Alright, to begin,my view to get to 50/50 ranged and melee will always have dedicated melee and ranged. Devestators will never be good at melee, nor powerfists be good at ranged. However, a few things exist that I believe can be altered and tweaked where both sides blend a bit better, especially in the middle: Tacticals.

First; Shields could stand to have players behind them be able to shoot past them if they are standing very close to the shield bearer. This allows LSM and Orks to use Shields and even Shieldwalls as mobile cover and shoot as they advance towards an enemy position. So, like this guy:



Only one guy is the shield and the other guy is the gun. When both stand, the Bolter cannot see past his shield. When the shield kneels, the Bolter can fire right next to the shield bro's head as though the Marine's shoulder is a railing. This gets both guys closer to melee. I'd say Orks should be able to do this as well, but they can't crouch, so instead I propose a change to the Rokkit system. Give it the Temptest Launcher arc and have them fire in salvos of 3 with a wider spread the further it travels, even if it spirals like it does now, players will still have a good idea of where it will land, thus making it a skill weapon rather than mostly luck or point blank instant death. It can fire over the shields and we can debate on how much each Rokkit's damage should do, it won't one shot people regularly, it can help flush people out of cover without always needing the Kannon(itself needing attention), and it would be even better at AV which has been a complaint for Orks. Since Ork Shields are basically high cover, Ork weapons would peak around the sides of the shield as they could with cover.

Second. Tactical ranged damage is way too high and available to almost everyone. Headshots on most rifle weapons is really high. I think there should be a 5-20% decrease in DPS for these weapons overall depending on the back end data, and Headshots take additional % reduction.

In addition to just plain high damage (it's not so simple however as they suffer the most against high T targets) Eldar have too much body damage on most of their Shuriken weapons, this isn't partiually noticed on their own, but it's when they stack with our buffs does it get rediculous. The TLSC is especially guilty of this, and the cannon gets pretty crazy at the high end but it's ok, it has a lot of pitfalls to balance it out, like being stationary with two fully supporting characters for one thing. So in addition to nerfing rifle weapon DPS overall across all factions Shuriken weapons should retain a higher % of their headshot damage while.losing more % of their body damage, maybe even more than numbers I threw out above. I especially think that this should be true about Jinx and Enhance. I think that maybe these buffs only affect only ranged headshot damage rather than damage overall. Jinx is probably just fine in melee, since.. well....jinx in melee is really hard to actually do.

Bolters. Two things. 1. Headshot damage is way too high, especially with the CQC barrel.
2. Mag size is also way too high. Tactical on Tactical class melee won't occur if everyone is carrying literally more damage potential than heavy weapons can deal before overheating. Drum mag and maybe box mags need to be looked at.

The general rule for tactical ranged weapons should always be: Max 3 unassisted kills with near or perfect headshot ability, 2 should be average, and a weapon should always get 1 kill with all body shots before having to reload.

Chaos: Hysterical Frenzy and Lash is basically jinx (with heals) whatever rules apply to jinx, should also apply to this: i.e affects headshots, not body damage. This includes the SB.

Plasma: I'm not sure about this one. If anything probably leave it alone and maybe even buff the headshot damage, especially for pistols and charged shot. Making this a more appealing option for blending melee into the ranged game is essential because the pace of the weapon actually helps melee occur. Get your shots in, or get stuck in.

Ork Shootas: after a damage reduction, their Shootas should be the total inverse of other weapons. This by being inaccurate and have a lot of kick to them, but have 0 move penalty and as they continue to fire, they get more accurate, less kick, and with mods, faster rates of fire. That way they can keep their massive clip size, still put out absolutely fuck tons of Dakka, and still be encouraged to get stuck in with the rest of the Boyz.

Melee itself: While Tactical classes lose their top end edge for ranged, they gain better melee ability.

1. Import stats for Sprint Attack from R. SM to EC. So while animations can't change, a Sprint Attack is pretty universal. To begin with, I'd say no matter what weapon, race, or class (yes even Devestators!) Sprint Attack deals a flat amount of damage and applies a very short stagger to the ungaurded enemy. I'd say Sprint Attack should deal enough damage to take out the shield of anything not wearing an Iron Halo or equivalent (so vets). That's roughly 200 damage. This can be clanged by Dbash and Sprint Attack, negating damage but otherwise engaging melee.

