around here.

Of all the things I hate the most in these trials is those patches. Even more than Malestroms zone wide cheesy gimmick one kick of death.