Melee Focused

[gandalfrockman]

Total newb.

I'm Curious if it is possiblee to setup a build focused PRIMARILY on melee.

Shooty Blasty is ok, but I prefer slicey dicey.

I'm that guy in COD who runs around with Ballistic knife/ Combat Knife.

So I want to know:

1.Is this currently a viable strategy in warframe?

2. If it is, what frames/weapons should I focus on initially, and later on.

[NumberFiveee]

Frames is up to you.. Although you can't get the high level frames, because of the difficult missions..

About weapons, e recomend Boltor, and whatever sidearm you like..

[guymanbrodude]

Rhino is a melee monster thanks to his Iron Skin ability. Farming the blueprints for him is rather easy, since they drop from the Jackal boss (that you can farm with any frame and any weapon as long as you're willing to spend a lot of time running away and pucking up the ammo that drops throughout the fight).

As for weapons, the ranged weapons wouldn't really matter for a melee frame, right? Though I suggest the Afuris as your sidearm. They deal decent damage at close range. For the melee weapon, either something FAST (Dual Zoren, Fang) or HEAVY (Fragor, Gram).

[gandalfrockman]

Frames is up to you.. Although you can't get the high level frames, because of the difficult missions..

About weapons, e recomend Boltor, and whatever sidearm you like..

Let me rephrase a bit:

1.If I focus primarily on melee; Am I going to be gimped relative to my ranged allies? What I am asking is wether or not melee is practical and useful as a primary mode of combat in this game.

2.If melee is practical and useful as a primary mode of combat in this game. What Frames/Weapons should I be looking at. High level/difficulty/expensive or not.

[guymanbrodude]

Let me rephrase a bit:

1.If I focus primarily on melee; Am I going to be gimped relative to my ranged allies? What I am asking is wether or not melee is practical and useful as a primary mode of combat in this game.

2.If melee is practical and useful as a primary mode of combat in this game. What Frames/Weapons should I be looking at. High level/difficulty/expensive or not.

1) Melee is very practical and useful. There's some videos on youtube of people just bashing stuff in Melee.

2) See my first post on my suggestions

[Mourn]

The only issue with melee is that you need to run up to things to kill them while the people with guns will stand back and shoot things. This often results in few kills for the melee guys. That said, I love to melee (Fang is stupidly awesome, btw) and I try to get as many kills as I can that way.

You could get stamina mods so you can Sprint a lot and often to run up to enemies before ranged people kill them. Just be sure to get a shield mod or two (capacity and recharge) because you're going to take hits.

[direcyphre]

Once you get the hang of a mission type and the enemies of a particular tier, you can essentially run any mission with entirely melee. There aren't a lot of instances where you have enemies at extended ranges, as most maps are pretty close quarters-centric. All you have to worry about is closing the distance, using abilities like Rhino's Charge, or Excaliber's Slash Dash. Rhino is a bit slow in general, but his first ability Charge can propel you pretty far, Second Skin is invaluable all around, and the other two skills are AOE stun/knockdown.

The only aspect to worry about is the proper melee weapon to equip, as what's good against Grineer may not be good against Infestation or Corpus.

[Arlayn]

If you play Excalibur you would get alot more kills as you slash dash through everything however if your really skilled you can run through crowds, slide or leap kick then hit E the melee button to do some harder faster hits... Alot of training with melee comes a long way... Stick between Rhino, and Excalibur... but if you worried about being ganged up on like by a horde of Infested then stick to rhino... if you want speed and worried about being horded be Banshee... although she has no direct melee abilites she can use her abilites to knock enemies down and beat them with her sword, find enemies on the radar with sonar along with their weakpoints, or use final to wipe out all the enemies who ambushed you... Or go Raiden and play Volt... lol

[TinFoilMkIV]

It's somewhat hard to say what the comparison between end game grade melee and range is right now as the mod system now works significantly differently in terms of weapon power.

Personally I believe it is completely viable to go essentially full melee (I say essentially because there will always be situations where you will want a decent range weapon on hand), although you will likely put yourself in more danger more frequently. If you know how to use your movement and the level to your advantage, as well as knowing your frames powers you should be able to keep up fine with melee (again assuming something isn't horribly broke at end game level that I don't know about).

As for frame/weapon choice, that is highly playstyle dependent, I'll try to go over some that I'm familiar with.

For frames I would reccomend a frame with a good panic button for when enemy spawns go crazy or something just plain goes wrong, since being in melee range will likely result in death othewise. A few that I can think of off the top of my head are Excalibur:Radial Blind, Rhino:Iron Skin, Ash/Loki:invisibility. As for some frame specifics, again from what I actually know decently.