Holy hell! I hear you exclaim, that's so unfair! OP!

Well not really. Everyone gets this. Tacticals, even Devestators. And that requires players to stop firing, hold Sprint, and run forward without the ability to fire, and then get the timing right and not miss their one shot at doing this. The fact that Dbash can catch it for a free clang with neither side being penalized is great as well. Now they're both in melee.

Melee Classes and Durability.


So the identity of the weapon is important as it explains what it's supposed to do. One word in particular comes to mind when thinking of an Axe: Cleaving.

So in realistic terms for bE to edit the weapon without changing animations (since they can't or won't do due to money), Axes are good at cleaving, or cutting through multiple opponents at once. What this means is that if the first player the Axe hits in its animation Arc FAILS to clang, the Axe will deal damage to the target (easy coding trigger), and then continue on through everything in it's path - ignoring all clanging sources thereafter - and triggering on hit effects all along the way if applicable. Thus the Axe's identity is generally OK in duels (which it generally isn't suffering anyway), and totally shines in a brawl: where, you guessed it, Orks and CSM want to be most.

The Mace is similar, only that it's supposed to target durability (the word here is SMASH!), not out DPS anything. As such, the mace is the master of Durability destruction. It cannot do this under the current conditions for two reasons:

The ranged game is so strong atm it doesn't have the time to actually try to break the weapon in a team fight unless it's being left alone.

The penalty for broken weapons is total garbage. It is quite literally the epitome a barrier of getting to 50/50 melee by forcing a broken weapon to avoid melee at all costs rather than finish the fight in it. Here's what it should evolve into:

SUDDEN DEATH.

Like Super Smash Bros ALL incoming melee damage is amplified to ludicrous levels once a weapon is broken.

You clang. You're down. You get hit, you're down.

PF/K combine both the Axe and Mace principals.

Knives and Swords

Could most easily get upgrades that help with RPS Precision victories. One I could imagine would be a deflection tool that auto/clangs a non-locked on target*. So if you're in a mass melee with a sword, your weapon won't cleave, nor be interrupted* by anyone other than the target you're locked onto, therefore his friend can attempt to help, but he can't outright disrupt a sword from it's target. The weapon will just take durability damage (and this could stand to be evaluated as a glancing hit instead of a full on impact)

*The exception being an Axe or Mace that successfully cleaves through someone will ignore all clangs. Originally I thought that a cleave would clang against a clang, but really, if this produces a situation where everyone dies, Blood for the Blood God I say.

T1 could use axes and mace's.

Chaos and Orks are a playground for this:

MoK Tactical T1 Axe:

Fleshook of Khorne, the fishooks at the end of Kharns chains, meant to hold skulls:



MoS: T1 Mace: Have a gauntlet that's basically got a knife in it like this:


You wouldn't even have to change the animation. It would bully other T1 durability, but anything above it would force it to WIN EVERY EXCHANGE, more than 1 clang to a higher Teir and it would break. Instead of dealing damage at all, it would break their weapon after a minimum of two successful hits, put them at sudden death on the third and thus get off on sadistic Glee as a T1 Mace breaks a PF and kills the wearer after 3 flawless hits. How humiliating. Perfect for Slaanesh. Watch as Slaanesh Marines crawl over Eldar games brutalizing their T1 and T2 weapons.

MoT: Knife: Puts a few stacks of flickering fire on a target per hit.

Orks: their knuckles are all T1 maces. They do the same thing the Slaanesh mace does, but only it takes 3 hits and they get 3 mistakes instead of 2:1.

Ork Pistols: Most I feel are in a good spot. They're powerful, but not too powerful in the sense that they prevent melee altogether. I'm not sure how I feel about the pokkit Rokkit, but I do have a solution to the Six Shoota. The Six Shoota can either fire its rounds individually, or press and hold for a brief period and the pistol will then shoot all 6 rounds like a charged Plasma shot. Having it reload fasta, especially after all Chambers are empty would be a good idea as well.

This could be a pretty cool mechanic but wouldn't ever work without reworking 99% of the weapons in EC, suppression would completely neuter this, as would melta weapons which would simply nuke down the shield, not to mention artillery weapons that would kill both players instantly. Other than that, this could be a cool utility function for shields but I doubt I'd ever use it, if your proposed tactical changes were made after all - most skilled players would just switch to the heavy bolter or melee spam, both of which are honestly a lot easier against pubs - they just lack the style points.

