Significantly reduce durability loss on a winning melee trade to avoid any situation where it is impossible to beat an opponent in melee even if all your melee trades are winning trades, but maintaining the limitation of durability when losing trades. Reduce the amount of time spend standing in one place while making melee trades to reduce vulnerability to gunfire while engaging in melee, possibly by reducing the time spent in the "recovery" animation or removing it all-together. Allow melee actions to be made sooner after an evade roll or speed up the roll animation to prevent the unavoidable free hit a player takes when making a dodge-roll at melee range, against an opponent that knows to exploit this (There aren't that many, but this doesn't make it less of an issue). Reduce stun durations or increase axe/mace damage or increase axe/mace swing speed to equalize the imbalance between the swords/knives and axes/maces, in light of the fact that swords and knives have a fast enough swing speed to hit the enemy twice before they recover from melee stun animations, thus allowing them to deal almost twice as much damage as axes and maces can during every melee stun (yes it is one sentence ) Reduce the charge-up time and damage of the power fist strong attack to allow the power fist to use the strong attack normally in melee, thus allowing them to play the "rock paper scissors" of melee without missing one of the key components of the game while simultaneously reducing the damage to balance how much DPS they have against vehicles.
Timing: Case1: The enemy spam fast attack and you spam dbash, but the charcater does nothing due to server async. (The opportunity window is so small. case 2: Enemy does a fast attack, you make dbash, but in your animation you are being hitted and you get an extra charge attack. Again, when the server shows the enemy fast attack the opportunity window has ended. Case3: Enemy does a fast attack, server delays, your dbash comes delayed, enemy hit and then evade your kick. Evades: Autolock evades 180º while kick cannot turn 180º? Timing evade exploit. Evade should be different key from jump/climb. Swing speed & Swing distance: Speed should be equal for all weapons and have to be balanced by damage/impact/stun/DoTs. Swing distance Should be smaller, evade is a sentence of death cause you leap with a strong attack. hell, even with fast attack Stun & DoTs: those stuns with the strong attack should be removed cause you usually get a free fast attack hit while stunned, and the damage being so strong that is enought to kill you, or 2 pistol bullets more. . DoTs: Only chainblades and knifes should have DoTs, to compensate AP, but for now, being strong hitted with a venom sword is almost and instant kill.
Ah! Yes, spoilers would be great! Thank you for that! Totally works for me and the exercise. I'll amend the rules and this will be the part of the format moving forward. Nice.
1) Reward skill over weapon selection. Knife should be able to win over sword if the sword is inexperienced/gets outplayed. 2) Make avenues for a skilled player to win over even multiple opponents if he is able to outplay their opponents. Map design, weapon stats dunno. 3) Make axes,mauls and mastercrafted weapons in general viable. Look at LP costs and swingtime 4) Make posessed viable. Introduce cd based (~1/min) lash that drags target in on contact or something unique to make him worthwhile. 5) Make melee viable option, not fotm. When melee was the way to go, gameplay devolved into blobs of revving chainteeth and interrupts from allies, not fun.
I'll remake my suggestions in this format and delete my original post thereafter. Glad I could be of use.
1 Make melee ttk the same as ranged ttk. 2 Make possessed marine a viable option, increase attack speed and add bolt pistol or other offhand weapon
1. Heavier melee weapons should be more rewarding for skilled users 2. Mastercrafted weapons should be more viable 3. I think its annoying when a friendly Raptor lands next to you, or someone misplaces they kick and knocks you out, especially in the middle of the fight. You could make the knock out time shorter for allies or remove it. 4. Better hit detection, for example when enemy is below me on stairs my swings go over him, also my attacks often hit the enemy that is crawling on the ground rather than the one standing next to him.
