(PC) Melee Phase 2: STATS Feedback

[(XBOX)ShonOfDawn]

Exalted blade feels very much worse after the update. For some reason, the attack animations have been slowed down considerably, and the heavy attacks do not generate waves, as they should be. EB is supposed to be the ultimate melee weapon, considering that excalibur is fully meant to be a melee warframe and that EB provides no other bonus (IE: Hysteria's invincibility, Baruuk's AOE), it should excel in the damage department. It is by no means weak, but in my opinion it has lost some of its personality. 

In order to fix it, EB should receive a small damage bump (40% maybe), and its heavy attacks should create big, fast traveling waves that punch through enemies. Excal's 1 and 3 should also be somehow reworked, as they feel quite outdated. 

[ASHERATOR]

I will just do a synopsis of my feelings in relation to the numerous comments. Lets start with the Negative and I will end on the positive items:

  Heavy Attacks has taken a huge beating in multiple sections of the forums and is a primary source of dissatisfaction people have in how the game feels as well as mine. The solution so far was to add heavy Attacks to the melee button which I feel was the opposite of what was needed since now I am even more frustrated by them. Many players comment that they do not even use heavy attacks. To return this to a viable part of the game play you don't need to add a AOE bubble blast or anything special or new to the attack just treat it like the old channeling attack in that it still adds to the combos just with a different attack style. The fix is that simple and it would become an enjoyable part of the game as it stands now it adds nothing and is actually a penalty to us to activate the heavy attack as has been said over and over.

  Condition Overload starts off strong which is good but the fact it no longer scales for higher end content is an issue and there are plenty of solutions that have been suggested so I will just point out that it is a concern.

  Blood Rush based mods only scaling to 220 hits again kills the ability to scale properly just like the condition overload problem both of which have been mathematically outlined a lot in the forums. Again the gear works great for the star chart but starts falling off after. I do not want weapon creep but do want to be able to use any weapon and have a way to get it to scale to the enemies that I am facing...that ability has been removed by handcuffing the status and crit and it seems like a weapon creep system with kuva weapons is being put in its place which is antithetical to the warframe idea in my book.

  I do not find the new finishers viable as by the time I get something down to the point I could use it generally they will die from status procs before I can activate. The old sneak up stealth finisher system made more sense to me. The Mercy finisher animations on Thralls I will admit to enjoying.

  I agree with the numerous comments on the changes to the Zenistar and Glaives especially the Orvius. They were unique weapons that had niche uses which made them interesting and fun. The Zenistar disk time out especially considering the other changes make for a weapon that is not viable at all. Removing the Orvius signature move of having the best tracking capability of all glaives which then could lift an enemy off the ground drain them or do an AOE attack to a group makes it extremely lackluster piece of gear now in comparison. The changes made them uninteresting and I am not finding any situations that I would bother using them now. People are having similar if not as extreme issues with the gunblades which I get as well.

  Most of these issues tie into sehafoc's earlier comments about “Games of Labor” where re-balancing to the detriment of the point of the game or the items that someone has worked hard for in the game impacts the customers psychology in ways that I can't imagine the developers want us impacted. Yes the re-balancing the catchmoon then balancing 5 others was positive but nerfing scaling I am having a hard time seeing the benefit and am only hearing the frustration from the community.

   The positive aspect of the system:

  The changes to how to activate melee moves in the stances is a huge improvement over the previous weird button mashing. I cannot thank the developers enough for this consolidated system where no matter the weapon I can easily tactically coordinate my dash forward to attack an enemy, do a radial strike on the group and then finish up a tougher enemy in the group with quick attacks. That is not even mentioning the easy movements I can combine to dodge, roll, back flip, wall-walk, etc in conjunction. The different weapons and stances that have been worked on have unique looking movements which I very much appreciate the eye candy but more importantly to me the system now has a solid and stable mechanic to do a variety of things easily.

The return of blocking and improvements to it are fantastic.

  I for one love the freedom of movement in this game which is amazing as I look at many other games systems of obstacle vaulting, etc that remove my immersion in the game and make me feel like I'm on a rail with limited choices. I love that one day I can be a grunt on the ground or free-play bounties, fishing, mining, boarding and the next be having a space battle on an arch-wing. The variety of play options and gear keeps the game interesting. Which is why the issues above which either limit us or punish us for acquiring stuff all are the wrong precedent in my humble opinion.

[alseltas]

Taken away the affection of combo counter, Thrown melee’s throws are totally useless now.

 With slow wind-up, the throw only hits few time per a enemy (usually only once), and also its returning takes time, resulting too small DPS at all. 