You think most weapons kill too fast - you realize that for example, on the Bolter, the DPS being reduced by 20% would make it only slightly better than a grav-gun in terms of DPS? which is already so slow that it takes about 4 seconds to kill a static, full EHP stacked ground assault. Again, encouraging zerg play and improving the efficiency of the class due to reliance on I-frames (of which it can get up to 4, which can buff durability by something like 8 seconds on average) and the shield. I think it's worth noting that no where here have you even proposed looking at shield durability or re-working I-frames despite suggestions to buff melee classes.

To give you an idea, the bodyshot nerf % suggested there would decrease the DPS on a bolter from anywhere between 201.4 DPS (5%) and 169.6 DPS (20%), this would be only slight faster than a regular grav-gun (meme wepaon) while also having to contend with I-frames that grav does not as well as damage fall off which would impact this even further, CQC would actually be hugely detrimental - which is fine - but would basically make it useless as your damage fall off would reduce your DPS so much that you're basically shooting pellets.

Additional headshot reduction % again lowers the skill ceiling and puts less value on good accuracy over spamming blindly, not to mention you continue to spew the same horseshit about Eldar being the only ones that can land proper headshots and now you're arguing that Eldar have too much damage on bodyshots? I'm sorry, what? first you complain that the bodyshot damage is too low and that headshots are mandatory, so your solution is to nerf bodyshot damage and put even more reliance on headshot damage for Eldar weapons? LOL.

The buffs are solid, sure, but even with Jinx bodyshots would not be that intimidating especially against an opponent landing headshots, I also see a distinct lack of suggestions to nerf Eldar buffs despite them retaining objectively the best of the 'skill ceiling' with these proposed changes. Transparent doesn't even begin, Dominov.

But yeah, we've already seen what happens when this is done - people play melee or heavy bolter because why bother with the tactical peashooter when you can carry the maximum DPS heavy bolter - or the multi-melta - and just farm bad melee players all day. or you switch to melee (because it's incredibly easy, RPS is the only variable) and go and farm bad melee players.

1 KILL FROM THE ENTIRE MAGAZINE HITTING BODYSHOTS BEFORE HAVING TO RELOAD!?!



Do you frequently play shooters? I'll take the above statement as a no, because we've already seen this happen in Beta. If I have to put 30 shots on a target in order to put him down - on bodyshots - you'd be changing the bolter to deal less than 14 damage per shot because 14 * 30 = 420, which is about the durability of a single Ork ground assault at rank 6 (the toughest non-vet infantry target you can fight), you'd still have enough damage in your magazine to mow down an LSM apothecary without a full magazine on bodyshots though. Holy fuck, what a joke. It'd literally be worse than using the fucking grav-pistol in terms of DPS as it currently stands, 14 * 333.3 / 60 = 77.7 DPS vs Grav Pistol which has a DPS of like 108.

Heavy weapons are not designed to kill an entire team as much as they are to suppress, this game is not trying to replicate stalingrad, the somme or verdun. Heavy weapons exist to suppress the shit out of the enemy and instantly mow down anyone stupid enough to try and push through the area it is covering which they do perfectly as it stands. They are designed to stop a few people but not an entire team pushing into an area, yet if you have 3 heavy bolters or shuriken cannons/deffguns in an area? you'll basically never pass that area with anything but jump assaults or flanking it.

As for the numbers on kills... 'max 3 unassisted kills' in a single magazine I mean, no? it's essentially gimping the primary role of a tactical which is ranged combat. Melee is a solid defense they have but they are not reliant on melee to any extent other than self-defense, they are not built as a class in EC or in fluff to charge blindly into the enemy's ranks with a knife, if you start issuing chain-swords as equipment for tactical classes while nerfing the bolter? Sure. We'll turn this game into nothing but melee spam, why not. But you'll have to give me a chain-sword on my tactical for me to ever agree to something like this, because being shit in melee and shit in ranged will make the class obsolete for anything other than capturing, after which any competitive clan will simply have their tactical players redeploy as jump assaults to rush in and maintain control of the capped area.

