After the melee weapon switching change, keep the quick melee keybind's ability to do combo-less attacks

[Apav]

I don't take issue with this upcoming change where using your melee attack with your primary or secondary out pulls out your melee weapon. But when your melee weapon is out you are forced to do combo attacks. And since this change is removing quick melee, DE is also removing the only way you can do combo-less attacks. Now why would you want to do combo-less attacks you might be wondering? There are a few circumstances where people prefer this. A good example is a polearm with the Bleeding Willow stance.

Repeatedly pressing E with your primary or secondary out. Notice how freely I am able move around and how fluid the animation is, perfectly looping itself:

Repeatedly pressing E with your melee out. Notice how less fluid it is. In trying to start a combo animation, it does this frequent swipe attack that not only breaks the flow of the attack, but stops my movement. Much harder to move around with the frequent stops: 

I like this quick melee attack more than both slide attacks and combos, it's much easier to control my movement and has a wide range. But with the upcoming change, any melee attack will pull my polearm out and thus I will only be able to do what is shown in the second gif. But there is a way to go ahead with this change and keep certain attacks from trying to do a combo. Currently there are two separate keybinds for melee and quick melee, both bound to E by default. DE could leave the quick melee keybind in, unbound by default, and make it so that when you bind it to a button and press it, your melee will do combo-less attacks as shown in the first gif. People who aren't interested can simply leave the keybind unbound and it doesn't affect them. 

So while attacking with your melee will pull it out after these changes, you would still be able to do the same attacks you could to do with quick melee, if you chose to use those. 

Edited March 9, 2019 by Apav

[Hyohakusha]

^ This times 1000. "Quickmelee is the best polearm stance" is only half a joke because it's true. Stepping into a swing, being held in place and getting shot sucks. Scythe stances are the worst offenders of this, and polearm stances show why freedom of foot movement is so important. I seriously hope DE isn't going to unify hold forward into the new combos, as that will only end up making melee feel like crap. Getting stuck in the same combos when those combos restrict your movement would be a straight nerf to melee, and some pretty particles won't make up for the loss of mobility. DE needs to be very careful with melee 3.0 otherwise its just going to feel like a massive nerf to a main aspect of the game.

[Andele3025]

Thats fixed with stance variety (for ones that alter quick melee) and block cancel (while actually using melee, hold block and wait for next click just till the recovery animation starts).
True issue that might come up with the new swap thing is if they replace the ability to have separate keybinds per melee vs range loadouts/if it removes the option to make the dedicated melee keybind (the one that only works while on melee) be left click so that no matter if gun or blade, left click is attack.

[Apav]

18 hours ago, Andele3025 said:

Thats fixed with stance variety (for ones that alter quick melee) and block cancel (while actually using melee, hold block and wait for next click just till the recovery animation starts).
True issue that might come up with the new swap thing is if they replace the ability to have separate keybinds per melee vs range loadouts/if it removes the option to make the dedicated melee keybind (the one that only works while on melee) be left click so that no matter if gun or blade, left click is attack.

I'm not sure why you think these solve this issue, I just tested these and they don't. Block cancel does not allow me to do what's shown in the first gif. As for the other stances:

Shimmering Blight with primary out: Same as Bleeding Willow and no stance quick melee, the attack I want to keep doing

 

Shimmering Blight with melee out: Similar to Bleeding Willow's attack with the melee out, but instead of a jab breaking the animation and movement I do a single thrust

 

Twirling Spire with primary out: Single thrust then swipe attack

 

Twirling Spire with melee out: Same as its quick melee, but after the swipe attack it completes the rest of the combo

 

I even tried no stance.

 

No stance with primary out: Same as Bleeding Willow and Shimmering Blight's quick melee, the attack I want to keep doing

 

No stance with melee out: A series of forward poking thrust attacks

 

Needless to say, I'm pretty confused. Why does no stance, Shimmering Blight and Bleeding Willow all share the same melee attack with your primary/secondary out, and Twirling Spire is the only exception? But I guess with the upcoming change it will only matter what happens with the melee out, and sadly none of those do the attack in the first gif in my original post.

Edited February 9, 2019 by Apav

[(PSN)Ozymandias-13-]

They did say in Melee 3.0 they had a goal to streamline combo input. 

