Putting together this thread for people to ask short questions of the community, though Devs may interact.
Couple of reasons:

1. We see the same questions over and over. Community can help each other here.
2. There are issues that aren't classifiable as bugs for reporting purposes but just seem off.
3. Asymmetric balance is tricky: Some stuff seems incredibly imba 1v1 but makes sense within a Faction.​

What I'm going to do is compile the answers in the following reserved post.

Between the Dev posts, Twitch Q&A, Discord communities and the Community Q&A team there is a ton of information floating around in the ether so this will act as a link hub, but there are still thousands of new details that are worth discussing.

​

So only a few guidelines I remotely care about:

• Keep it brief. Paragraph or less is perfect.
• If you have an answer, preferably with a current link, post it.
  
• Debate but don't argue minutiae beyond the relevant or I'll have it removed.
  
• Be respectful but ffs have a sense of humour.
• Bugs go in the bug bucket https://bhvrmtl.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
• Don't talk out your ass. A lot of us know the game well. Test before commenting.

​

<RESERVED FO NOOU>

Well I guess I'll start, with the most obvious and gamebreaking bug that I can think of:

The ability to dodge roll out of the stun portion of a successful Dbash parry is out of control and completely ruins the melee system at the moment. It's been 100% solved and replicated with nearly every single LSM I ever face rolling out of my successful Dbashes 100% of the time unless I lead my parry by several SECONDS and the stun hits while they're still clanging off of me due to hitting me with a fast attack.

Because of this "get out of your own stupidity" jail free card, RPS is still broken giving massive advantages to JPA, but really for all classes. For tacticals, they roll out and start shooting me before my animation even finishes, for JPA they side dodge and attack me from the back before my animation finishes. At this point, Dbashing at best grants you 1 free attack, at worst is guaranteed death. It's bullshit that my only option is to Dbash the fast attack spam, and they can simply never be punished for it ever by rolling, and as a result I have no window to counter attack or escape.

I'm aware it applies to all factions both ways, however this problem is made incredibly punishing and stupid with grav guns for LSM. Once a marine with one rolls away while I'm still locked into my animation which barely covers any ground, they've got the laser on and I'm 100% dead.

I'd rather disagree with this now or never. First off, its completely wrong from gameplay perspective and it is quite a common idea that can not be ignored.

Current bash is a death sentence for melee guy that was staggered. You can get 2 fast attacks in on anyone at all times assuming the stagger actually applies and you take no delays. With apothecary this will mean fancy 100% poison and we all know how deadly those is. I am killing 100% of melees this way, its reliable as hell. For ranged guns this means that you have ~1.5-1.6 s of stagger which with a tiny shooting delay for guns is 1.3 s of point blank pure(100%) headshot firing, which on bolter is 7 headshots or 550 dmg to raw marine or 370 to toughness 155. Even assuming that you fuck off some shots or start a bit late it will be around a solid 300 dmg to tanky target which means most of its hp. (i hope no one wants to kill melee in melee range as a devastator out here, right?)

I will say it this way as a ranged main: if you are not killing most you targets after one bash you are playing ranged completely wrong.

Obviously, you have to score bash first, which is tricky. And of course by score i mean inflict stagger and not just "play animation close enough". Now, on normal conditions, assaulting player that knows his shit has enough time to either react to too-early bash or roll\evade(and yes, you can roll out) from too late. 90% of melees dont do this, of course and are free kills therefore.

But assuming he rolls out and gets away, whats next? You can bash again and try this up to 4 times or you can try to gain ground or time while he is rolling out of your bash(you can roll out of yours, which i hope everyone is aware of), through some effort survive past 10s of time which means a lost melee duel for attacker, so on and so forth. the problems start not with bash and not with how your target can escape it. The problems for a ranged player come when your enemy starts using heavies and durability game comes into play.

