Dev Workshop - Melee Rework Phase 2: TECHNIQUE

[(PSN)Crixus044]

The rest of the changes need more info, which would be great to have, but you do realize you've buffed condition overload for the majority of button mashing players, which is what we were tryna avoid right?

Most people only get 3-4 procs currently by simply using the melee weapon and pressing EEEE, so you basically just buffed those styles you were tryna avoid. What you should be focusing on is the strategic tactic of stacking procs through use of your entire loadout. We recently got the ability to swap weapons very fluidly. We should be promoting that. Lowering the buff to +40% would make it so that strategic setup can get great power out of the mod, while button mashers will not benefit nearly as much as they do now.

[Aekhon]

1 minute ago, TheGrimCorsair said:

And nothing of value is lost, given endless missions aren't supposed to go endlessly but reach a point where they eclipse a player's ability to continue.

Maybe for you nothing of value is lost, but for me it is.  Seeing how long I can last solo in a survival is one of the things I spend most of my time doing in this game.

[(XBOX)Architect Prime]

This all hinges on the actual damage re balance. 

[kapn655321]

I am nothing short of giddy when I read these notes.
These are very exciting changes.

I've always felt these were to come, for many years.

I'm so F-ing proud of you DE!, for finally bringing these updates.
Sincerely, thank you all for your hard work.
I knew you'd get here.
I just knew you'd get here.
And I am so proud of you.

I look forward to trying So many weapons again in a new light.
Ones I've always wanted to love, but they didn't have a chance.
Thank you for not forgetting about us, and for all of your dedication.

[TARINunit9]

Look, I know you guys really wanna turn Warframe Melee into Devil May Cry, and watching the inevitable nerfs to Maiming Body Rush Overload is going to be freaking delicious, but remember what the principle gameplay of Devil May Cry is: high effort for high reward. Now look at Warframe: high grinding to reduce the effort for high reward. I'm not seeing a lot of comparability there

[Bioboygamer]

Just now, Aekhon said:

Maybe for you nothing of value is lost, but for me it is.  Seeing how long I can last solo in a survival is one of the things I spend most of my time doing in this game.

Well, from what the devs have said in the past, they don't agree with you. I get that it feels bad for the part of the game you enjoy to be phased out, but it's ultimately for the betterment of the game's overall balance. I'd probably feel the same way as you if I were in your position, but it's ultimately a futile battle.

[(XBOX)Architect Prime]

3 minutes ago, Aekhon said:

Maybe for you nothing of value is lost, but for me it is.  Seeing how long I can last solo in a survival is one of the things I spend most of my time doing in this game.

I would normally side with you on this issue, but I'm pretty sure this won't hurt how long you can go to such an insane degree. Anything that could go 3+ hours before will probably still get you that far at least based on what we know so far.

[Shaderox]

Ahh dedicated melee mode again, how i missed thee.

Surprised there are people that actually liked this new instant swap and auto blocking system. Well the instant swaps might still be there (Still think it looks really weird that the weapons you hold teleport to their "holster" and the weapon you want appears like magic in your hands) and auto-blocks that interrupted other actions, like if you run up to a enemy currently and try to do a heavy attack in hes face, all he has to do is shoot once to damage you (since its a %damage reduction) and interrupt your attack since you get forced into blocking.

This also means we'll be able to "aim glide" with melee weapons again 😄 good times.

 

Its a bit funny how that high rated post on the first page advocates the importance of blocking with a street fighter clip.. personally i feel more badass manually blocking dangers than having a system automatically doing it for me.

 

But now we have block on the aim key again, heavy melee on the old channeling key (is that still a locked keybind for controllers?) and normal attacks remains the same, but talk about a rage mode, i wonder if that will have trigger conditions because if its a manual keybind there will be more keys to bind, can get troublesome to work that into some keybind setups and a extra key to bind on controllers can also be troublesome, its quite packed already and any and future locked keybinds makes it harder to make a working setup.

 

Edit:

I see mod changes in the dev workshop, but no mention about the changes to Zenuriks channeling efficency, or Naramon(i think it is) special combo counter or arcanes related to the old systems (A lot of the Zaw ones are quite channeling oriented).

[(XBOX)Architect Prime]

This op made me hungry irl. Now I gotta go eat

[--RV--Hyenah]

We should be able to block with melee no matter what way we equipped it. Aiming to block is so counter intuitive to me. If I want to change back to my primary fast, just let me press F and switch back really fast as we do now by just aiming.

