Since Melee 3.0 part 2 has no ETA, can channeling be adjusted to not be turned off if player fast swaps to guns?

[ADirtyMonk]

TDLR: Either keep channeling on no matter what the player does, or address the real issue by allowing some low% life steal + flat hp healing (ex. 1.5% + 15hp) on a normal melee hit for all melee weapons as a base effect.

 

100% uptime on life strike is required to comfortably survive with melee on squishier frames in sortie+ content where incoming damage may be too fast to react to with abilities/health pads/operator arcanes before you are dead but can be mitigated by full healing with every melee hit. With the new instant weapon swaps from melee it is far too easy to turn off channeling and lose the powerful healing needed. Performing any action that taps the block button, including basic actions such as the bullet jump - aim glide - double jump - roll movement chain, as well as the "block" combo, will turn off channeling. Current workarounds which I have been using include:

• to either not using any action that involves pressing block; meaning I cannot use the best movement combo and often lose access to the best combos in a melee stance
• completely removing primaries and secondaries; which fixes channeling automatically turning off but no guns kind of suck in general especially with the new amalgam mods and is flat out non-viable against some enemies
• swapping to a tank/AOE meta frame that I do not prefer using
• deal with having to turn channeling back on every few seconds, which sucks

 

• Healing return has been tried as an alternative. It works alright for most content. The healing can be inconsistent as it is very strongly dependent on crowds of enemies within melee range to give decent healing. The big problem is that it forces the player into very high attack speed status weapons on very fluid stances of which is a relatively limited selection. The mod also costs significantly more mod points; you effectively need a 14-16 cost mod for the healing to be non-negligible. Compared to even a rank 0 life strike which can heal several hundred HP a hit for 4 mod cost. This is, of course, assuming the enemy is not completely status immune in the first place.

Another issue with channeling that has been present for a long time is that if a player runs out of energy while channeling, channeling will turn off and must be manually reactivated. It would be nice if channeling were changed to automatically come back online once the player has collected more energy.

I understand that the current state of melee is a stop gap between Melee 2.9 and Melee 3.0 but it has been several weeks since 2.9 released with no sign of melee 3.0 in sight. Since this is the case it would be a nice QoL change to address this problem in the meantime.

 

That being said, the real issue is the requirement of constant, large amounts of healing, not that fact that channeling gets constantly turned off (since the only purpose of channeling is life strike). I advocate for a base % life strike + flat healing on hit (ex. 1.5% life steal + 15hp healing per hit) on all melee weapons. This would yield acceptable healing on fully modded weapons without stifling weapon choice and simultaneously cover the gap in early-mid star chart where the player does not have access to frames/equipment/mods/pets/etc with healing. There are also far less newbie friendly alternatives such as rebalancing healing return or life strike to work for every melee hit on an enemy instead of having activation requirements, baking life-steal effects into focus trees (Unairu could use a booster) or arcanes, etc. Reworking how player/enemy armor/damage functions to narrow the gap between the possible values, etc.

Thanks for reading.

 

Edited May 13, 2019 by ADirtyMonk

[Rawbeard]

wasn't melee 3.0 cancelled?

[vaarnaaarne]

If so, could we get pre-phase 1 2.0 back? Or at least option to use the old system?

[Buttaface]

Yeah, all block combos and blocking generally are completely messed up currently, especially when combined with toggle channeling. It's still a mystery why they arbitrarily chose to F up one of the best, most polished systems in WF and one of the best melee systems in any game anywhere and instead implement the steaming garbage that melee is currently.

I had a sinking feeling when the "cool new melee sounds" introduced months ago turned out to be crap, and that feeling hasn't abated since with the terrible subsequent changes.

Edited May 13, 2019 by Buttaface

[ganjou234]

3 hours ago, ADirtyMonk said:

• Healing return has been tried as an alternative. It works alright for most content. The healing can be inconsistent as it is very strongly dependent on crowds of enemies within melee range to give decent healing. The big problem is that it forces the player into very high attack speed status weapons on very fluid stances of which is a relatively limited selection. The mod also costs significantly more mod points; you effectively need a 14-16 cost mod for the healing to be non-negligible. Compared to even a rank 0 life strike which can heal several hundred HP a hit for 4 mod cost. This is, of course, assuming the enemy is not completely status immune in the first place.

Actually, it's best used with a high status primary/secondary with a sparring weapon as your melee (do with Hirudo for more heals). Proc status with gun->Knockdown multi hit finisher.

[Yousho]

7 hours ago, Rawbeard said:

wasn't melee 3.0 cancelled?

... What?

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

I wrote a macro to do it....

dunno what you PC folks have available or how complex it can be.

but I just keep track of my weapon state by monitoring the last time I pressed ADS/Shoot vs Melee (this determines if I'm currently wielding a gun vs melee)

and anytime I touch Melee if I had Previously been in gun mode I have it autotap Channeling for me (you don't want to autotap channeling for Every melee press, or you'd turn it back off with repeated swings; only on transitions)

 

[Teridax68]

On 2019-05-13 at 9:02 PM, Rawbeard said:

wasn't melee 3.0 cancelled?

It wasn't, as far as I know, it's just that DE shifted their attention towards other stuff in the meantime, namely the Jovian Concord update we were told was coming this week, plus Railjack apparently not that much further down the line. I do wish we got more updates to melee in the near future, though...

As for the OP's request, I agree completely: in an environment where melee and gunplay are meant to be part of the same cohesive whole, it makes no sense for an attack of one type to disable a toggle, and the fact that it's been implemented that way is likely why so many people have been caught by surprise with Channelling inexplicably turning off. Keeping it toggled on until deliberately toggled off (or until the player runs out of Energy) would likely be the better way to go about it.

[Arcira]

While waiting for the rest of the rework there is a band-aid method for constant toggle. It takes like a 2 seconds and you only need to do this once at the start of the mission.

1.) switch to your melee weapon with quick melee

2.) activate channel

3.) switch to your secondary weapon with the "switch weapon" command (Don´t know what the default key is you may have to look it up in keybindings. It´s important you use this command and not "aim" for switching to your ranged weapons)

4.) use quick melee again

Congrats! Now you have constant melee channel toggle even when using aim/aimglide or archwing weapons.

Disclaimer: Doesn´t prevent deactivating toggle when using archwing, k-drive or death.

Edited May 15, 2019 by Arcira

[Rawbeard]

3 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

DE shifted their attention towards other stuff

yeah, everytime THAT happens whatever they were doing never came back. let's consider melee 3.0 dead for a couple years at least