(PC) Melee Phase 2: TECHNIQUES Feedback

[Steel_Rook]

1 minute ago, DoomFruit said:

This was never explained anywhere (as is customary for DE), but you need to press the heavy attack button... except when dual-wielding a pistol and glaive, in which case it's still hold melee to throw. This means that you'll never be able to throw or shoot directly while having a gun out.

Heavy... Attack... Button? What? Did they add a new keybind? Can I use this "heavy attack button" without a melee equipped? What even is the point of creating another keybind? This isn't Devil May Cry or Dark Souls. We don't need a two-button melee combat system. Holding attack worked just fine, now it does... What, nothing? Confusion aside, this just seems like a pointless decision.

 

3 minutes ago, DoomFruit said:

Autoblock seems to be acting exactly as it used to be... which is incredibly annoying for me. I hate that crap. I do not want to autoblock. Especially when I'm trying to come down on an enemy's head but NOPE, GOTTA GLIDE.

As I said, that's an issue with the implementation of auto-block, specifically that it's hard-coded to aimglide because it used to be bound to the aimglide button. There's absolutely no reason why auto-block should trigger a glide, nor why it should interrupt charged attacks or melee swings. At the risk of coming across as crass, that's an example of ineptitude in implementation, in that DE hard-coded the mechanics to their shared controls and couldn't be arsed to fix the implementation when the systems got repurposed. I'd rather they fix autoblock over scrapping it.

That said, it's not triggering for me. Could be I'm not having any luck in getting it to trigger, though. If you're saying it's supposed to work as intended, then I'll take your word for it and kee trying.

[Bowbie]

Hi,

i dislike how combos works with gunblade (both with bullet dance and high noon stance).

Before i used to use charged attack, while standing still and while moving. I liked the gun aspect of the gunblade. This is now the heavy attack, it is the same, but slower and i used to up my combo counter.

Now with high noon, neutral combo makes me move without any control, all other combo almost don't cast a gun attack so it's out of the picture for me.

With bullet dance, the stance that should mainly focus on the gun part. Neutral tactical combo makes me go foward without control and is not 100% gun. Foward tactical combo is the same but move foward more. I dislike those combos ( i dont control my movements and it's not 100% gun) and they are redundant. Foward combo is almost 0% gun. neutral combo is 100% gun but is makes you move heavily backward.

All in all, to get kinda my old use of the charged attack, i shall take the bullet dance stance, do only one (or 2 max) neutral combo and wait a bit for the combo to reset, or only used heavy attack without ever upping my combo counter. That's clearly not the way combo should work.

 

on a side not this may not be a bug but i find it odd that slam attacks and heavy slam attacks do the exact same damage (at least on the weapon description) for gunblades.

Edited November 1, 2019 by Bowbie

[Maxim_M_Payne]

I'm still not having fun, and i'm not satisfied as a melee player.

You slapped a band-aid on two issues without fully resolving them, and added several more.

I try to be patient, and I am trying to be polite in my feedback. Nevertheless, I am angry, I am frustrated at your apparent ignoring of most of the feedback given in Phase 1; and most vitally I do not find this any more fun to use. Bring back pre-Buried Debts melee. Each "improved" phase of "StReAmLiNeD" 3.0 has consistently made it worse to use and play with, not better. Near the entirety of 2019's changes have already broken my heart as a Valkyr main; so it's depressingly impressive that Phase Two made me actually give up and go straight to bed last night after testing things out and reading the patch notes. I don't want to hunt the Kuva Liches. I don't want to do anything. I want to hack, pummel, slash, and stab the good, better ways that we used to be able to do in-game; and each new phase of 3.0 denies me even more of that simple, basic pleasure. My motivation and interest in any game updates is next to outright dead.

I waited eight months for you guys to fix the changes made in Phase 1 and make melee actually feel fun and solid again; and for it to no longer be blindingly clogged with bad, bubble-filled VFX specks; and instead, even with the bar to clear literally touching the ground, it's been dug under.

I'd like to say I think it's been worth the wait, but it sincerely hasn't, in any regard.

You finally restored our ability to lock into melee mode? That would be wonderful, and really might have cheered me up after 2/3 of a year gone by; if you hadn't also slapped in a hideously bright flash that wasn't there before; using the exact same flash-bang-torture that's been jammed onto all our arrow trails and arrow impacts since Saint of Altra.

I didn't want this. I will never want this. I wanted to be able to hold my own melee weapons again, and to have ACTUAL HOLSTERING; not for their to be EVEN MORE flashing, bubbling, and lens-flares. When I said I wanted Sword Alone back, what I and the other melee mains were asking for was to literally just DRAW OUR BLADES AGAIN. No searing sparks, no flash, no horizontal flare. Just pulling it out, and swinging it around. Did I mention your lovely effect happens every time we lock into melee?

Sincere thanks for at least restoring the ability to lock in, but it does little good and doesn't make things any better when melee still hurts to look at; and it especially barely improves the current state of melee, when, as I will detail, YOU SLAUGHTERED ALL THE BEST COMBOS.

Literally, you could have just made holstering inherently faster, kept the holstering system in, and then removed all of the holster-speed mods. I kept telling you that for all of Phase 1, and it still is the better solution here; far more than all of the issues that have arisen from your inexplicable desperation to destroy the Stance system and foist this twitching, flashing mess on us.