I don't disagree that the magazine mods are over the top on most weapons, but fuck me - 30 shots on the body to kill a target? LOL. You need to factor in the potential to miss with these weapons because if you don't, you create a shit gun that requires 100% hit ratio to kill someone on bodyshots or mandates headshots. Headshots are a skill-shot akin to grenades, not the only way to hit, though players should be encouraged to land headshots if they can.

Both of those are cancerous, especially on a faction that has the same ranged damage as their LSM counterparts. If there's any faction that doesn't need a damage buff for ranged weapons it'd be Chaos, lash is also cheesy as by nature of staggering anyone it hits, but that's neither here or now.

You'd... leave it alone and BUFF the headshot damage?

HAHAHAHAHA. I'm sorry, stop. You shouldn't be taken seriously on anything to do with the balance of EC, holy hell. Yes you've got some solid ideas but what in all buggery is this, you want to BUFF the highest alpha damage weapon tacticals have - the one anyone competent uses over a stalker bolter because once you throw a scope on it, it basically is a better stalker bolter - rapid fire headshot spam that downs almost every class in 6 headshots, it even minces Orks.

As for shootas, I don't mind this, but they'd be absolute dogshit by virtue of the damage reduction. You'd be nerfing the shoota to deal less than 5 damage per shot if you want every shot to hit to get a single kill on bodyshot.

What aspect of this game do you even frequent Dominov? I have no idea how we genuinely have such vastly different experiences, how the hell do you not realize what giving 200 DAMAGE TO THE SHOULDERBASH would do to the meta?

You want to see the CHAD marines deploy - thrusting across the battlefield to fucking instantly kill people by thrusting them to death with ceramite crotch & shoulder? Yes. you could D-bash it, but good luck when this is all tacticals are doing because their ranged weapons are dogshit and why engage someone in melee when 2v1 you can just nuke them down faster than they can recover. Shoulder-bash, roll away, shoulder-bash. Or even just move backwards, sprint and shoulder-bash again for 400 damage in total. Nerfing the damage on this or making it only effective against armour would also limit it, since it would make tacticals way too predictable and easily countered, as it would be the only way you'd start a fight due to efficiency in stripping armour.

As for this, eh, whatever. Reworking melee is generally a good idea but cleaving/cutting through multiple opponents should be a general trait for melee, as for auto-clanging/blocking vs non-locked targets... I mean what the fuck, what the hell kind of game do you want here - a massive zerg fest where people just fucking blob into murder-balls of melee spam? I mean, by all means, we'll turn the game into a moshpit simulator and just bash our heads against each other for half an hour till one team wins. Skilled gameplay, immersive to the 40k IP!

Fuck me, this is just beyond pathetic at this point. Nothing like trying to re-balance the game from a perspective of bias and misunderstanding as well as perhaps an undertone of salt, maybe you'll be able to GvG BLOP and actually win once you make everything ungodly powerful or ungodly broken; or you'll just sap all the skill from the game and low-skill, barely coordinated spam will win over superb individual skill with 'functional' teamwork.

You must be joking
no time today for that maybe tonight
ps: i think proteus explained well why its bs

What about having the option to downgrade one's bolter/main weapon [to some extent to later be determined] in order to improve bp and knife, or more armor, or whatever you want to do with points?

I think the base bolter is pretty powerful, especially for how low it costs.

We've been here before @ProteusVM. I'm really not sure why you're so antagonizing about it, I'm not about to insult you, I don't know why you have in virtually every response you've had for me.

First, I think you missed the bit about the Eldar and didn't pay attention because you saw something you didn't like the first time and then have ignored the various changes since as I listen to your concerns, as well as speak with fellow Eldar and follow my own experiences. I don't believe anything I say is perfect the first time round, if I did, I wouldn't post expecting feedback, but I've always stated that the Shuriken's deal too much body damage and their main gimmick is being focused on headshots - it's not about being competitive in their case, it is literally how they survive, if they miss a certain percentage of their headshots on an ASC, they don't have enough DPS on their body shots to make up the difference - this relationship between the do or die needs to stay with the Shuriken; it has been specific to my argument about keeping the Eldar headshot damage high in comparison. The major problem with it, is that the Bolter and the Ork have big issues with allowing this to happen; the bolter does burst damage better than the Shuriken, and the Ork is so resilent, it can just stand there, take shots, and then dish them back out np with withering RoF, hence the imbalance that needs a bit of tweaking, DA's don't need more damage, they just need to not die/lose all of their armor when they're doing all the right things vs a tougher opponent.