Heavies are the main instrument of melee v ranged superiority right now, and god, they save the situation since otherwise ranged would kill melees much more then 10% of time they are supposed to. Current heavy attacks have a dead zone. It is a zone far enough from caster to still be reached by attack but not close enough for him to be interrupted at that time. So, if you are separated enough from heavy attack caster with a knife, you are very screwed, trying to interrupt it will result in clang, which now is x1.5 dura loss which will be changed to x1 next patch, you can try to bash to negate some dmg, but you will be hit with heavy and a combo fast if your enemy has a sword(which he has most of the time) which will result in x2 dmg dealt to you or you can try to roll. Rolling is the most preferable option, since it does not come with inescapable penalty to either Ehealth or dura but it has drawback too which i'd rather not dwell into right now.

Summarizing all that, the problem is not the bash, its the bloody heavy attack that is very hard to deal with as a ranged player. Getting out of dead zone takes too much time without rolling to escape dmg, which means you either never get into it or you roll out.

Getting this fixed in favor of ranged will turn the tables, unfortunately, since 1.5s of stagger was the worse fix to parry developers could make( without nerfing guns point blank,that is ).

You're talking about something completely different than what I am talking about.

What I am talking about is the flagrant abuse of an exploit that allows players to completely ruin the RPS melee system. From my experience 90% of players know and fully abuse this exploit to 100% efficiency making Dbashing ineffective and never a good option since it usually results in putting you in a worse position despite it being the corrcet move in the RPS system. THAT is what I'm trying to highlight here.

You on the other hand spent all that text talking about the results of a successful Dbash stun, a Unicorn scenario for me since it only connects 15% of the time because literally every LSM dodges out of it nowadays. Its a completely separate discussion of what should happen should a dbash stun connect.

Your assessment that 90% of melees don't fully abuse this is factually incorrect, unless some factions can dodge roll out better than others. I would not be surprised by this since as an ork it's very rare for me to be able to dodge roll out of a marine Dbash, most likely because the marine animation isn't total shit and actually covers more distance and hits quicker than the ork one does.

To further discuss your tangent though, tacticals HAD to get a longer Dbash stun because the way it way before, it was literally impossible for tacticals to have a single moment of counter play to the fast attack herp derp spammers before the patch changed it. Before it gave them at best a timing reset of the fight, and at worst a dodge exploit would result in just getting hit again. The stun duration increase was to let tacticals actually be able to do damage to melee attackers instead of everything except other melees being a free kill to the derp spammers since dbash was no punishment at all.

If something needs to be changed about what happens after a dbash stun, fine. But don't confuse that issue with one about people who, frankly, are just cheating at this point. And make no mistake, it is cheating, it doesn't matter if its within the game.

On another note, until exploits are fixed, all balance has to be done with the knowledge that the exploit is still around and concessions have to be made to compensate for the exploit until it is resolved. You can't balance a game around cheaters, you have to stop the cheating then balance the game around the intended functionality.

Nah, playing against LSM, hardly anyone evades yet alone rolls away. 90% is 90% for me and it is what we, CSM are experiencing. But who knows, maybe there are some different hidden LSM playing with orks out there

I'll just say that roll is possible or not depending on your bash timing. With early enough bash it is completely impossible for anyone involved aside for JA, since life is a bit easier for them.

No, they hadn't. There were multiple solutions or redesigns to bash weakness problem and making it synergizing for 500 dmg with their gun was definitely not the best of them. I downed JA with that bash, brain deterioration and risks of heavy attacking forced a lot of melees to just forget about everything except fast attacks. 4 bashes were all that was required to kill them. I will never forget poor JA soul that got killed by me 3 times in the row just with bash + roll + shoot combo.

Also, dodge exploit will not result in dmg infliction since you can roll out before their comeback attack hit you. There is difficulties facing JA swoop swoop heavy combo though. But since its related to heavy attack it is exactly about what i was talking earlier.

While bash was lacking in stopping power, you could easily hold off any spammer and by playing tactically come on top of the game most of the time.

Abusing exploits is not the same way as cheating, you know. Especially when exploits are related to poor coded timing which at that point means that its not even an exploit, its a root inside poorly designed system.

I will note, however, that there will be a design problem in a game where you dont die 9 out of 10 times when entering a melee range as a ranged specialist. Current situation is just absurd. My tac scores 40 kills with such an ease mainly due to weak state of, cough, LSM i am playing again in melee, cough.

