Feedback on Melee Changes - Two Sides by Two People

[A_Lil_Kitsune]

Overview

This update has been well received by many, however, there have also been a few who've presented different views (myself being one of them). The below points are designed to demonstrated the opinions of me and my friend, who stand at each end of the spectrum on this. Whilst we see the pluses to the new system, we also see each other's perspectives. This is to say, we can see that yes, in some ways, a few things stand to be either changed or catered for. This is intended to highlight these things, and will be finished with a recommendation. Feel free to ignore the recommendation, it's to make me feel better that I put my point forward.

If it's in italics, assume I'm presenting my own personal gripes.

"Fast Switch" Pros - "New system allows me to have my cake and eat it too"

• Feels more Fluid compared to switching in the old system.
• Don't lose combos when switching, as opposed to the old system.
• Shows combos more often, as compared to not knowing combos without melee out in old system.

"Fast Switch" Cons - "Oi, that was my cake."

• Missing a definite and hard to mistake way of pulling out melee, which was done better in the old system by holding "F".
• "But I had the power cell a second ago" as I switch accidentally (Attributed to the first point).
• Pressing mouse 2 in a fall, but switching to your ranged weapons instead of staying melee, unlike the old system. (This is not fun when you transition directly into a rubico prime scope.)
• Just a personal gripe which might just be me, so feel free to ignore this, but what happened to channeling for life strike???

"Auto-Block" Pros - "I'm a Jedi."

• Streamlines melee without dumbing down IE. i can do all of the combos i could before and block with fewer key-presses.
• integrates the full suite of melee into the rest of game-play IE. no more having to pick either gun and really awful quick melee and full melee combos and blocking and channeling and building combo over guns.
• feels more fluid IE. going from one method of combat to another doesn't require a long switching time which usually results in losing combo unless I used 2 combo duration mods and I can go from one to the other instantaneously.

"Auto-Block" Cons - "But I wanted to be a lancer."

• I have been stun-locked by this animation, leading to me going down. As Inaros, no less. This is not right. Now, not gonna lie, the same thing happened to me in the old system, but at least it was my own fault then.
• As stated in the quote reflecting my stance, sometimes it feels good to block everything, not because the game forces you to, but because you decided to. It felt really good to perform blocking combos (Even with a full berseker build + fury (I hated that timing)) and shred most everything. This might just be my opinion but yeah. Now you can't really block of your own accord, and when you do, it seems to toggle, not the best thing in the world, in my eyes.
• Again, linking back into the "Fast switch", I don't want to transition straight into a sniper while gliding. In the old system, it was helpful to be able to control your flight with your melee out, but now it seems to force you to use guns mainly, which I disagree with. Obviously. In my eyes, Warframe should give you the option to run melee or ranged, or both if you're so inclined. I can see how the switching might be helpful, but yeah... Come on, guys, give me my m2. 

"Directional Slam" Pros - "Yeah, I can't really fault that"

• This is just fun, objectively. I don't care what anyone says.

"Directional Slam" Cons - "Worry not, someone else managed to though"

• Used to the old system. Legitimately the only reason.

Recommendation

As someone who develops software (and this was parroted by my friend), you don't just update a system without building in some acceptance for legacy formats, styles, files, the list goes on and can go on until we're long in the tooth. From this viewpoint, we have come up with this proposal; give us a choice. It's as simple as that (Yes, I know easier said than done), give us an option about whether or not we want fast switch. Whether or not we want auto-block. And yes, for that picky individual, even the option to do the old slam. Heaven only knows why you'd want to, but someone does. This recommendation doesn't have to be taken on board, but we would appreciate you at least take it into consideration. Understanding the constraints around implementing this, we understand if it simply can't be done, but from our perspective, it would improve the experience of the player considerably. But seriously, guys, life strike? Why would you do this to us? 😭

Might not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but just thought you might like to hear the opinions of both sides, instead of just a rant about how x feature doesn't suit someone. Cheers for reviewing this if you do ❤️

Edited March 9, 2019 by A_Lil_Kitsune
Spelling mistake.

[artemisfortune]

hey man, this is really solid feedback. really well thought out and i agree with a lot of your points. appreciate ya!

[A_Lil_Kitsune]

Thank you, I'm glad I wasn't giving feedback to a void lol

[EquinoxPrime]

Always nice to read some real feedback.

A lot of threads on these changes have been very "I/me/my", it's nice to see someone present both perspectives. Feedback from both sides is important in order to reach a compromise, going forward.

