Melee Channeling: Use Stamina Instead Of Energy?

[Azamagon]

Hear me out on this idea. This is part of a bunch of other suggestions:

* Make regular melee attacks cost no stamina whatsoever

* Make sprinting cost no stamina either, or at worst, make sprinting stop your Stamina regen.

* As the title says: Make CHANNELING melee attacks cost quite a chunk of Stamina, instead of Energy! (Faster/weaker melee weapons cost less stamina, while slow/powerful weapons cost more. Far more balanceable than now).

EDIT: For clarity: In contrast to how meleeing and stamina works now, if you don't have enough stamina, you simply don't do the channeled strike. Not enough Stamina = No channel strike.

* All defensive actions (Blocking, rolling, parkouring etc) still cost stamina, and they should all provide direct defensive benefits: Blocking completely protects from frontal attacks and CC, while rolling/dodging/parkouring should also help with defenses, from all directions, such as by making enemies prone to miss and/or apply damage reduction during the animations and/or evading CC when rolling/dodging.

 

That way, Stamina becomes a more interesting resource: It's used for greatly boosting melee attacks and/or for highly defensive actions. That way, modding for Warframes  also become more interesting, and interestingly enough, fits oldstyle archetypes a bit more as well:

* Health/Shields = Passive survivability, thus "Strength/Tank"-mods

* Stamina = Active survivability and melee combat enchancements, thus "Agility/Rogue"-mods

* Abilities = Caster improvements, thus "Caster/Mage"-mods

Quite neat :)

 

What this also does:

* It makes Melee attacks not interfere with Abilities by simply not using the same resource at all. It feels weird that they do, really. They are meant for different things after all.

* It makes using Stamina more of a decision: "Heavily empower my melee weapon, or dodge/block attacks?", instead of just simply being close to no choice at all (since regular melee attacks consume Stamina way too fast, making these choices close to non-existant)

* You don't drain most of your Stamina when fighting just one enemy. Right now, sprinting up, blocking and then melee attack an enemy = You are out of Stamina already, pretty much.

 

Currently, I don't use Melee Channeling much, because it's simply not worth it (except maybe for Life Strike) due to competing with precious Energy. If it cost Stamina though, I bet not just me, but a lot more people would be using Melee Channeling!

 

Thoughts and opinions? :)

Edited April 23, 2014 by Azamagon

[Syzodia]

Couple problems:

-enemies shouldn't then disintegrate upon death from stamina-channeling. Not really a big deal, but I luv melee channel as it is right now becuz of this effect <3

-You can perform virtually any maneuver that has a discrete stamina cost as long as you have some miniscule amount of stamina left, meaning you can do as many melee channelled attacks as you want.

 

I actually think it makes more sense to use warframe energy for melee channelling - it'd be weird to spend stamina to make yourself glow, don't ya think?

[Azamagon]

Couple problems:

-enemies shouldn't then disintegrate upon death from stamina-channeling. Not really a big deal, but I luv melee channel as it is right now becuz of this effect <3

-You can perform virtually any maneuver that has a discrete stamina cost as long as you have some miniscule amount of stamina left, meaning you can do as many melee channelled attacks as you want.

 

I actually think it makes more sense to use warframe energy for melee channelling - it'd be weird to spend stamina to make yourself glow, don't ya think?

1) I don't see why not? Think of Stamina as a mix of real-life stamina + Warframe void power. After all, how do they use Stamina to magnetically attach to walls when horizontally wallrunning? EDIT: You could extend it the other way too, if stamina is considered some kind of pseudo-void-power: When parkouring/dodging etc, anything that requires big chunks of stamina to do, why not have those actions make you glow like when melee channeling as well? :D

2) That would need a change though. If you don't have the stamina for a channel-swing, you'd neither consume the insufficient amount of stamina, nor get the channel-benefits. Simply: You'd need the right amounts of Stamina to actually channel-strike.

 

I think making more sense of things is always important. But sometimes, logic can be stretched a bit for the sake of better gameplay, don't you think? As I said in the first point, stamina doesn't have to be NORMAL stamina in these weird Warframes after all...