Its very possible that Marine Dbash just works better than the Ork one. I know for a fact the ork one doesn't travel as far and I'm fairly confident the boot to the head portion is faster for marines than the ork swing or whatever they do now. Unfortunately I can't find the comparison video.

As an ork, unless I start my dbash at least 1 second early before they start attacking the animation for the fast attack, the enemy LSM WILL roll out of it, every single time. I've had fights where they roll out of it 4-6 times in a row. Basically Orks have to be psychic and know what the marine will do ahead of time to actually be able to land a dbash stun.

Also if there was a glitch that allowed for instant reloading, would that not be considered cheating? Just because its a bug within the game itself doesn't make it any less cheating, especially when it's done so incredibly reliably at this point. Its a conscious decision these people are making to break the rules to give themselves an unfair advantage.

I've even starting coming across marines who have figured out how to cancel the Dbash parry clang into a heavy attack which ignores the stun and lands the heavy one me. So now my Dbash is actually just a vehicle to get a heavy attack to the face with 100% certainty since they fast attack until they see the parry then glitch into the heavy once they bounce off.

Having no attack window was terribly constricting meta. You're spot on it's flipped to advantage Tact now. When a Bash win + Fast Attack clang was breaking the knife last month I was getting awful salty but no fire delay on most high burst Tact weapons after an Evade, Bash or clean hit is clearly just as bad.

Personally think the Big Shoota delay would be appropriate. It's night and day vs the SB or TLSC. Or at least make me switch to pistol where the damage is solid for head shots but not enough that just anyone can noob-spray someone down after a single Bash. Been talking to Michael about that this week.

Agree on the inconsistency. I'm going to do some UAT testing on the various Faction Bashes and interactions this week and post vids, hopefully with someone else recording their POV. Lots of people have been raising attack range, stagger & double-bash output issues, and I do find my Orky suffers from the most fails (objectively).

Nathan mentioned the client/client disconnect has been terrible lately and seeings the stagger pose and 'dizzy' FX both appear to be client side I'm constantly seeing successful Bashes where the guy playing in Europe/Oceania has rolled away long ago (0.2s ago, but still). That's always been a problem with EC's emphasis on client-side 'tells', right through pre-alpha, but now we're seeing 350-500ms latency as a result of the shitastic Amazon servers.

Whether it's a latency thing or a problem with the Ork Bash I'm not sure. Could be both. All faction actions could really do with being normalized for a patch THEN tweaked for asymmetric complexity (don't even get me started on the Eldar vs SM Evade Attack ranges). I'll forward this feedback and the test results to Brent too, he's in charge of all things melee atm, and talk to some of the all-faction players. I know @DJPenguin has confirmed a few discrepancies with me.

If it was possible I'd say to add the delay to Dbash recovery itself for shooting in general. The Big Shoota wind up delay is like having a crap heavy boltor and severely impedes its usefulness in many situations and adding it to other guns would make them awful and completely skew balance in a major way.
I'd say current time for pistols would be fine with like 0.25 or 0.5s added delay for rifles after dbash before they could shoot. But adding delays like that would probably be a lot of work for devs and would confuse players as well wondering why they couldn't shoot.
Honestly I don't think the shooting immediately after dbash is a huge issue, but I can understand why people would want it tuned and adding a delay would give the devs a hook to tweak it without changing Dbash in general. What I do know is I don't want it to go back to tacs basically being free kills because there was no escape from melee.

Your last point was kinda of what I was trying to get at where balancing with broken mechanics is fine short term, but people should understand that once the systems get fixed they'll need to be re-balanced again. The best case of this recently was when they fixed or heavy attack animations and their win rates went from 60% to like 15%. Technically it was a fix that should have been done, not arguing there, but Orks had been balanced with that issue in place, so once it was fixed, it completely tanked ork competitiveness.

I guess what I'm saying is balance is hard and very delicate, it's like walking on ice, gotta take it slow and careful, but sometimes you slip (bugs happen) and take a header into the concrete.