Melee Impact Damage... What?

[WolfgangHype]

Okay, so I was looking around my melee weapons for something with a little impact and... wow are these bad. I don't even mean in the sense that most of them don't have any. I mean, they make absolutely no freaking sense! I'm going to list a few weapons and their base damages for some comparison.

 

Dual Ether: A sword reknown for it's cutting power

Impact: 4 Pucture: 4 Slash: 21

 

Fang: dual daggers

Impact: 2 Pucture: 10 Slash: 2

 

Dual Zoren: dual axes

Impact: 0 Puncture: 0 Slash: 13

 

Ether Reaper: blade of the same variety as Dual Ether

Impact: 7 Puncture: 7 Slash: 35

 

Scindo: Big freaking ax

Impact: 5 Puncture: 5 Slash: 40

 

Galatine: Sword as big as most frames

Impact: 0 Puncture: 0 Slash: 33

 

Gram: Smaller version of the Galatine

Impact: 6 Puncture: 6 Slash: 28

 

Okay, if you can't see what I'm getting at, the numbers seem completely random. An axe has less impact damage than a sword that is described as the best cutting weapon and a pair of freaking daggers. And then a large sword has relatively even less than that (0 out of 33 instead of 0 out of 13) and for comparison the two handed ether weapon has 7 impact. What the heck? The Gram is there for an example of a better damage spread.

 

Personally I'm of the opinion that most melee weapons should have a decent chunk of impact damage. After all in the event that you're not cleaving through the opponent (say because of an energy field) you're basically just smacking them with a metal pole. Having been smacked in the head with such, I can tell you that makes quite the impact. This point is doubled in the case of end heavy weapons like an axe or a heavy sword.

 

From a more mechanics standpoint, we just need a better spread of damage types for melee weapons and it would make a decent amount of sense to make axes a fairly balanced weapon on the impact/puncture/slash triangle with swords leaning towards slash, daggers (and probably the kama) towards pierce, and maces/fists/staves towards impact.

[HellEnforcer]

 I don't know. I normally link impact with concussion. So anything with an edge I would put it as slash. A hammer on the other hand, that is what I would put as impact... A big impact. I am not sure, but I think the Fragor has impact.

 

 However, that's just how my head works.

 

 As for the mechanic part, I totally agree. Most of them are slash, making them quite useless against anything but infested and those rare melee grineer units or the crewmen whose shields have been depleted for some reason.

[direcyphre]

Near as I can tell, those are all weapons with what we'd call 'sharp edges'. I get what you are trying to say, but it's more of a distribution of total damage across types (added together, subtracting any obvious resistances by particular enemy types). I also suspect they are mainly placeholders, as damage 2.0 was more about the guns rather than the melee, but they obviously had to add all those damage types to everything in the game. No additional balance passes have taken place because they are still gearing up for melee 2.0 which we already know will buff all melee weapons.

[VKhaun]

Yeah impact is like, blunt trauma. It won't be significant on most swords. I think Plasma Sword was only set to impact because we had no impact one hand weapon at the time, as Magistar was not in the game yet.

[theasl]

magistar?

[Chaz_Darkbane]

Focus on some of the melee weapon built for impact then. Magistar and fragor for example

[Shienpoh]

Focus on some of the melee weapon built for impact then. Magistar and fragor for example

or the fist(&foot)-weapons, like the kogake, obex, furax etc.

[WolfgangHype]

I wasn't aware they were doing a Melee 2.0, I mostly just read the patch notes and catch the big announcements on the main page.

 

Looking at a weapon purely as "does it have an edge? then it's slashing" seems entirely the wrong way to go about it. The way I'm thinking about it is: if you actually managed to block the blade what happens then. With an axe or heavy blade you still have all the force of a piece of metal on the end of a stick slamming into you. An axe is also meant to break into a surface typically. Like how you'd use an axe against a tree is to just slam into it and dig out chunks (what I would consider more like puncture), compared with a saw which is slicing your way in (more like slashing imo).

 

I'm not saying it should be all or even mostly Impact or Puncture, but that they should have a larger share of the damage than is currently given to them.