Here is the rage fueled, hate forged, version: Or here is the polite, reasonable rage free version if you prefer:
Yet prior to 1.3 total ranged kills was well over 60% of all kills compared to melee kills being around 40%. Now were around 80% of all kills being scored by ranged archetypes versus around 20% of all kills being scored by melee classes. And just FYI axes and mauls were still garbage prior to 1.3 and have been garbage since they were nerfed a few weeks prior to the game going live last fall. Well over HALF of all melee weapons for LSM, CSM and Orks are total and complete garbage as a result. All the shooter fanboys that want a pure shooter in EC are in for a very rude awakening if/when we ever see a good 50/50 balance between total ranged kills and total melee kills. Those of us that enjoy playing melee most of the time, our gaming experience shouldn't be any less important than those that play primarily ranged. We bought the same game everyone else has. Telling us to be happy with 60/40 is total bullshit. If it was the other way around and melee archetypes were scoring 80% of all kills the "ranged posse" would be shitting golden fucking bricks and giving themselves aneurysms and blown blood vessels in their foreheads from the sheer frustration of being totally dominated 24/7 like ranged now dominates melee. And just FYI melee archetypes have NEVER gone above 40% of all total kills, even in the days during Alpha when melee was extremely OP for a few patch cycles total melee kills never went over 40%. The fact that this insanely ridiculous imbalance between ranged vs melee has now gone on for four months is unfathomable. It's to the point I've removed all but a handful of melee loadouts on all my characters.
Ranged will always out perform melee with pure KDR. Heavy classes are safe enough and kill fast enough that they will get good KDRs. Compared to melee who have to get neck deep in enemy lines and become a massive target that everyone turns to shoot at.
Hell yeah, neck deep in blood, viscera and blades through the endless storm of bolts and plasma all the way. Every time I try Devastator I'm just find myself itching to just get up off of that wall and go smash something in the face with the butt of my gun, I just don't have the patience to wait for my prey to come to me lol. Is what it is I guess, <3 Melee thug life. if Ranged absolutely must have their easymode at least I know every kill I get as Melee is hard earn't and worth enduring the rage inducing bolt storm.
This, it was basically TTK against ranged fire that started all this. On one hand, it was decently balanced but ridiculous that melee players could bumrush through 30m of fire with gap closers from the front. On the other, without that TTK we fixed the problem of charging through ranged fire (which is good) but now the ranged fire actually in melee is incredibly strong (which is bad). Which is why almost everyone and their mother wants to increase the time it takes to shoot after being melee'ed/ or using melee so that firing mid-melee isn't an option. Do that one change, and watch the game change immensely. In addition, do that one change before anything else, if you do any more than that (if you do that) then the pendulum is just going to swing AGAIN. If they don't do that change then it's just going to be a stupidly over-complicated balancing act that will shit on all classes/factions because they'll be too busy tweaking all the numbers instead of actually fixing the damn problem. Calling it now
Even during the most overpowered days of the prototype MON TA during early Alpha we still couldn't bumrush from 90 feet away. While I appreciate your candor and honesty on the need for a delay when going from knife melee to Bolter Fire, the bumrush from 30 yards/90 feet away while eating Bolter the entire time didn't happen even on the most OP melee builds of all time. So it sure as heck wasn't happening just prior to 1.3. January time frame prior to patch 1.3 was the most balanced EC has ever been. It took more than 2 and a half years of game development and 18 months of dedicated player testing and feedback to reach that point of balance between melee and range. All that work totally wiped out by a single patch. All of the current melee vs ranged woes were self inflicted by BHVR via patch 1.3 and were totally unnecessary. We threw out and/or ignored 1.5 years of lessons learned during Alpha and Beta testing with patch 1.3 and set ranged vs melee balance back 24 months of game development. We can only hope BHVR doesn't choose to keep forgetting what we learned during Alpha. At this point we are simply rehashing and rexperiencing the same broken/imbalanced mechanics that were sorted out during Alpha and Beta.
I said 30m in game which is more like 30ft in actual talk. Basically my 30m is like, what the game measures out as 30m which is actually not that far. And the 30m I more meant is 30m with gap-closers depending on the class (I usually say that in other posts, I just left it out here). Like a JPA can easily gap close 30m by in game measurement (or could I should say), even while being fired upon. Obviously GA's were closer to 15-20 depending on their loadout, maybe more depending on situations of course. So when you see me say 30m, remember I'm measuring by the in game version of 30m, which is closer to 30ft in a reasonable measurement in game. Yeah even I agree 90ft/m never happened. As for the rest, like I said I agree. It was pretty balanced before the TTK changes. Still we could keep the "charging under fire" fix that was kind of the whole point of the patch, but un nerf melee by just simply making shooting during melee not viable. Not only would this give melee classes a shit ton of durability in their niche, it would make slow swing weapons actual options. Slow swing weapons don't suck against other melee options because even with a slow swing they can clang and win by durability (or at least break even)(and when game performance doesn't muck it up). They suck because the swing is so slow they can be fired upon and killed with ranged damage before it ends. On top of that, it would heavily nerf the knife. Currently the knife is by far and away the worst melee weapon, we all know it. The only reason it is strong is because it gives ranged classes a chance to shoot (in Dbashes or clanges). If they couldn't shoot, then the shittyness of the knife would truly be clear because it would only be "a knife versus a better weapon" instead of "a knife until I can shoot versus a better melee weapon". So, if they want to revert ttks and such (which I doubt they will), then keep the current Dbash stun and knife durability, but don't implement the delay in shooting and all that on top of it or it will go out of whack. If they want to keep TTKs like this so that people can't so easily charge around/through ranged fire as easily as before then just implement a longer "bring up" time for all ranged weapons in melee (pistols included). Start there and see what the change is like, after that I'm all for trying out other changes like knife durability changes or melee mechanic changes and what not. Basically, I'm all for a fix, but this game can't handle many more pendulum swings in balance. It's just too much. So let's fix it, but do the big change (bringing up ranged weapons in melee being slower), see where we are at, then try some of the other 100 ideas people have had (some horrible some with merit).
I'd indeed thoroughly and most persistently recommend to read wh40k books before making any decisions or claiming any points....*nods nods* Almost all of them should be enough (not all, but almost all). If any readers of this thread require any additional consulting services regarding how to read almost all of wh40k books they are free to contact me or Mr. Brujah. Both of us have Ph.D. in wh40kology, having graduated from the Malcador's University in 2010.