As I stated in the OP, enhance and jinx would only apply their buffs on Shurikens as Headshot damage, to body shots, they do nothing and I don't have numbers for it - they can be altered, and the devs have the data to back it up so they can figure it out the numbers tweaking over our opinions. I'm really not sure why this is controversial or grounds for toxicity though, you can disagree-I'm not going to get mad about it, I'm not about to fight you over numbers, the numbers are just supports to an idea that tactical (there needs to be a better name for this because it encompasses DA, Shoota, and Traitor as well), of all the factions, has too much ranged focus, and not enough in the melee department, therefore, your argument is valid; either players choose to go full on Devestator, or full on Melee, and if they start to feel less lethal, they'll go for the better option of their preference. The entire point of this thread, is for tacticals to get closer to a 50/50 balance, as they could in SM, instead of the current 95/5% balance it currently is. You COULD fight with a knife and pistol in SM just fine, and if tacticals get to the point where they're, say, 70/30, or 60/40%, I'd be very happy about it.

Likewise, as we've clearly had different experiences in SM, I need to remind you that the tactical had the ability to literally one hit ANYONE with MC combat stims (which gave them a lot of damage reduction) and a serrated combat knife and people thought it was cool and fair. Now I'm definitely against this, but yes, the shoulderbash was that powerful. It defined tactical melee. However, apart from the stats, fluidity, and distance traveled, there's a major difference EC has to deal with: Non JPA melee classes. This didn't exist in SM apart from the extremely tough NPC versions. There's not really a good guide here. A lot of the reasons we're bouncing between a melee dedicated patch is because the tactical class has very little in the offensive melee department, is regulated to D-bash spam, and desperately tries to make as much use of a ranged weapon that waivers between ineffective and OP.

I can say though, that we have to work within the constraints of what we currently have. Which include stats and stats effects. Can't alter animations, ect. So what's left is the current scenario:

How to:

Make Tactical Ranged Capable of threatening Heavy Weapons. They do this just fine right now.

How to make Tacticals capable of being threatening melee, in melee. They don't do this right now.

How to make Tacticals make getting into melee more appealing to each other. This does not happen more than 99% of the time.

And yes, @ProteusVM, if there are large swathes of the game dedicated to large amounts of fire-fights, then blobs of (mixed) melee doesn't sound all too bad honestly. In fact, I'd argue that's one of the best parts of the game, and scales beautifully. Look nearly every SM centric artwork out there:



The battle is fucking intense. I know it's stylized. They all are. But it's desperate beyond measure, in almost every work. This is what people generally expect when they play 40k, when they play DoW, table top, ect. This is eventually what people would like to see, and it starts by making a potentially painful decision of not letting really powerful weapons be constantly available, and not fearing to get into melee, but rather seek it out.

If you want a to play a different game you should play one such changes are way to late in the life cycle and is it even legal to change stuff so drastically? people payed 50-100€ in RTC to play EC and not a totally different game

Nothing is perfect but there's a difference between expecting something perfect the first time round and suggesting something that makes sense. You're suggesting, amongst other nonsense, a weapon that relies ONLY on headshots and thus rewards skill better than its competition (as in, if you land headshots - you de-facto win vs anyone in a head-to-head fight - otherwise the weapon is useless) which creates an imbalance of skill ceiling and allows Eldar to consistently outperform their opponents, even if the LSM player is a better player in terms of accuracy.

See:

The idea with Eldar, as a whole, is that they rely heavily on teamwork - I still think the ASC deals too little DPS to be viable hence I've suggested changes for it on the UAT thread but building a weapon that relies ENTIRELY on headshots rather than fixing the fact that it cannot reliably outgun other players unless you land headshots is an issue that needs to be resolved. Headshots should be advocated and pushed as much as possible, but they are still a skill-shot. NOT the main and only way to use a weapon. As for the intention, that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you're making these changes with the intention to make casual play more fun, the end result is all that matters and the end result is that this comes off as someone pushing to make Eldar more competitive than their opponents.

