Melee Handling, Combo's And Directional Context.

[J-Pax]

Melee is a blast to play in this game, and in all honesty I'm fine with how it is now, but this game is so good so far that I feel "Just fine" is not something it should be striving for.

If I'm going to be a space ninja, I want to do a lot of awesome stuff with my melee, which means it needs to be much more sensitive and influenced by the character, no?

Here are my basic suggestions:

1) Charge attack Combo's:

So currently our standard melee attacks do swings in a variety of directions, this makes it seem a lot more fluid and as if the character has a lot of experience in handling these weapons - Heavy Charge attacks need to have more animations. It's just fine that my skana does a broad sweep attack in front of me, but if I'm chaining heavy charges on those Ancient infested, then it needs to have more variety - and possibly a bonus on achieving a 3/5 hit charge combo.

i) Another note on charge attacks is that they need to be much more AoE based. So frequently I have had two or three charger's directly in front of me, and my charge attack sweeps through them all visually, but only hits one. This "pathing" issue needs to be fixed somewhat in my oppinion, otherwise I may as well have just hack and slashed them one by one with my vanilla attack.

ii) Also: My charge attack currently deals less damage than my regular melee swings, because of all the Melee +% mods I have installed. The charge attack ought to scale better related to you regular swing attack, otherwise it's a little non-sensical.

2) Jump attacks:

Now I'm not sure if this is already in place, but having tried it and not noticed a difference I'm hazarding a geuss at "it hasn't". Jump attacks are freakishly fun, jumping off a ledge and landing on an unwitting Grineer Marine with a slam attack is something beautiful to watch, having it do 50 damage on them is not. Fall distance should influence the damage GREATLY. If I'm being chased by a hoard of Infected Charger's, my go to move (which I love with the dark dagger) is to run to the nearest wall with them in tow, sprint run up it, backflip off and then slam attack down on them. It's art in motion.

3) Dodge attacks:

By tapping the shift key while moving your character does an evasive maneuver, a dodge roll, etc to evade attacks - It'd be very fitting for a space ninja to unleash a devastating flourish on an unsuspecting enemy ala the slide attack, rather than rolling yourself out of the way of a hazardous barrage of shotgun fire only to stand up and have to charge an attack.

4) Slide attacks:

It'd be nice if our slide attack could in fact be charged, but have a much slower charge time than standard charges - however the trade off is that the slide attack could, not do more damage, but do some kind of status affect, like if I slid towards an enemy and charged it up, my character would rise up at the end of the charge and do a "uppercut" style swing with a Skana for example, knocking the target in the air (by a foot maybe, not a million miles) and onto their back, like the Bo staff does.

5) Directional context:

This game has excellent animations in terms of melee, it flows nicely and really has that feeling of space-ninja-ness. However, having my character swing haphazardly at the air ABOVE an infected crawler is somewhat annoying, epecialyl when my reticule is directly on the blighter. Melee needs to be contextual in terms of where your reticule is, so that you can target that weak arm on that infected ancient, or kill that crawler - or even slam that knocked down marine with your bo-staff. This also means that you would be able to target heads and other weakpoints on enemies.

6) Stealth Executes:

If you're planning on making stealthy gameplay a part of missions, with possibly experience bonuses, then there need to be some pretty sick execution animations. Just saying. Kicking a grineer marine in the back of one knee, then plunging your skana down in through his jugular and into his heart as he falls to one knee is possibly one of the classiest "Sucks to be you" moments for a ninja.....in space.

Edited March 5, 2013 by J-Pax

[Kadishia]

On 4,

Each WarFrame could have different abilities for each uses.

On 6

We are trying to push that through. :)

[CY13ERPUNK]

some good ideas OP

i agree that melee combat dmg needs to be "normalized"

ie:

base atk does 10 dmg

charge atk does 4x dmg

slide atk does 2x dmg

jump atk does 3x dmg (maybe upto x5 with some kind of height scaling, don't want this to overshadow chrg atks, like every 10 feet gains x50% or something like that)

this would also remove the discrepancy between the dmg of chrg atks and norm melee atks and allow us to have a much more streamlined melee combat formula/system