They could make all standard button spam the standard quick melee with no benefit beyond simplicity and make the special combo input provide combos with benefits. Of course that's under my optimistic assumption all combos will actually get a benefit outside of simply alternate attack animations like most of them are now. 

[Apav]

2 hours ago, (PS4)Riko_113 said:

They did say in Melee 3.0 they had a goal to streamline combo input. 

They could make all standard button spam the standard quick melee with no benefit beyond simplicity and make the special combo input provide combos with benefits. Of course that's under my optimistic assumption all combos will actually get a benefit outside of simply alternate attack animations like most of them are now. 

If they're completely getting rid of quick melee and combo-less attacks, I hope this is the cast. It won't do as much damage as a full combo, it won't proc any IPS statuses, but it is streamlined and fast. 

Edited February 9, 2019 by Apav

[Andele3025]

3 hours ago, (PS4)Riko_113 said:

They did say in Melee 3.0 they had a goal to streamline combo input. 

They could make all standard button spam the standard quick melee with no benefit beyond simplicity and make the special combo input provide combos with benefits. Of course that's under my optimistic assumption all combos will actually get a benefit outside of simply alternate attack animations like most of them are now. 

Vast majority of stances combos have some good damage boosting use (be it 1-2 forced procs, multihits on same attack, 25-150% bonus damage or a combo of those at once) unless its ancient """stances""" or the whips and scythe ones.

[Apav]

On 2019-02-09 at 4:00 PM, Andele3025 said:

Vast majority of stances combos have some good damage boosting use (be it 1-2 forced procs, multihits on same attack, 25-150% bonus damage or a combo of those at once) unless its ancient """stances""" or the whips and scythe ones.

They could improve the combo system but still give you an option of using a separate keybind to use combo-less quick attacks and each would have their uses. Combos for devastating hits and forced IPS procs but lock you into restrictive animations, and combo-less quick attacks that don't do as much damage and don't have any IPS procs but are fast, fluid and allow more freedom of movement. 

Edited February 10, 2019 by Apav

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

The lack of movement is from the stance combos. Which I do agree is annoying. Don't know why DE decided to throw this out then keep the old stance that locks us into attack animation. 

[5H4DE]

13 hours ago, Apav said:

They could improve the combo system but still give you an option of using a separate keybind to use combo-less quick attacks and each would have their uses. Combos for devastating hits and forced IPS procs but lock you into restrictive animations, and combo-less quick attacks that don't do as much damage and don't have any IPS procs but are fast, fluid and allow more freedom of movement. 

Once melee 3.0 is fully rolled out that won't be a thing anymore and we'll be able to interrupt animations at will.

[Steel_Rook]

Personally, my biggest concern with this proposed change is... What about those of us who rebound our equipped melee keys? I prefer to combo with left mouse, but only when my melee weapon is out. I get the idea of the fast weapon switch, but I'm not a fan of losing my quick melee or my dedicated separate melee combat keys.

[AresTheLegendary]

.....They're removing the quick-melee.....? lol DE really could not display a greater lack of knowledge on what the player base wants. Either that or they don't care.

[Apav]

11 hours ago, TheRealShade said:

Once melee 3.0 is fully rolled out that won't be a thing anymore and we'll be able to interrupt animations at will.

While you will be able to interrupt them, that doesn't change the fact that you still won't be able to move around as freely in the middle of doing them (not that I expected otherwise, just stating a fact). And that still doesn't solve the issue at hand here, there still won't be any way to do the old quick melee attacks like what's shown in the first gif. 

7 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Personally, my biggest concern with this proposed change is... What about those of us who rebound our equipped melee keys? I prefer to combo with left mouse, but only when my melee weapon is out. I get the idea of the fast weapon switch, but I'm not a fan of losing my quick melee or my dedicated separate melee combat keys.

Certainly, there are more problems created by removing quick melee than just this that they have yet to address. 

2 hours ago, AresTheLegendary said:

.....They're removing the quick-melee.....? lol DE really could not display a greater lack of knowledge on what the player base wants. Either that or they don't care.

Here are the immediate melee changes coming very soon. It looks cool and is a nice QoL improvement, but they are completely removing quick melee as a result. That creates some issues. 

Edited February 12, 2019 by Apav

[Xzorn]

Oh cool. Someone else noticed this coming.

I actually already did parsing tests on current quick attack and Twirling Spire's combo attack in a controlled environment. I can upload the videos if needed but I was waiting to see if this gets botched as I've already been aware in spite of DE's attempts Polearms perform better with Quick attack spam.