"Slam attacks have received new VFX again". Wonderful, maybe you guys changed them so that they aren't a giant spark-filled explosion of spherical - 

Remind me never to get my hopes up again. This is literally the same effect as Phase 1, with maybe 5% fewer  of the blinding sparks. There's still the downward explosion of sparks, there's still the mushroom-cloud level dome going everywhere, it's still horribly opaque; and it still isn't as subtle or visually pleasing as the good 'ol Melee 2.0 circular shockwave that only went across the ground. God, I miss that energy disk effect. It beat the heck out of having a small war crime occur whenever I slam.

You gave back manual block, yay! Except you really didn't, since it still only works right half the time; using RMB still occasionally brings me back into gun aim, and auto-block still exists. I repeatedly emphasized on the Phase 1 Megathread how obnoxious and intrusive automatic block is. It still exists at all, when it really, really shouldn't; and it still lies in wait to interrupt everything we are currently doing to lock us into its stupid animations and freeze us in place. TAKE. AUTO-BLOCK. OUT. ALTOGETHER. Combine that with the fact you've raised all blocking percentages to 100% without explaining a single bit of this dandy new angle system; and I am getting the odd impression you don't have any real roadmap for the future, that you all never actually playtest melee; and that none of you have ever, EVER had a favorite frame that was Baruuk, Valkyr, Wukong, or Excalibur. By the way, for me, the favorite melee-centric Warframe was ALL OF THEM. Until this year. This disappointing, "rip-the-ninja-out-of-space-ninja-and-always-ignore-the-players" year.

We asked for you to re-do completely all the bad Stances like Crossing Snakes; and indeed, we specifically emphasized not to touch a single part of the good Stances or any of their Combos. Oh boy, guess what you guys did with The Old Blood?! Everything's been rearranged, five-plus years of muscle-memory is now ruined, and all the coolest Combos are either gone altogether or rearranged into such an awkward configuration that I no longer can easily perform them.

Once upon a time:

I liked Resplendent Calma.

I liked Winding Claws.

I liked Broken Bull.

I liked Dark Light.

I liked Forest's Remorse.

I liked Heeding Call and Destined Path.

I liked Searing Undertow and Blazing Vortex.

I liked Dire Courtship, Thunder Hydra, Shattered Village, and every other Combo that you've now killed. And I'm betting you didn't keep records and probably deleted all the "old" and "irrelevant" animations and coding for them. Congratulations, melee is now even less fun than it was in Phase 1; and one of the few things I still found enjoyable, the Combos and Stance system, is completely butchered. You've turned them all into homogenous twirling that makes Stances barely any visually different from each other. I can't tell Blind Justice from Decisive Jugdement anymore; and in point of fact, they now look suspiciously like you just cut and rearranged their combos in a zig-zag between the two like Frankenstein's monster.

Finally, and most insultingly: in your determination to completely remove the charge attack, combo counter, and channeling mechanics, despite repeated player rage over their removal and our repeated explanation of how each of them had and still has a clear benefit, you've added one further issue. "Heavy Attacks" are bound to Mouse3; an abominable and awkward keybind that I had sincerely hoped nobody in video game development actually thought was anything but tedious and clumsy to use by now. I don't have a mouse that can click my scroll-wheel; and indeed, my financial circumstances keep me from affording one. As a lovely result, I can no longer throw Glaives or the Wolf Sledge. At all. In any context. I also can't shoot my gunblades. A huge part of what makes them distinct melee weapon categories is locked away behind a bad keybind; and combined with the murder of the Stance system, my inital glee at using something as magnificently grotesque as the Pathocyst is gone.

Bring back elements that actually looked different and didn't constantly belch out specks. 

Bring back the whole holstering system, make it inherently three times the previous speed like you should have done from the get-go, and take out the holster-speed mods. This flashing twitching is slowly but steadily driving me misanthropically insane.

Bring back the old Combos and restore the good stances that you've slaughtered to the fun they were. Somehow. The bar is literally underground. WHY did you do this? We liked them, believe it or not.

Fix the weird Stances. You know, the ones that are the Stances we actually asked you to change, because they are bad and awkward. Stances like Crossing Snakes and Grim Fury.

Bring. Back. Quick Attacks.

Bring back holding E to throw Glaives and Wolf Sledge; and also for firing gunblades.

TAKE OUT AUTO-BLOCK ALTOGETHER. IN ANY CONTEXT. I DON'T WANT MY GAME PLAYING ITSELF FOR ME, IT'S BORING AND INSULTING. And it constantly interrupts things to "save" us; even now. I hate automatic block; so, very, very much.

Take that accursed flash out of melee lock-in, and then maybe I'll be glad Sword Alone is back. You can't restore my most sorely missed mechanic, and then expect me to be relieved you made it visually offputting.

NEVER bind anything to Mouse3. It never works, and it's never convenient or comfortable for the players' fingers.

I'm exhausted, I'm angry, I'm bored, and my hype is gone. I don't want to know what's going on with Duviri, because I know that even if I acquire that weird horseman-thing's sword, it will be pure misery to use. I don't want to hunt the Liches, because that fancy new Hammer is going to suck without Crushing Ruin and Shattering Storm restored to the fun they were for years and years, until literally yesterday killed them.

I don't mean to go on a tirade, but I'm simply done. I can't bring myself, at the present, to enjoy a game that consistently annihlates every aspect of the melee combat that originally sold me on keeping it installed upon my Steam account. I can't enjoy being a space ninja if the ninja half of that equation is neutered, scrambled, clogged with needless VFX, and shoved ever further aside with each "improvement".