Edited April 21, 2014 by Azamagon

[ShiningArmor]

The point of melee channeling is to focus your Warframe energy into your blade to power it up. You can't focus your physical energy into the weapon itself, just a stronger swing. Therefore it would remove the glowing effects, and not do as much damage or disintegrate the enemy upon kill. It would be completely pointless. Also the "magnetic energy" you speak of is probably from the Warframe as well, where we are getting our pumped energy to imbue into our weapon. The stamina is just us, we're trained to be the best in the universe, remember? There is no possible way they would swap it from energy to stamina with that in mind. Another thing is that stamina regenerates quickly over time. This means that someone could pretty much always channel their weapon, or if they're using something like Fang Prime which requires almost no stamina to use, it would make channeling severely overpowered and would ruin the idea.

 

Although an idea is an idea, and in any other circumstance, I might agree with you.

Edited April 21, 2014 by ShiningArmor

[LukeAura]

I'm not sure it quite works, but I do think the wrong direction was taken with how tied melee is to our energy and warframes. 
Gun+Caster works great, Guns drain nothing from the caster type.
Melee+Caster works....not so great. Channeling drains energy, stamina and melee boosting mods are tied to warframes where ability boosting mods could go.
And as enemy damage increases, AoE CC abilities work much better for protection than blocking.
You can be a gunner with quick melee.
But you can't do melee with quick gunning.
Melee exists on its own, or as a sub/emergency function to other playstyles.
you're right in intention, wrong in design I think.

There are ideas I do like though. Removal/reduction of stamina costs for certain actions, Giving others with stamina costs defensive benefits to compensate.

[Thelonious]

I'm not sure it quite works, but I do think the wrong direction was taken with how tied melee is to our energy and warframes. 

Gun+Caster works great, Guns drain nothing from the caster type.

Melee+Caster works....not so great. Channeling drains energy, stamina and melee boosting mods are tied to warframes where ability boosting mods could go.

And as enemy damage increases, AoE CC abilities work much better for protection than blocking.

You can be a gunner with quick melee.

But you can't do melee with quick gunning.

Melee exists on its own, or as a sub/emergency function to other playstyles.

you're right in intention, wrong in design I think.

There are ideas I do like though. Removal/reduction of stamina costs for certain actions, Giving others with stamina costs defensive benefits to compensate.

 

Not to sound archetypical, but why would a "caster" (in the archetypical sense of the term) try and engage in close-combat? Aren't they specifically designed for range?

I mean, I'm not gonna try and build my nova as a "tank" or a "support"...and I can hardly build my nekro as a "nuker".

 

Just as certain types of ranged weapons work well with certain frames (Torid+Vauban, Stug+Trin, Ignis+Ember), melee works better with others. It's just another specialized playstyle.

Back on topic, and transitionning, it's the reason why I don't see anything wrong with Channeling costing Energy. It actually balances the fact that caster frames with more base energy can close the gap, melee-efficiency wise, with said melee-specialized frames (loki, ash, valkyr)

And it gives you something to spend your energy on if you're not an ability spammer.

 

Expends the use of energy beyond warframe powers and gives a bit of synergy to the whole gameplay system.

Instead of the simplistic, boringly classic, bipolar design of Mana vs Stamina [caster vs melee], and nothing in between.

 

Problem is, and you underlined it yourself Azma, that Melee consumes too much stamina of its own to be able to use the other stamina-dependant features.

I personally blame the stamina recharge timer, implemented at U10 when DE made a pitiful, unanimously rejected attempt at reworking the stamina system, mainly trying to alleviate the rushing issue by fixing slide-sprinting (for better or worse, your call)

 

But instead of before, when Stamina would keep regenerating while you're meleeing, you now have to stop attacking/sprinting completly for a whole second just to start regenerating.

Before, you were able to sustain E-spamming for a while before running out of stamina completly. And have some direct benefit from stamina regen mods.

Sure, swing costs were reduced, but in practice, you now run out of stamina twice as fast when meleeing.

And that's probably why we got a mod like Second Wind to compensate. At the cost of a mod slot of course...While making stamina regen mods much less interesting of a choice for melee specialization.

 

And with Melee 2.0 and the combo system rewarding players for attacking continuously, you also can't have time to stop and even start regenerating.

 

So simple fix: just make the recharge timer not affect melee swings. Just that would do a lot of good to melee.