The comparison uses nothing but Atk Speed and Base damage on Serro (Electric) against armor. This was to produce a long parse time to reduce variance.

The results were 2 minutes and 5 seconds kill time on a lvl 100 Heavy Gunner with Quick attack and 2 minutes 20 seconds using the block combo of Twirling Spire.

• From this I could conclude that in spite of Twirling Spire's damage modifiers the DPS between the two was nearly the same.
• Given a full combo over 8 hits of Twirling Spire gives an overall avg damage bonus of 200% per attack.
• Since both had near kill times I could conclude Quick attack spam was roughly twice as fast as combo attacks.
• I then know that when Condition Overload and features of Corrosive status are in play that Quick attack is much better.

This is all aside from the animation problems with stunting momentum and movement... Actual performance drops will occur.

[MasterBurik]

If Melee 3.0 functions the way DE claims, it will no longer be necessary...but I see the value in keeping the quick melee option during the transition.

 

Upside for DE: If melee is placed its lowest point for the beginning of the process, the only way to move is up. 😉

[Apav]

8 hours ago, Xzorn said:

Oh cool. Someone else noticed this coming.

I actually already did parsing tests on current quick attack and Twirling Spire's combo attack in a controlled environment. I can upload the videos if needed but I was waiting to see if this gets botched as I've already been aware in spite of DE's attempts Polearms perform better with Quick attack spam.

The comparison uses nothing but Atk Speed and Base damage on Serro (Electric) against armor. This was to produce a long parse time to reduce variance.

The results were 2 minutes and 5 seconds kill time on a lvl 100 Heavy Gunner with Quick attack and 2 minutes 20 seconds using the block combo of Twirling Spire.

• From this I could conclude that in spite of Twirling Spire's damage modifiers the DPS between the two was nearly the same.
• Given a full combo over 8 hits of Twirling Spire gives an overall avg damage bonus of 200% per attack.
• Since both had near kill times I could conclude Quick attack spam was roughly twice as fast as combo attacks.
• I then know that when Condition Overload and features of Corrosive status are in play that Quick attack is much better.

This is all aside from the animation problems with stunting momentum and movement... Actual performance drops will occur.

Succinctly put, thank you. Didn't even think of the fact that CO polearms will greatly suffer if they get rid of the quick melee attack. We'll have to wait and see when the change goes through but if we do lose these attacks I'd appreciate it if you could upload those videos and make a thread! 

3 hours ago, MasterBurik said:

If Melee 3.0 functions the way DE claims, it will no longer be necessary...but I see the value in keeping the quick melee option during the transition.

 

Upside for DE: If melee is placed its lowest point for the beginning of the process, the only way to move is up. 😉

Melee 3.0 is going to unify the combo system and make the combos actually worth using, but that still won't provide as fast spammable attacks and nonrestrictive movement like a lot of weapons have with quick melee. No matter what they do with the combo system, they will always be combos after all. In some circumstances it's plain better and easier to use quick melee instead of combos, so all I'm suggesting is that I would appreciate if DE would give the ability to choose which one we want to use. Think of it no different as choosing which combo you want to use. 

Edited February 12, 2019 by Apav

[tekmansam]

Not only do I agree with the OP 100%, I too am dreading this change for one related issue.  I--barring polearms--really do not like spamming E for melee.  I much prefer having melee bound to left click.  Spamming E is actually pretty hard on my poor phalanges.  With these changes, I fear that I will no longer be able to use left click for melee.  This is quite upsetting to me.  This could be solved if E were some sort of "quick swap" that did a strike and switched your weapon.  You could then continue to use left click as your attack key.  As I understand it is to be--I am dreading it.

Edited February 17, 2019 by tekmansam

[Xzorn]

Okay, I did some basic editing on that video comparison for kill times between Polearm Quick Attack and Stance Attacks. Added a timer for reference and re-did a test in order to make sure I show the number of hits for the Quick attack version. Again, stance used was Twirling Spire's Block Combo.

Only three mods were used in this test. A Maxed Primed Pressure Point, a Riven with +%Damage and +%Atk Speed and Drifting Contact. That's it. No Elemental mods, no Condition Overload. Base Electric damage against Ferrite armor. A neutral damage modifier to produce the least variance possible without my finger falling off.

