[Rework Suggestion] - Melee 3.0, IE making melee good for something

[crackbeard]

Damn you obviously spent a lot of time here so i feel kinda bad for this but... melee is more powerful than anything else right now tbh so atleast 80% of that huge post is irrelevant.

 

Edit: re reading that although i still don't think melee needs to be any more powerful some of those ideas are really COOL and would make it more enjoyable which imo is more important anyways so yeah.

Edited May 6, 2016 by crackbeard

[Replacement]

21 hours ago, CrimsonDalekanium said:

War/Scindo Prime

Cleaving Whirlwind/Tempo Royale

Berserker, Body Count, Blood Rush. Pressure point, primed reach/reach, 3 90% elementals (or 2 elementals and collision force/buzzkill)

Broken War/Nikana prime

Crimson Dervish/Decisive Judgment

Berserker, Body count, Blood rush, Pressure point, primed reach/reach, 3 90% elementals (or 2 elementals and a Buzzkill)

 

Obviously improved by steel charge, pairs well with strength/duration volt or rhino. 

Redeemer

High Noon

Pressure point, fury, and as many elementals as you can jam on there.

Excellent suggestions.  A little high end, but excellent.

20 hours ago, Yistern said:

Banshee/RB Excal + Dagger

Any stance

Covert Lethality, Fury, Life Strike, any combination of mods thereafter.

 

Orthos Prime

Any stance

Pressure Point, Spoiled Strike, Reach/Primed, Body Count, Fury, 3 Single/Dual stat element mod combination.

 

Dragon Nikana

Blind Justice (Because it's clearly the best)

Pressure point, Spoiled Strike, Fury and/or Berserker, Killing Blow, Corrupt Charge, Focus Energy, Body Count/Toxin or heat single or dual stat mod, anything else to plug up the holes.

-First Example is what I'd call "distorting" -- you have a frames that say "nevermind, you're allowed to sneak attack these guys no matter what" and a mod that says "nevermind the HP system.  You automatically kill."

Your other examples are good.  Not terribly hard to obtain either.  I thank you both for your input, and I'll try some of these on sorties and see how they perform.

Here's part 2: Name any GUN that can perform well in sorties.

Answer: Just about anything with a potato.

===

I'm not a believer in "melee builds" to the exclusion of guns.  This is warframe.  I should be expected to do both.  But melee weapons are clearly polarized - they require very specific weapons, or very specific builds, to make them work well enough to actually be used.

I personally run most high end content with jat kittag.  I never drop into stance -- its sole purpose is clearing me space.  I clearly do not believe it has crowd control issues.  But the same can't be said for fang prime, for example, which doesn't necessarily have something going for it in place of large aoe crowd control.  

I don't want to hijack this thread, I just want to point out that the experience is vastly different.  There is a systemic flaw with outliers who are "worth it".  This isn't healthy.

Edited May 6, 2016 by Replacement

[Gurpgork]

10 hours ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Valkyr is good for a really obvious reason. And Wukong. And Chroma. And mirage. Give me something man, give me a build that thinks outside the box, some random non survivable frame and a goofy melee weapon, like a sword. Or a whip. Or claws. 

A gimmick I've been experimenting with is melee Limbo. 

Shadow Step is probably mandatory. I use a Cataclysm build with a decent amount of range, lots of strength, and Rift Surge. Then I use the Destreza or the Lesion with Maiming Strike. 

It works way better than I expected it would... 

[(PSN)WINDMILEYNO]

31 minutes ago, Gurpgork said:

A gimmick I've been experimenting with is melee Limbo. 

Shadow Step is probably mandatory. I use a Cataclysm build with a decent amount of range, lots of strength, and Rift Surge. Then I use the Destreza or the Lesion with Maiming Strike. 

It works way better than I expected it would... 

I have to applaud that. Sounds cool.

I just feel a little off put off that it's a gimmick kind of thing...

