Scopes already suffer from suppression, the issue(?) is that they render the weapon immune to spread.

I'd love for EC to be saved Thrakka, I really fucking would - but I'm also not delusional enough to believe that the issues EC has stem from balance. They are almost entirely down to the fact that new players are at a huge disadvantage due to advancements/lootboxes, a shit tutorial and clusterfucked design philosophy with transports basically only serving as 'zerg craft' to push from point to point en-masse in the hopes of getting something done.

And as for player retention, even those who stick around have zero to do. There's fuck all cosmetics, literally nothing in terms of long term metagame and the matches are so cookie cutter it hurts, we could have had Enemy Territory: Quake Wars style objectives in a 16v16 format with rolling battles that progress between objectives ala Tug of War but with dialogue informing both teams of the updating battle.

Ideally without any focus on vehicles and almost entirely built around infantry gameplay with capture-able forward spawns which could be fought over rather than a destructible transport which can be double melta-bombed and destroyed in the blink of an eye - and we would likely have had a much, much better game for it.

It's as I said to Njord and Thraxus - it was never personal, but I've always realized that EC could never have accommodated what they wanted from the game with such a simplistic melee system, much in the same way that I am now telling Dominov that the game, as a generic shooter, cannot accommodate MOBA like wargear variety and choices, it will simply change the shooter and likely even the melee portion of the game into an absolute clusterfuck with most loadouts being utter trash and 2 - 3 meta builds, as we see now.

I didn't bother to read it because it's still full of awful ideas, we're not making a MOBA, I'm all for giving players more specific loadout choices that specialize them in certain traits but shit like only Eldar getting 80% headshot boost with upgrades, even if they pay for it with 80% durability, is asinine. The loadouts not only have to be viable and fairly balanced but also fun and I can guarantee you that getting killed in 3 headshots is not fun nor will the TTK on 80% headshot damage be fast enough to justify dying in 0.280ms.

Adding options for players that force them to specialize in such a way that they cannot beat a specific player head-on simply because they sacrifice the ability to hurt tanky units goes against everything a shooter implies. Third/first person shooters are entirely built around the concept of accuracy being king, (s)he who tracks their targets the most consistently will win, and (s)he who tracks their targets' heads the most consistently will win overall.

You cannot fuck with this formula, or you make a shitty shooter. And EC does not have enough mechanics or unique functionality to stand alone without the shooter component, had more been done to encourage melee and make melee skill based (see: reworking the system to not be rock, paper, scissors garbage) then perhaps you could have done something to this extent, but that's not the case nor do the developers have the funds to pursue this path.

I'd rather not then tack onto this loadout specializations such as mandating that someone play an Eldar in order to make use of headshot multipliers, especially if as you suggested they will most likely have to be the squishiest Eldar build possible, making them killable in something like 3 - 4 headshots from a bolter.

The issue with EC is not balance, not even slightly. The largest issue is a shit tutorial with zero player engagement and a metric fuckton of exploits which the developers refuse to put the man-hours in to fix. The sheer lack of content is a huge issue with EC - there's fuck all in the game and you can basically reach the 'full EC experience' within like 30 hours.

Not to mention the faulty design philosophy, instead of meaningful battles with forward spawns and bases being captured, we have transport vehicles which get popped between points and render the 'meta' in competitive play to farm the transports and then lock down the map for an easy win.

I can't tell you how much more fun this game would have been if we had only had infantry instead of these clunky goddamn vehicles and all the maps were designed around the infantry concept rather than open maps with transport vehicles. This would also solve a """huge""" balance issue with Eldar considering that the only reason anyone ever thought they were OP was because fire dragons would obliterate all their transports and then they're left running on foot into Eldar guns.

If we want to fix EC, the issue ain't balance. It's going to take bE actually putting in some time to fix exploits like rollex, removing i-frames and grenade tricks as well as reworking the maps to get rid of vehicles and focus more on the infantry game, because I don't know a single person who jumped into a vehicle in this game and genuinely thought they functioned well or had an actual purpose beyond transports.

