In Defense of the Melee Rework - Why I believe DE made the right choices

[Bakaguya-sama]

Tldr: Melee weapons have to be OP because AoE nukes are OP.   

Some people says Melee are currently overpowered. Yes, melee can do ludicrous damage with the right builds. 660% extra crit chance from Blood Rush, 440% extra status chance from Weeping Wound, and several hundreds percent extra in damage thanks to Condition Overload. Big red Crits with Heat Viral procs everywhere.

Alternatively, Heavy attack builds on Gunblades and weapons with guaranteed Slash procs (Scythes, Nikanas etc.) can deal even bigger damage, at the cost of being slower than combo based builds.  

But I think melee current power level is fine. Why? 

The answer is Saryn. Or more in general term, mass AoE nukeframes like Saryn and Mesa (Volt, Mirage etc.).  These nukeframes can deal lethal damage to enemies over a large area, many of them can do it without requiring line of sight. And they do it very fast, effectively placing a death timer on every mobs on the map that is measured in seconds.  

Melee, by nature, can only deal damage in a limited area in front/around the player. The only way for them to be a truly viable choice is for them to be doing significantly more damage than the AoE nukes.  Because if they don't,  AoE nukes will simply kill everything, leaving nothing left to be touched by melee weapons.  

The way I see it, DE was faced with two choices when they reworked Melee and nerfed Melee range and Maiming Strike (the spin2win builds) many months ago:  

  1. Make Melee do reasonable damage,  rendering obsolete in the face of obscenely overpowered AoE nukes.  

   2. Make Melee do obscene damage so they can compete with AoE nukes as a viable damage dealing option.  

At the end, DE chose 2. Which I believe was the correct choice. 

Unfortunately, nerfing AoE nukes to reasonable levels can never be on the table, seeing how badly the community react to any kind of nerf. Like we see with the helminth pre-nerf backlash happening right now.  So I have lost all hopes of that ever happening.  

Some may say that current Melee is "braindead". I do admit spamming Forward + E + (RMB depending on the stance combo) isn't exactly high octane gameplay. But is it any less "braindead" than Saryn pressing 1 and 4,  or Mesa pressing 4 and LMB? I doubt that. At the very least, when I'm using melee, I can see the enemies I'm killing, and the mobs get the chance to hit me back.   

Yes, I am fully aware of the irony that the melee reworks have made "Melee" Nukes like Khora and Baruuk   more powerful. I am also aware that the Zenistar is still broken by the rework. But aside from those cases, I believe that the Melee rework was a tremendous success. It has opened up a very wide variety of melee weapons to being viable. Lots of competitive mod choices too, with 2 distinctive playstyle both being supported (combo vs heavy spam).  

So hopefully, this puts an end to any calls of nerfing melee. At the very least, you can't nerf melee without first nerfing AoE nukes. 

[(XBOX)EternalDrk Mako]

-looks around confused-

unsure when it was bad? i mean i heard some grumbles but lots of the minor issues were fixed a bit later

only issue I have is the new channeling was shelved due to covid aka the empowered trigger state that was to replace old channeling 

but thats for someday to drop so meh , the overall function of most melee and stances has been pretty good i think

[Oreades]

-also looks around confused- 

wasn't all of this settled, like months ago? 

[MasterBurik]

3 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

At the very least, you can't nerf melee without first nerfing AoE nukes. 

Spoiler

Oh...right. 😉

 

[lukinu_u]

The issue is melee are AoE nuke right now.

[Andele3025]

17 minutes ago, (XB1)EternalDrk Mako said:

 

unsure when it was bad? i mean i heard some grumbles but lots of the minor issues were fixed a bit later

but thats for someday to drop so meh , the overall function of most melee and stances has been pretty good i think

Kinda. Melee 3.0 will be finished when stances get reverted from their new animation lock filled state into the old mechanics they had (ironically more free movement, slowdowns, keyboard steer on dashes, not forgetting to put decellerations on certain attacks to not yeet yourself into the air when making a attack near stairs, etc), we get the promised 2.999 devil trigger and life strike becomes 0.5% universal life steal instead of heavy attack slash only mod (and maybe meme strike works like a 100% vigilante set effect)

However yes, increasing floor massively while reducing cieling to 1/5th of its prior "optimized but realistic average" was very good.

[Traumtulpe]

15 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

Unfortunately, nerfing AoE nukes to reasonable levels can never be on the table, seeing how badly the community react to any kind of nerf. Like we see with the helminth pre-nerf backlash happening right now.

The problem with their Helminth lies in both their reasoning, and the expectations that they had set. They said they were going to buff weak abilities to make them more appealing - instead they nerfed the better ones because players were excited for them.