Shadow step was given to us

Crit mods were given to us

Parkour 2.0 was given to us

No elemental fix yet to help those builds against crit builds

These are fixes. But they aren't built into the game, they are things you have to build up, grind for, buy with plat, make room on your loadout for now what feels like mandatory mods instead of the effect being apart of the weapon or something...

Its all a choice though.

Here's mah thoughts:

If I ever go with a melee build that is not normal, like my favorite saryn (who is supposed to be a melee frame, as toxic lash only works with a melee weapon) with venka and vermilion storm, there is a clear moment when I can no longer melee and have to switch to using guns. My melee build varies in the time it lasts, but even with spammy powers, I get swarmed, though I do not use naramon or arcane trickery. Everything gets so much easier in the mission when I pull out a primary.

Running away to lick my wounds while invisible to the enemy, or attacking "from the shadows" sounds ninja ish I guess. It helps, but what's getting me is that ninja are more effective at killing things with guns than melee in this scenario. Sure, ninja fight with whatever tools available. It just so happens the best tools available usually tend to be guns. Meta guns are a thing. What is a meta melee weapon? For as long as I could remember, it was the galantine, now it might be war? But, people seem to just be less agreed on what the best melee weapon is versus how almost everyone seems to agree on the too 5 guns.

In exterminate missions, it is easy to know what to expect and what your melee weapon will be able to deal with, so you can say melee is viable and does not need to be based off of endless missions. 

I am thinking of reasons why melee should be ok where it is, but I still wish for tweaks and changes

Giving melee weapons gimmicks to deal with survival/defense/interception missions may have seemed like the answer, but there were/are other ways to go.

 

[Yistern]

16 hours ago, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

Valkyr is good for a really obvious reason. And Wukong. And Chroma. And mirage. Give me something man, give me a build that thinks outside the box, some random non survivable frame and a goofy melee weapon, like a sword. Or a whip. Or claws. 

Where are the fun and goofy builds, or the casual builds that are fine and scale even halfway into late game with their dps?  

Whats the "much more"? With just a little more effort, you could win this post over

How about a high-fire rate, high status lascera blast/corrosive build? Or better yet a Bo Prime build using shattering impact and blast damage! It strips armor fast, then blast procs to send the enemy across the room. (Assuming it can actually do that.)

[(PSN)WINDMILEYNO]

8 hours ago, Yistern said:

How about a high-fire rate, high status lascera blast/corrosive build? Or better yet a Bo Prime build using shattering impact and blast damage! It strips armor fast, then blast procs to send the enemy across the room. (Assuming it can actually do that.)

High fire rate...ok, sounds legit. You like that blast on your melee. Cool stuff.

 

Negativeness down here: I think the best swag stick is the serro with blast and corrosive. But elemental damage...is farther behind crit damage in bandaid mods.

[ReshyShira]

On 5/6/2016 at 7:25 AM, Replacement said:

Excellent suggestions.  A little high end, but excellent.

-First Example is what I'd call "distorting" -- you have a frames that say "nevermind, you're allowed to sneak attack these guys no matter what" and a mod that says "nevermind the HP system.  You automatically kill."

Your other examples are good.  Not terribly hard to obtain either.  I thank you both for your input, and I'll try some of these on sorties and see how they perform.

Here's part 2: Name any GUN that can perform well in sorties.

Answer: Just about anything with a potato.

===

I'm not a believer in "melee builds" to the exclusion of guns.  This is warframe.  I should be expected to do both.  But melee weapons are clearly polarized - they require very specific weapons, or very specific builds, to make them work well enough to actually be used.

I personally run most high end content with jat kittag.  I never drop into stance -- its sole purpose is clearing me space.  I clearly do not believe it has crowd control issues.  But the same can't be said for fang prime, for example, which doesn't necessarily have something going for it in place of large aoe crowd control.  

I don't want to hijack this thread, I just want to point out that the experience is vastly different.  There is a systemic flaw with outliers who are "worth it".  This isn't healthy.