Following that, more content. I have no idea why there isn't a metric fuckton of cosmetics for every faction, but there should have been.

Not to mention, re-work melee. I'm so fucking sick of this rock, paper, scissors garbage. If bE is genuine about saving EC, a re-work of the melee system to include attacks separate from movement is a must as well as hit tracking and the ability to influence the speed of a strike by moving the camera slightly, allowing melee players to outplay each other with superior footwork. I'd be 100% fine with melee attacks locking me into melee for a few seconds which triggers every time I am struck in melee, but the game has to actually have a skill based melee system first.

But of course, that won't happen. So we'll try and pretend that adding more loadout choices will make anyone give a fuck about the game, especially when said loadout choices aren't adding anything to the game as much as just making certain builds inflict penalties upon you thus becoming even more useless.

If we want to re-balance anything though - start by removing the 43%* headshot resistance on Orks because that's the largest imbalance in game by a country mile. The only reason Ork players don't win every single match they're in is because their players are absolute garbage.

I want those bolter skins!

its 43% exactly, tested with dev tools and actual damage numbers to get correct answers and to that it comes that ork headshot hitbox are incredibly hard to hit, since its only eyes and above.

What @Oan-Mkoll said, he's the maths magician - I'm just the grunt.

if you consider that a normal shot does 100%
an headshots normaly does 200%
on an ork an headshot does 157% instead of 200%
so a 57% boost wich leads to 43% of the damages going into the dev's pocket
but for whatever stupid reason its still ingame wich is dumb considering you cant headshot them from the back and half the head dont have hitbox ... (and dont reply that you take more damage from the back its wrong it has been tested)

In fact there are plenty of shooters that do not place a high premium on headshots (Relic's SM being one of them, Halo, especially 1&2 being another more moderate example), and many games that do set such high value on headshots have extremely varied and nuanced weapons that must be learned in order to play well generally have almost zero focus on melee combat at all (Ubisoft anything, CoD, Battlefield, and every variant of CS). If there's a game that does that, and has melee other than a simple knife strike, please let me know. Generally these shooters have much better gun systems than we are playing with, so for you to even tell Njord or Thraxus that they're too lofty while defending headshots and ranged mechanics as they are now is just about as hypocritical as it gets. You want to bake your cake and eat it too. I understand. We all do. Cept my version is seeing the tactical unit being the lynchpin between melee and ranged as it was in SM, I feel like that's fair and satisfies both parties. That to me is a sign of a healthy relationship between Ranged and Melee. You're just picking one over the other, saying things are ok, and then trying to deflect this by frustrating imbalance by either finally saying what virtually everyone has already said about exploits or asking for what no one would say no to anyway: more content, and content that's been asked for for years at this point. I used the MOBA as an example because you could probably easily see how it translates into this game, with us having virtually every aspect of one in it already. We have ranged DPS units, Mages (who literally use Mana), Tanks, even assassins of both ranged and melee variety. Hell, one of the most popularly requested game modes, and even your example of non-vehicle combat skirts dangerously close to going full MOBA with a tug of war forward capture points (towers/bunkers) unlocking the map style of gameplay considering classes and such.

It's in fact Alterac Valley, which I've proposed to do since 2013.

Yet, in this game, it's clear we're stuck with both. If you "remove" either, the game's dead. It does neither of them well, and you conveniently glossed over that fact by favoring one. This game does not exist unless you can strike that balance, no matter how you try to expand it. The very nature of that imbalance crushes the fun out of the game for everyone who experiences it so nothing will matter until that's solved. Therein lies the Golden opportunity to improve both. I only could focus on one half of the issue. I will now focus on melee in the next post.