[(PSN)CyrrowCyclonis]

Is the Sword + Pistol combo still a possibility or is that being abandoned?

[kapn655321]

The short dodges, I love it.
The Attack Cancels?! I LOVE IT!!
Juggling, retooling channel, range stat in menus!

Oh man.

You guys just let me use my Shaku.
Oh Man! That just dawned on me!
HAMMERS. O_O
OMFG.

Yes. Yes, and thank you, and yes.

You guys don't even Know.
I have waited for this moment for years.

Thousands of hours in missions wanting some of these things.
This is blowing my mind, and I am very grateful.

[WolfgangHype]

Will we still have stances that can open enemies for finishers?

[seprent]

3 hours ago, Ramflare said:

Definitely worth noting the skana in the devstream had something like 0.6  0.8 attack speed so of course it looks slower, we'll have to wait and see. Crimson dervish is already a slow/janky looking stance so it's probably about the same

also to know it got i think roughly a 350% damage increase from 24 slash to 84 

[AtrusStrix]

RIP Melee. On the bright side we can just focus on guns now.

[HyokaChan]

Heavy attacks will only be worth it on weapons with low status and crit chance, meaning, stuff we'd literally never bring into a high level mission to kill with. 

The benefits from blood rush or weeping wounds is simply far, far too great to bother ever wanting to spend on heavy attacks. I guarantee you, in high leveled missions, as it is now, unless you absolutely need something like a demolyst in disruption dead, you'll never use it.

[Azimbee]

Please allow Weeping Wounds and Blood Rush to scale on non heavy attacks if the damage doesn't scale properly on release. That seems like a good compromise, allowing for the niche of holding onto combo being a thing.

If not, allow Power Spike to decay combo counter by a fixed amount rather than drop all the stacks, so that that heavy attacks become the primary means to 1 shot heavy units with consecutive uses, while combo stacked regular combos become the means to deal with fodder. A hybrid of the two systems might be ideal.

Alternatively, thinking forward, allow "Rage Mode" to scale the weaker hits and let there be an applicable rage mode to guns as well. Long Live Void Trigger.

[(XBOX)AntiCaesar]

At least blood rush and co weren't nerded into the ground as it seems. Hope they won't be heavy attacks only.

Life strike should have a bit of lifesteal on normal attacks too

 

Also how will this affect gunblades?

 

[Arniox]

7 hours ago, [DE]Bear said:

Condition Overload - Now stacks at a maximum of 3 Status Effects, however damage is being increased from 60% to a higher percent to balance the change. Final % to come.

please no 😞 this was such a unique, powerful, useful thing. You could finally properly combo pistols and melee weapons and etc.

[(XBOX)TehChubbyDugan]

2 points and a question:

Melee and mobility:  Slide attacks are not solely used for maiming strike and "spin to win" but also for mobility.  Beyond the issue of armor scaling, enemy damage scaling in this game nearly outright prevents most players from bringing anything other than tank frames into things like arbitration with an expectation to stay for very long because even regular enemies at a moderately high level can straight up one-shot a frame that isn't specced entirely for survivability at the expense of modding for abilities.  The only way around this is high mobility, and if you want to attack while remaining highly mobile, slide attacks are where it's at.  Good looking, stylish more "warframe" melee combos aren't going to prevent your death unless the speed and damage on every weapon is getting a beyond game-breaking buff so that there's nothing left to one-shot you.  The extremely high mobility of slide attacks is just as important in something like arbitration as is the damage it currently has with maiming strike/blood rush.

Crit re-balancing:  Those insanely high red crits that we all know and love aren't necessary for regular starchart.  Or most alerts, events or new content.  Or the majority of content in the game.  That being said, arbitration, ESO, endless mission farms, the ludicrously scaling armor of enemy units, and the upcoming wreck-your-face Kuva Liches are all things that either require, or look like they'll require really heavy damage.  ESO is a game type that where it is mandatory to either have a nuke frame or have guns that can kill enemies in just a few seconds; the point of the mode is literally kill efficiency.  You can't have a mode literally about kill efficiency in the game and then complain when players find the most efficient way to kill things, and then spec for that over "style".  The cries of DE associated personnel and certain players of nerfing this new hot gun or mod or whatever always seem like they're coming from people that think the game should be balanced around starchart.  With the current systems in place you cannot balance the game for both starchart and "endgame" content.  If you can last over an hour in arbitration the rest of the game is a joke.  If the rest of the game (with systems in their current state) is challenging, you cannot last an hour in arbitration.  Without a massive overhaul to many of the games core mechanics it's just not possible. 

