Melee in alpha was melee as it is now but with tons of weird bugs and features, including at various times:

• A "block" function that meant people could just hold RMB to stop you from dealing any melee damage (this was the first iteration of the melee system and it was not good).
• Backpeddle being faster than forward lunges
• Forward lunges that swung you so far in a straight line and did not connect with targets, making it easy to just roll once and shoot your attacker dead.
• An extremely short delay between rolling and shooting, meaning you could shoot a few rounds between every roll before the melee attacker could turn around.
• As mentioned, the ability to hit in the back after someone missed a single melee attack, due to the linear direction and extreme distance travelled.
• Infinitely chain stunning with fast attacks on any class. After just one defensive bash, your opponent could repeatedly hit you until you were dead.
• No stuns on melee trades, therefore absolutely no way to damage enemies in melee until durability was depleted, meaning axes were undefeatable... and it was 100% death when it depleted.
• A stamina bar tied to both running and evasion (possibly melee swings. I can't remember).
• JPA's being inexplicably immune to defensive bash for several months.
• MoN traitor assaults with both insanely high lifesteal and a stacking toughness (something that makes no sense by its self) buff that made them immortal as long as they kept landing melee hits.
• JPA fuel regen that allowed them to continuously boost and slam.
• JPA slam that hit like a frag grenade: large radius that would either one-shot or almost one-shot targets (in addition to the continuous boosting).
• (More recently on live) Tactical Dbash being so short, melee classes are encouraged to spam fast attacks as the best melee strategy, with no counter-play.
• (More recently on live) You are able to shoot someone dead after a single defensive bash because of the length of the stun.

These are all things that should definitely not return to the game. I am glad melee is the way it is now, and I do not want to take a single step back. Every new patch that makes melee changes does so in order to improve the system.

Several times have changes been made in order to stop melee from being "One hit and you're dead". Several times the game keeps reverting to this. I get upset every time the game slips back towards this because of how many times changes have been made to keep moving away from it.

I feel that if they just increase the ready time for your main ranged weapon after dbash to stop the dbash headshots combo from happening that melee would be pretty fine as is for now at least.

Thing is if they go with lowering the stun time on dbash it will also nerf certain melee weapons who depend on dbash to get HH in vs faster melee weapons.
Swords are already seen as the NR 1 weapon contender for melee a change to stun time on dbash would be the final nail in the coffin for anything that isn't a sword or knife.

yeah you know its a bad day when my fang of morkai is a better melee wepaon than my crozius on my marine

I agree with ya but I was more just sharing my memories of the insane melee in alpha.

The game is far better now than ever but of course there is still work to do.

NOW BACK TO MEMORIES!

Remember when harkus first came in and the quad guns were completely useless? Then a few weeks later the devs buffed them to be dead accurate so nobody could even get near the walls? Haha that was some scary shit I wonder how the new guys would of liked to try and take that fortress.

B point might be a chore these days but at least you can actually get inside the fort!

I dont want to see us return to that either.

Unfortunately for melee to be on par with current insanely fast ranged TTK "one shotting" melee will be required. Rather than seeing us return to that melee damage needs slight increases across the board and ranged damage needs toning down across the board.

Quadguns so accurate they could pick a Raptor out of the air before he hit the apex of his jump.

Emperor forbid you try to use a fucking Lascannon, the gun would spot and wipe you out before you even got a shot off.

I miss the flakk trait. Hope it's an option for the predator autocannon.