I suggested what I did, in the way that I did, to condense a very complicated idea into a simple one:

• Headshots in general need to be nerfed since that's the primary way ranged DPS is out of whack to everything else.
• Orks don't need headshots in their weapons. That's the trade they get for having resistance to it.
• Eldar Warlock buffs don't need to improve damage overall. They can just buff the damage on headshots - numbers can be tweaked overall based on data and the "feel". If an Eldar goes "well that was easy" it's probably too high. Their trade is that body shots will comparatively deal less damage than other weapons. They can also go further into this specialization of trading more body damage for headshot damage by investing into it, numbers for this are inconsequential.
• SM's would therefore get more out of dealing body shot damage over head shot damage unless they invested in that for their weapon.

I won't be responding to another one of your posts if it's the same BS as before @ProteusVM.

This post was made on a phone. I will come back to edit it, make it more concise and far shorter in a few hours. Most of it is notes for me to work with as a rough draft.

So assuming the following:

• Ranged DPS is going to be slightly less effective than it is now. Even in R. SM this was achieved with higher recoil's and spread and armor itself having a mitigation value, which is why the double upgrade bolter was so fierce, it could break down that barrier with consistently placed armor penetrating shots. The normal bolter, even with Kraken rounds, was not nearly as dangerous as the double perked one.
• Headshot Damage is reduced. Eldar and C/SM can improve their headshot damage by investing in it via weapon upgrades and/or MC.
• Orks deal no headshot damage, take further reduced headshot damage, and can take further upgrades to reduce headshot damage.
• Eldar Warlock buffs affect only headshot damage. Eldar can improve headshot damage even further via a unique MC upgrade that steals body shot damage and applies it to headshot damage. The amount is not really set or important, but the intent is that Eldar can specialize in that aspect by narrowing their ability elsewhere. You'll see this further as we move on.

Tankiness

So at first glance Relic's hp and damage pools were pretty similar to what we have in EC, and R.SM did have balance issues that never got patched out. However, it's important to remember that for the majority of the time you had to really invest in perks to get the best options that would seriously drive down the TTK's to what we're seeing in EC. It's also important to remember that for some, these could be seriously mitigated. I don't know the values of this, but Armor was seriously important in R. SM, it could take a lot of damage, while HP couldn't. It was possible for a Bolt Pistol to one shot you if it got a headshot while the armor was down, but before then it would take the majority of the clip to get through the armor if it could at all, so basic stat lines are extremely deceptive. The Iron Halo on a devestator more than doubled their TTK - an option we don't have in EC on basic classes.

In EC there are considerably more factors to balance out. For example; Ranged weapons all start with similar stats to the double upgraded Bolter and get better. They don't have to reach for it, they just get all of the stats, if not better ones. There's also more races, and more players in any given match, meaning that TTK's are going to be shorter comparatively because there's more vectors of damage.

So in EC T and Pen is for a lack of a better term, for both are quite often underwhelming. Really the only players it benefits are ranged at this point since the convergence of the builds leads to: High T, Ranged Options. Mark of Nurgle, Ork Ranged, Dark Reaper. Yet even then there's not really a strategic reason for doing so. It just is.

• T = Tank. Armor = Cover Hugger. Health = Melee Juggernaut

That means you should not have access to both tank or Damage. You are either firmly a tank, or firmly a tank killer.

If for example, a player chooses MoN, they are no longer able to use burst damage loadouts, it would be points prohibitive. Instead a MoN would have to settle for mid range DPS and tankiness, which would honestly be much more potent than it is now. T I feel like is seriously overvalued/undervalued for the wrong people, only absorbing one to two more body shots in a lot of cases - which only benefits players who are trying to get an edge over their opponent at ranged. It should feel like a character running around with an Iron Halo, eating up small arms fire without an issue until it meets a Plasma Gun or high Pen Melee weapon. T also stacks nicely with both armor and HP, yet neither of the other options really stand out on their own very well, even when Armor is clearly being pushed for LSM, and HP for Chaos to support their archetypes. These should definitely both be given to these factions in spades for that exact reason. Not everyone is going to have access to T as much anymore, nor should they.

