Speaking strictly from an EC gameplay perspective, the tactical's main weapons are all ranged. He currently does not have the option to equip a chainsword or other melee-focused weapon outside the knife. In this sense, I'd consider the tactical to be a ranged class. You are meant to run away from melee and shoot. Yes, you should be able to out-skill an assault, but really that should be a last resort considering your melee weapon is not as effective nor efficient as theirs. But I feel that discussion is for another thread. Patch 19's combat for assaults was relatively the same as it is right now. The fluidity was improved because of the free movement and turning of the new heavy attack. The bash was as ineffective as it is now and you see the symptoms of it in every match. It really depends what you mean by "fast" because I don't think melee kills have ever been slow. It was always either a 1-2 mistake system and you're finished. A stagger (much like getting hit from a lunge attack while bashing right now) from hitting the bash would ensure decent punishment and close that huge window to pull off the evade/roll. Finally, it comes down to playstyle. I don't think melee should carelessly charge into rooms full of ranged characters and engage in melee without getting gunned down. It's happening right now. It should normally be carefully picking off the stragglers and flanking devastators or supports to provide your own tacticals room to advance. If you're attacking a person and his friends come, you should naturally have to hit the road. You shouldn't be able to fight the odds so easily.
Mechanically, regardless of the weapon you should have an equal chance like anyone else. Statistically, some weapons are better, but as above, that doesn't change anything, just about who you fight and how you fight.
FYI The Knife hits for only 15% less damage than the Chainsword. Until patch 20 it was a Viable close combat weapon. Until Bash stopped Stunning and Force Tiers were amplified. View: https://youtu.be/IIfefiUaIfg So no. As much as you'd like to consider a Tatical as a Dedicated Ranged class, it is not. How can we ever expect Rifle class weapons to hit as hard as Heavy? Don't Heavy Weapons completely fill the role of Dedicated Ranged? Why have a slightly more mobile but less damage dealing Dedicated Ranged??? The way Tacticals were was and is completely consistent with lore. Having Astartes Tacticals that just drop dead when Assaults get close enough to them is ridiculous...
Its obvious Raptors are a but too good right now. The Fist need to be fixed to be a bit more difficult to use vs infantry while remaining a beast vs tanks and boss type units. Brent before nerfing all Melee into the ground please consider: The last 8 to 10 weeks Defensive Bash has made players invincible to all Melee attacks, to include Strong Attacks. Enter patch 20. Defensive bash no longer makes players invincible to all Melee attacks and is even failing to stop fast attacks occasionally. And since patch 20, all of the sudden all the Dbash spammers are convinced all Melee is totally op because they lost their 100% invulnerability by spamming the bash. That's a problem because most everyone that thinks the last 8 to 10 weeks prior to patch 20 is how Melee combat is suppose to work, and they're stunned by how "OP" they think Melee is because bash doesn't make them totally immune to all Melee damage. That's not how the bash is supposed to work, that's not how bash worked prior to patch 18. What we don't need to happen is to knee jerk nerf all Melee into oblivion because players were totally spoiled by being totally invulnerable to all Melee via that broken Dbash that gave 100% immunity to all Melee attacks.... Keep in mind the bash incorrectly giving 100% invulnerability vs all Melee was the state of the game for almost 3 months. Now that that broken state of the bash is gone all Melee is miraculously OP? I don't think that's right. Fix the Fist, Fix Raptors. Don't destroy everything else Melee related because of broken Melee mechanics. Players need to get used to the fact they're no longer 100% invulnerable vs all Melee by spamming the bash and start playing the game as its intended to be played. And FYI I'm still not seeing strong attacks soundly defeating the Bash. In fact it appears strong attacks clang vs the Bash instead of defeating the bash and damaging our opponent. We are a dog chasing our tail nerfing Melee classes, buffing Melee, nerfing Melee, all the while Melee mechanics and Melee rules still aren't all working correctly.
What about reducing travel distance on fist light attacks and lunge attacks while keeping the strong attack distance the same. It doesn't have to be a very large reduction, but the lunge attack is primarily the culprit right now. The lack of animation on the windup combined with the lunge attacks ability to stagger the bash for a free hit and the travel distance of the lunge is what is causing so much pain. I realize the fist used to be very hard (almost impossible) to use against infantry for similar reasons, but if the goal is 1-2 light swings will kill a player, they should have some ability to outrun and outmaneuver the fist.