Edited April 21, 2014 by Thelonious

[Syzodia]

EDIT: You could extend it the other way too, if stamina is considered some kind of pseudo-void-power: When parkouring/dodging etc, anything that requires big chunks of stamina to do, why not have those actions make you glow like when melee channeling as well? :D

.....now THAT sounds pretty badass too >:D

Combine with volt speed or something like that - BLURRRR

 

If your whole point is to make a separate energy pool of some kind for melee channelling other than warframe energy.......I'll partially agree there. TBH, it's perfect as it is since I rarely use my warframe powers.

My only gripe with that is picking up an energy orb (+25) when I've only used 5 or 1 energy points, from max energy, meleeing a mob - wasting a bunch of energy, but with the apparent buff (?) to energy orb drop rates, it's actually......almost perfect!

[LukeAura]

Not to sound archetypical, but why would a "caster" (in the archetypical sense of the term) try and engage in close-combat? Aren't they specifically designed for range?

I mean, I'm not gonna try and build my nova as a "tank" or a "support"...and I can hardly build my nekro as a "nuker".

 

Just as certain types of ranged weapons work well with certain frames (Torid+Vauban, Stug+Trin, Ignis+Ember), melee works better with others. It's just another specialized playstyle.

A couple of notes on that,

We also have close-medium close range guns too, Brakk, Stug, Boar Prime, Afuris, Boltor. They still don't drain casting. despite being too close for typical casting ranges. Brakk actually faces significant difficulties within the range some melee attacks can now be used at actually.

We also have a close range-caster in Ember who has a short range nuke and a medium-short range DoT that follows her, and Valkyr who is entirely close range oriented with her abilities.

Archetyping doesn't really apply here because being a caster doesn't mean the same thing as traditional MMOS. Casters aren't necessarily ranged damage or supporters in warframe, they're just warframes specced for casting their abilities often.

Gunplay encourages casting while Melee does the opposite.

Although true certain frames do have abilities that help alleviate that the modding space still shows the trend of working against effectiveness. And although it's nice to have something other than casting to focus on with our energy pool, casting is generally safer and more effective. 

[Guest]

i love your idea but

 

 

take both stamina AND energy?

[NDroid]

I don't mind channeling attacks costing energy but I do agree that melee is now very restricted by stamina usage. In my opinion it has a lot to do with blocking- you need to be able to block effectively to close the gap to your enemies but since you're often starved for stamina you can only block a few shots at a time.

When playing melee against any faction other than infested I find it pretty much mandatory to equip both stamina mods on the frame and potentially second wind to compensate. That's a big tradeoff that you don't have to make if you're using mostly long range weapons.

So I agree with your suggestions regarding regular attacks and sprinting (the latter definitely needs to have its cost reduced at the very least) and while blocking should still cost stamina you shouldn't be forced to use a specialized build just to use melee effectively. On the other hand, I like the channeling mechanic costing energy as it allows you to not only power up your weapon but also get secondary effects such as Life Strike.

[Wiler-Prime]

Take stamina and energy?

Nope nope nope... I love to run while parry that already cost me a lot of stamina when there is a mayhem next to me.... the last thing I want to deal with is to run out of stamina and don't be able to channel propelly

[HazaRD-WARRIOR]

Really against this idea.

Keep it as it is. Why change something that needs not any fixing? It's perfect now as energy channelling, also simulates that it is the same Tenno/Orokin source of power used for the skills/abilities.

Stamina being used for channelling for me is whoosh way over my head. No thank you.

p.s. don't fix things that aren't broken and don't diminish the whole point and idea behind stamina. For someone engaging in ranged combat all the time, they can with your model quick-attack and sprint forever (literally forever). Wha? And why? You need more stamina and that is what bugs you then drop a mod in there. You want more energy and the channelling eating it up bugs you then again, drop the mods you need (energy mods on Warframe and channelling mods on weapon) to get desired results. The direction you proposed is very sloppy, unbalanced and simply doesn't make logical sense either.

Currently, I use channelling a lot, and fight in melee often with no primary or secondary at all equipped, or just Kunai secondary for the rare conditions I need them. Haven't put a single stamina mod. Use a lot of running, all the melee (obviously) attacks and blocks, channelling a lot of the time if not most, and use skills like crazy. I find absolutely no problems doing all this at all. I always have enough energy for skills, my channelling costs almost nothing so it does not use up my energy, and stamina does not stop you from doing attacks. Your stamina is depleted and you keep pressing that attack button, you will keep on striking. It weakens you, it does not cripple you.

