The new two- handed nikana stance, will it be another victim of bad design concept?

[ICA-970326-47]

Dear Geoff and other animators in DE,

We have seen your great job on the new two-handed nikana stance, here I sincerely beg you: Please DO NOT MAKE IT A LONG COMBO. Break those great movements into a few quick and sharp combos. And give it the ability to move freely while performing the combos, please.

Recently, you have introduced a lot of new stances for the polearm, dual-sword, etc. But personally, I found none of them really good on the battlefield. They were all fancy looking with some well-designed animation, it's obvious you guys put in time and effort. But they are also slow, not connect fluently, cannot sprit while performing a combo, unnecessarily long and a lot of attacks are just useless cuz even sortie 3 enemies died in a few hits already. These unnecessarily long combos also cannot be canceled so that you are forced to wait for 1 or 2 useless attacks done, leave you completely open to enemies' attack.

Although these are just my personal opinion, and I know there are some people like these new combos. But long combo with limited mobility is just bad in the high-level face to face combat. You need to move, to block, to dodge and plan for next attack, or you will die under a lot of mobs' concentrated firepower, corpus tech's horrifying supra, and random bombard rocket.

 

As a CQC Saryn main, I tried almost all the melee stance and try to use them in high-level content. And in my heart, Blind Justice is just the best combo of all, followed by a few others. Such as Tempo Royal, Swirling Tiger, Vulpine Mask, Defiled Snapdragon and the quick melee attack of polearms. These stances are not strong in damage multiplier, but in the real battle, they just handle well in my opinion.

Taking Blind Justice as an example, here are the reasons why it just handles well.

1.You can move freely while performing combo, allow you to keep move forward to slash through mobs, or move horizontally to control distance and avoid taking direct fire if you are fighting a heavy target. You can simply move round to their back while swinging your nikana.

2.All combos are sharp, quick, fluent and not unnecessarily long. In the battlefield, I can quickly jump in, kill the enemy in a few slashes and immediately dodge or stop combo and start blocking. Leave enemies no chance to focus their firepower on me.

3.The damage multiplier of Blind Justice is obviously lower than other two nikana stances. But all combos sever a good purpose. The Heeding Call combo ragdoll enemies and allow slash proc to take advantage of stealth multiplier. It also has a good range that can damage several enemies at once. The Guiding Light combo provides superb mobility to get close to the enemy, also has forced slash proc and manageable ragdoll. By effectively use all these effects, Blind Justice can handle most situations efficiently.

[ICA-970326-47]

Stupid mistake in titles.....I spent 20 mins editing my words but got a spelling mistake.....oh god.

[(PSN)CrimsonAxure]

21 minutes ago, ICA-970326-47 said:

 Blind Justice is just the best combo of all, followed by a few others. Such as Tempo Royal, Swirling Tiger, Vulpine Mask, Defiled Snapdragon and the quick melee attack of polearms. These stances are not strong in damage multiplier, but in the real battle, they just handle well in my opinion.

Taking Blind Justice as an example, here are the reasons why it just handles well.

1.You can move freely while performing combo, allow you to keep move forward to slash through mobs, or move horizontally to control distance and avoid taking direct fire if you are fighting a heavy target. You can simply move round to their back while swinging your nikana.

2.All combos are sharp, quick, fluent and not unnecessarily long. In the battlefield, I can quickly jump in, kill the enemy in a few slashes and immediately dodge or stop combo and start blocking. Leave enemies no chance to focus their firepower on me.

3.The damage multiplier of Blind Justice is obviously lower than other two nikana stances. But all combos sever a good purpose. The Heeding Call combo ragdoll enemies and allow slash proc to take advantage of stealth multiplier. It also has a good range that can damage several enemies at once. The Guiding Light combo provides superb mobility to get close to the enemy, also has forced slash proc and manageable ragdoll. By effectively use all these effects, Blind Justice can handle most situations efficiently.

I'm an Ash main, and i totally agree. Time to do a stance review in my car

Blind Justice: (Holds block) goodbye lol (TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP)

Tranquil Cleave has so many pauses like, HIT PAUSE HIT PAUSE, Decisive Judgement is just waaaay to heavy, while Blind Justice, is really smooth, and gives you a lot of mobility. I made a REALLY edgy video, it showcases Ash and Nikana prime. In the video, I use Blind Justice, and my movements are just really smooth. Using Tempo Royale is the more slower version of Blind Justice. Defiled Snapdragon. Wow. The hold combo shreds nullifier bubbles, and it turns you into a ball of death. It's my restrict you mobility, but in return, you get to have full control over yourself. 

[LSG501]

I'm just waiting to see it clipping through all the walls on narrow corridors etc

[(PSN)watt4hem]

11 minutes ago, (PS4)PS_90210 said:

Using Tempo Royale is the more slower version of Blind Justice.

Excuse me good sir, but my berserker galatine is basically a human size moving blender.

[Gemenai]

I hope that the stance for the 2h katana will be something like Decisive Judgement for nikanas.

[ICA-970326-47]

According to their showcase, the current design of 2h katana, (probably) an odachi, is still a long combo stance.

I mean, the last part of that combo when you charge toward enemy, slice, jump to the air, spin and strike down, it looks nice. But for what purpose? If you want to land the previous attacks, you are already standing in front of the enemy. Other bad examples, from my opinion, can be the new fan weapon stance. It has way too much fancy and useless combo that are repetitive, immobilize you and sever almost no different purpose such as mobility, ragdoll, stun or finisher.

About other good stances I mentioned:

Tenpo Royal is very fast, smooth and has great crowd control thanks to build-in ground slam. War Cry valkyr with a berserk galatine prime is just insanely fun to use as you can quickly move around while also dealing damage and knock down enemies.