Want to survive/not die/lose all of your armour when you're doing the right things vs a tougher opponent? Pull a TLASC and get up in his face or come in with warlock buffs and support, giving you the edge you need. Eldar have a very specific playstyle already defined and it works - they have asymmetric flavour in the form of a huge reliance on teamwork that comes off in buffs but lose 1:1 with almost every other class in a trade, which is why they rely on their mobility and cover fighting. The latter of these is not a unique trait to the Eldar, but they make the greatest use out of it due to their speed.

Again, just to put it in bold. ELDAR ARE NOT MEANT TO TRADE HITS WITHOUT WARLOCK SUPPORT. This should change mind you, nerfing the buffs and making Eldar more solid individually, but that's how it is now. Warlocks give you a HUGE edge in combat due to their buffs, which creates a unique playstyle for the Eldar and gives them appropriate flavour to their gameplay, if we want to start discussing anything as to specifics of Eldar balance, start suggesting some re-works or removal for some of those buffs, especially the one that gives you a 50%! damage increase against any target hit by it.

Doesn't matter where it applies, if it applies - especially on headshots which are already a 2x multiplier - it'd be applying 2.5x damage when jinx is active, so unless the weapon is dealing about 6 damage per shot on headshot by default, you'd be looking at something like 60 damage on a headshot. From a weapon with 750 RPM.

I'll be honest, this is FAR from toxic, this is passionate debate at most - I wouldn't take offense to it though you're of course free to do whatever you want. As for the reasons for this, when you get the core maths behind your suggestions wrong and push ideas that anyone who has experience with third person shooters can tell you are wrong, you run the risk of suggesting ideas that are completely devoid of understanding, that would actively make the game worse. Check what you put down, make sure it's correct, and I'll have less or no reason to come after you with the belief that you're either lying through your teeth or ignorant and yet still offering balance feedback.

Tactical classes are versatile combatants that have a huge focus on ranged combat - there's a reason why they carry a KNIFE not a SWORD - they are barely equipped for melee fighting but carry a primary rifle that allows them to engage with a consistent level of damage, as said, about 80% ranged, 20% melee. They use melee as a last resort, not as a first response, because ranged weapons provide superb death-dealing ability against anyone and everyone they may run into, the knives are only drawn against inferior forces for sport or in desperate last stands if ammo is depleted.

Players will choose to go full on Devastator and full on Jump Assault because being mediocre at both is god-awful, we've already seen this happen during EC's founder's access because they patched ranged weapons to have less damage and threw the entire system out of whack, during the JPApocalypse especially - where you had nothing but melee classes because ranged weapons did not work.

As for a 50/50 balance, not only is it wrong from a 40k standpoint, Dire Avengers do NOT rush into CC LOL, but it creates shit gameplay where you basically make all the capture classes mediocre stop-gap classes that you only pull to capture before switching to your preferred playstyle, there's no reason to have a versatile combatant when a heavy bolter can annihilate 3x as many as he can or a melee class can cut apart 3x as many as he can. Zero reason to exist other than capturing the point and re-deploying.

And no, you could not fight with a knife and pistol in SM just fine. Want to pop on sometime? I can show you what happens when you try, the knife was a good weapon of LAST RESORT but it got you killed every single time you tried to take a melee class head-on unless you seriously injured the melee class as he was closing the distance. I'd rather not have the game turn into a shitty melee brawler where unskilled RMB-spam wins the day and 'skill' in the form of rock, paper, scissors takes precedent.

Because the shoulderbash with MC combat stims had a maximum range of about five meters and the knife perk did literally nothing. It was a 12.5% damage increase, just about a single hit less on JPAs (100 hp, 60 armour) and two hits on an Iron Halo devastator (100hp 160 armour). That being said, tactical melee in SM was not defined by shoulderbash unless you were fighting bad players, closing the distance was risky and often ended up with shooting at close range however, when you did want to melee, you started by slapping your opponent with a stagger because running away or rolling back to shoulderbash caused you to take extra damage, shoulderbash was an ambush attack, not a main-line tactic.

As for tacticals? yeah, give me a chainsword and I'll spam like a shitter to carve through bad players and kill the game even faster, why not. Because what this game really needs more of is an awful interpretation of Dark Souls' combat system combined with mediocre ranged weapons that might as well be nerf guns with your proposed suggestions.

