Opening The Potential Of Melee

[gell]

Making melee weapons different, that's what we're suggesting in this thread. I'm going to forget about criticizing or theory crafting exactly how melee 2.0 works or how good it is. But how much thought has DE put into making the melee weapons different? Why choose one over another?

 

Melee could have all sorts of stats and properties. I suggested this a long time ago before melee 2.0 was even a thing. But here we are, on the cusp of melee overhaul, and most of the following has not been done. So here are things melee could do, to make the gram a valid choice vs the galatine vs even the pangolin sword. These are just general ideas, not specific to any one weapon. I'll mention the current melee system and weapons from time to time, though, for frame of reference. (I'll be using the galatine and gram as an example a lot because they are very similar, but the galatine outshines the gram in most ways currently, so there are ways 2.0 could fix this.) This could introduce new mods too, but let's not get too far.

 

Here are the obvious, we know these:

- damage per attack

- rate of attack

- charge/channeling damage (it can vary per weapon)

- charge speed (in melee 2.0 you could maybe channel faster/slower depending on weapon)

- crit chance and crit damage

- damage types, just like guns

 

 

 

Here are some stats/properties we already have, but most pay little attention to because it's not directly DPS:

- reach

 

- momentum (this word is used on the wiki a lot, referring to the amount of time you can't be knocked down while charging up and swinging a weapon. e.g. This is incredibly high on the gram, and tiny on the orthos. Galatine is in the middle I think). Granted, melee 2.0 does away with charge attacks, but that doesn't mean momentum needs to go away. Maybe some weapons just have longer times where you can't get knocked down, or specific attacks in the combo. This shouldn't be unique to only the stance, but to the weapon and the stance. There are a lot of permutations here.

 

- slam attacks (the move you do when you jump and then slam down). Knockdown? Stagger? Status proc increase? Anything else?

 

- wall attacks. I find these almost entirely useless compared to regular or charge attacks. These need something different for weapons, or to combo into other attacks.

 

- slide attacks. Again, these need to combo into other attacks now.

 

 

 

What Melee 2.0 brings us for diversity:

 

- lots of new combos and animation, separated by stances. Are these only per weapon type, or actually weapon? Sure, maybe the gram and galatine both use the same attacks, but they could end differently. Maybe galatine ends in a horizontal slash, while the gram ends in a forward spin to cover more ground. We can't expect weapon-unique animations; that would kill the animators and cause memory issues. But changing which attack happens where could be done per weapon. Maybe one weapon has one extra swing in the middle of the string.

 

- parrying based on stamina, improved. Sure, each hit while parrying eats stamina. But it could be different for each weapon. Maybe the galatine still excels at charged channeled damage, but it is big and slow so it's worse at parrying than a slightly smaller gram. Maybe the gram's energy edge could explain its ability to mitigate even more damage even though it's slow (it disintegrates bullets instead of deflecting them). Or the gram could deflect corpus lasers/plasma back at the enemy (lightsaber?). Let's not get caught up in arguing details, but the potential is there for variety.

 

- Animation sets can also affect attack arcs. It's like reach, but it affects how big of an angle you can hit around you. The circular slash VFX can change per weapon and could possibly even grow to different shapes based on which part of the attack. An extreme example might be if an upward swing caused a gust of wind to fly out and hit an enemy at medium range.

 

DE uses mastery to lock out weapons, but that ultimately doesn't matter much. Who cares if gram unlocks at 2 and galatine unlocks at 3? That's no reason to make one much stronger than the other. With melee 2.0, we could really see an increase in melee choices. Let's give that plasma sword and ceramic dagger some action, yes? It's time for melee to feel different, perhaps even more differentiated than how the guns feel. They don't need to be limited to damage numbers and animation sets.

 

Amount of work:

I always think about this as a developer. I know more ideas take more work, which takes more man hours. So what does most of the above take? Not much. We know most of those things exist, the question is if the values are exposed for the designers to mess around with. Can a designer change how much stamina each weapon uses per parry? How about adding a value for deflecting damage back at a random target? It doesn't take a lot of time for a programmer to do this, but it opens up a lot of room for experimentation from Scott, Steve, and other designers.

[immolator1001]

Hey you missed the most important one. Fun. 

 

I really enjoy the unique weapons and wished there were more unique melee weapons.

Edited April 6, 2014 by immolator1001

[Seanjuju]

In theory, if the mastery system wasn't under-supported, the melee weapons would be tiered. They should be tiered.

[F_deel]

With melee 2.0, we could really see an increase in melee choices. Let's give that plasma sword and ceramic dagger some action, yes?

 

I heard in the stream [DE]Sheldon went up to Pluto with just a Skana while testing Melee 2.0, so I guess all melees will make an appearance in everyone's loadout

Edited April 6, 2014 by F_deel

[gell]

Hey you missed the most important one. Fun. 

 

I really enjoy the unique weapons and wished there were more unique melee weapons.

 

I didn't miss it. Fun is inherent in good design. I also don't need to say "make the weapons pretty" or "don't make sucky controls."  The choice in weapons may not be fun, but the choices you make during combat should be, and diversifying weapon functionality by exposing the aforementioned properties to designers would have a lot of potential for fun.

 

 

 

In theory, if the mastery system wasn't under-supported, the melee weapons would be tiered. They should be tiered.

 

Why? How many tiers should we have? And when you answer that, can you then tell me how different the weapons in each tier would be?

 

 

I heard in the stream [DE]Sheldon went up to Pluto with just a Skana while testing Melee 2.0, so I guess all melees will make an appearance in everyone's loadout

 

That could just mean they cranked up the numbers though. Who knows, but we'll see. I can't criticize the system yet, but Sheldon taking the Skana to Pluto could just mean really broken numbers. Or Scott saying he played defense with melee only means nothing too because you can do 15 waves of Infested with half the melee weapons out there right now.

Edited April 6, 2014 by gell