Excalibur: good mobility, can get around the battlefield fairly well, can take out potentially dangerous groups with slash dash, and has a solid panic button with Radial Blind, which stuns any enemy in its area for a fair ammount of time, enough to kill several of them or just get out of danger.

Rhino: very durable, Iron Skin makes you effectively invincible and can be used to walk straight into enemies as well as a panic button to prevent impending death. Base speed is below average but has fair burst movement with Rhino Charge.

Loki: Light and very fast, possibly the fastest frame as far as base movement speed goes. When playing multiplayer can easily get in and out while enemies are focusing on another player before they can react effectively. Cannot take many direct hits, but has invisibility which makes him untargetable and immune to most damage (some AoE attacks can still connect if an enemy throws one in your direction) as well as making melee attacks crit, great ability for rapidly killing enemies as well as getting out of trouble. Also has a decoy to distract enemies.

Ash: Similar to loki but a bit more durable, smokescreen is similar to lokis invisibility except it lasts less time and has an AoE stun when it activates (note smokescreens duration is terrible at rank0/1, but is more than enough when maxed)

Nyx: potentially viable melee choice. as Chaos is a decent panic button, stunning all enemies in range and causing them to generally ignore you until you attack them again, the weakness in melee is that chaos has a noticeable startup time, so you can be killed while activating. Absorption is a fair panic button, as its almost instant and makes you invulnerable for its duration, but it is rather costly so I would put chaos above it unless you're in a really bad spot.

Those would be my personal top picks, but I believe most frames have potential to be played in a melee style if you know how to use their skills for it.

As for weapons, basically the style and look you want.

If you like running around rapidly slashing, I'd recomend one of the lighter weapons, most dual weapons are quite good at this, as well as being able to hit multiple targets. The Cronus and Heatsword (not dual) are both fairly good single blades for standard attacks.

Heavy weapons will resist being interrupted while actively swinging both charge and normal attacks, however do note you will slow down when the charge attack starts up so they are less effective at trying to chase/stay mobile while charging.

Then theres charge weapons, good for running around an popping up behind/infront of an enemy and taking them out in a single hit. Most of the weapons capable of a single charge hit kill do have fair charge time so you have to start before you get in range, depending on the weapon. Heavy weapons are very powerfull with charge attacks, but lack mobility of the lighter charge weapons. As we currently do not have an effective way to determine weapon base charge damage besides playtesting, this can be a bit harder to determine when picking a weapon. All the heavy weapons have similar charge abilities, other weapons I would recomend for charge attacks would be dual heatswords, the plasma sword, and the furax.

I'm sure there are some good weapons I missed or am just unfamiliar with in there, you can ask around and probably find some other alternatives if you want. Also you don't need one of the weapons that are focused solely on one of those above stats to play that way, you can mix and match depending on how you want to play as well as mod your weapon, it doesn't hurt to have a melee weapon with both fair charge and normal attack abilities, although I will say getting a weapon to 1 hit kill with a charge attack is recomended if you want to focus a lot on charging.

[Arlayn]

End result it depends on the player...

[gandalfrockman]

It's somewhat hard to say what the comparison between end game grade melee and range is right now as the mod system now works significantly differently in terms of weapon power.

Personally I believe it is completely viable to go essentially full melee (I say essentially because there will always be situations where you will want a decent range weapon on hand), although you will likely put yourself in more danger more frequently. If you know how to use your movement and the level to your advantage, as well as knowing your frames powers you should be able to keep up fine with melee (again assuming something isn't horribly broke at end game level that I don't know about).

As for frame/weapon choice, that is highly playstyle dependent, I'll try to go over some that I'm familiar with.

For frames I would reccomend a frame with a good panic button for when enemy spawns go crazy or something just plain goes wrong, since being in melee range will likely result in death othewise. A few that I can think of off the top of my head are Excalibur:Radial Blind, Rhino:Iron Skin, Ash/Loki:invisibility. As for some frame specifics, again from what I actually know decently.

Excalibur: good mobility, can get around the battlefield fairly well, can take out potentially dangerous groups with slash dash, and has a solid panic button with Radial Blind, which stuns any enemy in its area for a fair ammount of time, enough to kill several of them or just get out of danger.

Rhino: very durable, Iron Skin makes you effectively invincible and can be used to walk straight into enemies as well as a panic button to prevent impending death. Base speed is below average but has fair burst movement with Rhino Charge.

Loki: Light and very fast, possibly the fastest frame as far as base movement speed goes. When playing multiplayer can easily get in and out while enemies are focusing on another player before they can react effectively. Cannot take many direct hits, but has invisibility which makes him untargetable and immune to most damage (some AoE attacks can still connect if an enemy throws one in your direction) as well as making melee attacks crit, great ability for rapidly killing enemies as well as getting out of trouble. Also has a decoy to distract enemies.

