Hello, I wanted to do a friendly post for @BrentEllison just to adress some of the melee problems in general, and see if they could be fixed in the future hotfix or patch.

Right now, melee is the optimal choice to go engage combat. Its almost imposible to beat a melee specialist 1v1 for a series of problems that I will now show:
-D-bash doesnt working most of the times, a lot of people just can deny the stun by rolling away. This can be done with any class, but it seems to happen more often with the assaults variants and hawks.
-When D-bash actually connects, the stun is too short to even make a fast attack with a small weapon (knife and knuckles tier speed) or a tier 2 such as the chainsword or force sword. The melee system is supposed to let you do a fast attack or a charged attack if the D-bash connect when the opponent has the melee specialist trait (to not get stuned for too long), or just a fast attack with a tier 2 weapon, but right now they can clang the attack because the stun is too short.
-The lunge in almost all the factions is really long, with the exception of the orks. This makes the melee opponent to close distance really quick and leaving almost no opportunity for the ranged classes to put some shoots before they start the melee confrontation. EDIT: This was fixed, but in the wrong way. Now the orks also have the long lunge attack.
-Some weapons have a really fast Charged attack. The problem is that with the new tier 3 system of weapons, you get a small stun that should let you do one fast attack, but with the charge time being the same as the fast attack, you end up connecting 2 hits and the enemy cannot react to that.
-When you do a charge attack and you released it, in the midle of the animation most of the time your attack can be clanged by a fast attack or even interrupted by one.

There may be a couple of things that I forgot, but most of them are there. This is also one of the main reason that makes the eldar really powerfull.

Thanks for reading, and keep up the game!

Combat knives durability too low, but yeah, the rest of that too.

One melee problem is JPAs being able to boost out of dbash stuns, and generally just being the only class many bad players can use. They whined on the forums super hard and got them buffed up months ago, which I guess is the way to get things improved for this game. A shame.

I really like the core mechanic of this game, being that if you are in the middle of a melee combat you have to (by force) contest him in melee, kynda like DoW 1 and 2. But right now is just a joke that you cannot punish a guy that is spamming RMB like crazy because he doesnt get punished by rolling out the stun.

Melee is extremely strong and there isn't much you have to do to be successful. Every hit dazes/stuns, the lunge has a rather absurd range and the damage per swing is quite high. 1 hit kills need to be removed completely.

To be fair, bolters are meant to be kind of countered by high-toughness and armor loadouts.

Past that, there's obvious problems with the melee system, especially how certain weapons clang. I'll still lose clang fights with a modded chainsword versus preset loadout melee users, or rather it's a neutral clang so both lose even though the modded chainsword has more force and damage and thus should win over default weapons of the same tier but it doesn't.

Imho, there should be a wargear item that lets non-melee archetypes be able to stand their ground more in melee, letting people have the option to style their gameplay to how they wish to approach certain situations. The current duration on d-bash is very weak in melee and needs to be tweaked for more than just non-melee users. I love the chainsword, but god is it stupid to have the smallest of windows to win a duel against someone with an axe-tier weapon. They have to royally screw up at that point for a chainsword to win, and that shouldn't be the case. Higher tier weaponry should only tilt the scales slightly, not unbalance them. Skill and reading and predictions should be how the melee system gets addressed, not just spamming RMB and abusing your extra stamina rolls until they break their durability or get clanged on their allies.

Another point -- clanging on allies. YOU should be the one that gets a heavy recoil and a brief stun when you hit an ally, not them. You shouldn't get punished in a melee duel because some new player or someone who doesn't know what they're doing swings at your back with a charged attack as if they can hit through you for some reason.

@Wolf-Steel The problem is that "countered by high toughness" is at the cost of basically nothing. People don't have to generally spec 100% towards defense. Just doing basic things can make the bolter vastly less effective. There's no "counter" its just "you ranked up". It isn't tactical, interesting, or dynamic in any form. The bolter doesn't upgrade, but armor does.

If I get pulled into melee I tend to just give up or run and with both options I feel awful, I don't want to easily be able to kill them, or even trade, I would be happy with just surviving a tiny bit longer so at least it feels like I put up a fight. Right now nothing I've tried saves me or extends my lifespan in the slightest and I'm not left with a whole lot of options.

I play the Traitor class exclusively.

Same problem, but with shoota.

Higher armor rating is kind of specific to melee archetypes, however. An example, the ground assault for LSM can have much higher armor rating than the other archetypes. Granted, this armor is almost useless and you don't see a notable gain until you're able to slap that iron halo on.

Hit detection and the awkward clanging system is the largest of issues to fixing melee. Until the hits actually register as intended, you won't ever be able to get a working system because I'll have my fully-wound up power attack somehow stunned by a d-bash stun when I hit them before they even began kicking, but the client-to-server communication and the hit detection issues cause severe problems that we all experience. I'm generally more afraid of 2-3 bolter users as a melee main than I am facing two melee users presently. I can make people clang on each other and AoE hit them with a well timed stun. I'll die in 1-3s from just 2 people focusing me down with bolters.