The Problem I'm Having With Melee In General

[WhiteCopain]

I've always been a sword and shield guy. So when we finally got that in the game I was instantly buying platinum and getting it. I've never been one to really put the best stuff on a weapon I could before now either, but I went out of my way to look up some good mods to put on the weapon so I could deal decent damage (it's not maxed and neither are the mods so it doesn't yet, I'm hoping for the best though). But... now I'm noticing a pretty big problem right now with this in general.

 

I like playing Excalibur (more specifically, Excal Prime) because it is well balanced and not something that easily makes me bored of the game (Such as how Rhino's damage reduction, Bonus damage, and huge AoE CC and damage makes everything trivial and boring until way late). I've built him fairly bulky on the Shield side with a Redirection one level from being maxed and a maxed Vigor mod... Not the most durable, but durable enough for me to realize a rather large problem.... I die almost instantly at anything that would be worth it to use Melee on.

 

A big reason to use melee over guns or skills is that it builds up a damage multiplier, letting you scale up more and more against those stronger enemies. The problem here is that I'm not really any more durable with my Sword and Shield out then I am with my gun out (if I am, barely). The only time I really have issues with damage is super high defense runs or survival. There was an alert today with enemies that were ~30 For a defense missions, I figured this would be a good time to practice with the weapon, but any time I went to swing I'd get punched down very fast and swarmed by other enemies. If I'd try to focus on comboing or keeping my bonus damage up, I'd instantly get killed because hitting one enemy lets five other murder me instantly. If I try to block attacks, I lose my combo and can't do anything and still risk some ancient draining my energy, some Grineer CCing me, or letting the Corpus heal their shields up.

 

If I'm missing some big thing with melee let me know, because I'd like to get involved with melee, but it feels really difficult to get invested in.

Edited July 20, 2014 by WhiteCopain

[Alad_VI]

Fluidity, that's what you're missing. Weave your targets, and know what should be Marlee's and what should not. If it's a huge crowd of enemies, use the magic of bullets to soften then up and then go in with AoE combos.

[Petersheikah]

Use blocking, Life strike mods and try to aproach enemies in a more NINJA stile, maybe with wallruns etc. You said you love shields, so it's logic to block bullets. Use Knockdown moves or that amazing NINJA KICK, it's great in all situations

[Kthal]

With my T4 viable melee builds, there is a certain set of mods I find myself having to use to survive:

 

Vitality -> Rage -> Flow -> Quick Thinking work together in a chain which, as long as you are dealing enough damage for Life Strike to keep you alive, makes you almost unkillable. If I have shields at any time, then I know I can be doing more.

 

Reflex Guard is a major nuisance when using guns of any kind, but when going pure melee it acts as a huge damage reduction, 55% at max rank. This effectively doubles your survivability while closing in.

 

The rest of my mods I put into minmaxing abilities, Radial Disarm on my Loki and Speed on my Volt. Energy efficiency shouldn't be a big worry because of the amount of health being gained and lost keeping you full.

[Metalarcher]

Seems to me like you could benefit from some AoE CC on your weapon.  Though I haven't used the weapon, I would imagine Silva & Aegis aren't at orthos-level range, with hard AoE attacks.  You might try putting some ice on your weapon as well as getting the status up so you can reliably deal explosive damage, that will probably stun/knockdown enemies in close-range so they don't get an opportunity to hit you.  As for whether this would work on ranged enemies, I think in order to pull that off you'd have to put some blocking mods on your Excal, like Reflection and Reflex Guard, in order to make that effective.

 

Though to be honest I don't hate the idea of getting more damage resistance in melee, considering melee weapons can do more damage than anything else in the game (there is no upward limit to the multiplier) but getting them to that point is far more difficult than, say, using a Soma to just mow everything down, and at range to boot.  But that's very much a fine-tuning and balancing issue, so as to when DE has the desire to get around to that, or if they ever do...who knows?  Balancing the game from the ground up isn't something they've really ever said, to my knowledge.

[Kthal]

there is no upward limit to the multiplier

 

I believe it caps at 3.5x - I got a 747 combo on a Prosecutor and it stopped there.

[Metalarcher]

I believe it caps at 3.5x - I got a 747 combo on a Prosecutor and it stopped there.

I think it actually does keep going, it just gets practically impossible, though not technically impossible.

[Virdigo]

Ok your doing it wrong, I'm not saying your going about melee wrong but your going about excal melee wrong.  Excal needs two things to melee radial blind and silence.  So dump the sweeper put a hushed stinger in your carrier or use a dog/helios and focus on control.  Blind combined with a melee build that's fully stealthed/silenced will get 4xdamage vs unaware opponents basically everyone you just radial'd but as soon as the shooting starts again they go back to alert status.  It's the easiest playstyle in the game I would think since you never run out of ammo and everthing just stands around waiting for you to kill it.