Agreed. IMO, melee is crap atm not because of the broken power-fist but because of: a. too long distance for all power weapons lunge attacks (maul, axe and powerfist, powersword excluded) b. broken d-bash taking too long to be employed properly and effectively (short stun would help a ton) c. soft-lock being too effective. Hitting anything is not related to skill/targetting anymore, it's a autoaimbot that just needs to go. d. weapon tiers should determine who wins the clangs, not affect the outcome of the RPS system as it is now. Unfortunately, instead of fixing those, I fear that what we'll get is a return to a goddamn awful idea of Jump Assualt being a "glass-cannon", with reduced survivability and 2 fuel bars. Raptors and JA already sacrifice their ability to fight effectively in ranged combat (side-arms being useless at it), why should they be impaired also in close combat or mobility is beyond me. #brentellison please consider the fact, that recent JPA/Raptor spam is mainly related to how easy it is to get kills due to the over-effective lock-on, not the JPA mobility. How about we just get rid of the soft-lock entirely for the Jump Classes? There is a hard-lock on activated by the player anyway, why should melee get an extra bonus? It is coming from me, as an avid JPA player and I do feel that some weapons need a hard look into, but lets not destroy the class and bring it back to the brink of being almost useless - again. Staying-in-the-fight power of the JPA is not the problem. Core rules of melee suffering from recent lock-on handicap is. Patch 16 done it right, please let's try and go back to it (with improved reliability of dbash).
Lunge distance nerfs are questionable. We have more than just lunge distance issues going on right now. Lunge distances have covered the same distances in the past when the game was pretty solid(patch 16). The fact that now there's also stuttering and teleporting, it's impossible to judge the intended lunge distances with the teleporting and overall game instability while in close combat. To simply say "nerf lunge distance" when the netcode that effects how we are seen by others as moving around the game world isnt working right, that makes no sense what so ever. Soft lock is a no brainer and needs to be removed totally, at least in my humble opinion. The Hard lock is enough and when working and tracking properly, the Hard Lock is more than enough. It's worked great in the past(patch 16) and it seems that we're getting back to that same point of the mechanic working and tracking reliably.
Lunge is conjectural, it can go either way. I know they just reduced them, was it not enough? Bash previously Stunned against almost any attack, except sometimes Heavy Attacks. Under no circumstances should we bring that back... RPS design is for Bash to only be effective against Fast Attacks (and maybe running attacks). Currently, it IS, but all it seems to do is negate their damage and do a slight amount of damage to them. In my opinion, speeding up melee was absolutely vital to improving the 40k feel of the game, and by removing the DBash stun, they have certainly achieved the speed. Bash stunning or disengaging slows melee down too much again. All they really need to do about Bash is increase its speed and damage a bit. Threat it as a Parry or Riposte rather than a Kick. 100% agree on Force Tiers, they should only affect Clangs. Maybe a PARTIAL effect when winning RPS, but that is up for debate/testing. As far as Soft Lock I am 100% in for it staying, for all the reasons I posted in the Soft Lock thread. On a side note about your post: - Pistols were brought back up in Damage. All they lack now is Range and Sustain. Less than 10m they are 100% viable in between swings. - JPA and Raptor Jinks are way too strong. It allows the Jump Trooper to ignore RPS and get free hits. - Patch 16 had serious issues as well. DBash was not good.
Interesting point. In that case, lets not discuss anything about the game till the netcode gets fixed Seriously tho, why exactly should the power axe/maul/fist lunge be longer in distance than the other weapons? They deal more damage, is it not enough for you? Other way of fixing it is reducing the amount of I-frames involved with the lunge and strong attacks. As it is, spamming lunge/strong attack + evade combo is prevalent and easily overrides the RPS. Agreed on the d-bash, thats my point as well. It was designed like this and used to work like that in patch 16 (when it decided to work actually . I also dont want the return of be all end all dbash - the ultimate melee move - as we've seen in last 2-3 patches. Short stun would punish RMB spam tho and would let ranged to compete in close combat. Speeding it up will help immensely, hope that will be enough. Also, I would love to see the strong attack properly break dbash and deal damage as well, not clang against it.