It's perfect the way it is. Again, no, thank you.

Edited April 22, 2014 by HazaRD-WARRIOR

[Azamagon]

The point of melee channeling is to focus your Warframe energy into your blade to power it up. You can't focus your physical energy into the weapon itself, just a stronger swing. Therefore it would remove the glowing effects, and not do as much damage or disintegrate the enemy upon kill. It would be completely pointless. Also the "magnetic energy" you speak of is probably from the Warframe as well, where we are getting our pumped energy to imbue into our weapon. The stamina is just us, we're trained to be the best in the universe, remember? There is no possible way they would swap it from energy to stamina with that in mind. Another thing is that stamina regenerates quickly over time. This means that someone could pretty much always channel their weapon, or if they're using something like Fang Prime which requires almost no stamina to use, it would make channeling severely overpowered and would ruin the idea.

 

Although an idea is an idea, and in any other circumstance, I might agree with you.

Like I already mentioned: Who says a Warframe can't empower their stamina with minor voidlike powers, in a chi/chakra-like way? Have a little imagination guys! Glowing can stay, disintegration can stay and damage boost can stay.

 

Being trained to be the best in the world, stamina would be practically unlimited anyway. If stamina had a more significant meaning (maybe even a slight renaming to fit) so it did something as meaningful as I have suggested, it wouldn't make the Warframes feel like they have horrible lung-power

 

If each channeled strike consumed about a fifth of your stamina or so, it would not be up "all the time". Considering that I said Stamina would not be used for general melee fighting or sprinting, but only for channeling and powerful dodges/parkouring, the regen could even be nerfed a bit.

 

I'm not sure it quite works, but I do think the wrong direction was taken with how tied melee is to our energy and warframes. 

Gun+Caster works great, Guns drain nothing from the caster type.

Melee+Caster works....not so great. Channeling drains energy, stamina and melee boosting mods are tied to warframes where ability boosting mods could go.

And as enemy damage increases, AoE CC abilities work much better for protection than blocking.

You can be a gunner with quick melee.

But you can't do melee with quick gunning.

Melee exists on its own, or as a sub/emergency function to other playstyles.

you're right in intention, wrong in design I think.

There are ideas I do like though. Removal/reduction of stamina costs for certain actions, Giving others with stamina costs defensive benefits to compensate.

Yup, as you can see, the different styles don't mesh well. Melee interferes too much with the Caster-style. Play Nekros in melee and use channeling and say goodbye to your Desecrate-spam (which is another issue, but that discussion is for a different thread)

 

At the very, very least, yes, some actions really need to have their staminacosts reduced/removed. That's for sure.

Another problem is the whole Stamina-powercreep going on with the new Warframes. Valkyr and Hydroid have about double the amount of stamina compared to the other Warframes, for no apparent reason either.

 

May I ask why I'm wrong in design though? Look beyond stamina as just purely stamina. Think of it more like channeling your stamina in a chi or chakra kind of way and it could make more sense. Quite a lot of ninja series and games (or whatever includes ninja-esque characters) have stamina or physical energy useable in these mysterious ways. I don't see why Warframe can't do that.

 

Problem is, and you underlined it yourself Azma, that Melee consumes too much stamina of its own to be able to use the other stamina-dependant features.

I personally blame the stamina recharge timer, implemented at U10 when DE made a pitiful, unanimously rejected attempt at reworking the stamina system, mainly trying to alleviate the rushing issue by fixing slide-sprinting (for better or worse, your call)

 

But instead of before, when Stamina would keep regenerating while you're meleeing, you now have to stop attacking/sprinting completly for a whole second just to start regenerating.

Before, you were able to sustain E-spamming for a while before running out of stamina completly. And have some direct benefit from stamina regen mods.

Sure, swing costs were reduced, but in practice, you now run out of stamina twice as fast when meleeing.

And that's probably why we got a mod like Second Wind to compensate. At the cost of a mod slot of course...While making stamina regen mods much less interesting of a choice for melee specialization.

 

And with Melee 2.0 and the combo system rewarding players for attacking continuously, you also can't have time to stop and even start regenerating.

 

So simple fix: just make the recharge timer not affect melee swings. Just that would do a lot of good to melee.