That being said, I agree with a lot of your points.

30 minutes ago, A_Lil_Kitsune said:

• Again, linking back into the "Fast switch", I don't want to transition straight into a sniper while gliding. In the old system, it was helpful to be able to control your flight with your melee out, but now it seems to force you to use guns mainly, which I disagree with. Obviously. In my eyes, Warframe should give you the option to run melee or ranged, or both if you're so inclined. I can see how the switching might be helpful, but yeah... Come on, guys, give me my m2. 

 

This was a big one for me as well. In today's hotfix they added a toggle in for blocking with true melee-only (no primary/secondary equipped) but it seems kinda borked at the moment, was testing it earlier.

Kudos for your feedback, Tenno!

Edited March 9, 2019 by EquinoxPrime
clarity

[A_Lil_Kitsune]

Yes, it's kind of fixed, but it toggles block, which means once you're slowing down, you're stuck slowed down. Really annoying, in my eyes.

[Urgval]

I agree with you. I like the new fast weapon swap and directional slams, but the rest of melee changes took away the "Space Ninja" experience - the very thing why I came to Warframe. DE is tuning this game into a 100%-shooter, a genre i dislike. 

[A_Lil_Kitsune]

Which is why I present the recommendation of letting the players decide the style they want to play. Some like shooters, some don't, best of both worlds \o/

[Steel_Rook]

Something I want to bring up: I believe DE aren't so much moving away from "a dedicated melee mode" but rather trying to move towards a "EVERYTHING is melee mode!" While it's true that a lot of what you do will pull your gun, in my experience that ends up not mattering. Whether I'm holding a gun or a sword doesn't determine whether I'm USING a gun or a sword. In both cases, I'm using both weapons, sometimes alternating between them. The goal of the system as I understand it is to remove the "decision" of whether you're going to be using melee for the next while, or whether you're going to be using guns by letting you switch between them at will with no cost. Now granted, I'm not a "pure melee" kind of player so I don't know what that does to people who used only or predominantly that - take my feedback with a grain of salt. But I AM a player who tried to use all of my weapons, which this system makes far easier.

Not denying there are issues with it, though. The one I hear most often is the loss of "sword glide." I agree with this, though I feel the issue is less about melee and more about Aim Glide itself. I have a proposal to change it in some fundamental ways which should both restore the ability to "sword glide" and maybe even make it a bit less tunnel-vision-y. The long and short of that proposal, though, is remove the zoom and scopes from Aim Glide entirely, refactor old "less zoom during glide" mods to re-enable scopes and restore zoom, and don't swap out of a melee would while gliding unless the player actually attempts to fire. An alternate suggestion proposed in that thread was to move Glide off of the Aim button entirely and stick it to holding the Jump button while in the air, using the Sprint/Roll mechanic to differentiate between double jump/glide.

On the subject of accidentally dropping batteries, that seems like a bug. I'm of the opinion that the automatic switch should always switch to a Secondary when carrying an item, even if melee was originally switched to from a Primary. Don't think you'll get a lot of arguments there.

[Sceleratii]

I fully agree with all points in this post and really hope DE listens to it. 

 

Also channeling now is basically unusable with this recent update, so rip my lifestrike builds. 

[SilviaS12]

16 hours ago, A_Lil_Kitsune said:

Overview

This update has been well received by many, however, there have also been a few who've presented different views (myself being one of them). The below points are designed to demonstrated the opinions of me and my friend, who stand at each end of the spectrum on this. Whilst we see the pluses to the new system, we also see each other's perspectives. This is to say, we can see that yes, in some ways, a few things stand to be either changed or catered for. This is intended to highlight these things, and will be finished with a recommendation. Feel free to ignore the recommendation, it's to make me feel better that I put my point forward.

If it's in italics, assume I'm presenting my own personal gripes.

"Fast Switch" Pros - "New system allows me to have my cake and eat it too"

• Feels more Fluid compared to switching in the old system.
• Don't lose combos when switching, as opposed to the old system.
• Shows combos more often, as compared to not knowing combos without melee out in old system.

"Fast Switch" Cons - "Oi, that was my cake."

• Missing a definite and hard to mistake way of pulling out melee, which was done better in the old system by holding "F".
• "But I had the power cell a second ago" as I switch accidentally (Attributed to the first point).
• Pressing mouse 2 in a fall, but switching to your ranged weapons instead of staying melee, unlike the old system. (This is not fun when you transition directly into a rubico prime scope.)
• Just a personal gripe which might just be me, so feel free to ignore this, but what happened to channeling for life strike???

