A "few" ideas on improving Melee Combat Experience (aka "Melee2.(9)" )

[Drejzer]

{Disclaimer, this thread is in no way "absolutely unique, original and perfect", to be frank: it's more like an Infested Charger (and most likely it will look like one (I'm reaaally bad at expresing myself or explaining things) that appeared on the forums) — an amalgamation of ideas that I stumbled upon on the forums or thought about during the day/night. So it is highly probable that I might post something that one of you(or several people) posted already. Btw, should it sound like a school essay, please do forgive me for that.}

In U13 we got fancy combos packed in stances, Channeling, hit counter combo meter, and ability to go "Sword Alone". Later we even got long awaited aerial attacks! (Nobody osprey expects Spanish Inquisition Tenno with a sword) .

That's one thing to cross out from a great concept thread(archived):

If you read it (and i sincerely recommend it) you will see few worthy additions to our repertoire namely: roll and dash attacks.

Roll attacks: they could be an another gap closer when you have to reload your weapon while chasing that low-hp capture target. Instead of waiting for thatdamned reload(or Void forbid: holster) animation to finish, we could roll and jab/slash/stab/*insert kind of harming action you do with your melee* them. Or just have it for variety. And fanciness.

Dash (attacks): ↑ read aforementioned post ↑ It covers this perfectly: tl;dr: rolls are clumsy, replace them with dashes/sidesteps (DMC3's Trickster style a little bit toned down in every direction besides forward) Forward could be a gap-closer and an alternative for slide attacks(more choice is good)(also covered in said thread)

Aerial attacks: Yep, we have them, but they send us forward by default (which causes us to miss sometimes) I would like to attack things that are before me without flinging myself even further, a simple attack is all I ask for(I can jump up to almost everything, especially now. I don't need additional attack that flings me away from my target...). Our current Flying Swallow-ish attack could be performed by using mele while aim-gliding.

 Before we fall back on the ground: Could we get jump-cancelling (jumping on enemies that resets jump-related actions like bullet jump, jump attacks etc.) mechanic? ←this would be extremely useful when trying to melee some bosses *cough*Lephantis*cough* or just for fanciness and coolness. did I mention Coolness?

I mentioned Combo Counter(i'll refer to it as Hit Count Display (HCD)) before, it's nice and adds viability to using melee as it gives us bigger and bigger Dmg to keep up with the scaling of Enemies. It's nice and useful. Alas, we all fear the moment when we (or our teammates) kill everything in the vicinity. Then panic strikes as we search for enemies to keep our x4 dmg multipiler. (of course most people have Body Count installed, it would be rather hard to get to that Multiplier without it)  We notice the enemy! But as we hit them, we see that dreadful "1" in the lower-right corner... And so my proposition to this idea is to Implement "Decaying": after a brief (our basic 3s) upkeep of our current HCD it would start rapidly decaying up to a "Breakpoint" (the Breakpoints would be hits required to earn the current multiplier), upon reaching the breakpoint Decay would stop for the upkeep and it would continue until HCD reached "0" or an enemy was hit with melee(which would interrupt decay and let us continue slaughtering our enemies).

 

Of course this brings us to another problem: Sparsity of high-tier breakpoints. Currently hits required to upgrade our HC_bonus by one tier equal to 5(3

^{HC_bonus_tier-1}) tiers are the modifier (x1.5,x2,x2.5 etc (x1.5 is first tier) so the amount of hits required to get back to our x4 multiplier would be (5*3⁵)=1215 and it would be much more dangerous, as the enemies have much higher DPS, HP and Armour.
My solution? Reduce the scaling, but also reduce the multiplier ( I thought about making it ceil(6*1.7^{HCD_bonus_tier-1}) and making the multiplier rise by 0.25 instead of 0.5 that would result in slightly higher hits required to reach multipliers up to x3.75 (x4 would then require 1212 hits) but later noticed that rounding numbers would play tricks on me so forget about it.

And an indicator how much time do fe have left before we start loosing our HC bonus (or loose it completely as we do now) would be nice (or do we already have it?).

Now onto Channeling! That's one neat-sounding and looking feature which almost no-one uses (besides Life Strike). Yeah it sounds nice. It looks nice. But it's useless. (I might be exaggerating a little). 
Anyway I'd pretty much Implement @FoxFX's Concept:

It has great Ideas about the channeling (+Focus system)!
While writing this I remembered about Countering! It uses Channeling as of now (supposedly - I don`t remember ever pulling it off when I tried...) I could be remapped to pressing [context_action/interact] (default X). Other than this I don't really have any ideas/tweaks to implement it to this mix. 
(I'm not giving you a compressed version of that thread.)

