Exactly what is it that people want for melee and guns to be the balance?

[(XBOX)CordingMoon7789]

I suppose not to bring melee down to guns' level; but is it to bring guns to the level of melee or is it to find a middle point of power between the point at which melee and guns are in terms of power?

[-Trendy-]

Weapons should always be a choice, not a necessity. Players will always go to the power creep weapons that make the most sense to use to be as efficient with our time as possible. The last thing I want to do after work is grind for an extra 30 mins to an hour of content i dont enjoy for a weapon I will enjoy. So having the best min/max is ideal. With that said Yes... guns need to be at the level of melee. If people want to use melee let them, as long as they are just as equally as powerful as guns. The issue though, is that many players would 'rather' use guns than melee. In fact.... melee is only used because of the sheer power of melee. If you bring guns up to equal par with melee weapons... no one will use melee. Melee needs to also be just as good as guns.... think innate range modifications on all weapons across the board to let them do things from ranged. Its no secret that there are certain melee weapons that trivialize all content in the game. Not to mention some warframes with infinite scaling on them. I dont see why making weapons have a ton more range so they can somewhat accomplish what a gun does with some new melee addon? think exilus mod? i dunno. 

[BRZZAFK]

Single target guns should do equal or more damage than melee to single target. Explosive is fine as it is right now.

[JackHargreav]

I suppose buff their damage and make them scale somewhat.

[Berzerkules]

Anytime we get a ranged weapon that approaches the power of melee there is a massive outcry to nerf it. 

 

[Hypernaut1]

Its close to where it need to be IMO. Melee is strong enough to be the best option when up close, Guns are powerful enough to be effective at range. Besides a few weak guns, i never feel like i have to choose one over the other. I appreciate the fact that i can resort to melee if my gun isnt cutting it. Yet, i dont feel that melee is so strong that guns are useless. 

Before the rework, only a few melee weapons felt like a great option over guns. Now most melee weapons feel like a viable up close option

[(XBOX)Abherration]

I feel the balance is acceptable atm. But i like to unload thousands of rounds from a Supra while giggling maniacly(did same in Mass Effects horde mode with a Geth SMG that fired for 3mins, but did zdps). Then when enemies are close punch them/cleave them/cudgel them to death with couple extra rounds for shizz and giggs from my aklex hand cannons. 

 

[-skimmer-]

I experienced meta back when guns were superior. It honestly wasnt all that interesting and just needed less apm.

Some extra mechanics for guns would be welcome though. I kinda want that sniper combo counter on a Daikyu. Or mod for semi autos that would encourage double tapping by creating Sonar weakspots on first hit, that would have to be hit again with second shot for extra damage. Maybe mod that would give guns manual reloads and gave out short buffs on perfect execution, while prolonging reloads when you whiff?  Yknow, power through interesting builds like melee sort of has. The gun modding got a bit stale.

[PublikDomain]

Melee requires you to get closer to an enemy, so theoretically you could have the weapons balanced so guns are safe but weaker and melee is risky but really strong. But with +Range nonsense letting you melee enemies from gun distances and so many things that make the player nigh unkillable there's no way to create that risk. Liches for example have a lot of close range threat and will grab you if you try and melee them, but they're solo enemies that are supposed to go toe to toe with us. You couldn't have something like a weak little Butcher pick up the player and throw them. And you couldn't do something like make enemies able to parry the player and break your combo because there are too many enemies onscreen at a time that these tells would get lost.

There's not much for buffing guns either. Even ignoring how batS#&$ insane melee modding stats are (I get +990% Crit Chance just from BR and some Gladiator mods) and how much you'd have to buff gun mods, at the end of the day guns are longer range. If you make them as strong as melee or even within the ballpark there won't be a reason to melee. After all, why stab a guy if you can shoot him from across the room? If guns are faster, we'll use guns. We'd just go back to the Tonkor days where AoE primaries are the meta instead of melee and it'd be the same problem, but backwards.

Not to mention that buffing a part of the player's kit means making the player stronger, and we're still dealing with the player having nothing in the game to put that strength to good use against.

[Aldain]

Let's do a thought experiment.

Take the Veldt, 26 rounds, semi-auto DMR type rifle MR 8.

Now let's compare it to the Dragon Nikana, also MR 8.

Both have the same Crit and Status chance of 22% with the only minor difference in that department being the Veldt having a 0.2 higher base Crit multiplier.