The problem is that to make melee viable you basically rely on getting a combo-meter going, that requires you to forsake your other weapons to use melee.  This means you're screwed in a lot of situations (or at least a lot higher risk) because many enemies have specialized attacks that only work in close quarters.  You know, the same distance you use melee in.

 

And yes, there are some select weapons that are good, but by-and-large most aren't. 

 

On 5/6/2016 at 11:58 PM, crackbeard said:

Damn you obviously spent a lot of time here so i feel kinda bad for this but... melee is more powerful than anything else right now tbh so atleast 80% of that huge post is irrelevant.

 

Edit: re reading that although i still don't think melee needs to be any more powerful some of those ideas are really COOL and would make it more enjoyable which imo is more important anyways so yeah.

Melee is very powerful in very specific circumstances using exclusive equipment.  Last I checked secondary and primary weapons don't rely on exclusive equipment and specific circumstances to be competent.  People speak of x5 multipliers, but honestly, that require a high-end build using exclusive mods that only becomes viable when you use it to the exclusion of everything else.  Because, unlike any of the guns in the game (barring sniper rifles, maybe) you can pull them out and immediately start killing, while with melee you gotta "spool up" your melee attacks a few dozen repetitions.

 

On 5/5/2016 at 11:31 PM, Yistern said:

You can't say melee is bad because you weren't around for a certain set of mods. Tough tatas, but you're just gonna have to wake up and smell the dual-stat/single-stat builds.

Translation:  "You haven't played as long as me, so you deserve an objectively worse experience."
 

On 5/5/2016 at 0:58 AM, Hellmaker2004 said:

Most melee weapon also have a cleaving effect, this is of course different depending on what melee weapon you use but overall they all have some sort of areal damage, another thing you forgot to mention is how melee have a combo counter than can go as high as five times higher damage.

Many primary and secondary weapons either have an AOE effect or the ability to penetrate targets.  Furthermore, with the exception of shotguns and similar weapons, they can be used at long distances that are far, far beyond what melee can be effective at.  So, there's literally no net-gain for melee weapons in this regard, so why do they have an objectively worse base damage mod?

 

On 5/5/2016 at 0:58 AM, Hellmaker2004 said:

Melee weapons do not use ammo, fire rate and attack speed comparison is not a very good metric. And you only compared with Fury, where is Primed Fury and where is Berserker?

Many of the "Good" weapons have good ammo efficiency, ammo is not likely to be a problem with most weapons unless you're intentionally being wasteful.  I compared Fury because it is the most comparable mod to Gunslinger and Speed Trigger.  I have only compared them to similar mods that work the same way:  base speed increase that doesn't rely on exclusive mods.

 

On 5/5/2016 at 0:58 AM, Hellmaker2004 said:

Yes, true steel is very bad compared with almost any other critical chance mods. So join the Blood Rush master race and you will understand how strong critical melee weapons are.

Okay, that's great that they made a crit-chance boosting mod that makes critical-hit builds viable!  So why do we excuse True Steel for being awful?

 

On 5/5/2016 at 0:58 AM, Hellmaker2004 said:

You only compare the base damage, you can not compare one part off a weapon and say it is bad when they have something that can offer five times multiplier on damage and a ridiculous amount of critical. This would be the same as comparing a Tonkor single target damage and compare it with a Lanka fully charged headshot damage only to realize  that Lanka deals more damage and is more ammo efficient, and yet we see people with Tonkor instead due to one of the aspect one tool have over the other.

It was the thing that stuck out the most to me and had the largest disparity:  Base damage.  The five-times multiplier only occurs in specific circumstances where you are able to melee kill enough to maintain the combo.  While trivial with Body Count, that is A.  An exclusive mod and B. Still a situational bonus.  To really get that x5 you have to be using melee exclusively, whereas a primary weapons is immediately good and doesn't require a 100-hit combo to provide comparable damage.