Ash: Similar to loki but a bit more durable, smokescreen is similar to lokis invisibility except it lasts less time and has an AoE stun when it activates (note smokescreens duration is terrible at rank0/1, but is more than enough when maxed)

Nyx: potentially viable melee choice. as Chaos is a decent panic button, stunning all enemies in range and causing them to generally ignore you until you attack them again, the weakness in melee is that chaos has a noticeable startup time, so you can be killed while activating. Absorption is a fair panic button, as its almost instant and makes you invulnerable for its duration, but it is rather costly so I would put chaos above it unless you're in a really bad spot.

Those would be my personal top picks, but I believe most frames have potential to be played in a melee style if you know how to use their skills for it.

As for weapons, basically the style and look you want.

If you like running around rapidly slashing, I'd recomend one of the lighter weapons, most dual weapons are quite good at this, as well as being able to hit multiple targets. The Cronus and Heatsword (not dual) are both fairly good single blades for standard attacks.

Heavy weapons will resist being interrupted while actively swinging both charge and normal attacks, however do note you will slow down when the charge attack starts up so they are less effective at trying to chase/stay mobile while charging.

Then theres charge weapons, good for running around an popping up behind/infront of an enemy and taking them out in a single hit. Most of the weapons capable of a single charge hit kill do have fair charge time so you have to start before you get in range, depending on the weapon. Heavy weapons are very powerfull with charge attacks, but lack mobility of the lighter charge weapons. As we currently do not have an effective way to determine weapon base charge damage besides playtesting, this can be a bit harder to determine when picking a weapon. All the heavy weapons have similar charge abilities, other weapons I would recomend for charge attacks would be dual heatswords, the plasma sword, and the furax.

I'm sure there are some good weapons I missed or am just unfamiliar with in there, you can ask around and probably find some other alternatives if you want. Also you don't need one of the weapons that are focused solely on one of those above stats to play that way, you can mix and match depending on how you want to play as well as mod your weapon, it doesn't hurt to have a melee weapon with both fair charge and normal attack abilities, although I will say getting a weapon to 1 hit kill with a charge attack is recomended if you want to focus a lot on charging.

+1 Bazillion internets.

You have provided exactly the sort of information I was looking ofr and detailed analysis to back it up, in doing so you have shamed all the other responses.

My conclusions:

Loki and particularly Ash sound Right up my alley, I can start with excalibur, and switch to rhino if the grind for loki/ash is looking too long.

Loki / Ash sound muchmore challenging to use in this way than rhino/excalibur, but more rewarding as well.

I will just have to try some different weapons to find my niche on that.

[TinFoilMkIV]

+1 Bazillion internets.

You have provided exactly the sort of information I was looking ofr and detailed analysis to back it up, in doing so you have shamed all the other responses.

My conclusions:

Loki and particularly Ash sound Right up my alley, I can start with excalibur, and switch to rhino if the grind for loki/ash is looking too long.

Loki / Ash sound muchmore challenging to use in this way than rhino/excalibur, but more rewarding as well.

I will just have to try some different weapons to find my niche on that.

Well I do play mostly melee style a lot so I have experience there. I will say that farming loki parts will probably be pretty hard for a while until more people get geared up. Also definately try out other frames, it doesn't hurt much to work on a new one if you don't need to actively hunt for something else that you can't do at the same time, and I personally think its nice to have the options. Even with a similar playstyle its fun to have different options, as some frames can do things that none of the others can. And yea, melee weapons is mostly trying some that seem/look cool and seeing if you like them. I've been using the amphis lately as it looks really cool in action, although I generally prefer one of the single blade weapons for aesthetic purposes (sprinting past enemies while slicing them in half with charge attacks is always fun).

[Timdog]

excalibers slash and dash is an excellent "get out of S#&$" button, it's really rather hard to get trapped with taht and the +sprint speed mod. Just don't run out of energy in mid-fight and find yourself sourounded :) I like shotguns, it goes well with the "im in your face" model that you are looking for - dive into combat, hit E a bunch of times, shoot a few people in the face with your shotgun, reload once everyone is dead :)

[xenapan]

Yeah... I used to primarily play melee. I played it on both my rhino and my ash. Then when I started my new account... Loki. Just very much up to your style of melee. I HEAVILY recommend playing a charge->release melee type weapon rather than straight up slashy slashy as right now charged damage mod is 25% increase per level up to 5 levels while standard melee is 7% per level..up to 5 levels.. .and you cant have multiples of a single mod so atm... straight up slash spam is seriously gimped.