I think I'm going to go play Dark Souls 3 now; which the Japanese noticably have not touched a single thing about the control scheme of; nor have they suddenly cut out all the Weapon Arts and replaced them with clumsier, less fun ones; as was done in Warframe with Stances and Combos since literally yesterday. 

Halloween is normally my favorite holiday, but I will remember 2019 as the year it brought only disappointment.

 

 

Edited November 1, 2019 by Maxim_M_Payne

[DoomFruit]

20 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Heavy... Attack... Button? What? Did they add a new keybind? Can I use this "heavy attack button" without a melee equipped? What even is the point of creating another keybind? This isn't Devil May Cry or Dark Souls. We don't need a two-button melee combat system. Holding attack worked just fine, now it does... What, nothing? Confusion aside, this just seems like a pointless decision.

Yep, they did add another keybind. No, this wasn't mentioned anywhere at all. I personally stuck it on the same button as alt-fire (for me, mouse button 5); it doesn't clash and there's no overlap. I don't know why it isn't a simple dual-mode button for alt-fire/heavy attack. Yeah, it is a pointless decision.

22 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

As I said, that's an issue with the implementation of auto-block, specifically that it's hard-coded to aimglide because it used to be bound to the aimglide button. There's absolutely no reason why auto-block should trigger a glide, nor why it should interrupt charged attacks or melee swings. At the risk of coming across as crass, that's an example of ineptitude in implementation, in that DE hard-coded the mechanics to their shared controls and couldn't be arsed to fix the implementation when the systems got repurposed. I'd rather they fix autoblock over scrapping it.

That said, it's not triggering for me. Could be I'm not having any luck in getting it to trigger, though. If you're saying it's supposed to work as intended, then I'll take your word for it and kee trying.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you on any point. The implementation is annoying, it's intrusive and it could have been done so much better (namely: with an option or maybe even a dedicated block button, like we used to have 6 years ago). I don't tend to notice the autoblock that much because I obsessively zoom after every single swing to get rid of the stupid sword so I can airburst my Corinth again (such wonderful fluidity, DE), but I distinctly remember getting paused in mid-air when I was trying to leap over an enemy because the game still thinks that it knows what I want to do.

[Vesciroth]

6 hours ago, -S-O--Sephiroth-Crescent said:

Gunblades feel wrong now please give us the old hold E for 2 shots back and also tap e for 1 shot EVEN when running 😞 my fav weapon is borked right now 

 

1 hour ago, anfuerudo said:

And Gunblades added insult to injury. Especially Redeemer. You're swinging and throwing your blade most of a time, rolling here and there with zero efficiency, because if you want to hit something, you have to get up close and personal, but then your combo brings the big boom and the enemies scatter randomly around the room, because Redeemer has that guaranteed blast proc on targets up close. Heavy attacks... well, they're working almost like they used to work when they were called charged attacks, but they no longer produce combo multiplier, so it's a flat damage all the time. Zero scaling. And if you want to charge it, you have to perform a dance, but then when you perform one heavy attack all your dancing goes nowhere, along with your combo counter. And you have to bloody hit the target, and your shot has to land on it, and it should be enough. Because if it wasn't, you have to do it all over again. Or simply forget all that bloody minded dancing and concentrate on heavy attacks. Thanks, very inventive.

 

4 hours ago, DoomFruit said:

Gunblades: JESUS CHRIST WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? I can't charge up a shot without having to go into melee mode and explicitly press alt-fire and I can't melee (in any stance or combo) without being thrown around like a ragdoll. I thought it was bad before, but now?

Completely agree with all of these. Please return charged attacks that don't consume combo counter for the weapons that were designed and constructed entirely with charged attacks in mind, i.e. gunblades, glaives, and the Zenistar. Other melee weapons don't need to have a charged attack mechanic, but these ones do. This isn't a new idea, when the glaive first came out it was the only weapon with a charged attack in the game. Melee weapons don't have to all have the same mechanics across the board. 

[5H4DE]

So, after playing around with the new system for a little bit I have a few impressions:

Tonfas & Scythes - just amazing, Reaping Spiral and Sovereign Outcast feel so good to use and the weapon's range is amazing.

Dagger - feels nice, juggling lifted enemies in the air is fun. Covert Lethality is a no go, just make it a Parazon Mod as initially planned, that thing might as well have the one-shot stealth finishers.

Dual Daggers - stances are wonky so they don't feel good to use, I'd rather use single daggers

Heavy Blades - Tempo Royale feels just as good as before, but weapon damage itself is abysmally low

Glaives - not amazing bit not awful either, glad simply throwing it doesn't consume combo counter

Polearms - better than before

Machete - Cyclone Kraken feels more satisfying than before and they finally have usable range

Sparring - Brutal tide first combo looks weird but overall they're nice and Heavy Attacks feel especially strong with these

Claws - Slash galore - nothing more to say

Sword & Shield - better than before, RMB standing combo for Final Harbinger feels especially strong

That's all I got to play around with for now

Major issues :

- plenty of forward combos SLOW YOU down, this is awful

- no new combos - it's all the old combos cut in pieces and stitched together in a lazy mannet

- Old stances don't have enough combo variety to use all of the 4 combinations, this is awful

- heavy attacks for a lot of weapons aren't worth using

Edited November 1, 2019 by TheRealShade

[Maxus1113]

So when using my favourite weapon combo - dual wielding the Euphona Prime and the Orvius I noticed the following:

• The Orvius' special mechanic (suspending throw) is really difficult awkward to get to work, since it will often just trigger a  normal (power) throw.
• The suspending throw is impossible to access with a secondary that has a secondary fire
• When dual wielding with a single handed pistol the power throw is no longer the suspending throw but the normal one. 
• The power throw seems to track dead bodies

Please change the Orvius' power throw (especially in dual wielding) back to the way it was before, since it was a very unique (and certainly effective!) mechanic when compared to the other glaives.