There's a list of units that would probably be able to do this, and the ability to stack them to be even more tanky.

Devestators, Lootas, and Reapers.

MoN

Gold Armor on all but the Eldar.

Orks with Gobs

LSM with T Upgrade

Striking Scorpions with Gold Armor & Toughness Upgrade
Fire Dragons with Gold Armor & Toughness Upgrade
Dark Reapers with Gold Armor & Toughness Upgrade

Eldar as tanks would still purposefully have less survivability than others because Warlock Buffs factor into their stats.

This means every faction has 3 Options for Tank Units - a Tactical, a ground based Assault Unit, and a Devestator.

• The Purpose of Red Armor

​

There are plenty of other archetypes to be fleshed out all over the place, and Red armor stands to be that vehicle. Instead of gifting T, Red Armor should just help with that archetype building. It would then make a lot of sense for Eldar to not have it either - they're already locked to their archetypes, whereas the other factions are a bit more flexible.

Red Armor:

For LSM: Get much better Armor and Armor regen values. There could even be augmentations that help improve the accuracy of a weapon beyond that of attachments (it would effectively be a 5th attachment), or grant melee bonus's (like tenacity that reduces any sort of loss of agency in the event they aren't all dropped), or grant lifesteal, or autohealing upon receiving melee damage - like reverse poison. There's a lot of options. However, like the marks from chaos, these augmentations would effectively be LSM's way of specializing to a task and forfeit the ability to do other things. Alternatively, they can remain generalists by not augmenting. Which is important since that's a strength of the LSM. It's important to remember that it should always be a viable option to remain vanilla. CSM feel this need too.

CSM: This is effectively accentuates what their marks do.

MoN: More HP and Armor.
MoK: Double Bonus to HP. Nothing to Armor.
MoT: Double Bonus to Armor. Nothing to HP.
MoS. More HP. Nothing to Armor. Increases Stamina Regen.

Both MoS and MoK would have the same option to auto-regen some hp upon taking a melee hit - only it would be less effective.

Undivided: More HP, Armor, and Armor Regen.

Orks: More HP, not Armor.

• Weapons With minimal, and/or Without Pen

​

These weapons are basically your mid range DPS options. Poison is a great example. It just deals damage, and in fact probably deals too much damage in a lot of cases. I would rather the damage be capped sooner and have a slower draining period much like a DoT in other games. It's highly convenient that most tanky units atm have access to DoT weapons. Bolters, Shuriken, and Shootas without upgrades are basically weapons without pen. They just deal base damage reliably. Thus, a MoN tactical loadout could easily look something like this:

MoN - 600 Points
Base Bolter - 400 Points
Plague Grenade - Free - Requires MoN
Plague Knife - Free - Requires MoN
HP Wargear - Free with MoN
Armor - Free with MoN
Consumable - Free

I don't really care how the devs re-balance the LP costs. This example is quick and dirty, but the point is that your choices will effectively lock you out of being able to "Cross Specialize". The MoN can't make an awesome Bolter because he is balanced to be extremely tough. As a tactical he's going to be tough and just have a basic weapon. He'll have access to poison, so you can't ignore him either. He's going to be able to get in your face and be a problem unless you've got a tank killer option.

• Melta & "Unique Weapons"

Would probably become the new meta should nothing itself happen to it. I therefore feel like the cap should be higher, but heat generation should be slower per weapon. They only way for them to get to the high cap is by focusing fire on a single target. This would support tanky FD's being at the vanguard but not blowing away everything in front of them with superficial ease like they can now.

There's a lot of unique weapons out there that should probably stick to a single class and/or Mark. The Felrought Plasma Rifle is definitely a Slaaneshi item just as its burstfire pistol - which could probably use a bit of change itself. The Necrotic Chainsword is perfect for a MoN tank.

• Pen = Tank Killers.