"Auto-Block" Pros - "I'm a Jedi."

• Streamlines melee without dumbing down IE. i can do all of the combos i could before and block with fewer key-presses.
• integrates the full suite of melee into the rest of game-play IE. no more having to pick either gun and really awful quick melee and full melee combos and blocking and channeling and building combo over guns.
• feels more fluid IE. going from one method of combat to another doesn't require a long switching time which usually results in losing combo unless I used 2 combo duration mods and I can go from one to the other instantaneously.

"Auto-Block" Cons - "But I wanted to be a lancer."

• I have been stun-locked by this animation, leading to me going down. As Inaros, no less. This is not right. Now, not gonna lie, the same thing happened to me in the old system, but at least it was my own fault then.
• As stated in the quote reflecting my stance, sometimes it feels good to block everything, not because the game forces you to, but because you decided to. It felt really good to perform blocking combos (Even with a full berseker build + fury (I hated that timing)) and shred most everything. This might just be my opinion but yeah. Now you can't really block of your own accord, and when you do, it seems to toggle, not the best thing in the world, in my eyes.
• Again, linking back into the "Fast switch", I don't want to transition straight into a sniper while gliding. In the old system, it was helpful to be able to control your flight with your melee out, but now it seems to force you to use guns mainly, which I disagree with. Obviously. In my eyes, Warframe should give you the option to run melee or ranged, or both if you're so inclined. I can see how the switching might be helpful, but yeah... Come on, guys, give me my m2. 

"Directional Slam" Pros - "Yeah, I can't really fault that"

• This is just fun, objectively. I don't care what anyone says.

"Directional Slam" Cons - "Worry not, someone else managed to though"

• Used to the old system. Legitimately the only reason.

Recommendation

As someone who develops software (and this was parroted by my friend), you don't just update a system without building in some acceptance for legacy formats, styles, files, the list goes on and can go on until we're long in the tooth. From this viewpoint, we have come up with this proposal; give us a choice. It's as simple as that (Yes, I know easier said than done), give us an option about whether or not we want fast switch. Whether or not we want auto-block. And yes, for that picky individual, even the option to do the old slam. Heaven only knows why you'd want to, but someone does. This recommendation doesn't have to be taken on board, but we would appreciate you at least take it into consideration. Understanding the constraints around implementing this, we understand if it simply can't be done, but from our perspective, it would improve the experience of the player considerably. But seriously, guys, life strike? Why would you do this to us? 😭

Might not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but just thought you might like to hear the opinions of both sides, instead of just a rant about how x feature doesn't suit someone. Cheers for reviewing this if you do ❤️

I think your feedback would be more helpful here where all the feedback is being posted by many:

 

[Ormugoden]

You have essentially addressed all of my problems. As an Excalibur/melee main with Lifestrike, I'm kinda forced to controller bind and see what happens or declare the current build unplayable. All the money I've soaked into Potatoes and cosmetics... Yay...

Edited March 16, 2019 by Ormugoden
TYPO

[_Blackwatch_]

For the 1st 20 min of playing warframe with the new melee changes i havent went through all of the changes BUT ONE thing stood out like a sore thumb and that was the quick switch. I prefered the old "holding F" to swap weapons because i was able to change my melee button from "e" to "left click", and channeling was changed to "e" I did this was because i didnt want ANOTHER  broken "e" key in which resulted in replacing my keyboard please DE everything is fine JUST RETURN THE HOLSTER i dont want to not play warframe becasue of this issue.

P.S quick switch is annoying please get rid of it

[(PSN)chubbslawson]

On 2019-03-09 at 7:32 AM, Sceleratii said:

I fully agree with all points in this post and really hope DE listens to it. 

 

Also channeling now is basically unusable with this recent update, so rip my lifestrike builds. 

They won’t listen if history is a guide 

[Teridax68]

As someone who quite likes the new melee system, I have to say the OP is very well-written, and I think establishes some good common ground between the various different perspectives players have had on the changes: personally, I love the fluidity of the new system, but I have to admit that some parts of it aren't quite there yet: some aspects are still in transition, like stances, some aspects were probably not considered much, like object holding, and some were just design decisions that I don't think worked all that well, like auto-blocking. The net current result is a system that I think is full of promise, and to many already delivers on some key factors, but that still has a ways to go.