I said all of that to say this:  Even without seeing final numbers, the change in the way certain mods work, mainly blood rush and maiming strike, looks like a very hard nerf.  Currently, a weapon with 25% CC with MS and BR with a x2 combo will give you 495.5% CC.  Nearly 500% Crit chance.  An almost 2,000% increase of the base, with those 2 mods and your combo counter at x2, which is easy to get.  Will the final numbers give even remotely close to that much of an increase?  Because those numbers are needed to even have a chance against a never ending hoard of enemies with insane damage and insane armor.  People see 500% CC and think that it's not needed, but forget that a sortie 3 level heavy gunner has 7,000+ armor, and 96% damage reduction.  Those insane crit numbers are the only thing that separates melee crit weapons from being useless in high level content.  I find it very hard to believe that the base weapon buff combined with literally any combination of mods and combos will allow for effective, efficient kills from crit melee weapons against high level enemies with these nerfs.  When you add this to the fact that you will be losing mobility by being stuck in combos, focusing on smaller groups of enemies rather than sideswiping whole packs on the move, players that focus on melee are going to have a much harder time in high level content.  I'm not reserving judgement until I play it this time simply because I've seen the combos in action on the dev stream.  Taking out a handful of low level enemies should not take that long.  The combos look great, but are far too slow when you've got 20 enemies on screen with perfect accuracy and they're all looking at you.  The combos are far too slow to keep efficiency up in ESO or stem the tide of enemies in arbitration.  Time to kill is important in high level play.  Strong and cool mean nothing if they don't have the efficient mechanics required by the game (I need to stress this.  Beyond ESO's literal efficiency mechanic, being able to kill quickly to keep up life support or defend a fragile point is a requirement of high level play if you want to go back to your orbiter successful.) to back it up.  Unless there's some absolutely drastic changes (beyond a hard buff to base stats) that I missed, melee use is going to drop off hard in high level content while probably spiking higher in lower level missions, because that's what it's being balanced for.

Condition Overload change question:  Will the now limited 3 stacks for CO still be exponential in their damage calculation like they currently are, and still effect total damage and not base?  If not, this is possibly the hardest nerf you've put in the game to date.  (to clarify for the uninformed:  currently, 1 status with CO will give you 60% extra total damage.  2 statuses is not an extra 120%, it's an extra 156% as it's exponential.  3 statuses are an extra 310% total damage.  A 100% status weapon with IPS and 2 combined elements can give you 5 total statuses by itself, assuming the enemy lives that long, which is an extra 949% total damage.  Not base, total.  This is pulled directly from the wiki.)

It's a hard nerf regardless considering how easy it currently is to stack several statuses on an enemy and gain enough damage to compete with current crit weapons.  For as much as I typed out for the crit nerf, honestly this one hurts more, even if the damage IS still exponential.  Fast, status heavy weapons with CO were the melee weapons with the fastest time-to-kill without building combo first.  Without building combo counter, just using melee in concert with your guns, CO weapons were the MOST effective backup weapon you could have.  If this is as hard of a nerf as I suspect it might be (no longer being exponential.) then this completely kills any hype I had for the melee update, and will probably kill status weapons in general.  Most status guns (bleed procs aside, even though those are used more by crit that status.) aren't even effective in high level content for anything other than armor strip or building status for CO (see Boltor Prime completely power crept out of existence.)  Even if the damage calc for this mod stays the same and just caps at 3, it's not just a nerf to status melee, it's a nerf to the usefulness of status guns as well, since you won't be using them to stack status anymore, unless you're stacking it for a CO/crit melee with no status chance of its own.

The new animations look great.  Plenty about the melee rework looks good, and the upcoming mainline looks like it will be a lot of fun.  I honestly came into this thread with hype, especially after it was clearly stated during the stream that "spin to win isn't going anywhere, we're just raising everything up to meet it."  That doesn't look true from these notes.  It looks like a nerf for the strongest mods, all being balanced for lower level content, where they are currently beyond overpowered. The thing is, until you finally do something about enemy scaling, that OP strength will be necessary for high level content, and it doesn't look like we're getting to keep it.

[Slayer_of_PCs]

Heh. Looks like the content creators are going to have a full docket for their youtub channels. 

