Melee Guidance No longer reducing combo duration to 0 if combo duration is 6 or below.

[OneLunchMan14173]

Fair bit of this is going to be copied from where i replied in a similar thread but before that since people who aren't aware will likely mix up the whispers in the wall heavy attack negative combo interaction change with this, and will give context to why its important if you aren't aware:

in whispers in the wall, performing a heavy attack with an exalted with negative duration would reduce the *active* weapons combo, which is 0, than the *active combo*, which is usually 12x, allowing you to get unholy 12x heavy attack spam.  This was noted to be patched of course and the current state is specifically after dante unbound, and I did not see any patch notes regarding this so I am going to operate under the assumption that this is unintentional as particularly in devstream 178 Q&A, it was explicitly addressed that the current state of exalteds, pseudo exalteds and statsticks would ideally be eventually changed when a solution was found, but there wasn't one yet. (paraphrasing it was around minute 45:30 of the youtube vod).  So this is not regarding that or that playstyle.


As it previous stood, for a weapon of 5 combo duration, equipping melee guidance would set your combo to negative one.  Of course you can't actually have a negative duration even in

spoilerism, (least as far as we know!), but the effect was that equipping melee guidance would reduce your weapon to be unable to build combo as your hits built a combo of 0 duration if you did not mod the weapon for increased combo in some way, in exchange for buffing your allies combo duration, whicb given that, the mod name, has given at least to me the impression it was intended to be a support mod to melee teammates.

This has always been questionable of course where its value as a support aura was a very light hit or very heavy miss as if you have melee focused allies, their builds are assumingly not dependent on ally sources of combo duration which I believe this is the only one,  but reducing your combo to zero for exalted weapons allowed you to maintain the same combo for your melee as a whole for example, you could swap to your regular melee and have different utility and purpose than your exalted.  One particular use of course for baruuk which is my area I can speak for, is building combo because his own combo is infamous of course for knocking enemies away and struggling to build combo particularly from base star chart lack of enemy density, exasperated in multiplayer where he would have to chase after quickly dying enemies and frankly more problems than should be explained here. 

That said, the end result of the current state of melee guidance, which again I am assuming a bug, is this, just being stated so at least people can see why this .1 matters so much:


Melee guidance shares a polarity with steel charge that gives squad 60% melee dmg and due to an undocumented change, is no longer competitive as a selfish or support option, while some mods are of course going to be better or worse than others, beyond the irony of it being named melee guidance but being the near objectively wrong choice to 'guide' other melee teammates which is itself a niche support option in random matchmaking.  In the case, where you are matched with other melee users, ideally multiple, who have built no mods to support their combo duration, and those melee intended builds are not running the melee-focused focus school's combo mechanic change, and they are playing in a way that they get value from an additional 12 seconds duration, it is useful.  I can not imagine the odds of how often that occurs but I can only imagine it is comical and not justifiable to be reduced to as its intended value.

The melee slot for exalted melee frames has been reduced to being either not worth using, or rendering the exalted weapon "worthless" in the sense of in the macro-level of justifying investing in exalted weapons compared to current options the returns are not as high as they should be, particularly compared to recent melees or incarnon weapons, or the micro way of actual gameplay contradiction of having two separate weapons no longer able to share 1 active combo of melee hits, where if one is intended to be util or damage, it weakens the others use for damage by interrupting existing combo.

- Wukong for instance can no longer prime enemies with his 4's large range and follow through and swap back to deal ceramic incarnon tennokai nukes or similar play,
- Baruuk has to abandon his base melee and commit to a build that focuses on enabling his 4 and avoid using his regular melee under any circumstances or he now has to build up combo again to be competitive with base melees.   
- Excalibur now has conflicting wants when he sheaths exalted blade, where continuing to melee at all to play by the excalibur sword swinging gameplay fantasy undoes the combo you have built up before, forcing you to avoid using melee at all until you have refilled your energy/go back into exalted blade state, while not as significant, not being able to justify using the new dex katana on him hurts.
- I have no experience to speak on behalf of valkyr so I won't.