 

[Steel_Rook]

15 minutes ago, DoomFruit said:

Yep, they did add another keybind. No, this wasn't mentioned anywhere at all. I personally stuck it on the same button as alt-fire (for me, mouse button 5); it doesn't clash and there's no overlap. I don't know why it isn't a simple dual-mode button for alt-fire/heavy attack. Yeah, it is a pointless decision.

But that means I have to take a swing and "semi-equip" my melee weapon before I can use the Heavy Attack, then, no? The whole point of the quick-melee weapon swap was so we could use our full suite of controls without having to manually swap to a melee weapon. Looks like Melee 3.0's reversal of this has been full-throated, with the majority of melee mechanics once again locked behind a "melee equipped" mode, whether I hold the swap button or take a swing with melee. It was already annoying enough trying to block Flame Eximus AoE explosions, now I'm going to have to do that every time I want to fire my Redeemer or swing a heavy attack? When's melee 4.0 coming out again?

I'm being facetious, obviously, but this is just dumb. I get adding a "secondary fire" alternative for melee weapons - sure, why not. But why attach heavy attacks to it? More specifically, why REMOVE heavy attacks from the quick melee button hold? Because right now it seems like holding the quick melee button... Does nothing? Why not let both input methods cause a heavy attack?

 

19 minutes ago, DoomFruit said:

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you on any point. The implementation is annoying, it's intrusive and it could have been done so much better (namely: with an option or maybe even a dedicated block button, like we used to have 6 years ago). I don't tend to notice the autoblock that much because I obsessively zoom after every single swing to get rid of the stupid sword so I can airburst my Corinth again (such wonderful fluidity, DE), but I distinctly remember getting paused in mid-air when I was trying to leap over an enemy because the game still thinks that it knows what I want to do.

Well, if they didn't do anything to Autoblock then yes - it'll still stick you into an uninterruptible aim glide. If I had to guess, the reason this happens is because someone at DE took a shortcut way back in the day. Rather than implementing a unique "block" mechanic, they reused the code from the Aim mechanic and attached stats and animations for it. At the time this made sense because you could only trigger block via the same key which triggered the aim/zoom/glide mechanic. Then they moved block away from that key, but simply reused the whole package, and that package comes with aim and zoom attached. What DE should have done as far back as Melee 2.9 is reimplement block separate from all of its aim heritage. That way, you could auto-block while falling without going into a glide OR autoblock while gliding if you initiated a glide.

Given the slap-dash nature of melee 2.9, I could see them rushing it half-cocked an that slipping through the cracks because nobody ever tests anything. I don't see how it could STILL be the case in Melee 3.0 many months later after this issue has been reported and examined in detail over and over again, by myself and others. It seems like DE took a superficial look at the feedback and skimmed the notion that "people don't like autoblock, let's roll that change back" without ever getting into the how or why people are complaining. Surface-level design decisions like these always bother me on a principle level, because it demonstrates a lack of care for player feedback and poor development practice.

I sincerely hope we're both wrong, somehow, and that DE fixed auto-block and block in general to not trigger a glide in the air, but... I doubt it.

[DoomFruit]

4 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

But that means I have to take a swing and "semi-equip" my melee weapon before I can use the Heavy Attack, then, no? The whole point of the quick-melee weapon swap was so we could use our full suite of controls without having to manually swap to a melee weapon. Looks like Melee 3.0's reversal of this has been full-throated, with the majority of melee mechanics once again locked behind a "melee equipped" mode, whether I hold the swap button or take a swing with melee. It was already annoying enough trying to block Flame Eximus AoE explosions, now I'm going to have to do that every time I want to fire my Redeemer or swing a heavy attack? When's melee 4.0 coming out again?

Correct. Incidentally, "heavy attack" is exactly the same as the melee 2.5 charge attack - it has the same attack animation, has the same wind-up animation and has the same wind-up sound. The only difference is that instead of having both of them on the same button but accessed contextually (tap vs. hold), there is now a completely separate and un-necessary keybind.

Honestly, I still think that melee 1.0 was the best version. We had quick attacks, we had charge attacks, it never felt clunky to use either one, we could block at any moment if we so wished and when some weapons had similar stats, they were distinguished by having different attack animations.

[ExcaliburUmbra]

So far I’m enjoying the new changes, but two aspects have disappointed me so far:

1. Heavy attacks are just old charge attacks with new VFX. Since they are an integral portion of the new system, I was hoping for some new animations that would standardize their functionality since a lot of the old charge attack animations were awkward to even hit enemies with. I’m especially disappointed that Exalted melee weapons re-use other classes heavy attack animations rather then having unique ones.
2. Stances that didn’t have enough combos/animations to support every facet of the new system (both variants of neutral and forward combos) weren’t given new animations but instead just don’t have combos where other stances do. It feels like they are unfinished in comparison to the stances that have all four ground combos,

[Steel_Rook]

19 minutes ago, DoomFruit said:

Honestly, I still think that melee 1.0 was the best version. We had quick attacks, we had charge attacks, it never felt clunky to use either one, we could block at any moment if we so wished and when some weapons had similar stats, they were distinguished by having different attack animations.