 

[(PSN)WolfSaints94]

Just curious what does these mean for the dual wielding for one handed melee and secondaries is that also coming in phase 3

[(PSN)Hemolytica]

Pretty pretty please let us link operator arcanes and amps to specific loadouts!!

[Lunifall]

I really appreciate the change of removing the ragdoll effect of slam attacks; it's always been annoying trying to close in on an enemy with it only to knock them away.

I had already mentioned this in a previous post, but i would also love to see the addition of a mechanic where, while you are in midair and aiming directly at an enemy below you, you can hold down the melee key to slam directly into them, knock them to the ground, and preform a ground finisher. This would be similar to how you can preform a standing melee finisher on an un-alerted enemy by holding the melee key.

Ground finishers can only be preformed on enemies that have been knocked to the ground, and the best way to knock an enemy to the ground (besides the blast status effect) is a slam attack, so it seems like it would make sense to smoothly combine the two. 

Overall amazing work DE, i'm really looking forward to trying things out after the update!

[DeLawrence]

I'm gonna start this post by totally agreeing with the CONDITION OVERLOAD / MAIMING STRIKE changes:

"The change is bufffing it for the button mashers". Good...I'm tired of "endurance" purists with their 7 status loadouts looking down on me for enjoying the game. CO is a melee mod...everything it does and requires is and always should've been melee. I don't like being locked into using specific secondaries just to maximize damage of a totally different weapon. I don't like stat-sticks, period.
I want to slash some enemies with a flashy combo, throw them across the room, pull out a revolver and finish them with a headshot or vice-versa...however I feel like and please. That is fun!

The 7 stat cult was created based on a totally different issue and that is enemy scaling. Yes...I understand that past level x00 tactics such as this are needed, but my argument to that has always been "What's the point?".
Rewards scaling has been awful since forever...it's been established long ago that DE doesn't know how to make "rewarding rewards" and reasons to push the limits of builds. Scaling enemies exponentially is not a reason to warrant a required loadout/playstyle. You should be able to find a playstyle/loadout that you like in order to deal with thougher enemies. 
The highest level enemies most players meet are the 100, 120 from sorties. On the rare occasions you go into a longer arbi session you might reach 300+ but those are outliers...exceptions...not rules. I referrenced these examples as potential objectives for players...like a reason to play and encounter such high level enemies besides the "just because I can". 
Don't even bring "world records" with enemies in the thousands level range into discussion because those only exist by "abusing"(not necessarily in a bad sense) invisibility/lockdown/one hit kill mechanics (Ivara + Sleep Arrow + Covert Lethality dagger). At that point you're not "playing" the game, you're doing something that maybe 1% of the playerbase would ever think of. Is it cool? I guess. Is it representative of actual gameplay? Heck no.

Ah, if these changes succeded a rewards revamp that actually needed me to encounter extra high level enemies, then the discussion would be different alltogether. Until then, I'm not going to complain about an issue that is literally non-existent for the majority of players.

The same thing goes for MAIMING STRIKE. Most actual crit builds have been invalidated by this mod. It was a mistake from the get go...how the devs could not predict a spin to win meta when releasing a mod with 90% ADDITIVE CRIT CHANCE is beyond me, but alas, it's happened and it's going away more or less...or rather, the entire melee system is getting buffed to a similar level so that "spin to win" is a choice not a requirement.
Side note: Look at the market price of MS, panic sales have started already.

There's a bigger discussion to have here regarding availability as well but I won't go into detail, I'll just say this: after making this mod terribly OP...DE did us one better and made it sorta exclusive this year. That led to the absurd 300+plat prices for it...like seriously? 

 

People seem to whine before having experienced the changes. Some just whine about their Maiming Strikes and Condition Overloads and completely disregard the new heavy attack mechanic and mod changes that open up paths to new builds. I will point out though that the info on the actual changes is pretty scarce for an update that's supposed to drop next week/ the week after at worst. 

With that said though I like the direction of normalizing melee weapons.If it works correctly, this should bring back variety and personal preference and move away from 2-3 meta weapons. Of course there might still be some weapons better than others, but if the differences are neglijable at best, it will be fine. But that's to be seen once the update hits. Until then, I'm eager to try it with an open mind and make my mind accordingly.

One suggestion I have though. Seeing that there is now an emphasis on "Lifting" status and aerial combos, why not have a charged bullet jump that would pull some enemies in the air. Maybe have the same angle as the dodge. That could lead to some more fluid transitions between the staple of movement in this game, the bullet-jump, and the actual melee combat.