they do...
they regenerate back to full in about 10 seconds or so.
what some of the ranged class then did was pull them all the way to the respawn checkpoint to kill it before this regen kicks in.
Marius wrote:Bronze_D wrote:
that said, by now i don't think there's anyone left that can deny that there's a serious skew on the balance of melee/ranged unless if they live in the dream land.
I can.

The designer goes on to say that the disparity isn't there in hardcore because ranged classes can't death zerg things.
Melee are still viable if proper tactics are used by everyone (i.e. no death zerging). The two highest characters in hardcore have been a barbarian (act 2 inferno) and a monk (act 3 inferno). This is because melee classes are still more tanky where it counts - the monk managed to get through inferno Belial without being one shot by any of his attacks.
A demon hunter or wizard cannot do this, which is why inferno progression for a hardcore DH/Wiz is far more difficult. Sure, we can farm stuff a bit better, but get put into a caged arena fight, with one shots ahoy, with no room to kite for miles, and we go down.
Fortunately Blizzard understand this - they can see hardcore progression (plus their lead technical designer seems to be a massive fan of the mode), and as stated in their post, will be focusing on removing death zerging, rather than ultra buffing melee or nerfing ranged.
Oh yeah that's all good and valid.
But unfortunately this is only part of the problem, Blizzard designers essentially miscalculated (by a large margin) on the effect of the abilities that the monsters have on the classes.
in general melee class take exorbitant amount of damage for melee strike attempts compared to ranged, from things like plague/vampire, desecrate or worse molten/fire chain, frozen, among others the amount of damage the melee class can expect to face just by attempting to get into melee range is sky high compared to the ranged class.
From what i can gather essentially what you are saying is that ppl naturally are supposed to farm the gears necessary until they can just go through it the same way a regular person go through say normal mode.
In practice though this is not what's happening, the fact is that ranged classes, either DH or wizard does NOT NEED to death zerg the enemies to kill something, there are combinations that indeed will be near impossible for them to kill with just kiting (hello invulnerable minion, vortex, molten, naturally flying or fast mob), and THIS is what they use the death zerg to kill, but with moderate gears they can burn through the REST of them with ease and THIS is where the clear imbalance is showing very much.
Comparatively the melee class gets obliterated if they attempt that same approach with similar item level gear (comparable stats and cost), because just by being in melee range to the enemy increases the damage they take by colossal amount which their gear generally cannot handle.
So you farm the lower level with the melee or get the gears from AH at MULTIPLE times the price of the gears the DH and wizard need to clear the act, while the DH and wizard (and technically the WD too but i don't play WD) farmed them ages ago with stats a fraction of what the melee need.
THIS is why there are many popular build for melee class around in the forum centered PRECISELY around avoiding the need for the melee class to stand and engage in melee combat for extended period, because to engage the enemy in melee combat for extended period requires gear FAR beyond what you need if you do not need to maintain the distance or position so close to the enemy to do good damage to the target.