Or why even bother saying the thing about having to have a melee weapon, if the melee or ranged part of it didn't matter?Because it's limited to your reach and ranged weapons do not have that.
Graystone really nailed this part on the head and it is important to bring it back up when trying to understand why the wording was necessary.
If the developers had put "ranged weapon" in the definition, then questions of range and reach become way, way more complicated.
Flanking makes the character flat-footed because they are distracted by the immediate potential of a strike, not the strike itself. The reach of unarmed strikes and melee weapon attacks is what defines the engagement zones of the greatest majority of characters of on Golarion. Yes, there might be 10 high level adventurer's around who have feats that let them use a ranged weapon to make attacks of opportunity, but as far as I can tell, those all limited your zone of engagement to 5ft, regardless of what your reach might otherwise be.
Flanking is about being distracted while being within the reflexive reach of an enemy regardless of whether they have a means to have a reflective attack. Once that is true, the character is distracted and is left flatfooted to the people who make that condition true, regardless of the weapon they use to make an attack with. While I personally would have liked that to mean that the character should be flat footed to anyone at that point, because they are already distracted, I realize that the power balance issues it would make are just not worth it mechanically. Solo Monsters would just always have a -2 to their AC against the entire party and minions could make PCs way way too vulnerable to enemy casters casting from a distance.
From a game balance perspective, I'd be perfectly fine with this actually. You would just have to make the average expected AC that much higher, or the average expected to hit that much lower. A system like this would heavily incentivize teamwork and positioning and discourage solo fighting more than PF2 does.
At the same time, I'm fine with how PF2 handles flanking as well. It's simple in execution and doesn't have a ton of corner case situations to take into account. If you could make a melee attack, you qualify to grant flanking.
Attacks with Reach are not ranged attacks. Those are still melee attacks and benefit from flanking. They also provide flanking as long as the Reach of the attack is of a duration for longer than a single attack. There are some things, like the Lunge feat and the Extending rune that only provide reach for a single attack - those won't provide flanking to other allies because the Reach effect ends once the attack is over. But Effortless Reach gives reach permanently.
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Which I am aware of. It appears that the person I was replying to deleted their post. So now it looks like I necrobumped this thread.