That could definitely be a different way to "fix" it as well. But it still doesn't go away from the fact that meleeing clashes with the caster side of things.

 

.....now THAT sounds pretty badass too >:D

Combine with volt speed or something like that - BLURRRR

 

If your whole point is to make a separate energy pool of some kind for melee channelling other than warframe energy.......I'll partially agree there. TBH, it's perfect as it is since I rarely use my warframe powers.

My only gripe with that is picking up an energy orb (+25) when I've only used 5 or 1 energy points, from max energy, meleeing a mob - wasting a bunch of energy, but with the apparent buff (?) to energy orb drop rates, it's actually......almost perfect!

See, it can be totally badass if done the right way! :)

 

Yeah the point is to seperate it from Warframe energy. Stamina just seemed like the perfect place to put it.

And no, it's not perfect because YOU don't use your powers much. Like I mentioned earlier: Play Nekros on Desecrate-duty and try and do melee channeling. Hope you have a lot of energy restores with you!

 

And although it's nice to have something other than casting to focus on with our energy pool, casting is generally safer and more effective. 

Nailed it. It's quite pointless to use melee channeling actually. This is partially the channeling mods' fault (all those penalties are bleh!), and partly because ... well, it's using energy in the first place!

 

i love your idea but

 

take both stamina AND energy?

Umm, way to miss the point, no? >_>

 

I don't mind channeling attacks costing energy but I do agree that melee is now very restricted by stamina usage. In my opinion it has a lot to do with blocking- you need to be able to block effectively to close the gap to your enemies but since you're often starved for stamina you can only block a few shots at a time.

When playing melee against any faction other than infested I find it pretty much mandatory to equip both stamina mods on the frame and potentially second wind to compensate. That's a big tradeoff that you don't have to make if you're using mostly long range weapons.

1) So I agree with your suggestions regarding regular attacks and sprinting (the latter definitely needs to have its cost reduced at the very least) and while blocking should still cost stamina you shouldn't be forced to use a specialized build just to use melee effectively. 2) On the other hand, I like the channeling mechanic costing energy as it allows you to not only power up your weapon but also get secondary effects such as Life Strike.

1) Thanks, I'm glad others can see part of the issues as well.

2) I don't see why we couldn't have stuff like Life Strike even while using Stamina? Life Strike needs a nerf anyway, so nerfing its power, but also going over to Stamina-useage for Melee Channeling would make it feel far less harsh of a nerf.

 

Take stamina and energy?

Nope nope nope... I love to run while parry that already cost me a lot of stamina when there is a mayhem next to me.... the last thing I want to deal with is to run out of stamina and don't be able to channel propelly

* On the first part: I hope you are not responding to me, as I said ONLY Energy, not Energy AND Stamina (which it actually does already).  Also, if you didn't know, if you are out of Stamina and use Channeling, you will use your Energy on the strike, but you will get no benefit from the Channeling. So be careful about that!

* Regarding the second issue though (not being able to use channeling right after rushing up with blocking) - That's actually a very good point, and so far the only good counter I've seen against my suggestion. I'll think about that.

[Mak_Gohae]

i suggested this the second this was shown in the stream.

 

Melee is already restrictive in that you have to switch to a melee mode that deosnt let you use your range weapons and on top of that now you have to worry about when you can use focus because it take energy away from your power. If you dont bother to pile on all the energy helping mods to make this possible.

[Azamagon]

i suggested this the second this was shown in the stream.

 

Melee is already restrictive in that you have to switch to a melee mode that deosnt let you use your range weapons and on top of that now you have to worry about when you can use focus because it take energy away from your power. If you dont bother to pile on all the energy helping mods to make this possible.

I'm glad someone else also understands the issue!

Edited May 4, 2014 by Azamagon

[Saenol]

Stamina is already a very limited resource for melee-centric builds, often far more so than energy.

 

I think the current system, though not flawless, is better than this proposed system.

[skinotik]

I like your stamina for channeling idea.  But I think sprinting should still drain your stamina.  Im ok with basic melee strike not draining stamina.

 

 That could be a way to make stamina a viable ressource.  The one big issu I have with this idea is that it will complexify greatly the game.  You will now have to take care of 2 ressource, Energy and Stamina.  It could be very confusing for new player.  That kind of system would be like melee 3.0