I'm gonna preface this by saying that although I compare melee ttk to ranged ttk, I am not going to talk about how to balance melee vs ranged. Rather, I would prefer that melee fights be able to be conducted on a faster pace with as little static (not moving) combat as possible, because you don't win melee fights by standing still. Movement is a very important part of a melee fight, and movement goes hand-in-hand with positioning. The biggest problem of all with melee is that it discourages you from repositioning due to the mechanics as they are currently and gives you very limited opportunity to disengage if you cannot resolve the fight in a timely manner. I believe the melee system could use more of a rework overall rather than just changes to one or two things, because it is a guessing game, not a contest of skill like it really should be, and melee fights tend to be excruciatingly long and drawn out (~5-6 seconds average) compared to ranged fights, which are usually decided within the first 2 seconds of a shootout. That said, most of the mechanics provided in the RPS system are still core parts of my proposed rework, with a few changes that, while being quite a bit different functionally than the current system, still retain most of the "x counters y" mechanics currently present. Here are my ideas, because they might be a lot more fun and rewarding than the current system: Separate the slow, clunky d-bash into its two parts; Blocking, and Bashing Spoiler Firstly, add a faster, much more responsive blocking mechanic that you can hold to block light melee attacks. (blocking a light attack will stagger the enemy long enough to perform a light attack with any weapon OTHER than the powerfist) and reduce the damage of heavy attacks by 50% (attacker is not staggered). Blocking an attack without a shield will reduce your weapon durability by a percentage equal to the attacking weapon's impact minus 100. So for light attacks, a standard knife will reduce it by 10%, a standard chainsword by 13%, a power axe by 16% and so on. Heavy attacks have much more impact, will break your weapon much faster, and you will still take half damage to block them unless you parry it. Secondly, add a kick/bash that is performed as quickly as a light attack with the knife, but costs a stamina point to use and will do one of four things depending on the situation: -If the opponent is blocking, be it with a weapon or with a shield, it will break their guard and stagger them as if they lost a clang, allowing you hit them with a light attack or punish them with a stun if you have the stamina. -If the opponent is staggering, you will stun them for 2.5 seconds and prevent them from rolling for an additional .5 seconds, wherein you can hit them with a heavy attack with any weapon, but if they take damage from anything other than poison or fire the stun will be cancelled immediately. -If the opponent is light-attacking, you will both clang, you will take half damage, and the attacker's weapon will lose 25% durability. -If the opponent is heavy attacking, you will be staggered and take full damage from the attack. The clang system should still apply to light attacks performed at the same time in much the same way it does now, but both weapons should lose durability based on each other's impact. Spoiler Same situation with heavy attacks, too. Rather than spamming light attacks to stop heavy attacks, make it so that you have to time your block in order to parry them, which will stagger the attacker. Spoiler The problem with stopping heavy attacks with light attacks is that it does not prevent the attacker from immediately beginning any of the three attack types, and so the player has virtually no time to determine and react to the combo that the attacker may very well have planned beforehand. In other words, the interruption and damage is inferior compared to any of the other attacks' counterplay, both of which result in a stun. A parry system that staggers the attacker when successful would likely solve this problem. Just make sure that the game provides adequate, synchronized audio and visual cues to indicate when the player should begin blocking. Only kicks and light attacks can be performed when you are not in melee mode. Spoiler You switch to melee mode by drawing your secondary weapon (if you are not a melee class already). Left mouse button will block UNLESS you aim down sights first, in which case you will shoot your pistol or cast your spell. Shield users will not be able to aim down sights and will of course always block with left click (unless you swap your controls). Swooping Hawks and heavy classes should be avoiding melee in the first place, so not being able to heavy attack is a fair trade, I'd say. Remove the smart pistol, but keep the melee mode lock-on. No more smart pistol cheese. No more free aimbot. More or less, the point is to make the melee more fast-paced by reducing the number of stun options in melee and shifting the focus from mostly mindgames to mostly reaction times and mechanical skills. It is far more accessible for players overall to react quickly than it is for them to strategize quickly. It is rewarding and satisfying to win in a fast-paced melee system, and less risky in a ranged-dominated meta.[/spoiler]
1) Dodging from successful DBashes/cancelling stuns with dodging. This definitely doesn't deserve to live and should be begone by now. Fix it. 2) Speed of every melee weapon that is not a sword or a knife. All classes of weapons that aren't swrods/knives are de facto not used often even though they've higher tiers and larger amount of damage because their current speed can't let them be competitive against other weapons, melee or ranged. Buff their speed with accordance to the sword/knife speed. 3) Readability/visibility of attacks. I'll be a bit selfish here but I still have problems reading attacks properly from time to time and I suspect that's the problem for a lot of players. I don't know how to reach this goal correctly but richer visual and sound effects may help it. 4) Beyond wonky Power Fists/Klaws behavior. I'm still not sure know if their current state is intentional or not but right now they're badly interacting with clanging rules, I can't make use of them without fully depending on sprint attacks. Revert Power Fists/Klaws behavior back. 5) Melee weapons with elemental damage for melee classes. Quite a few Chaos/Ork players are exclusively using only the Necrotic Sword/Burning Choppa (myself included) instead of either normal or mastercrafted versions to deal much more damage to their enemies. Reduce their durability to 75/80 to make them a less viable choice with taking into consideration Point №2.
1. Get rid of Dbash. 2. Lock guns from shooting for 1-2 seconds after any melee attack makes contact with an enemy or if an enemy lands a melee hit against the attacker. 3. Make fast attacks slower. 4. When fast attack clangs fast attack no damage is taken but durability is lost on both weapons. When fast attack clangs heavy attack heavy will do half damage and deal half durability damage, the fast attack will deal no damage and do a quarter of durability damage. When Strong attack clangs strong attack quarter durability lost, one stamina lost, and no damage dealt to either player. Edit : Strong attacks would cost 1 stamina regardless of other interactions in order to prevent spam. 5. Get rid of dodge roll damage immunity.