That's what I feel, as well. I never got the point of having flashy combos in a game like this in the first place. Give players a simple two-three hit looping combo and leave it at that. All the spins and whirls and lunges and such might look fancy from a spectator's point of view, but they make the game's pace feel uneven and end up being wholly interchangeable anyway. This is why I proposed giving players access to two looping combos and that's it. We definitely don't need four of them, we don't need more buttons, we don't need more complexity. This isn't a fighting game, it's a horde shooter where the best "combo" is the one most easily able to cleave through a large number of enemies, or alternately one which is able to cleave through one tough enemy. We definitely don't need mobility in the combos themselves, because we have a whole mobility system as it is.

[Miko_Rider]

The use of "Life-Strike" by a heavy attack feels very bulky.

Often you need a little life in stressful situations. Before the update, you could quickly activate the mod by chanelling.
The heavy attacks, however, are too slow compared to usage before the Melee update. While doing the animation of the heavy attack you can get killed.

[Maganar]

12 hours ago, Vesciroth said:

 

Yup, it seems like DE was so focused on getting rid of charge attacks because nobody used them on most melee weapons that they unfortunately forgot about the weapons which relied entirely on charged attacks as their normal attacks, such as glaives and gunblades. Using the default feature of a glaive or a gunblade, i.e. throwing or shooting, should not be primarily locked to the heavy attack feature, especially since heavy attacks now eat all your combo stacks. The update has made it both uncomfortable and unrewarding to use glaives or gunblades for the things that makes them unique, which are their throwing or shooting mechanics. For higher level enemies (not crazy endurance run enemies, you will experience this even at levels below 100), I am incentivized to not throw my glaive or shoot my gunblade, because that will eat my entire combo stack, which I need to be able to kill the remaining enemies, and the single heavy attack simply won't kill enough enemies in a single hit to justify using it. We should never be incentivized to not use the primary feature of a weapon.

In keeping with what I have said earlier, we should be able to smoothly and repeatedly aim and shoot gunblades/throw glaives both on the run and standing still, like we were able to before the update, and this should not be a feature locked behind eating you entire combo stack. These shooting or throwing options don't need to have the same 3x damage multiplier the old charge attack had, given the increase to base damage and combo counter building, but they do need to be as comfortable as before and not consume your entire combo counter.

The mechanics of the old charged attack system, while bad and unwieldy for other melee weapons, were perfect for glaives and gunblades. And that makes perfect sense because, if I recall correctly, when the glaive was first released it was the only weapon with a charged attack, because it was the only melee weapon at the time that a charged attack mechanically made sense on. Other melee weapons don't need default charged attack mechanics for normal use, but glaives and gunblades have always needed them

Heavy attacks for these weapons can have bonuses like greater damage or (what I'd be more interested to see) different functionality, like gunblade heavy attacks firing an aoe knockdown/knockback projectile or glaive heavy attacks applying a guaranteed slash proc (these are just possible examples), but what they can't be is the only way to use the weapons for the reasons we love them, the reasons we've been using them for years, which are their old default shooting/throwing mechanics. 

I'm very glad to see I'm not screaming into the Void and that other players are noticing and echoing my concerns.  Gunblades were always of less interest to me (I mostly just used Redeemer Prime for Profit Taker to cover extra elements, using the Bullet Dance reverse walk combo) so I hadn't gotten to them yet in my extensive melee weapons test that began yesterday (I own about half of the melee weapons in the game I believe as a MR27 player that obsessively buys inventory slots to hoard a comprehensive collection of just about anything I don't hate).  That said, I was already worried about their usability going down since I know things like the reverse-walk combo have no doubt been reworked or removed and now I see that I was correct to believe this would be the case.  This is very unfortunate.

Heavy attacks are still super "meh" to me (much like old charge attacks) outside of insanely broken synergies like my Fragor Prime that has a +Initial Combo stat from a riven after this overhaul resulting in spammable 3x multiplied heavy attacks that oneshot Heavy Gunners well over Level 100 in a broad sweeping arc that hits everything in 180 degrees in front of you.  That said, it's still better than old charge attacks for normal weapons, so I'm not clamoring for "bring back charge attacks!"  I just want Glaives, and Gunblades too it seems, to have the old charge-attack style attack so that they can work properly again rather than requiring full melee mode (or dual-wielding with pistols in the case of Glaives) simply to be able to throw/shoot on demand.  This is an integral part of their identity and made them unique and allowed skill expression by aiming the throws and shots for a weapon class that normally devolves down to mashing a single key while running through missions.

Edited November 1, 2019 by Maganar

[Jarriaga]

Here's my feedback:

***Background***

Ever since Reb and Meg announced that Zenurik's Inner Might would be revised to affect heavy melee efficiency (Effectively a buff considering the new mechanics), I've made threads about how that would further eat-up Naramon's melee niche while giving Zenurik an underserved buff considering how the combo counter damage multiplier and many damage/channeling mods would only work with heavy melee, which in turn costs your entire combo multiplier if used without efficiency.

I made a thread about this last Friday, but it didn't get any traction.

Someone else also made another thread about the same topic this Monday. Didn't get much traction either.

Yet a third thread about this on Wednesday, which also died quickly.