So Pen is highly undervalued at the moment. It exists in spades for Melee to the point of negation, but really this is just melee's version of the head shot conundrum, it really only benefits them. It also, again, under current conditions, adds another layer of unnecessary edge and complexity to ranged that effectively grants a one bullet advantage over someone else with all other variables being equal. Pen, like T, needs to be locked to archetypes. The question everyone should ask is who actually needs Pen on a team? And the follow up is how to not make Pen feel like a waste of time when it's not called for?

For Ranged, this means skill shotting with Plasma. The uncharged plasma can honestly be as effective as a stock Bolter. It can in fact be balanced in a way that there's really not much difference between the two, even its pen value. However, the charged shot would always have a ridiculous Pen value, and the damage just punches right through a tanky unit no matter where he was hit, or if he was hit with AoE damage. Just gotta hit.

We're about to get to get to melee, so ill revisit Pen there.

Melee and Durability and "Weapon Broken".

Penetration in Melee is simply a "Win More" option. Generally units with the most Pen, have the highest damage per hit, highest impact, and highest Teir of weapon. This is essentially melee's headshotting problem that would be made far worse if the current durability was any more fragile than it currently is without a meaningful result for a weapon being broken. This, above even the RPS itself, is primarily why melee has issues - it is literally about stunlocking your opponent into submission to get a big damage hit in, the RPS just facilitates it. The RPS system is highly unlikely to be changed completely, but if that's the direction the devs want to go I'll revise my ideas to suit since atm it seems economically unfeasible to change the fundamentals.

As such, what we can change is:

1. Shoulderbash needs to be in this game. This is a fundamental DPS option anyone in melee should have. You really only get one shot, and currently it can be D-Bashed for no penalty. I feel like that's actually great the way it is, only if Sprint Attack dealt more damage.

• Furthermore, DPS Melee Specs should definitely have the option for Furious Charge, which would further enhance Sprint Attack based on their weapon. If they're carrying a mace, it would deal more impact. Sword, more damage. This is melee's actual headshot option, and would follow the same rules, you have to commit to it in order to benefit from it. If you don't, you have other options available.

2. Melee Tanks Will Always Be Better than Ranged Tanks in terms of Survivability - this includes being shot while in melee.

• This is something that R. SM did not put into their game apart from NPC's because they just never got to that point. I would imagine that the VL, Plasma Cannon, melta, and massive grenades were all factors in not attempting to put in foot slogging melee monsters that could carry Iron Halos. Yet, if you're tank spec, that's what's available to you. The main problem with this is that people cite the MoN when it was first implemented, and again, the issue wasn't necessarily the fact that it was tanky, it was because it dealt damage as well as everyone else.
• What's more is that even with a total revamp of melee animations, there's still no penalty for blasting into melee with ranged weapons. No penalty for even blasting through your friends should they forgive you if it means they take out the guy they were fighting as well. This obviously heavily deters melee from occurring. As such, if players connect with melee weapons, their T will rise, and the pen of their weapons will instantly rise with it to the point of rendering ranged ineffective against them for a short duration (we'll say 2.5 seconds - long enough to get through an animation to clang again and/or dodge away), but melee weapons will not. They'll stay in ratio while ranged weapons merely do 1 or 2 damage per hit, and possibly even being regened over by lifesteal and heals - like the healing glitch Eldar had with mitigation. Grenades will deal far less damage, if any, and even plasma will be hard pressed to dislodge a melee. The only way to really deal with it if you're within 20m of it, is to get involved, or get back and press your ranged advantage once it's over.

3, Melee can be separated between burst damage and steady damage like ranged can through durability and "sudden death." Teir's are not necessary, and can be simplified into two types of weapons instead.