Now onto the highlight of the show: fancy combos packed into nifty stances. They are nice, flashy and cumbersome. Yep, many melee users end up using spam-[E] combos or spam-[E]-while-holding-one-other-key(usually [forward] or [block]) combos sometimes they happen to execute one of the pause combos (not always intentionally) and hold ones barely see use (This does not apply if the best/most useful combo of the stance is a pause or hold one). (I'm speaking from my own and my friends' experiences here)
The problem with hold combos is the fact that you have to hold at one specific point in the combo (otherwise it just executes charge attack), pause ones have it slightly better: you can tap [E] with short intervals so that you end up performing those combos (but some stances have more than one pause combo so that is sometimes an issue) while combos involving directions other than forward (namely:backward) have the problem that the frame simply walks back (of course one could simply press that key in the right moment but it's quite hard to know it when you are invisible, or can't see the animation for one reason or the another).
Then there is upcoming pistol+glaive(/blade somewhere in the future) stance/mode... of which i heard that it would be turned on wwith alt-fire in melee so it's good with me. I think. It's Super-Beta right now, so I'll ignore it (Well it could possibly open a doorway to fulfilling one of my dreams but oh well...)
Yeah, back to Combos! This part would probably require [absurd] amount of work and scrapping quite a lot of the current system (it would probably be melee 3.0...) well it was requested/speculated/proposed ever since the melee2.0 was announced,
That is: two types of attacks. 
I'd  imagine this to be like this:
{
Basic attack "Line" and "Special" attack line (5 hit or something?(prefferably they would have same amount) that could be mixed together (so if we went N-N-N-S-S we would get first 3 hits of normal and last two of specials. The animations would go from one-to-another (hopefully) seamlessly, but probably some repositioning animation would be used for some (if not most) of them 
Another way could be "Specials" being ending attacks/attacks that branch out to other combos (instead of hold-[e]/ pause/[e]-with-another-key combos).

Besides those I'd like to see "Utility combos" added. They would be accessed by holding [block] and pressing [Melee attack], not every stance would have all of them (while it would be nice if normal attacks were weapon-type based and same for all, and stances would get unique ones that would use the "Special" attack input), I imagine them like this: 
     {
     [block]+[Attack]: defensive move (some sweeps maybe, chance to disarm or stagger the enemy, or some procs; depending on enemy)
     [block]+[forward]+[Attack]: gap closer(dashes,jumps, runs,etc), more offensive procs, slams, things like that
     [block]+[strafe]+[Attack]: fancy piruet/sidestep dodge with an attack or stuff like that
     [block]+[backwards]+[Attack}: knockbacks, attacks that launch into the air, or an attack that leads to a fancy backflip dodge(this one I would envision as a "generic" one )
     }
The "Special" attack could be performed by pressing [reload] as it currently does nothing by default (checked on the .
}

Edit: I just remembered about the fact that stances are MODs... 
I'd like the Ranks to go like this(let's say that some stance would have attack string length of 6): {4 attacks of normal&special;generic utility}→{5 attacks; generic utility} →{6 attacks; generic utility} → {6 attacks; generic utility;Stance-specific utility} or, using the alternate way, each rank would unlock a branch/finish and the 

 

Should you be wondering what Dream was I taking about: its' ability to equip more than one melee weapon.
We currently can take wit us: a {Rocket Launcher,Two Machine Guns, Two Bladed Weapons With a Size of a Greatsword EACH } aka {Ogris,Twin Grakata, Kronen} But we are unable to take with us A greatsword, a whip, and a set of "Sparring gear" (Kogake/Hirudo/Obex) or even a Glaive and Kogake) while we can go just with a bow, or just with a thrown melee that leaves us defenceless. Why not allow us to take with us 2 or 3 melee weapons? (I wouldn't mind being able to take more secondaries/primaries as well (instead of other weapons) (personnaly I think that having 2 melee max would be best, as it would allow for "fancy switching" that is executing a weapon-type-specific attack while switching. (And I'm not the only one that would like to see that)
(Yes I want to be Vergil from DMC3 in Warframe, got a problem with that?)

UPDATE: After trying the Thrown+Seondary I don't think that it would influence melee, seeing that it's simply an upgrade to simply using a secondary.

Well I wrote it, should you overcome this wall of text containing my ramblings and wishful thinking, feel free to comment (and I would like to hear some feedback, I think... )

Edited July 3, 2017 by Drejzer
Cleaned it up a little