 

On 5/5/2016 at 0:58 AM, Hellmaker2004 said:

Melee weapons does not need to offer crowd control. We have frames with a ridiculous power strength that can lock down whole maps, other frames are excellent at at surviving. Quite simply not all frames are optimal at melee range.

Yeah, I know that CC frames are useful.  So why should melee weapons be relegated to being a situational tool that will, more often than not, be overshadowed by literally any other option.

 

On 5/5/2016 at 0:58 AM, Hellmaker2004 said:

Overall melee is in a very good spot in warframe. The damage they can dish out is extremely high and they can cleave down a huge amount of foes at the same time. Clearly not every melee weapon will fall into this category, but the same can be said about both primary weapons and secondary weapons as well. And the whole system does not need a rework.

Because, under specific circumstances, melee is not completely worthless is a valid excuse for it being mostly useless.  Am I getting that right?

 

 

On 5/5/2016 at 1:01 PM, (PS4)WINDMILEYNO said:

7). A lot stuff the Op said is really great, if not really representative of everyone's sentiments (looking at the first couple of responses). ~ melee shouldn't be auto target like archwing imo, but anything to close the gap helps.

 

Pouncing/Charging:  When targeting an enemy with a melee attack who is outside of your melee weapon's reach, you put on a sudden burst of speed to close the distance (About as far as you would travel with a bullet jump, but almost instantly) and strike the target for higher than normal damage due to the inertia of the charge going into the hit.  If the target is outside of your pounce range you can keep repeating this, though with a slight delay between each "hop" but still should get you there much faster than you currently do.  This eliminates some problems with melee by reducing the amount of time the enemy has to shoot at you.  Ideally this would also be made to function against airborn enemies so that you can close the distance against mid-air enemies to strike them instead of relying on the current-and extremely awkward-leap attacks.  In essence this would function similar to how melee works in Archwing.

I imagine pouncing repeatedly would be not very more advantageous than just bullet jumping to close the gap, but the pounce attack in general sounds cool

It shouldn't be so difficult to hit aerial enemies.  Plus melee is actually auto-target if you have a particular option enabled called "Melee Auto Targeting."  So yes, it literally is already in the game, it just doesn't work against aerial enemies or as noticeably against ground-based enemies due to lack of a pouncing mechanic like Archwing has.

The point of the charging/pouncing would be speed, as it would be quicker and place you into the first hit of your combo if you hit the target.

 

 

On 5/5/2016 at 1:35 PM, YasaiTsume said:

I agree for the first two mod types mentioned (Base damage and Attack speed)

I strongly disagree for Critical mods for melee, because Melee Crits are very devastating (Stealth attacks can x8 the amount of damage dealt iirc) and Melee actually has the very best Critical based mods in the game amongst other weapons. I am fine with the Blood Rush + Body Count combo we have now. 

Melee has the best exclusive critical hit mod.  Notice how only the combo-variant is actually useful.  You're saying that, because there's an overpowered exclusive mod, the normal, completely worthless version, shouldn't be viable?

 

On 5/5/2016 at 4:37 PM, polarity said:

Melee attacks get bonus damage while sliding, in the air, on downed/unalerted targets, and from stance combos.  Ranged weapons don't.  Melee weapons don't need more base damage, players need to stop spamming quick melee while walking forward, and use them properly.

As for crowd control, learn to slam from bullet jump, and use a weapon with a decent slam range, or combine melee with a frame that makes enemies vulnerable (ie. Mag with pull.  There's a reason I can survive with no rezzes to 2500 cryotic on Earth - Lua, with an account fresh out of the tutorials).

Yeah, and melee weapons get bonus damage from hitting enemies in their giant heads, can get attack speeds that melee weapons can't compare, can dish out concentrated status like melee can't compare, can hit more targets in a single shot than melee can compare, etc.  Melee has massively fewer options when it comes down to it. 

 

I'm glad you can make 2500 cryotic fighting the easiest faction in the game.

Edited May 14, 2016 by ReshyShira