Melee Vs Ranged PvP on GW2

Hello everyone,
This is my first post, and im here to find some more ppl to discuss with about something thats being intriguing me..,
Why ever go melee on PvP (and even PvE) on Guildwars 2??
By now 4 classes seems to be efective on melee combat; Warrior, Thief, Guardian and Ranger(?). But all of them are efective on ranged combat as well.. In addition there is no healer-especific class and most of the cross-class-combos I've seen includes some form of ranged attack...all of this leads me to think about this situation:
You are on a PvP combat, or RvR whatever.. your team is facing the oposing team, 20 ppl on each side trading spells and shots.. why would you ever charge to the middle of their army to hit an elementalist and die in 2 seconds ( because their entire team will focus you since you are an easy target, and you will have no healer to keep you up) if you can stay protected in the middle of your on army shooting some arrows on their team??, arrows wich would go by some wall of fire and get bonus damage, or interact with any other friendly skill?
I dont see melee being good at any other situation besides killing someone isolated from the main group.. something that will leave you isolated too and opened to be ganked...
Im planning on rolling a thief -ok the game is far from relase but im excited-, but im worried about this, i like dual guns and unload, but i want to slice people too..
Thanks for reading this|||That's the current main worry about GW2 PvP, the balance of Melee vs Ranged.
Ideally, melee combat should have bigger advantages then Ranged combat because of the extra risk and the fact that enemies can dodge away from you. Maybe you'll deal considerable more damage, maybe you can shutdown someone better.
In the end, it all depends on the skills each weapon gives you. What they do will determine if melle or ranged is the way to go.|||When I take a look at the Warrior skills, I get the impression that the 1-2-3 combos add a lot of damage potential and could fuel the weapons burst skill to land a final blow.
Like Nemeon Lion said, I think melee will have a lot more damage.
IIRC (from an Ele vid at Gamescom), dodging projectiles makes you lose energy and quite a lot, too. So when you dodge a lot in the backline, you might have less energy to spend on offensive moves or to help your team.|||i am actually more worried if ranged is even useful, i have seen warriors jump great distances and thiefs just shooting a shadowstep arrow.
ask your self this, why would you go ranged when getting in range for melee is just as fast?|||For the OP I'd be more worried about the balance of the actual pvp formats than the balance of attack styles since the worry seems to be derived from the amount of people present.
If you're playing ~20v20 then you could basically autoattack someone down with the basic ranged attack skill with proper focus firing. This seems like much less of an issue when the amount of players is limited to say, 5 or 8 etc.|||If you're playing 20v20 a test of skill isn't taking place.|||Not to mention 20vs20 will really only take place in WvWvW, and that's not even serious competitive PvP, so meh.|||That wasn't really the point either. Regardless of whether it's serious or not, having it unbroken enough to be playable, challenging and fun is still desirable.|||For Simply Kedde, i agree with you, but ive kinda accepted it is almost impossible to balance every profession for every pvp format based on other MMOs, it seems that some professions will always be better for a kind of pvp scenario then for others.
What im worried about is that.. im seeing melee being too vulnerable on scenarios with a lot of players because engaging someone on melee would make you an easy target opposed to if you decide to keep with ranged attacks, since if you get focused you can run to your team and if someone decide to chase you he is going to be vulnerable. That in addition to every class being effective at ranged may kill the melee on massive pvp.
In scenarios with less players i see melee being useful, since you may be able to survive longer and kill some ppl of the other team while that.
I find this important to think about because it may change what profession i will roll depending on what kind of pvp i may focus on and more than one profession seems interesting to me.|||I have the feeling that melee is going to generally be tossing up higher numbers. Also, warriors and guardians will be packing pretty high armor, so the theory is that it will help. Warriors have also demonstrated some decent mobility what with the leaping and the shield bashing, so it'll be interesting to see how it all ends up.