Tactical classes do not threaten heavy weapons head-on. Unfair to use this as an example but deny they can threaten melee. In order for a tactical to outgun a heavy ranged class, the heavy ranged class needs to be caught off guard or be a worse player, significantly worse. The scope exploit's suppression resistance is good at 25m but a devastator should never allow you to get that close, and even then, crouching & firing for the head is 600 DPS - far faster TTK than the tactical can even hope to achieve with buffs.

Tactical classes, by the above logic, are threatening to melee because they can get the drop on them or the melee player can be really bad and spam right mouse button. It's not a one way street here, a bad melee player will consistently lose to a good tactical melee player. They can do both exceptionally well in good hands.

As for making melee more appealing to each other? Give them chainswords as a melee option and I'll take it, I'll charge into melee a lot more and do a lot more damage, just prevent me from taking ammo mods or something. It'd still be cancerous gameplay and kill the game faster, but hey. There's a suggestion to try and play devil's advocate and engage your suggestions.

I disagree entirely. It sounds like the wet dream of an angsty teenager without the understanding of skilled gameplay or combat tactics. Encouraging more melee in EC - a system that requires practically zero skill and is largely based on spam when engaged in a large brawl rather than counter-play when fighting in groups sounds like pure shit, it's almost as retarded as the argument that more players in a game make the game better despite all it doing is creating more of a clusterfuck, with less skill required to perform.

40k contains some incredibly cool images - but that's all they are, images that fall apart once you start deciding how to turn it into a game, because it is impossible to do without making ranged combat useless. They would be absolutely god-awful to actually play, nothing but melee spam and then occasionally getting killed by artillery from a plasma cannon-type weapon. The battle looks intense and desperate but that is just an illusion, if you tried to reflect that in EC you'd create an absolute fucking mess that takes zero skill, just spam RMB and try not to stagger your team mates until one side wins. You want to play 40k like that? Go play Dawn of War. It works there because your individual units are just that, units. They aren't player controlled, they don't have differing levels of skill and tactics or even personal concepts on how they view the vague entirety of the 40k universe, because this kind of shit will never apply to a third-person shooter.

As for me, I never want to see this game go down the route of a skill-less spam-fest where your ranged weapons are so dog shit that you have to be given melee weapons to hopefully compete when they run through your hail of gunfire to get into close range. 40k to me is a fucking awesome sci-fi universe because it allows melee to exist but not on a small scale. You want to melee? you damn well better ambush or attack from unexpected positions or with overwhelming numbers, because ranged weapons will blast you apart if you charge in like a daft plonker into a gun-line. Melee is still perfectly viable as it stands in Eternal Crusade, you just have to play smart.

And how is the description of this game truly that different from. SM? As @Thana jested, there's quite a bit of leeway in the description, I mean, we're fighting in an MMO. You want to take a stab at defining how this is an MMO and battlefield isn't? Or for that matter, justify that the game is balanced to the legion of people who think it's not and have since left the game on those grounds alone?

The ideas, moreso than the numbers, are what are important here, and they are all still very doable just by altering stats, it's really not all that radical at all. This is beta levels of change, and I think most of you are afraid of it because it changes the nature of your playstyle and you don't like the idea of it. @ProteusVM even said in a previous post that his main is a Stalker Bolter, and he as well as many others would likely go back to Devestator if it were no longer viable to "be effective" - paraphrasing of course. My question is just how effective does one need to justify keeping things the way they are? Do Bolters, or any weapon of the same type really need 6-7 kills without having to reload? Do they need 14, each? Do Shootas? Do Tacticals necessarily need to fear melee either? I mean with a ASC you'd be lucky to get two, even if it's theoretically possible for more, and this feels absolutely perfect playing it. I physically cannot solo an entire team on my own with a ASC on a single mag, and there's nothing wrong with that fact.

That's fine though, everyone has a playstyle, and in fact even different Tactical classes do. We can disagree on the heart and intent of the game, but that's what I've believed from day one; Tacticals are capable and meant to be in melee as much as they are at ranged, even if both of the specialists do it better in their field.

This core of my opinion will NEVER change and I will always try and get the game there. I am however, always keen on hearing others opinions on how this could happen.