My thoughts on the above:

• This may be more of an under-the-hood system right now, but I think the whole process of picking up and carrying objects needs some changes. For one, I don't think it's really necessary to be unable to carry something while wielding a primary weapon (why don't we just hook the thing to the side of our warframe?), but on top of this, I also think there are a lot of cases right now where we just don't need to be carrying stuff around: we don't need to carry around a datamass for Mobile Defense/armored vaults, or a moltecoil for Assault, when we could just go to the objective and press a button to get things started. Streamlining this subsystem in particular could solve a lot of gripes regarding current weapon switching, but also solve some long-standing issues with objects in particular (including some more niche cases of trolls holding onto a mission-critical object, or said object clipping through the floor and rendering the mission impossible to complete).
• I think any sort of scoped sight needs to only activate on alt fire, including scopes for guns like the Seer or Veldt. Entering ADS should just bring up some standard zoom for all weapons, which should eliminate inconsistencies and undesired excess zooming in when aim-gliding/blocking under the new system.
• Channeling right now is a bust, though to be fair this was largely the case already before. My guess is that current mods that rely on channelling may instead be transferred to heavy attacks (how that'll turn out in practice will be something to try), but on top of this DE has promised some Devil Trigger-type button to replace channeling, which I don't think is necessary: personally, I think that once current channelling gets shifted to heavy attacks, alt-fire should always trigger one's gun alt-fire: already, there are complaints that one has to memorize which weapon one is holding in order to determine whether one will be channelling or alt-firing, and I think that's a clear sign that there shouldn't be inconsistency there to begin with.
• I'm personally not a fan of auto-block, not only because it interrupts some of the player's actions, but because I feel right now it mostly just causes the player to block without really being conscious of the fact that they are blocking. It doesn't really replicate the Jedi feel for me, and maybe I'm biased because I love the Lego Star Wars games, but I think it's because to me the Jedi feel to blocking and potentially reflecting attacks should involve some active participation from the player. In this respect, I feel blocking would work better if it always happened while using ADS, as is currently the case in melee only mode.
• I largely agree on principle that switching to new systems should leave players with the option to return to the old ways... provided support for this generates minimal interference. If DE has to put work in for two systems each time they make a gun or melee weapon, that may not be so good, though if the old system can be allowed without interfering with the new system, and without generating too much additional overhead on new additions, I don't see any reason to not leave it as an optional setting.

Some more thoughts regarding the above:

• Stances are getting updated, but I hope they get massively streamlined. I don't think it's all that great to have to hold or pause in the middle of a combo, or use some directional input when it causes our movement and combat to interfere with each other. Warframe could certainly incorporate some of the finer combat of fighting games, but at its heart isn't a fighting game itself, and shouldn't treat combat as if the player were in some static arena each time, or even pushed in any manner to halt their movement. Just one melee button, one block button (which I think should also be ADS), and a few non-locking animations I think could be enough to have a deep attack and combo system.
• This is likely just my own preference, but I personally don't really see that much of a distinction at this point between primary and secondary weapons, or even a need to have three separate weapon pools (or three weapons equipped): primaries and secondaries are similarly powerful guns, and on top of that I feel switching weapons is currently a little fiddly compared to the instant feedback of going from gunplay to melee. If we were to just have two weapons, and could choose any from one big pool of guns and melee weapons (so you could have two guns, or two melee weapons), the current system could flow much better, and we'd free up a button from a currently fairly crowded input scheme (or at least be able to use it for something else, like a smart command option for pets).

[LuckyCharm]

I agree with most things op is saying, let me add to that the frustration of trying to mine/fish/synthesis scan and using a melee attack to hit something and being forced out of your equipped gear. Really not fun and its just one of the reasons i used to just love quick melee. 

Another reason was i could have my primary... Lets say zenith, and shoot its secondary attack while swinging my melee stick with quick melee. You vant do that any more, you physically have to have your zenith as the "active" weapon before you can secondary fire so if youve done any meleeing you'll be unable to until youre back on your gun mode

[Jonas_T_acc]

For me meleeing feels just like it did before, except that I do more damage now when I can utilize stance combos compared to quick melee. Did a quick test of almost all melee I think and especially staffs felt very good. With Flailing branch you really get alot of movement wich almost felt a bit overwhelming. I also tried Clashing forest and that stance gave me more stationary swordplay.. or polearmplay??
Right now I use this MB (Mouse Button) config, since that's what feels best for me with the current melee system.

Fire weapon - MB1

Aim weapon (zoom) - Side MB

Secondary Fire - MB2

Melee Attack - Middle MB

Channeling - MB2