Melee: Present and Future goals!

[Xymos]

5 minutes ago, motorfirebox said:

Hey, while you're at it: NORMALIZE THE SPEED STAT ACROSS ALL WEAPON TYPES. As it stands, the melee speed stat only tells you how quickly the weapon executes combo animations. Because combo animations vary wildly across weapons and stances, the speed stat really only lets you compare weapons of the same type (dual daggers, nikana, etc.). It doesn't allow you to compare a nikana with sword, because nikanas and swords use different combos and therefore have different animations.

In order to normalize this and allow comparison across weapon types, what we need first is a numerical indication of a stance's animation speed—an average, I suppose, of the number of individual strikes in each of the stance's combos. The weapon's speed stat would then be applied to the stance's speed, and the resulting value would be displayed in the stat column.

I agree with this,also, all combos and each attack should have almost the same "delay" and speed, instead of varying delay all across the combo which makes melee inconsistent and not fun to use.

[Renzo]

This has probably been mentioned before (I haven't read the whole thread) but I will mention this anyway. I've been playing a bit with melee lately and I have noticed that your melee swings can actually be blocked by other enemies. If there are two enemies so that one is behind the other and you swing at the enemies, the one that is behind the other enemy does not get hit for whatever reason.

By all means, if my great sword cleaves enemy in half and there is an enemy behind the splitted personality, that enemy should definitely get hit too.

Melee weapons should have similar punch through as ignis has for example. It goes through enemies, but not through walls.

[MasterControl]

RIP my post, 2018 - 2018 died in the great merge. Will attempt to rebuild it from what I had.

 

Glad to see channeling dying. It didn't really fit with the rest of the game, and charge attacks are far more stylish. That said, I am a little concerned about the whole combo counter ordeal. I understand that you want to make charge attacks and charge builds more effective, but please, not at the expense of current builds. The crit-combo build is interesting and fun with a reward for investing your time into maintaining your combo counter. If you want to make a severe change to melee like this, perhaps consider it as a mod. Just as we'd build a crit build around Blood Rush and a status build around Condition Overload, we could base a charge build on a new mod that makes charge attacks consume all combo counter when you charge. Give us more options, not less, and don't ruin other builds for the sake of making another one viable.

You should also look at charge attacks themselves as well. I, for example, don't use them because it's pretty easily possible for an enemy to walk away or knock your head in, given the charge time and the lack of bonus range. They feel slow and unrewarding, and even if you do land them, the target is sent flying, meaning you can't continue your combo. Perhaps start by increasing the range and speed of charge attacks. Range because, if I'm going to attack slowly, I should hit more things at once to compensate, and attack speed so I'm not sitting there like a gibbon getting shot at more than I reasonably need to. Not asking to be able to spam charges like a beserker built Prisma Obex, just a little faster than they are now.

And on that note - don't be afraid of melee damage being higher than that of conventional weaponry. You are close, in enemies' faces, with no cover beyond what your powers and blocking can provide. It's a tradeoff - high risk, high reward. The only exception are melee frames, like Valkyr, who sacrifice the cc and area damage of more specialized frames in favor of the sheer survivability needed to use melee, and if the overall effectiveness of melee lessens, tanks would likely see less playtime as a result.

Oh, and thanks for lessening the meme strike meta, without completely butchering it. It was getting a little annoying, but it has it's uses.

 

[(PSN)Onder6099]

On 2018-05-11 at 9:09 PM, [DE]Rebecca said:

Combo Counter minimum hits per tier adjusted significantly so higher tiers can be reached more quickly and easily. Combo Counter damage multiplier may apply to heavy attack only and all points are spent on attack.

Will not that force the players to choose quickest Melees and Stances with Combos granted multiple hits to use Heavy attacks ASAP?

[Zilotz]

Sadly one part was implemented nerfing melee much by making us unable to hit thru dead enemies(not only walls)...

I'm strongly against the nerf but sadly even more nerfs coming soon...

So when it all gets implemented melee would be weakest class in the game instead of strongest one(before the nerfs mentioned here).

[DreadWarlock]

I've seen some people complaining about Combo meter being essential for scalability, but frankly on my experience this couldn't be further from truth.

Reason being, it's very hard to keep your combo meter even with mods like Body count. Your combo meter only ever increases in high levels, and even then the enemy spawn rate sometimes gets broken and you lose all your progress(Naramon alliviates that somewhat but people still used melee even back when Naramon didn't have this, so it's no excuse)

You can only reliably keep combo meters to about 3-3.5x, more than that and chances are you'll never see anything above because it requires too many hits to be possible.

Of course Using Max range spin to win builds, made it easier to hit these levels, but then only these builds ever reached them.

