While playing last night I kept running into a nagging problem while melee'ing. Light attack spammers from Tacts/Heavies.

Now obviously, the answer is "just Dbash them noob" which yes, that does work, however the animation time for a Dbash is plenty of time for someone to shoot me thus killing me without even at least taking someone with me because RPS took too long. My ONLY alternative to this would be to spam FA myself, which would take just as long if not longer(and make even more noise to alert others to my presence).

This got me thinking, what if we just speed up the system, would this solve issues?

My initial thinking is to take the standard timeframe for Sword FA and slow it down a bit(maybe not quite as slow as Axe FA but around that).

Make this the baseline animation speed for FA, Dbash and HA. This should be fast enough to be fluid but still possibly leave a -little- time for actual reactions, not just shooting your RPS roll. Dbash and HA suddenly become quick answers.

Now of course you'll have to rebalance the weapons, WHICH IS GOOD, because right now they don't feel different enough. My thoughts on if we had normalized weapon speeds:

Swords/Daggers/Knuckles stay as they are pretty much.

Axes get increased Damage but weaker Impact than all other weapons, the glass cannon weapons. Pick right and dominate, pick wrong and lose badly.

Maces get increased Impact but slightly weaker damage than Axes(they are I believe about the same right now).

Fist/Klaw- This one is tricky, honestly we could leave it as an oddball outlier like it is currently with it's own odd rules.

OR

We give it different Infantry/Vehicle damage profiles(which is entirely possible, Gravgun/Cannon have this so I know it's entirely possible to code). This would let it get a Mace-like treatment and make it more for busting weapons and decent killing but with a side of AV to make up for the LP cost.


Melee combat becomes quicker, weapons get niches, people get stitches. Yes? No?

RPS doesn't matter and is a null and void concept as long as the speed of transitioning from KNIFE to BOLTER and rolling + shooting can both be done faster than 2/3 RPS animations.

-Rolling and shooting is faster than a strong attack. Especially vs Axe, Mace/Maul and Fist strong attacks. This gives the ranged player the advantage in close combat vs a close combat(melee) specialist. Most of the time not only is rolling and shooting faster, we can roll and start shooting and we will be well out of range of our melee opponent who was standing inches away before we started rolling.
-With a knife in hand clanging vs a sword we can swap to Bolter and fire faster than our opponent can execute a bash or strong attack. This gives the ranged player the advantage in close combat vs a close combat(melee) specialist.

How do we fix these issues? We reimplement the DELAY between swapping from knife to Bolter. We reimplement the delay AFTER we roll, BEFORE we can fire our Bolter. These delays were present 90% of Alpha and were present from launch up until Tactical Escalation. These delays were in place to make MELEE the better option vs a melee opponent because swapping from Knife to Bolter to knife to bolter takes too long(as it should) while in a MELEE encounter.

The difference will come from other stats.

Sword will outclang an Axe if the Axe user picks wrong, last longer against Mace than Axe will.

Axe will greatly outdamage a Sword/Mace if they pick right.

Mace will bust them all with extreme prejudice if they don't pick right and have middle of the road damage

Fist will be Mace-like but can be given full access to RPS system because it now has a separate damage profile when punching Infantry/Vehicles like a Gravgun.

Also the Fist HA lost it's Lock On ability on purpose awhile ago. It's part of the attempt to balance it's extreme power in the Melee RPS system.

Back when Klaw/Fist had tracking on their Heavy Attacks, their HAs turned them into 10m homing death-rockets. EVERYONE ran Fist or Klaw back then while the Eldar wept. As much as people try to deny it, in its barest form the Klaw/Fist are capable of playing the entire range of the RPS, so long as the user correctly predicted the enemy's reactions, as goes for any form of melee combat in this game. The tracking simply had to go.

Axes and Maces will be fine if we get rid of the ridiculously long wind up and follow through animations. Brent added these about a week prior to the game going live.

1. Axes/Mauls/Maces still swung slower than swords PRIOR to that horrible nerf, they just didnt take a second to a second and a half to cue up a single fast attack. This can be fixed if we revert the wind up and follow through animations to be faster(like they used to be).

So to be clear.

Leave Axe/Mauls attack speeds alone. The actual speed of the swing is NOT the issue. The timing/speed issues are the horrifically long wind and and follow through animations. The extraordinarily long follow through animation is just as much responsible for the poor performance of axes and mauls and the horribly long wind up. Fix both please.

We're playing a 'shoot 'em up' and melee should play like a 'beat 'em up' so I'm all for melee animations being quicker.

We're playing a third person shooter with melee elements grafted from a single player RPG. It's important that melee is represented in a 40K game, but not like this.

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For the RPS system to prevail you would need to make ranged as clunky and unsuitable for the environment as melee is. And this is what gets argued, in essence, almost every time improvements to melee are suggested.

I do understand the desire to make melee good. I do read almost all the output of the various interested parties. I do not agree that digging a deeper hole with the existing system is the answer.

Looking at the game as a whole, which everyone should do, it is apparent that there are many factors that dictate the success or failure of melee attacks. I suggest reducing or removing those factors is a better course of action. Making RPS work is a dead horse, but I fear the path BHVR has taken (and is taking) is making it good enough without tackling the underlying cause.

I'm receptive to a thoughtful and reasoned discussion from any interested party on melee improvement, with the proviso that I'm not interested in expired equine evisceration.

It can be clanged with light attacks yes, but the problem was people were just sitting around corners forever holding a HA and then locking onto someone coming around the corner or standing on the other side of the wall and the game would auto guide your cruise missle one shot fist into them.

Now at least if you want to catch someone around the corner you have to manually aim and have good timing.

I do like dread's idea on this, because the thoughts I've had on melee incorporate a good chunk of his own. I might have to hang up my Git Prod if its going to lose to swords too but seems a fair trade.

You can manually adjust your aim just before the hop. And they aren't getting out of the way of that unless they dodgehop off the wall.