For reference, assuming the exact same build with no base efficiency mods and a max-rank combo counter (12x // 222 hits), in Naramon, a single heavy melee hit drains it down to 0. In Zenurik, the same hit would drain it down to 7x, so you can deal a lot more heavy melee hits with a damage multiplier using Zenurik while Naramon would have to start building its multiplier from scratch again (Which no longer affects base hit damage). It can be mitigated somewhat with combo efficiency mods, but these also stack with Zenurik's Inner Might as well, so the gap remains.

The update is now live, and Naramon has taken a bigger hit than anticipated because Blood Rush was revised so it scales off base crit rather than total crit, effectively killing red crit potential on weapons that don't have base 30% crit. The combo counter has a hard cap at 12x / 222 hits, so just enough to start getting tier 1 red crits, but you still see orange crits. This change in how Blood Rush works also hurts rivens you had rolled for crit chance so it would give you enough total crit as to reach the next crit damage tier. They are no longer part of the equation.

Now, taking into account the speed in which you reach the combo counter cap (12x / 222 hits), the entire counter being lost in a single heavy attack unless you have efficiency, the Blood Rush rework, and the combo damage multiplier only applying to heavy attacks means that there is no real advantage for sustaining a long combo now. At least the Condition Overload nerf still lets you easily kill evel 165 Corrupted Heavy Gunners and Bombards, but crit-based builds are not scaling anywhere close to that.

***Proposed Changes***

- Blood Rush should be revised so it scales based on total crit instead of base crit (As it did before), or like Condition Overload it should get a higher base buff value to compensate the potential scaling value that was lost so it can at least reach the equivalent of Tier 3 red crits in order to compete with Condition Overload. Another alternative would be for Naramon to have a higher combo counter cap (20x - 25x) as a passive to help it scale better in melee overall.

- The reworked Zenurik Inner Might should be moved to Naramon. The reworked Zenurik Inner Might has no place being in Zenurik considering how powerful Zenurik already is and how this would further eat into Naramon's melee niche. "Channeling efficiency" made sense for Zenurik because of how it was tied to energy, but the current combo counter resource has no link to energy either, so it is thematically inappropriate as well. Naramon is the melee school. Therefore, it should exceed in all forms of melee at all times with no competition.

Zenurik currently has too many advantages. Giving it melee heavy attack efficiency on top of that when the new system was designed around capitalizing on heavy attacks while Naramon got an indirect nerf thanks to Blood Rush would only further push Zenurik towards "So good that there's really no other choice".

Overall, I like the changes to the melee system. I am loving my Nikanas now that they are actually hitting things from a distance, and will try scythes next. But Naramon is useless and dead to me now.

So hello Zenurik.

I'm also a bit upset about how the Blood Rush formula change effectively killed "+critical chance" in all of my melee Rivens, because they are no longer part of the Blood Rush equation. One thing is to gradually tone down rivens with disposition changes, but this change effectively killed the entire stat and now my rivens compete with regular mods.

[Twilight-Knight]

STATS - Exceptional change

TECHNIQUES - brilliant + disaster

 

[Shizzazzle]

Love the changes to stances, going to take some getting used to but it *feels* right. That said...

Please let us rebind Heavy Attacks to the pre-update 26 Hold E keybind. Not only does it feel clunky and unnecessarily laborious on any melee weapon to have a separate button for Heavy Attacks, it's rendered weapons like Glaives and Gunblades too awkward to use. It's an enormous step backwards for "flow" in an update that's otherwise made melee flow a lot more reliably. 

[Maganar]

7 minutes ago, Jarriaga said:

Here's my feedback:

 

Overall, I like the changes to the melee system. I am loving my Nikanas now that they are actually hitting things from a distance, and will try scythes next. But Naramon is useless and dead to me now.

 

As someone complaining heavily about the way Glaives have been treated and griping seriously about this, I still have to take a moment to tell you that you're going to love Scythes.  I was astonished at the way Hate and Reaper Prime just chew through Level 100 Heavy Gunners within only a couple hits and the animations are now extremely fluid and mobile unlike the formerly unwieldy animations.  Scythes are a huge win for me.  Also tried Nikanas, also liked their animations.  Having the long sweep from Blind Justice on the gap closer so that it can be used on-demand is beautiful.

I echo your thoughts on Naramon, and have nothing else to add.

Speaking of maintaining combos, that's just another thing that feels awful about Glaives as I could have complained about in my earlier post.  Putting the throw mechanic on the Heavy Attack key now strongly incentivizes players NOT to throw except to execute a target after building up a high combo multiplier, instead encouraging us to just spam faster melee attacks at point-blank to build up the multiplier and then finally throw.  As someone else said in reply to me, there should never be a case where players are incentivized to AVOID using the primary mechanic that defines a weapon class, and Glaives are now in that position because of the Heavy Attack binding for the throw.  The charge attack "hold to throw" (or fire for gunblades) really needs to be returned to these melees with alternate attack styles.

Also saw someone mentioning this being unwieldy with their Zenistar disc deployment and that makes sense to me, too, based on my experience.  Thus, lumping that into this category of melee weapons that need their charge attack returned (though only for the sake of throwing/shooting/deploying) seems fair to me.

[Noctah]

The Fist stance Gaia's Tragedy has lost its "Thousand Punches" part of the stance, which was my favorite!

It was the end of the hold combo, where the frame with do 12 hits in a split second.

No other stance was as close to allowing use to MUDA MUDA MUDA or ORA ORA ORA.

 

[Duality52]

So far, the combos felt less restrictive than before and are a lot easier to execute.

Aside from the Zenistar's borked duration, something doesn't feel right with taking out the "charged" throw properties of the Orvius where it would suspend the enemy with a charged throw while dual-wielding. Can the "charged" throw properties be added back in to make the Glaives more distinct?