If you actually have a good reason to nerf things, there are only a few people complaining. See the Catchmoon for example. Was op, got nerfed. Done. The only issue there is releasing an OP weapon in the first place, and wasting the effort and resources of players without any compensation.

As far as melee is concerned, DE could easily reduce the damage of all melee weapons by 50%. Nobody would even notice unless they are on the Steel Path. Though if anything is getting nerfed, it'll first be Khora.

[kwlingo]

45 minutes ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

AoE nukes are OP.   

It funny on every balancing thread Nukes are the main topic. lol DE are you seeing the pattern...?

[TheLexiConArtist]

Meme Strike and spin-to-win wasn't nerfed and melee reworked because of any esoteric comparison of melee to AOE abilities. It was fixed, because quite simply it was a massive programming oversight that DE let fester like your local infestation. _{(too soon?)}

The effect of Meme Strike alone was only as bad as Hunter Munitions is currently - a slightly broken mod in that it takes weapons and effects designed exclusively without one half of the Crit/Status scale in mind, and makes them just do the best of both (and subsequently excel even more in their original strength, since DoT procs inherit Crit Damage). Case in point: Ivara's Concentrated Arrow can't proc modded statuses from the explosion, but Hunter Munitions still works, which is the only reason the otherwise bad augment is limping along being almost-usable.
It's busted because it made weapons cheat their class, but it's sort of a tolerable level of busted which doesn't need immediately fixing. It can be left to stew to study the effects and outcomes before any change is made.

The problem lay exclusively in its combination with the mechanisms of Blood Rush at the time. Where the equation should have been:
       ( ModdedCritChance * ( BloodRushModifier * ComboMultiplier )) + MemeStrike
It was instead:
       ( ModdedCritChance + MemeStrike) * (BloodRushModifier * ComboMultiplier)

That's the oversight which needed an immediate fix. The fact that Blood Rush was allowed to act as an 'end of equation' multiplier instead of putting Meme Strike's additive gain as the final change means that every weapon scaled up a Blood Rush Combo from at least 95% crit chance. So a crit weapon and a non-crit weapon are now almost indistinguishable - there's around a +25% difference in the crit chance base, at most, which doesn't amount to much in the grander scheme. And they're all scaling up to several hundred if not over a thousand crit chance. Nothing could compete with that. Every crit tier beyond yellow is doubling up too, so let's say we got a modest 500% crit chance from a (naturally 5%) weapon - that's 16(+ weapon's critdamage stat) times the output.

 

I won't defend the melee '3.0' changes much, I'd still rather have my quick-melee than the sorry state most stances are in (and the abject failure to 'sticky target' enemies like it used to, regardless of settings), but fundamentally we see two facets of change:

1. Improving damage across the board to narrow the gap between the previous non-Meme-Strike/non-combo users and what absurdity Meme Strike was capable of with Blood Rush
2. Changing how combo works to shake up the overbearing spin-to-win 'playstyle' and also to facilitate mechanical changes to Blood Rush in hopes of avoiding future issues.

Did that second, less 'numbers game' change actually hit the mark and take Blood Rush off the every-man's build? Maybe not. But the attempt was made.

[Andele3025]

40 minutes ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

Meme Strike and spin-to-win wasn't nerfed and melee reworked because of any esoteric comparison of melee to AOE abilities. It was fixed, because quite simply it was a massive programming oversight that DE let fester like your local infestation. _{(too soon?)}

The effect of Meme Strike alone was only as bad as Hunter Munitions is currently - a slightly broken mod in that it takes weapons and effects designed exclusively without one half of the Crit/Status scale in mind, and makes them just do the best of both (and subsequently excel even more in their original strength, since DoT procs inherit Crit Damage). Case in point: Ivara's Concentrated Arrow can't proc modded statuses from the explosion, but Hunter Munitions still works, which is the only reason the otherwise bad augment

Wrong, meme strike on its own has/had no unusual mechanics, merely the most reliable one to abuse old BR with. And it was pointlessly nerfed as BR itself got fixed.

[TheLexiConArtist]

15 minutes ago, Andele3025 said:

Wrong, meme strike on its own has/had no unusual mechanics, merely the most reliable one to abuse old BR with. And it was pointlessly nerfed as BR itself got fixed.

Oh, it's you again. No, I'm perfectly accurate. Additive crit is an unusual mechanic, especially in the context of just mods. And 'turns any no-crit weapon into a reliable yes-crit weapon' is always going to be questionable, since it should ostensibly have other strengths traded off for its crit inability.

Yes, they did do the old "let's chop off both sides of the equation" approach and Meme Strike is now pretty much obsolete for the slot opportunity, but that might just be part of wanting to dissuade people from over-reliance on slide attacks as part of the redesigned system. - make them actually try the changed stances and heavies instead.