Now the combo counter only affects the explosion. However, the explosion does not have any Crit chance. While other weapons such as Redeemer P can deal huge damage with the combination of Heavy Attack and True(Sacrificial) Steel, glaives, which were already minor melee prior the Old Blood, gained nothing but only nerf.

Please revert the nerf and give them your love again.

[Moon.Shadows]

I can't begin to accurately describe how I feel right now without using socially unacceptable language. Literally DAYS before I get zenistar it's nerfed so the disk feature lasts 10 seconds for each combo multiplier.

I am going to go for understatement of the year and say, "I am really angry".

[Grave.Knight]

Reflection doesn't do anything now.

[(XBOX)DarkForceLegend]

Through building a few things I've found that status builds don't seem to be as viable as they once were. Granted, I am new to status builds, so I may be ignorant to some key mods or something. After trying a few configurations i've found that weapons that are intended for status seems to be easily outperformed by crit based weapons. Take the Falcor for example... I've been enjoying the new Glaive combos so I was eager to get the Falcor to work over the past week, week and a half. After trying multiple configurations to my mod build, I was forced to utilize a riven to make a crit viable build so that it could compete in higher level gameplay.

I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand it was able to do most all of the content in the star chart, but with much investment. Were as a crit based weapon takes far less investment and can easily handle star chart content and late game content.

[ToKeSia]

what the point to put +slide critical that specialized in slide only into riven if the value is lower than +cc that affected every attack type?

[Crousere]

Scindo Prime should have better stats, I would like to see it as a sidegrade to Gram Prime. Description says it has been used as an executioners axe, why not give it a bonus heavy attack damage and 3x critical damage (or something like that) to match that description. It's oldschool weapon and I would like to have a reason to use it

[Twisted_Wisdom]

Since the latest melee update, I dont think much of how streamlined changing weapons has become. Its PITA. There is nothing streamlined about it. Used to be able to change weapons quickly, now have to keep rotating through weapons to get to right one. If i wasn't using tanky frame, would have died while trying to change weapons.

[Grave.Knight]

On 2019-12-04 at 5:44 AM, Twisted_Wisdom said:

Since the latest melee update, I dont think much of how streamlined changing weapons has become. Its PITA. There is nothing streamlined about it. Used to be able to change weapons quickly, now have to keep rotating through weapons to get to right one. If i wasn't using tanky frame, would have died while trying to change weapons.

If you want to switch back to your previous weapon just aim for a split second.

[(PSN)BlightDragon89]

Overall I like the new system, but the Zenistar changes really make the weapon useless. This was my go to weapon for my solo survival and arbitration runs. With having to use combo count to make the disk useful, I would have to leave my camp point. Also, there is next to no way to get said combo count back up before the disk run out of time. IMO, you have nerfed the usefulness of this weapon to basically 0. I hope to see this change reversed in the future.

[DCaedus]

I am loving the re-balanced stats of the melee weapons. Feels like 80% of the melee weapons are great now, as opposed to 20-30% of them being good for endgame content previous to the update.

Great job there.

Edited December 7, 2019 by D_Caedus

[Haranthus]

I'm finding that most of my melee weapons have been crowded out by extremely clearly "best" options.

I keep asking myself ... Why take any other weapon than Gram Prime??

I've given other weapons a try, but ... I keep coming back to Gram Prime.  Even my favorite Zaw is now just an after thought compared to Gram Prime.  (it doesn't help that the stance feels pretty lousy)

[wolfwind12345]

zenistar disc nerf to 8secs is useless 

[(PSN)de_sch0sch]

Exalted melees are in a poor state now. There's 3 possibilities:

1. Bring them in line with regular melees regarding mod pools (rivens, combo mods)
2. Beef them up to compensate the lack of the mods mentioned above
3. Remove them as abilities and give them the Garuda Talons treatment (new warframe abilities needed)

[Brodh]

Can we please get an explanation for adding IPS to all the pure elemental melees? It's incredibly frustrating to have things I invested in completely lose their identity for seemingly no reason. As far as I can tell Silva & Aegis was the only survivor, and I half expect that was a mistake.

 

[Twilight-Knight]

This melee ... huge damage yes ok, at first anyway. Screw up previous melee system. Now all stances can be seen as the same, people glad at high damage ? ok. But it's potential are actually limited. Pfft there is even nerf on stances not about damage, but about speed and hits.... GOOD. Game is actually for fools with Mr 20 above die easily when they encounter problems anyway.

Inaros and limbo runners .....

The melee 2.0 at sanctuary update was so perfect, so as I thought they would apply scaling buff with levels but no, since all animation lock removed I knew things just going straight down.