• The timer starts on the hit and ends when the model breaks.
• One accidental ground finisher was performed during the stance test.

Sorry for the 21:9 aspect ratio. feel free to skip through. I probably should have increased the playback speed.

Analysis:

• Quick Attack took exactly 2 minutes in kill time
• Quick Attack took exactly 502 hits and ended at 3.5x Combo
• 3.5x Combo begins at 405 hits. 97 Attacks were performed at 3.5x
• Stance Attack took exactly 2 minutes 13 seconds in kill time
• Stance Attack took exactly 301 hits and ended at 3.0x Combo
• Stance Attack took 201 less hits to kill the target.

Conclusion:

As I originally estimated Quick Attack is doing the same DPS as Twirling Spire's Block combo however it's hitting twice as fast. The difference of doing an additional 97 attacks at 3.5x apposed to 3.0x means the combo damage multiplier is what prevents it from showing exactly x2 speed difference via hits-to-kill. Any weapon making use of Condition Overload will receive benefits from faster attacks but more importantly Corrosive weapons will receive a tremendous performance boost using Quick Attack since Corrosive status functions as a direct counter to exponential Armor scaling. Every Corrosive Status is essentially doing +%eHP in damage so if no DPS is sacrificed. Faster is better.

Twirling Spire was buffed from it's original modifiers and it obviously needs more.

It doesn't really matter what build the Polearm is using Quick attack is either equal or considerably better. Especially if mobility is sacrificed.

 

[Crankthulhu]

I could have sworn somewhere they said that Melee 3.0 would streamline stance attacks even further, into a more Dynasty Warriors/Musou combat system instead of the weird Devil May Cry system we currently have.

[Hyohakusha]

@Xzorn THANK YOU! I've been trying to explain this for like a year and a half, but I can't record at a decent frame rate to show it. On the defensive end, the loss of mobility also means you end up getting hit more, and more of your attacks whiff, which means you need to move up and adjust. If hold forward becomes a unified combo input, it's only going to make it even worse.

[Xzorn]

6 hours ago, Hyohakusha said:

@Xzorn THANK YOU! I've been trying to explain this for like a year and a half, but I can't record at a decent frame rate to show it. On the defensive end, the loss of mobility also means you end up getting hit more, and more of your attacks whiff, which means you need to move up and adjust. If hold forward becomes a unified combo input, it's only going to make it even worse.

 

Yea sadly the best Polearm stance is quick attack.

I had hopes for Twirling Spire when it came out but it fell short esp since you can spoof Condition Overload with things like Zakti while using Quick attacks. At least with this change the option of spoofing CO with guns might become more common, though I fear that will leave Crit in the dust. Melee is already pretty status heavy.

[Apav]

On 2019-02-17 at 4:30 AM, Xzorn said:

-snip-

Thank you so much for testing this and showing how polearm quick melee is plain better not just with movement and fluidity, but DPS numbers too.

They just made a thread about the upcoming changes (are also streaming a dev workshop too currently) and they didn't address this at all:

They were also streaming a dev workshop where they tested out the melee changes on a player's account who had a polearm zaw using Shimmering Blight. Looks like this confirms our worst fears, there doesn't seem to be any combo-less attacks anymore. Well I saw this coming, which is why I made this thread. The fact that they're giving an option for left attack to still melee gives me hope that they will eventually add a keybind for quick melee attacks, so I hope they see this thread.

 

Edited February 22, 2019 by Apav

[Chaemyerelis]

Such immersive gameplay there.

[Xzorn]

12 hours ago, Apav said:

Thank you so much for testing this and showing how polearm quick melee is plain better not just with movement and fluidity, but DPS numbers too.

They just made a thread about the upcoming changes (are also streaming a dev workshop too currently) and they didn't address this at all:

 

Yea, it's not really the first time this has happened either.

Hopefully because Polearms are a popular weapon class this will get more attention.

From my perspective there are two issues. One can be fixed by simply improving Polearm stances and their animations.

The other being mobility is more problematic as that could be what DE wants. It's hard to believe they couldn't notice the difference instantly.

[Redthirst]

I second that. The reason I use polearms is because they let me move at normal speed while attacking, without locking me into animations. Stances do the opposite of that, for whatever reason. But if I wanted to be locked into animation then I'd just use a heavy blade . It baffles me that in a game about fast and fluid mobility most of the stances lock you into slow and clunky attack animations.