I know what some of you are going to say, "oh but i've seen may people reaching a 5x multiplier". Which is true I've also seen that, and done that, but that was by the use of Naramon to become perma invisible, when you didn't have to worry about being one shot so you could spam E recklessly. Try and put your own survivabily in the process and see if it's that easy to reach such levels(No. Melee shouldn't only be viable with Invisibility or invulnerability, this is a mistake).

Anyway with enough power you can get absurd levels of scaling even with static numbers from melee. Melee stance multipliers, slash procs and crit procs do wonders. I've even tested builds that don't even rely on the combo counter before(Niche channeling charged attack builds) and they still easily took me above level 100 because of forced Slash procs and sheer damage on charged attacks + Other multipliers.

But what people here are severly underestimating is the new heavy attack system. Yes, Combo Counter is supposed to ramp up Heavy Attacks damage, and be consumed afterwards, but it was also implied that combo counter would increase much faster.

Like I said, I've tested similar builds before and using a single, high powered attack already took me beyond level 100 enemies, even without huge levels of combo meter. And they are saying that you'll have a Heavy attack that can scale and that this scaling happens much faster. I actually think that depening on the new melee weapon's pass, this can easily be one of the most broken things to happen. One could potentially one shot a level 1000 Bombard with a single crit hit(ignoring scaling armor altogether), with the right build. And depending on, if heavy attacks use charged attacks animations, I could see some unexpected weapons becoming really powerful on such setups, such as Machete weapons which has a multi-staged charged attack that hits enemies twice in close range, and move forward while hitting even more enemies at a bigger range, you could clear an entire corridor with this.

Anyways, whether this system succeds or not it will depend on numbers. It was mentioned that Melee mods will also recieve some tweaks to their numbers in order to make this system work, and weapons will be rebalanced in order to make normal combos work even without the combo meter scaling. But there's this one thing you guys are forgetting, acolyte mods add bonus crit chance or status chance depending on combo meter multipliers. I don't remember them mentioning anywhere that these bonuses won't affect normal melee. Remember while they may make use of the combo meter these mods are not an actual part of the combo metter system. I belive they may nerf these mods while increasing base crit chance, status chance on all weapons and on the main crit mods, which would result in pretty much the same numbers. I cannot say anything aobut this, but it is indeed too soon to draw conclusions. I'm being optmistic but like I said it all depend on numbers, it can still fail and end up being inferior. But I'm not one to say that it WILL happen.

[DreadWarlock]

5 hours ago, Mastercontrol98 said:

RIP my post, 2018 - 2018 died in the great merge. Will attempt to rebuild it from what I had.

 

Glad to see channeling dying. It didn't really fit with the rest of the game, and charge attacks are far more stylish. That said, I am a little concerned about the whole combo counter ordeal. I understand that you want to make charge attacks and charge builds more effective, but please, not at the expense of current builds. The crit-combo build is interesting and fun with a reward for investing your time into maintaining your combo counter. If you want to make a severe change to melee like this, perhaps consider it as a mod. Just as we'd build a crit build around Blood Rush and a status build around Condition Overload, we could base a charge build on a new mod that makes charge attacks consume all combo counter when you charge. Give us more options, not less, and don't ruin other builds for the sake of making another one viable.

You should also look at charge attacks themselves as well. I, for example, don't use them because it's pretty easily possible for an enemy to walk away or knock your head in, given the charge time and the lack of bonus range. They feel slow and unrewarding, and even if you do land them, the target is sent flying, meaning you can't continue your combo. Perhaps start by increasing the range and speed of charge attacks. Range because, if I'm going to attack slowly, I should hit more things at once to compensate, and attack speed so I'm not sitting there like a gibbon getting shot at more than I reasonably need to. Not asking to be able to spam charges like a beserker built Prisma Obex, just a little faster than they are now.

And on that note - don't be afraid of melee damage being higher than that of conventional weaponry. You are close, in enemies' faces, with no cover beyond what your powers and blocking can provide. It's a tradeoff - high risk, high reward. The only exception are melee frames, like Valkyr, who sacrifice the cc and area damage of more specialized frames in favor of the sheer survivability needed to use melee, and if the overall effectiveness of melee lessens, tanks would likely see less playtime as a result.

Oh, and thanks for lessening the meme strike meta, without completely butchering it. It was getting a little annoying, but it has it's uses.

 

According to what I've seen in some videos while Heavy attacks may be slower than normal combos, but they didn't seen to have the charge mechanic which is what made some of those hits miss. It looked like you just pressed a button and the heavy attack was executed.