The Dragon Nikana has twice the base damage (188 vs 90) of the Veldt, it doesn't have to reload, it swings at a 1.0 speed fairly quickly with the right stance while the Veldt fires 3.67 rounds per-second at max (which is fairly slow for the record). This means that for every one slash of the Dragon Nikana you need two bullets from the Veldt, which without a punch-through mod will only ever hit 1 enemy at a time, while the Dragon Nikana can hit multiple enemies in close quarters unmodded.

Now to compare the base damage mods, Pressure Point (120%, 5 ranks, 9 drain) vs Serration (165%, 10 ranks, 14 drain), with the added note that the Primed version of Pressure Point is the same as Serration. Because the Dragon Nikana's damage is twice that of the Veldt, even when using the normal Pressure Point it will outstrip the base damage of the Veldt by a fair margin, and by a much larger one if the Primed version is used.

To put it in super simplified terms, the Dragon Nikana only loses to the Veldt in two ways, range (which due to bullet jumps and auto-blocking is not a problem at all) and the ability to consistently headshot, but when you have twice the damage of the Veldt you don't even need to bother with hitting the head on enemies in the first place. Melee also has INSANE mods that only serve to increase that power by many magnitudes.

Meanwhile the Veldt has...a nice reload sound at best? I love my Veldt, but I'm not going to kid myself that it is worth using at all when a poorly modded melee can do the same job with less effort.

[Loza03]

Personally, I'd work resource management into the whole system. Since I think Energy is currently out of whack as well, I'd prefer a system where Weapon performance, not RNG or Zenurik/Pads/Arcanes or anything in the arsenal is the baseline rate of energy gain. And then have Melee have the least regeneration ability, if any at all. Likewise for health (I like Life Strike as much as the next guy, but the highest-damage options in the game does not need access to easy breezy healing). I would make it have an increased drop for ammo, and likewise guns get trended-down ammo reserves.

Power should come at a price. Weapons have ammo, and Warframes have energy. These might be complete non-issues if you have the right stuff (which is my problem with it), but they do in theory have a limiting factor. Since melee does not, and should not so as to serve as an emergency back-up (and because swords using ammo is dumb), they should have an indirect cost. They don't cost anything to use, and they are powerful, so having their cost be the inabilty to recoup any losses you might have seems fair enough to me.

[vanaukas]

35 minutes ago, Loza03 said:

Personally, I'd work resource management into the whole system. Since I think Energy is currently out of whack as well, I'd prefer a system where Weapon performance, not RNG or Zenurik/Pads/Arcanes or anything in the arsenal is the baseline rate of energy gain. And then have Melee have the least regeneration ability, if any at all. Likewise for health (I like Life Strike as much as the next guy, but the highest-damage options in the game does not need access to easy breezy healing). I would make it have an increased drop for ammo, and likewise guns get trended-down ammo reserves.

Power should come at a price. Weapons have ammo, and Warframes have energy. These might be complete non-issues if you have the right stuff (which is my problem with it), but they do in theory have a limiting factor. Since melee does not, and should not so as to serve as an emergency back-up (and because swords using ammo is dumb), they should have an indirect cost. They don't cost anything to use, and they are powerful, so having their cost be the inabilty to recoup any losses you might have seems fair enough to me.

Stamina existed for a reason but the outcry was louder.

[killerJoke66]

ranged to be at least 25% of what melees are in terms of scaling damage

[Loza03]

21 minutes ago, vanaukas said:

Stamina existed for a reason but the outcry was louder.

That takes even hotter than mine.

[-CdG-Zilchy]

It's not the weapons, it's the mods available for each weapon class. Why do you think secondaries are so powerful compared to most primaries? And the gulf between secondaries and melee, particularly gunblades, is immense due to available mods.

[TARINunit9]

2 hours ago, Berzerkules said:

Anytime we get a ranged weapon that approaches the power of melee there is a massive outcry to nerf it. 

 

That was true with the Kuva Bramma, yes, but only because A) it had huge AoE and B) it was "approaching" the modern power of melee where melee is just objectively the best option in virtually every battle. I remember years ago when melee was only slightly better than ranged, nobody minded if guns could match melee in damage

[Yakhul]

Pretty sure that the "balance" that people are asking for, as someone said already, is the mods available for Primary and Secondary. Currently, Secondary guns can be more powerful than Primary due to having access to mods such as Primed Target Cracker, Primed Pistol Gambit, and Primed Heated Charge.