• Pointy objects are burst DPS weapons. They deal a lot of damage on hit. This includes knives, swords, spears, glaives, and axes. Virtually everything with a blade edge or an Eldar can possibly equip in their entire arsenal. They exist purely to draw blood. You MUST hit your opponent in order to be effective.
• Blunt Objects are steady damage. They will produce very predictable results given time by attacking durability rather than attempting to deal damage directly. They exist to crush your opponent behind their own defenses. You MUST hit your opponent's WEAPON in order to be effective.
  • BEATING someone in the RPS system applies a bonus to your impact value instead of stunning them, bringing a weapon closer to breaking. Losing once to a blunt weapon is Autobreak regardless of tier.
    • Precision Weapons (knives, swords, ect.) can fight for quite a while without breaking each other's weapons. It's far more likely that these duels will end in someone dying outright than a weapon breaking.
      
    • Blunt weapons vs themselves may come down to sudden death every time. What will matter is who got their first and what players do once they get there. Nailbiters!
  • BREAKING a weapon applies impact value as damage directly to the player instead of not allowing them to fight anymore.

4. Melee can be further separated between tank and DPS. A great example currently is a shield bro and a best bro duo. However, their differences aren't as many as they should be. The best bro is often considered a waste of resources since it can't cap, yet they're actually very similar to Scorpion's and a Baneshee duo:

• Shieldbro is ultra tanky. He can tank with his body if he needs to, but his shield is a major consideration to his survivability. He has reduced damage because he is carrying a mace, but will break a weapon very quickly instead. His best bro, carrying a Sword is DPS burst orientated. He actually deals more direct damage than his counterpart, but cannot take as many hits, nor will he break a weapon quickly.
• Striking Scorpion is far tankier than it is now, but it deals less damage than it used to. It can no longer one hit people from the back. Still carrying a sword, the SS must land hits in order to deal damage, so it's only a medium tank without a focus of breaking weapons. He has regen on being struck option and poison. The Baneshee is the DPS unit, being even less tanky, has furious charge and the scream which is debatable as to what the options are for changes (or if it needs changing other than better suppression against ranged), meaning that its Alpha strike ability is extremely high, but sustained combat is not.
• So the results of the scenario depend on positioning and timing. Either the Eldar are in a good position for the scorpion to tie down the right units in order for a strike, or the LSM position themselves well enough to not get flanked and outlast their opponent to break weapons and start pressing a serious advantage. The option of taking one out immediately no longer exists since melee units are tankier. The scorpion cannot assassinate either one of them, but will also be able to stick around and fight them both.
  
• Positioning will matter even more with these types of melee fights. Blunt Weapons are going to want to not get flanked since they can't defend themselves from the rear, but if they can face forward they're going to be at the advantage.

5. Factions dictate Archetypes, Archetypes dictate strategy. Strategy dictates balance in an asymmetrical game. An asymmetrical game does not have a totally universal skill chart. You could be much better at one thing than another, and each race caters to a certain aspect.

Using this revamp, at every level the strategy of a LSM, CSM, Orks, and Eldar are all going to be very clearly defined from the class all the way up to how they are used at the Warparty level.

LSM will remain the most tactically flexible options in the game with a focus on defense and firefights with high armor and armor regen. They have options for it all. They'll have precision, survivability, tanky melee, dependable, and burst DPS. The downside is that they have to choose what combination of tools they have are right for the job at hand. Some may be weaker against certain targets, even races, than others. They cannot rely on a single tool like Orks might be able to and instead building a strong chain of linked units that each support each other from what might counter them. Their counter is collapsing that chain.

CSM will remain aggressively focused. They have ranged and melee marines that can wade through small arms fire, np, but will not be able deal with heavy units themselves or have to rely on steady midrange DPS instead of burst. MoK will be excellent at melee combat with virtually every loadout with hp upgrades and sustainability. Chaos can rely on going almost entirely melee, whereas the LSM wouldn't do as well due to tactical inflexibility, however, this leaves Chaos vulnerable if their DPS and support is shot out from under them before they reach melee range.