[Azamagon]

Generally, I think this melee rehaul sets a much better precedent than the previous iteration, by a pretty large margin, for a few reasons:

1) Melee range is more normalized (both in modding and in base stats), which makes FAR more weapons eligible than ever before.

2) Heavy attacks matter, and are actually generally very powerful.

3) Streamlining the combos makes for a much easier "memory game".

4) Many old and terrible stances were (for the most part) improved. I'll get to specifics later down.

5) Lifted status is a smart and nice debuff (aside from some "push enemies away" issues with certain attacks), and helps differentiate a bunch of combo niches

6) Much more stats to play with now, both for variation and for buildstyles, and which all can be seen in the UI now!

So, I'd give this rehaul a general thumbs up, but let's point out some specific good and bad stuff too:

SPECIFIC NEGATIVES:

• Weapons with ranged heavy attacks (Glaives, gunblades, Wolf Sledge etc) are not nearly as snappy from a quickmelee standpoint, could we quickly also use those attacks by holding the melee button?
• Could we PLEASE have an opt-out button (like in the arsenal or something) from Glaive+Pistol dualwield? I generally dislike the dualwield singular combo, and much prefer Astral Twilight.
• Lifted Status has the same issue with the enemy floating as Titania's lifting effect has: The enemies often fly too far forward when you attack them. Make them a LOT more "stiff" in their positioning, please?
• BUGS: Quickening, Parry and Zenurik's Inner Might do not work at all.
• Movement lock on many forward combos, still? It's really clunky. Sure, the forward+block combos (for the most part) helps a lot with mobility, but it feels like there could be a bit more leeway on the forward movement with many of the forward combos.
• Quite often, I generally feel the forward command input is a very hindering input for the movement-neutral combos, making you mostly use the Forward and Forward+Block combo, often even by mistake. Is there any other command input that could work better for those combos? Like, holding the sprint button instead of the forward button? At least as an option?
• On a specific stance note:
  • Flailing Branch - Neutral combo's last hit ALWAYS misses (even if you angle yourself to have its hitbox strike right through the enemy).
  • Shimmering Blight + Bleeding Willow + Coiling Viper + Pointed Wind + Brutal Tide (might be a few more that I don't recall) - All these stances STILL only have two combos each, which feels a little sad (especially when, for example, Iron Phoenix was restructured from two to three combos).
  • Atlantis Vulcan - Forward block combo ends VERY unsmoothly. After the weaponspin forward attack, the player just kinda goes to a halt, even with a slight pause to it after. Feels very clunky.
  • Clashing Forest - Forward combo has barely any forward momentum. Before it was maybe a tad much, but now it feels like a snail's pace combo in comparison.
  • Stalking Fan - Neutral combo is reaaally slow, most notably the last attack and its "twirl the weapon for half a minute before hitting" animation. Forward combo, in contrast, is superfast, and the forward+block is quite useful for movement and wide multihitting, so the neutral combo feels like a very stark detrimental contrast to an otherwise good stance.
  • The Claws / Claw Stances and Polearms / Polearms stances - Still animates weirdly, due to not streamlining the held-weapon-angle versus stance's-strike-direction. Very sad to see that this ugliness was still neglected. I'd prefer to, for example, actually SLASH my enemies with the Cassowar, rather than slap them with the flat of the blade.

SPECIFIC POSITIVES:

• On stances:
  • Decisive Judgement - Was one of the better designed stances in Melee 2.0, and in Melee 3.0 it somehow feels even better. My go-to stance now.
  • Crossing Snakes - From a clunky mess to an actually rather nice stance now. Good job!
  • Gemini Cross - Generally has a very nice flow to it, well done!
  • Sundering Weave - Oof, this stance got LOTS of useability and variety improvements. Good job!
  • Eleventh Storm - Soooo much more useful now (and not completely objectively superior to the Final Harbinger stance like before, which I never liked). THANK YOU!
  • Grim Fury - Immediate... KICKS?! KIIIIICKS?! Yes!
  • Swooping Flacon - VERY nice job with this one. My 2nd favourite after Decisive Judgment!
  • Vulpine Mask - Never liked Rapiers that much in Melee 2.0. But now... oof, they are so GOOD with this awesome stance. Would've liked a TINY bit more forward "dashing" on the heavy attack thrust though.

QUESTIONS:

• What is Follow Through? Like a damageloss factor per enemy for hitting multiple enemies in a single strike or something?
• How do you throw the Sigma and Octantis shield in midair now?

 

That's it for now, might edit in more stuff later.

 

[DageWasTaken]

The Zenistar's disk should be returned to its default 45 seconds duration. I'm not exactly sure what the design philosophy for the Zenistar is or was, but it's a camping weapon now, that's how it's used.

Having a base time of 10 seconds makes it bad, even though combo counters significantly boosts its duration (I heard it can reach 2 minutes). 

[Jarriaga]

1 hour ago, Maganar said:

As someone complaining heavily about the way Glaives have been treated and griping seriously about this, I still have to take a moment to tell you that you're going to love Scythes.  I was astonished at the way Hate and Reaper Prime just chew through Level 100 Heavy Gunners within only a couple hits and the animations are now extremely fluid and mobile unlike the formerly unwieldy animations.  Scythes are a huge win for me.  Also tried Nikanas, also liked their animations.  Having the long sweep from Blind Justice on the gap closer so that it can be used on-demand is beautiful.