I'm just a comp sci uni student not a game dev, but these are a few hopefully useful ideas as to temporary measures if the undocumented change needs to stay since i usually try to be proactive about solutions to problems i present:

adding some kind of combo modifiers into the exalted weapon abilities that can scale, for example, giving exalted melee combo duration an extension scaling off ability durations, as it is an ability, or strength increasing the combo accumulation rate.  This would work well with making combo maintainance on exalted weapons like excalibur and baruuk notably less painful to lose, while letting warframes like wukong and valkyr a little less dependant on getting tennokai mods, so mostly early game quality of life.  If the duration change can be added to the ability itself, it would make building exalted melees easier by freeing their modslots, and I would actually say if I can, be outright intuitive.  Furthermore on this, while the tennokai mods and system are fantastic, it did also make building exalted weapons even tighter on how mods compete with each other at least until you unlock an exilus slot, but even then it still can be a struggle especially at low MR with less capacity.

Reviewing the idea of allowing the exalted ranged hits to build combo, as it stands, for exalted weapon playstyles, they consume resources and are generally more maintainance to use than simple melee, but this does not help wukong or valkyr.  But I think the idea of exalted weapons as abilities requiring energy management but less combo management by legitimizing those projectiles as a part of the melees intended playstyle would be a good healthy standard compared to melees who only have to manage combo duration and do not put you into energy gain lockout.

at the end of the day, I believe I can say that the players who love these frames are not happy or at best unaffected with this situation, and the ones who don't I do not believe were previously unhappy about the old situation.  If it is a intentional policy change since last dev stream or before from the current situation on exalteds and statsticks was announced, I hope whoever reads this considers bringing up the idea of reverting the change if it is easy to do so, or being more clear if it is intended and ideally bettering the situation until it can be addressed properly,  for the reasons above and whatever they themselves have. 



Hope all the tennos and all others reading this have a good day.


 

Edited April 6 by OneLunchMan14173
clarified first paragraph, removed possible minor spoiler

[OneLunchMan14173]

Ended up being more than I thought but guess am definitely passionate about the melee exalted frames except valkyr who hopefully I will get soon and become just as passionate about.

Tl;dr

This isn't the infinite heavy bug change, but likely was caught in the crossfire as this of course does also kill any possible exalted heavy melee combo bugs but it hits a lot of these frames partciularly in optimization and mastery in what I can only assume was to solve a newfound bug, but making the current exalted melee situation worse for it.

This has killed melee guidance as its other niche as a melee support aura is directly competing with steel charge and is losing that competition badly.

The current state of melee exalted frames I don't think is what is was intended to be achieved with this change and I believe to be negative overall to their play quality and enjoyment of play.

If it does give unintended power, these exalted melees are having to compete with melees that are not only stronger in ways, but do not require handling the limitations and systems of exalted weapons and I think there are other ways to address that than this.




 

Edited April 6 by OneLunchMan14173

[OneLunchMan14173]

Suppose bump to this, still havent found the forum editquette page but assuming a 11 day gap warrants a bump for an unaddressed issue

[OneLunchMan14173]

Suppose bump again?  Not yet fixed, hope initial post was enough to sufficiently describe it

[Revacon]

Thanks for helping me understand what happened, used this so that I could spam heavies with Gauss while keeping the combo at a permanent 2x for YEARs. I thought I was in the clear when they changed it so that you couldn't gain combo while having negative combo duration in response to the 12x builds. Now I'm just depressed that another one of my melee builds got done in, this time by a complete stealth nerf to fix an entirely different build.

Really wish DE would stop gaslighting themselves into thinking our opinions matter and just properly nerf us back down into 2017 levels of power, this constant bait-and-switch of seeing how many nerfs DE thinks they can get away with got old fast and has resulted in the most boring builds ever, with anything remotely interesting getting killed off because since its not main steam DE kills it immediately in the fear that it will become mainstream and then be "off limits" for nerfing because the backlash would be too much. 

[OneLunchMan14173]

No problem, hoping they fix this, really is nuts, it is by all rights outright gutting melee exalteds like they said they wouldnt, so like I dont think im crazy for assuming its a bug trying to fix the combo system, so hoping they fix whatever it was they were trying to fix and fix this to go down to the full 0 second duration

Edited May 17 by OneLunchMan14173