Personally i'm one of the few people happy that we won't have to depend on the combo counter for normal combos anymore. Combos could get hard to keep up if one didn't use Naramon because enemies stop spawning at times, which made it almost impossible to keep the combo meter, and thus your melee attacks died there until you've risen them again. Needless to say this would get progressively harder the more you stay on a mission. Your attacks would eventually only kill enemies at a 5x meter, and getting that thing back to 5x takes quite some time. Although it's not that bad when enemies stop dying.(still, annoying as hell)

[MasterControl]

2 hours ago, DreadWarlock said:

According to what I've seen in some videos while Heavy attacks may be slower than normal combos, but they didn't seen to have the charge mechanic which is what made some of those hits miss. It looked like you just pressed a button and the heavy attack was executed.

Personally i'm one of the few people happy that we won't have to depend on the combo counter for normal combos anymore. Combos could get hard to keep up if one didn't use Naramon because enemies stop spawning at times, which made it almost impossible to keep the combo meter, and thus your melee attacks died there until you've risen them again. Needless to say this would get progressively harder the more you stay on a mission. Your attacks would eventually only kill enemies at a 5x meter, and getting that thing back to 5x takes quite some time. Although it's not that bad when enemies stop dying.(still, annoying as hell)

To be a tad more clear (muhbad) I don't mind losing the combo counter damage multiplier, ASSUMING melee base damage across the board is buffed accordingly - I'm just worried that we might be losing the benefits of Blood Rush on light attacks.

[DreadWarlock]

4 minutes ago, Mastercontrol98 said:

To be a tad more clear (muhbad) I don't mind losing the combo counter damage multiplier, ASSUMING melee base damage across the board is buffed accordingly - I'm just worried that we might be losing the benefits of Blood Rush on light attacks.

Yep this one is foggy, i've no Idea on what is going to happen to it. I don't mind losing Bloody Rush that much since Condition Overload is a thing, but Weeping Wounds would be a tragic loss since it worked on most weapons regardless of focus on crit or status.

[GPrime96]

4 minutes ago, DreadWarlock said:

Yep this one is foggy, i've no Idea on what is going to happen to it. I don't mind losing Bloody Rush that much since Condition Overload is a thing, but Weeping Wounds would be a tragic loss since it worked on most weapons regardless of focus on crit or status.

Weeping Wounds is a good choice to use for Condition Overload since Weeping wounds scales the Status chance and you can rely more on 90% Elementals or a couple of 60/60 status mods because of the increasing Status chance. So loosing Weeping wounds would mean complete reliance on 60/60s if you are using a Condition Overload status build like building a CO Lesion.

[Tzolkat]

I'm honestly not sure what to make of these changes on paper. As with anything complex like this, I would have to playtest it to form anything resembling meaningful feedback.

As for spinning into a wall to gain massive damage, I didn't even know that was possible, and so its removal is of no consequence to me.

[(XBOX)Evilpricetag]

On ‎2018‎-‎05‎-‎11 at 12:09 PM, [DE]Rebecca said:

 

• Combo Counter minimum hits per tier adjusted significantly so higher tiers can be reached more quickly and easily. Combo Counter damage multiplier may apply to heavy attack only and all points are spent on attack.
• Base damage increased significantly to compensate for loss of channeling and combo counter multiplier on normal attacks

 

I can't seem t remove the videos, they aren't relevant to my discussion.

 

As for combo multipliers. I've got 3 main issue, I'll summarize it into 2.

1. Ash Clones & Mirage Mirror Images.

Mirror Images are reduced to base weapon as it stands, no mods, maybe some buff with power strength, but they currently each have their own combo multiplier in order to boost damage.

Clones for the most part are not effected by most melee mod, but the combo counter & blood rush do seem to be effected.

2. Naramon Focus Tree

Power spike directly is designed to help with long term missions to prolong the combo counter to the users benefit, combo duration aids in this even further.

 

I'm just curious how you intend to maintain these abilities without hindering them (nerfing). Perhaps Naramon could add a branch to the tree to make the combo counter act as it does now.

 

While I'm at it. Hydroid has an amazing kit, but his passive tentical slam is relatively worthless, I'm unsure if it benefits from Pilfering Swarm, but most enemies die before that combo goes off or it just make it that much more difficult to melee them after a slam. I propose it spawn within 10m on an enemy, the further away the better.

[(XBOX)GrandSageDragon]

as if the zenistar and plague kripath wernt overpowered already without the combo now they will be so overpowered its not funny with the zenistar disk getting the damage buff as well it will surpass every melee except the kripath but then again most of mine are so powerfull I don't need any kind of buff at all I'm still instakilling level 225's with my zenistar's disk

[MasterControl]

1 hour ago, LonghornRed said:

Whaddya mean Channeling doesn't fit?!

It's a tacked on afterthought that they added when, ironically, they removed charge attacks in order to replace them. Why use loads of energy for bonus damage when condition overload and crit builds do that too, without costing energy? I mean I guess there's life strike and exodia brave but those can be used without a dedicated channeling build.