[Andele3025]

4 hours ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

 Additive crit is an unusual mechanic, especially in the context of just mods.

Ah yes clearly the fact that things such as harrow, arcane avenger, both cats along with ther companion hunter mod, vigilante set, navigator and artemis augments dont exist shows how unusual having something add a flat amount of stat after mods would be a unusual mechanic and it 100% clearly wasnt a issue of just BR being in the wrong place in the calculation, no way.

[TheLexiConArtist]

6 minutes ago, Andele3025 said:

Ah yes clearly the fact that things such as harrow, arcane avenger, both cats along with ther companion hunter mod, vigilante set, navigator and artemis augments dont exist shows how unusual having something add a flat amount of stat after mods would be a unusual mechanic and it 100% clearly wasnt a issue of just BR being in the wrong place in the calculation, no way.

Harrow, Ivara's augments, and the two cats are abilities, not direct mods (being a Precept Mod doesn't count, that's just a relic of when every ability was also a mod, and Augments as Mods is just a shortcut way to optionalise them).

Vigilante set bonus is not simply additive crit, since a 5% crit chance weapon could lucky-crit and proc Vigilante to result in an orange-crit. It sure as hell isn't a reliable one like Meme Strike either.

Arcane Avenger is not a mod, is significantly lower than Meme Strike, and requires you to eat bullets to maintain.

 

Even then, that's a bare handful of situational/conditional additives, not something everyone had to break the mould completely, and permanently. I mean, how many people were seriously using the base Nukor because of those additive sources? Relatively few. By comparison, how many people were using Meme Strike consistently? The vast majority.

Heck, the Nukor is even better of a comparison because it's still sort of leaning into crit with its naturally high damage multiplier despite the tiny chance, instead of being a clear-cut "This is a (status/etc) weapon, NOT meant for crit" that people strongarmed into being a crit weapon anyway through additive gains of Memeing.

 

If, say, we used the new combo system, but had no such thing as Combo Efficiency, and a mod gave additive crit based on what multiplier you consumed with a Heavy Attack, then that's the same sort of conditional limitation as needing to eat bullets, or work within the confines of certain abilities, and it might be fairly balanced.
But Slide Attacking is not a condition that limited the player in any way, so.. free +90% reliable crit chance.

[Andele3025]

1 hour ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

But Slide Attacking is not a condition that limited the player in any way, so.. free +90% reliable crit chance.

Aha, so flat crit apparently doesnt exist, vigilante isnt flat 100% crit on a rng proc and slide attacks which on a nice chunk of weapons have a lower multiplier than direct combos isnt a limitation or downside.
Let me guess you also think that current heavies are good for the game.

[(PSN)thegarada]

22 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

The issue is melee are AoE nuke right now.

Can you hit all enemies in 30+ meter radius? No.

I do not see much connection between AOE nuking and melee weapons though. AOE nuking is for clearing low level content and ESO. Melee weapons is for higher content, like steel path. They can still work simultaneously, especially on higher level content. However, melee weapons do not do high damage to keep up with nuking. Melee weapons deal higher damage. Way higher. You can 7 figures damage in one sec easy with melee weapons.

[lukinu_u]

Il y a 1 heure, (PS4)thegarada a dit :

Can you hit all enemies in 30+ meter radius? No.

I do not see much connection between AOE nuking and melee weapons though. AOE nuking is for clearing low level content and ESO. Melee weapons is for higher content, like steel path. They can still work simultaneously, especially on higher level content. However, melee weapons do not do high damage to keep up with nuking. Melee weapons deal higher damage. Way higher. You can 7 figures damage in one sec easy with melee weapons.

AoE nuke powers are reliable for everyone because they always perform the same, but melee can perform better if depending on your setup.
Melee are AoE, so regardless of the size you can hit mulitple enemis which mean your placement, movement and ability to move enemies around will affect how effective they are.

I personally play a Zaw with high range, Contagion for additional range when necessary, Magus Lockdown and Magus anomaly to stun and stack enemies. It's a bit less effective than other nuke source at low level where both OS, but it really is more effective past level 30, at least with my playstyle.

[Kaotis]

-looks around  realy confused-

What who where why when? <--- in no particular order

I haven't seen a melee op op we need nerf nerf right now post in ages. 

Curent state of melee is above the rest of weapons because of doble stacking stat proc , combo multiplier  afecting status and critical. The rest of weapons need this 2 mechanics as well and everythign will be "endgame" viable or "hardmode" viable.

 

[XaoGarrent]

In the long run, you're just going to get the Plasmor nerfed again.