Those 3 mods alone put Secondaries in a higher level of power, making the majority of Primary guns feel underwhelming.

Another thing that people have asked for, since the removal of Self damage, is to balance out the power of Explosive weapons. Sitting at the top you have the Kuva Bramma. This gun does not need any more changes, as it is fine the way it is, a weapon to deal with large crowds efficiently, at the cost of having to manage your ammo reserves.

But weapons like the Zarr, feel very weak now, compared to the Bramma, Kuva Tonkor and Kuva Ogris. Even the Lenz feels very weak now. Regularizing the power levels of the old explosive weapons to match or be as close as possible to the 3 mentioned before, is something i believe should be done to increase the variety of explosive weapons used.

[Berzerkules]

Just now, TARINunit9 said:

That was true with the Kuva Bramma, yes, but only because A) it had huge AoE and B) it was "approaching" the modern power of melee where melee is just objectively the best option in virtually every battle. I remember years ago when melee was only slightly better than ranged, nobody minded if guns could match melee in damage

I'm all for an across the board buff to ranged or scaling back melee damage a bit. If DE wants to buff ranged, adding mods that function like Berserker, Condition Overload, Blood Rush and Weeping Wounds would be a good start. 

There is practically no down side to using melee as your primary means of damage. You don't have to worry about managing an ammo pool, down time due to reloading or aiming. You have to get close to enemies to melee but with a range riven you're looking at 7-8m range. Melee range paired with our insanely fast paced movement allows us to cover a huge area very quickly, add superior melee mods into the equation and ranged weapons don't stand a chance.

Personally, I like that melee is strong. I injured my kb hand years ago so I play on a controller. Aiming with this damn thing sucks. Melee lets me enjoy the fast paced play style this game offers without being held back because of an old injury. I also like AoE ranged weapons. Little to no aiming, just everyone in that general direction is getting hit with some splash damage.

It sucks for people that enjoy using ranged weapons because melee is just far superior dps wise. It would be cool for those people to have a means to compete for dps in a way they enjoy.

[ChaoticEdge]

3 hours ago, BRZZAFK said:

Single target guns should do equal or more damage than melee to single target. Explosive is fine as it is right now.

pfft, they should rebuff the kitgun primary instead of nerfing.

[ReddyDisco]

Primary versions of condition overload, weeping wounds and blood rush and adding hit counter to guns similar to snipers. 

anything short of this will have a "its ok" reaction instead of "oh yeah!" reaction.

Melee weapons can use all these mods plus have insane range mods plus can use triple tornado bayblade of doom macros to just room clear in seconds, hard for primaries to compete in current state

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

They can buff status and CC and CD, but this argument is usually about people not understanding that single target is always gonna be single target.

Even if a sniper or single target weapon is an instant level 1000 enemy kill it's still single target. It could be powerful and useful, but bad players still will complain they have to aim fast and move their reticle and forma their weapons past 3 forma and use Primed bane mod for once. There's already options to increase your reload speed and fire rate, damage and crits so there's no excuse there either. It requires being creative and having gear.

You have options to make aoe primaries strong, but you better actually forma them and use them in combination with your arcanes and abilities and yes, you can actually can be rewarded for headshots (on single target), but that requires making an effort. 

My Cernos prime is great in steel path and I use my Harpak to apply some status to heavies with headshots as well, same with my twin rogga and some other guns I use like my trumna and muta Cernos, Akarius etc. But I also put effort into my guns with 4+ forma, primed mods, rivens, arcanes, and use my abilities in conjunction with them.

[BahamutKaiser]

A point in between would be best, along with a general nerf to the more obnoxious defensive scaling on foes so simpler guns aren't taking 3 magazines in SP with a maximal build. 

[_R_o_g_u_e_]

Melee needs to deal more damage than guns because you put yourself at greater risk. If gun and melee damage was = using melee would just be silly.

[TheVeiledScion]

IMO Warframe has too many options and too little organization of those options for balance to be possible.

The current movement speed, “parkour”, spin-to-win and a lack of strict differentiation between weapon types and ranges really don’t help as far as balancing is concerned, because the very trade-offs that would create balance are essentially flattened. If the player moves nearly as fast as a bullet with melee, and can move and shoot almost as fast over any distance - and if the game is built around speeding through missions and enemies as fast as possible - what room exists for balancing? Everything is just a race to the weapons with greatest speed and damage. And with too many weapons and enemies in the game, most of which were designed without a clear attention to the value add and to strict archetypes/classes, how could DE possibly balance melee and guns?