[[DE]Rebecca]

On 2018-05-11 at 3:09 PM, [DE]Rebecca said:

Melee attacks (including spin attacks) will no longer sweep through walls or objects.

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

[shut]

20 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

This is super reassuring, but it doesn't really do anything about enemies being protected by an explosive barrel or a bit of railing (or other small hunks of geometry here and there).

I'm still against the line-of-sight requirement in the first place, but if it must stay in the game, is there any chance that melee weapons could get an innate ~1.5m punchthrough so that minor geometry issues are less painful for the player?

[OniDax]

4 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

Beautiful change. Looking forward to that! 😄 Gonna feel real good slicing through enemies.

[Sannidor]

9 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

Nullifiers still require LOS to damage their bubbles with melee.

And it's them who need to see us, if they hide behind the obstacle it's even harder to start shrinking nul field.

This should be fixed asap.

[shut]

I still feel very against the LoS requirement.

 

I understand not wanting people to cheese missions by slidespamming behind a corner. But the problem with melee weapons isn't that this tactic is possible, it's that MaimingStrike+BloodRush makes this tactic borderline meta. Corner spamming (and, for that matter, slidespam itself) was NEVER an issue in the game before MS+BS was released.

I'm running a pure-Status melee build, which was not overpowered at all. Yet it got hit by the LoS change, and my melee weapon (which produces 100% of my damage output) is now super unreliable and kills things half as fast. Meanwhile, MS+BS can still get you >700% crit chance on a non-crit melee weapon.

 

This is not how you balance things. MaimingStrike+BloodRush (i.e. their multiplicative interaction) is STILL the most overpowered thing about melee weapons, sticking a mile over nearly every other build choice. It makes slidespam meta, and that happened to synergize very strongly with lazy corner spamming (which is why corner spamming became an issue in the first place). Blanket-nerfing melees as a whole did not solve this issue.

[AuroraSonicBoom]

17 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

Neat. Some abilities allow you to pull enemies into a ball, and the LoS check made it hard to use melee attacks on clumped up enemies. As long as you keep the inanimate object LoS check, enemy punch through should not work against the effectiveness of the previous nerf.

[Chroia]

21 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

This is wonderful.
Doesn't affect attacks with large sweeps getting canceled due to hitting corners before hitting the enemies, but certainly a step in the right direction.

On that note: Does this change, by any chance, affect LoS checks for abilities?

[Cryssoberyl]

20 minutes ago, [DE]Rebecca said:

PLEASE NOTE!

Right now on Public, 'objects' includes 'enemies'. We have changes cooking on the Dev build that removes enemies from the 'objects' rule, meaning that melee attacks will freely pass through enemies in range (i.e an enemy cannot block another enemy from being hit).

This will do nothing about the many problems created by level geometry, i.e. bits of uneven floors, walls, and other protrusions getting in the way of melee attacks.

As I understand it, the entire reason melee was given geometry exemption in the first place was to avoid the many clunky issues it would cause. If that's the case, this is another example of a studio stubbornly going back on lessons it had already learned in the past. Either way, it remains a terrible decision that makes the melee system vastly more inconvenient and punishes players using non-meta setups as much, if not more, as it does the people abusing Maiming Atterax nonsense. You should've nerfed those and left melee geometry alone.

[Jukantos]

I spent about two dozen hours crafting an Exodia Triumph set for my Zaw because i actually like Channeling and i saw a big opportunity in the Zenurik Channeling node. I very much enjoy that build as a massive damage multiplier to this day.

What will happen to my Exodia Triumph with this? What will happen to my Primed Reach? To my range Rivens that i partially spent thousands of platinum on? Am i just the unlucky one landing under the bus with this?

Also i cannot help but notice how the jumping charge attacks are specifically shown off on the plains because they fit the large open worlds a LOT better than the tighter tileset corridors which still make up ~98% of the game's content. That just feels... wrong. Might just be my deep antipathy to the plains shining through though. But i think the rest of my concerns are very valid.

It's getting annoying to constantly see the powerfull stuff i worked so hard to obtain get removed, "reworked" or nerfed, to the point where my mental image of power fantasy is actually getting sizeable enough dents for me to currently just... not play Warframe. After 5 years and 4500 hours i disagree with the recent developments in power fantasy cuts so much that i've gone and tried Destiny 2 (and, surprise surprise i hated it for the harsh limits in its power fantasy gameplay)

 

[(XBOX)Keats Caliba]

I'm looking forward to "spin to win" dead and buried. Looks ridiculous in game, and it doesn't make sense for a blade to be clipping through 10 meters of wall..

To get around small geometry issues maybe just have a 1 meter punch through applied to all melee weapons (except when a weapon is thrown)?  Just to help with small irritating snags that would add a little forgiveness to fighting hordes of enemies.  

[RiskOfLife]

Make blocking give you energy!