Eldar will not have Main Tank classes like other races do that can dependably push the line if they want. They would remain inflexible and reliant on a certain style of play: Precision of all things over Brute Force, and would be well balanced and fun to play and play against rather than relying on crutches as they do now. Their counter is disrupting the right units and breaking the chain from both an indvidual standpoint and as a team, not fighting fire with fire. Eldar are the fire. The Eldar are also extremely inflexible. You see a class, you'll immediately know its counter at the individual level. That's a lot better than a LSM tactical who may actually be deceptively strong in melee by trading in his burst DPS options.

Orks will rely on one of two options. Shooting. Or stomping, and they're simply brute force with both and arguably the best in the game at simply spamming them. They're meant to be really simple, and tough as balls, and their skill is definitely not comparable to what we know. A skill to them is sometimes just surviving the unsurvivable. That to me seems like an interesting route not even explored here. They don't rely on headshots or needing to rely on outright winning the RPS system. They just keep bashing you in any way that they can and their strategies will just involve bringing said tools to bear, their counter is to prevent this zerging from happening. Break it apart and they get considerably more weak.

Maybe you should actually play some of the games you're talking about before using them as examples - unless you were playing with some really, really bad players which is rather likely given your past history. Screenshots sourced from http://www.spacemarine.wikia.com/.

Tacticals had 100 hp, 100 armor.
Devastators had 100 hp, 125 armor.
Assaults had 100 hp, 60 armor.​

Relic's Space Marine absolutely puts a huge focus on headshots, the multiplier is actually 2.5x which allows you to absolutely mince opponents - especially with weapons like the Stalker Bolter which kill in like 0.3s on headshots and the Bolter with both perks which can kill in something like 0.5s on headshots without kraken and something like 0.3s with kraken, stats for which are below.

Add to that zero fall off for damage the only downside for which it should be like 10% less DPS but it ignores the fact that after you mince the armor, you deal the same damage to the head - so you two shot on unarmored heads.

Not to mention the stalker bolter.

And even the Bolt Pistol.


I'll give you Halo, but even that game has evolved past its basic roots and is a much more successful series for it and that's probably the largest series that includes 'melee' and ranged, but the rest of these comparisons make little sense, sure, they require a lot more nuance for headshots to be used but the only difference between those games and EC in skill requirement is that the developers refuse to take the steps that would make EC require more skill, such as removing a few egregious exploits, fixing some obvious imbalances and adding recoil to all the weapons. Which, surprise surprise, I've spent the better part of a year and a half trying to get them to do but at this point I've understood that bE refuses to commit to anything.

There is no happy middle ground because of the garbage melee system, you cannot create this happy balance because for ranged classes to be viable, their guns have to be viable, but in order to make it a happy balance they can't simply obliterate their foes at all ranges so they have to be less deadly/less accurate but then they lose melee fights rather heavily even if they're better players due to the durability system and RPS mechanics, so we end up with a situation where everyone runs melee. I don't understand how you haven't understood this yet.

You cannot make the guns ineffective at range or they will feel like shit thus people will run melee classes, and as long as I-frames, rollex & lag exists you will always be better off running a melee class if tactical melee is nerfed as you will simply avoid shots, roll into range and farm free kills.

I have zero issue with tactical being a weaker class in terms of firepower than devastators but better at melee, able to compete with melee classes, but the melee actually has to be fucking good first - something like Chivalry would be absolutely perfect, with attacks and movement separate from each other and attack morphing, allowing me to turn my camera to slightly influence the speed and angle of my attack, to hit faster or slower to try and throw off a d-bash attempt.

You understand nothing Dominov, because you're still spewing the same shite - the tactical was not the lynchpin between melee and ranged in SM btw, the only assaults you'd ever beat were terrible ones because the optimal way to play assault in SM was to shoot people with your bolt pistol or blind them, crash into them once and jump away while landing headshots on them because of the 2.5x multiplier, which meant you could basically 3 shot any class unless they had an iron halo, then it'd be 5 headshots.