Defiled Snapdragon does have a long combo and it's fairly slow, but it also has great mobility and insane big range (15~18m on whip attacks with Primed Reach). You can easily attack entire room with this stance and Primed Reach. The forced slash deal insane damage, and impact proc can help you lock heave enemies when fighting face to face.

Swirling Tiger is quick also, and it's advantages are both mobilities and supreme fast multistrike. You can easily move around while performing combos, and its quick multistrike combo can do 5 hit in a second, making status build very very effective. It has good CC also. Not like the new stance call Mantis something, that one is slow, not fluent and don't even have the badass feeling of using 2 swords together like a master swordsman. For me, it's like using 2 swords separately and performing some unnecessarily fancy strikes. Personally, I just really don't like it.

Vulpine Mask, or precisely, then finisher combo "Hidden Flourish" is very good. This combo is a bit long also, but it has supreme quick attack speed and very fluent design. You can move freely and attack several different enemies by one combo, the forced impact proc stun enemies make then unable to fight back. The last thrust open enemies to the counter-attack finisher, even if you don't perform the finisher, the stealth multiplier combine with high crit slash proc is still insane. The thing we can learn of this combo is that it combines a lot of quality of life advantages together such as speed, mobility, stun and a finisher that allows you to build rapier special for nothing but speed and crit. But not just add some big damage multiplier.

[Shinigami_Greed]

Swirling Tiger is terrible compared to Carving Mantis; there's no comparison.  Swirling flails you around like a drugged up star wars fanboy, while you actually move each sword together for Carving.

And Swooping Falcon, on that same note, is just way more smooth than the S#&$ show that is Crimson Dervish.

Edited January 13, 2018 by Shinigami_Greed

[NekroArts]

1 hour ago, (PS4)PS_90210 said:

Blind Justice: (Holds block) goodbye lol (TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP)

Really? Guiding Light is also good to use; if not for result purposes it's definitely fun to dash-kill through enemies.

Edited January 13, 2018 by NekroArts

[DrBorris]

As a counterpoint, Crushing Ruin's Raging Whirlwind and Cleaving Whirlwind's Broken Bull are both extremely effective combos that make using melee weapons with these stances equipped more interactive IMO.

"But how is it more interactive if you are locked into an animation, dummy?"

Well, because choice. Both of these stances have a short combo to compliment their very long ones. You are not just spamming the best DPS combo in every situation because your best effective DPS changes with every situation. If you are in a small engagement it makes more sense to just use the smaller combo because of the high build up the longer combos have. And when you get into a situation where you can make the most of your long combos, you can dispatch enemies much faster with them.

 

Locking you into a combo in these cases is a way of balance. You can't get Broken Bull's 4x damage by just spamming melee and you can't get the crazy CC of Raging Whirlwind. Just as you say the combos of Blind Justice serve a purpose, so do the long combos. They serve a purpose of tipping the risk vs. reward scale. You risk more by not being able to block and all that jazz, but as a reward you get an extremely effective combo.

 

If every combo of the new big boy Nikana are long then yeah, there's a problem, but I really doubt that happening.

[ICA-970326-47]

@Shinigami_Greed

Well mate, those are just my opinion and my experiences on the battlefield. Things like stances are really subjective. Although their practicality in high-level content is analyzable, in general games, it's just about a feeling. You feel that is good, I feel that is bad, nothing more to argue.

The purpose of my writings is not to argue which stance is best, that depends on people and how they play. My purpose is to point out a well-known opinion that some players like me and most of my friends, don't like the design concept of these new, long combo. We prefer short and agile ones.

Basically, this is a feedback to DE. Not saying that "I think this is the best, others are rubbish." It's just a game, and I'd like to be friendly.

May you have fun :)

[Kuestenjung]

vor 3 Minuten schrieb ICA-970326-47:

Basically, this is a feedback to DE.

And why is this then in general discussion?

Yes, most stances are all about fanciness and are kinda bad in terms of gameplay, nevertheless it all comes down to personla preferences and hopefully DE will make 2 stances avalable right from the start to please more people. 

One can only hope.

[ICA-970326-47]

Emmmm, sorry.....I'm really not familiar with this forum QAQ

[ICA-970326-47]

Should I create a new topic in the feedback-weapon category? But I don't know how to quote.....barely use forums instead of general discussion.

[SnuggleBuckets]

The stance combo system seems like it's fossilized into a limited system that only perhaps allows up to 3 or 4 combos on a stance mod, And if you have 2-3 very quick moves on a mod, like many of the older stances (some only having 2 or 1!), then you get very dull repetition in a lot of your fancy melee comboing.
The newer ones seem like they are trying to work around this limitation in the current system by making sure many of the stances have clear distinct combos using blocking, WASD and the pause/hold to allow as much variety as the limited stance mods can, and then make the combo animations more complex and longer to also try and breed a sense of variety into the melee system as it is built at the moment.

Personally I've enjoyed plenty of the newer stances that allow both WASD and blocking and some pause/hold, with long-ish flashy attacks.
But It would be really great if they could expand the allowed max combos on stances, so that you could have some simple fast and brutal attacks, but many different ones, using all the WASD, block, pause/hold, why not even add crouch into the mix, for a list of 8+  specific combos for your particular melee weapon.

Edited January 13, 2018 by SnuggleBuckets

[Askell91]

And im still sitting here waiting for a melee system rework...It's so boring... Tapping E whole day long...such fun. 

[(XBOX)ruleX Radikal]

vor 7 Stunden schrieb Askell91:

And im still sitting here waiting for a melee system rework...It's so boring... Tapping E whole day long...such fun. 

This.