I echo your thoughts on Naramon, and have nothing else to add.

Speaking of maintaining combos, that's just another thing that feels awful about Glaives as I could have complained about in my earlier post.  Putting the throw mechanic on the Heavy Attack key now strongly incentivizes players NOT to throw except to execute a target after building up a high combo multiplier, instead encouraging us to just spam faster melee attacks at point-blank to build up the multiplier and then finally throw.  As someone else said in reply to me, there should never be a case where players are incentivized to AVOID using the primary mechanic that defines a weapon class, and Glaives are now in that position because of the Heavy Attack binding for the throw.  The charge attack "hold to throw" (or fire for gunblades) really needs to be returned to these melees with alternate attack styles.

Also saw someone mentioning this being unwieldy with their Zenistar disc deployment and that makes sense to me, too, based on my experience.  Thus, lumping that into this category of melee weapons that need their charge attack returned (though only for the sake of throwing/shooting/deploying) seems fair to me.

Agreed. Players should not be incentivized to avoid using a weapon's mechanics.

If DE had left charge attacks as they are and added the heavy melee mechanic as its own thing, Glaive and Gunblade issues would be minimal. There was no need to fuse them both, which effectively results in the loop you have mentioned.

Edited November 1, 2019 by Jarriaga

[(PSN)Keiji_Haku]

1 hour ago, Jarriaga said:

Zenurik currently has too many advantages. Giving it melee heavy attack efficiency on top of that when the new system was designed around capitalizing on heavy attacks while Naramon got an indirect nerf thanks to Blood Rush would only further push Zenurik towards "So good that there's really no other choice".

 

I think we're already there lol.

[Redpaws]

Haven't had enough time to really test the new melee system too much, but I've been immediately disappointed with something I thought would be fixed with this update:

You can't use M1 to swing your melee while it is equipped. Unless you turn "melee with fire input" on. Which makes it so when you quick melee, you'll keep on swinging instead of swapping back to your gun, which breaks the flow a LOT when you do it unintentionally because you forgot to aim first. Especially if you're using a slower base speed melee with Berserker, and you only wanted to swing once or twice before going back to shooting. But having to use the quick melee button when I WANT to be in full melee is also a pain compared to being able to use M1.

Please make it so M1 swings your melee even with "melee with fire input" turned off when you've fully swapped to melee.

[Vesciroth]

1 hour ago, Shizzazzle said:

Please let us rebind Heavy Attacks to the pre-update 26 Hold E keybind. Not only does it feel clunky and unnecessarily laborious on any melee weapon to have a separate button for Heavy Attacks, it's rendered weapons like Glaives and Gunblades too awkward to use. It's an enormous step backwards for "flow" in an update that's otherwise made melee flow a lot more reliably. 

 

1 hour ago, Azamagon said:

• Weapons with ranged heavy attacks (Glaives, gunblades, Wolf Sledge etc) are not nearly as snappy from a quickmelee standpoint, could we quickly also use those attacks by holding the melee button?

For primarily ranged melee weapons in particular, those being glaives and gunblades, simply allowing you to bind Heavy Attacks to Hold E is not an adequate solution, because Heavy Attacks are both considerably slower than the old charge attack and wipe out your entire combo counter stack, and people who used glaives or gunblades heavily, as I did, used them to repeatedly use charged attacks as pretty much the only method of attack. The main reason people use glaives or gunblades is so that they can throw or shoot them constantly; every attack that you actually want to use should not be wiping out your combo counter, because that disincentives using the weapon for the main reason you're using the weapon.

These weapons are not good in melee range, gunblades in particular. They simply aren't, even after all the changes. Because the combos still haphazardly incorporate shooting and throwing (gunblade combos also feature atrocious forced jumps that fling you around the map), mixed in with melee attacks, up to half of your attacks will simply not hit the enemies if you're in melee range even using a melee-focused combo. If you can't shoot reliably or throw reliably with these weapons, there is no point in using them over any other melee weapon, almost any of which are vastly more effective for combat in standard melee range because their combos don't feature mandatory ranged attacks that miss everything in melee range and are too jittery and unstable to hit anything at distance. But the solution is not to make them better in melee range and leave the ranged attacks as broken and terrible as they currently are. Glaive and gunblade players are completely willing for these weapons to be worse at melee range than other melee weapon, provided their ranged mechanics are fixed and good once again, because that is a fair trade-off for using a range-focused melee weapon. Making them better at melee and not improving their ranged attacks will simply make these weapons completely interchangeable with any other medium to low range melee weapon, wiping out entire alternative melee playstyles and incentivizing even more people to use standard melee playstyles like spin to win, which is something DE claims they don't want.

For these weapons specifically (and you can certainly make the case for the Zenistar and Wolf Sledge too), a mechanic similar to the old charged attack has to be reintroduced. It doesn't have to be put on other weapons, where it was undesirable and clunky, but for weapons that were designed by the developers to be optimized for charge attacks, they need to be brought back in an adequate way, one that does not wipe out your combo counter every time you use it.

28 minutes ago, Jarriaga said:

Agreed. Player should not be incentivized to avoid using a weapon's mechanics.

If DE had left charge attacks as they are and added the heavy melee mechanic as its own thing, Glaive and Gunblade issues would be minimal. There was no need to fuse them both, which effectively results in the loop you have mentioned.

Exactly, I completely agree.

Edited November 1, 2019 by Vesciroth
accidentally pluralized "any other medium to low range melee weapon"