And yes, I'm picking one over the other because it makes a better game. There is fucking no one other than the bottom barrel shitters who would enjoy this game if it was a melee fest, because the melee is so simplistic it's not even funny, there's zero depth, zero skill or talent or even thought that is required to do well. You don't outplay your opponents in RPS, you out-guess them. I've got something like 1,800 hours on chivalry, something like 1,300 hours on Mount & Blade Warband and just shy of 2,000 on War of the Roses, I'm a huge melee fan, but the melee system actually has to be good first, otherwise there's no point making it the focus of the game.

You can only repeat the things that will save the game because they are fucking clear as day, the solutions to this game's problems have been stated so many times over the years that I'm sure even someone who has joined this game a week ago could come on these forums for a day and leave with a similar understanding of EC's issues as myself.

Except it's not, all we have is a very basic concept of DPS, tanks and healers - but that is in every game, you can boil every class down to this simply by looking at if they have a way to be tankier than others, healier than others or deadlier than others - even Planetside 2 has this, the Max unit is the tank with the Heavy Assault as the off-tank, the medic is a healer and the light assault/engineer is a dps, with the infil being a burst DPS.

They are not compatible Dominov, if you're making this comparison I find it hard to believe that you don't know simply how much adding moba style loadout choices with, literally, a fuckton of options to tweak your character and penalties for equipping certain wargear, would fuck with the game. These devs can't even get basic barrel mods right and I doubt even the players will be able to chip in to make something fun of this, all you'd end up with is a massive clusterfuck on your loadout screen and, given that most players understand so little, maybe 3 - 4 viable loadouts for each class which is actually pretty similar to what we have now.

You could very easily remove melee without it having any real impact on most matches, in fact some people might actually get more kills by not being given a reason to rush in blindly like an idiot. Regardless of that however, I've looked at your next post and there's zero suggestions to separate melee attacks from the movement system so regardless what you do in that change, it'll still play like shite. It'll either be changed to be so powerful that no one will play ranged or everyone will continue playing as they do now.

As long as we have an RPS system rather than a fluid melee system, it is impossible for us to have a skill based melee system. It will always boil down to spam and I-frame usage to get close and then spamming attacks in order to break the durability of a tactical, who breaks in two hits mind you, before winning. Even extending this break time won't change anything as it'll just make melee classes even worse and even easier for tacticals to gun down, even with i-frames.

Never look at melee and equalize the DPS, because you're ignoring the stagger inflicted by melee which prevents shooting, the ability to practically one-shot and the synergy it has with rollex which allow melee classes to basically roll around and take zero damage whilst murdering a tactical with ease as long as they're a bad player. I can tell how little you understand of the melee system that you say "All that said, I feel as though the RPS system, without its stuns, is actually pretty solid and its unlikely to be radically changed even as much as we wanted it to be." in your post after this one. The RPS system is the largest reason why the melee in EC cannot be buffed to be on par with ranged, because it takes zero skill and is already a commanding presence purely by nature of staggering and preventing ranged attacks as well as 3 shotting most builds and being extremely spammable.

And again, you put headshots as a requirement for Eldar weapons to be viable but male L/CSM weapons require bodyshots to kill with not much reward for headshots, which as I've told you, is a shit step for any shooter - EVERY faction should reward skill if you can land headshots. They are, alongside positioning, the single greatest tool a skilled player has for beating the odds and not simply turning the game into a zerg fest where numbers > skill in 80% of situations.

You can hide it behind whatever illusions you want, but I see through this Dominov - this is the same attempt to make the Eldar a much more rewarding faction for skilled players than any other in-game. that you've been pushing for almost a year now. To summarize, adding moba-style loadout choices with penalties for certain choices and a lot more options with percentage increases in certain stats would fuck with the game on an unprecedented scale, we'd have easily 10x the useless equipment items available to us and there'd be so many noob traps it wouldn't even be funny. There would still only be like 2 - 3 valid builds for each class, it's just now it would take longer for people to calculate all of the items to determine a meta and then go back to business as usual.