 

Enemy design doesn’t help either. There is little meaningful differentiation between CQC, medium- and long-ranged enemies, and WF has no true melee enemy units. Also, enemy AI behavior is basic and comes across as random, rather than being based on their choice of weapons. And there are so many unconventional enemy types that spawn with such high frequency and in such high numbers that any little distinction just disappears. 

And finally, Warframe’s lack of reasonable supportive gameplay mechanics (like true dueling/parrying/countering for melee and cover mechanics for guns) means that melee can’t really take advantage of the full melee combat options, and gunplay can’t really harness full gunplay options. Because meaningful balance can’t just come through stat changes; it needs to come through actual gameplay trade-offs and benefits. And no, nullifier shields aren’t what I have in mind.

 

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, TheVeiledScion said:

The current movement speed, “parkour”, spin-to-win and a lack of strict differentiation between weapon types and ranges really don’t help as far as balancing is concerned, because the very trade-offs that would create balance are essentially flattened. If the player moves nearly as fast as a bullet with melee, and can move and shoot almost as fast over any distance - and if the game is built around speeding through missions and enemies as fast as possible - what room exists for balancing? Everything is just a race to the weapons with greatest speed and damage. And with too many weapons and enemies in the game, most of which were designed without a clear attention to the value add and to strict archetypes/classes, how could DE possibly balance melee and guns?

 

Enemy design doesn’t help either. There is little meaningful differentiation between CQC, medium- and long-ranged enemies, and WF has no true melee enemy units. Also, enemy AI behavior is basic and comes across as random, rather than being based on their choice of weapons. And there are so many unconventional enemy types that spawn with such high frequency and in such high numbers that any little distinction just disappears. 

These two, IMO, directly connect with one another. But they're also connected with another issue, and rather conveniently, a recent game ran into similar issues. DOOM Eternal. 

Over some interviews, Hugo Martin (one of the main designers of the game) described how the dash, pole swing and meat hoo  mechanics caused the player to be able to too easily run around enemies and avoid. Combined with sharing an Ammo Economy with it's 2016 predecessor, the game became too easy. Tightening up the roles of enemies, increasing their lethality and a harsher ammo economy help solve that. Whilst Warframe's needs are dramatically different, and thus the specifics would be wildly different, I think balance passes with a similar philosophy would work well for Warframe, which is why in my own post on the matter. Warframe's an Action RPG with too much focus on the RPG side at, quite frankly, the detriment to both (since the RPG mechanics alone have to make concessions to the action mechanics and vice, over-focusing on just one will have a negative effect on the experience).

It'd be a fairly slow, potentially painful process to get to the best game Warframe can be, but it's worth taking.

1 hour ago, TheVeiledScion said:

And finally, Warframe’s lack of reasonable supportive gameplay mechanics (like true dueling/parrying/countering for melee and cover mechanics for guns) means that melee can’t really take advantage of the full melee combat options, and gunplay can’t really harness full gunplay options. Because meaningful balance can’t just come through stat changes; it needs to come through actual gameplay trade-offs and benefits. And no, nullifier shields aren’t what I have in mind.

Whilst I agree with the core philosophy - that balance comes through gameplay trade-offs, strengths and weaknesses, and so forth - I don't think that these suggestions would necessarily work too well for it. Warframe is not necessarily a game where duelling or cover mechanics - at least, as they are traditionally implemented - would work very well. Warframe flirts with being a horde combat game, and whilst there's nothing in that statement that restricts deep, engaging mechanics (See also Legendary Dark Knight mode in Devil May Cry, or some of the later rooms in DOOM Eternal), it does mean that the specifics of combat need to change up. For example - Warframe does have a parry/counter mechanic for melee enemies. Block just before an enemy attacks you, and they'll be opened for a finisher. That mechanic lacks purpose beyond a fun detail in Warframe.

What keeps Warframe from being an effective horde combat game is that we're arguably too good at it, if that makes any sense. A lot of a player's kit can be loaded up with powerful moves that affect heavies and light units alike and can be spammed with little regard for cost, making combat overly linear and oftentimes focused soley on these strategies unless you make yourself play otherwise - which gets problematic once the devs start expecting you to play that way and start shutting down mechanics to compensate that you also happen to rely on for creative, variety-driven gameplay.

What I'm saying is that, on some level, meaningful balance IS going to come from stats, but not the stats of damage, status, crit that people might expect.