[Discussion] Melee in Cosmic Break

Nothing much is going on and I'm slightly bored at work, so let's have a little discussion about game mechanics, because why the shit not.

To me, melee mechanics just felt badly designed from the word go. Most old basic melee weapons never warranted specialization as the reward does not justify the effort and risk involved in getting yourself to the required range, in fact, most of them felt like side-weapons, but with STR/TEC stat split, mixed builds were never able to give them enough damage. Melee weapons simply offered no real significant benefit over their ranged counterpart... that is, except three, all of which became the underlying concepts that made nowaday melees gay IMHO, each with its own strength: Squealer AM (fast long ranged travelling attack of moderate damage), Ivis/Adone LG (fast consecutive low damage attacks that stunlocks the victim, adding to massive damage) and Jet Hammer (slow close ranged big AoE weapon that does massive single hit damage, but with limited use).

Before I ramble on with my nonsense, would anyone like to compare how melee combat worked in games like SDGO/Exteel/other gundam games to that of CB? I've no experience with any of them and I can't imagine they are anywhere near as bad as CB.

The only thing that I feel is fucked about about melee weapons is how sensitive they are to lag.

the tracking is the major problem on newer ones.
the biggest issue is that melee has no real punish aside from status. Kiting is bad when the melee tracking just causes them to travel faster than you can move, a lot of things have upwards hitboxes so you can't even jump over them and shoot the min the back. There isn't any intelligence in it.

If all melees had a killica instant parry thing it would be a lot less braindead. That's one of the best things to ever be implemented.

melee vs melee fights are the dumbest shit because you just sit there mashing your shit hoping to outstun them unless you have a trump card.

it's utterly retarded in every way.

The score changes I feel helped a lot because before melees got twice as much score than a ranged bot that did the same damage, but that didn't really solve the overly issue in the design being poor.

Then there's the ones with tracking so bad they're just unplayable, you'll hit someone twice and your third hit will veer off towards a wall.

also RNG tunes were a bad idea regardless of what they do.

Winty wrote:

If all melees had a killica instant parry thing it would be a lot less braindead. That's one of the best things to ever be implemented.

I dont see how this will be implemented though since almost everything can be a possible melee with a cutter. There are still a lot of e-z melee counters like luto's counters and god forbid mellows. The effecticity of this will still be dependent on the server (and game coding) seeing as lag has a direct impact on if you can counter something or not (christ how do I counter underground attacks).

easy to implement, turn blue weapons into purple weapons with a parry main. Cutter and low cost shit doesn't need it.

luto counter has a start so she can't mash it, and a cooldown that you can punish.
mellow counter is a dash so if you don't melee her and try to bait, she's then away from, and she can just mash on it anyway. two completely different things. Killica counter is the best designed.

Diabolical wrote:

The only thing that I feel is fucked about about melee weapons is how sensitive they are to lag.

But that is with any that gives rapid movement over a certain distance: cart steps, stovls, air loops, full boosts, glide/slide boosts, sways.

Surprisingly, Accel Roll doesn't appear laggy to me at all, not sure why this is the case.

Winty wrote:

the tracking is the major problem on newer ones.
the biggest issue is that melee has no real punish aside from status. Kiting is bad when the melee tracking just causes them to travel faster than you can move, a lot of things have upwards hitboxes so you can't even jump over them and shoot the min the back. There isn't any intelligence in it.

If melees are easily kitable, the only way they will be usable is if your catch someone who isn't aware of you approaching, that seems far too limiting. Hence, I want to know how other games actual handle melees and reward its usage. From my general understanding, the reward usually comes in massive damage and ease to hit?

My main gripe with melee is stunlock, this, by natural, is "anti-fun": there's NOTHING challenging or competitive with right clicking harder and have someone just flatout die without being able to do a single thing for a few seconds.

True, with this meta tho, you hardly can even time things. I honestly dont find mellow counters hard, its almost an instant punish if you're using it as backdash and she can still shoot you. I couldn't give any real opinion on kilica counters since I never bother using her as counter melee since a lot of melee has higher base damage and HP to just straight up tank her. I think chain guards should be banned tho, those things are straight dumb.

Frankly, both chain guard and CV need to have a lot more downside to them, both of which currently encourage mindless diving with no real risks involved. Chain Guard could do with a slowed mobility (frankly, any powerful shield should limit mobility in some way, such as k-shield and no flight), whereas CV need something like constant HP drain to offset stun immunity, and as the game become more and more stun heavy (with TGH nigh useless at this point in time as stun prevention), CV becomes more and more potent and in more need of some nerfing.

You can't melee if you have a shitty computer is my opinion. The horrible frame skip when your face close to the rainbow color of bullets always prevents you from completing a combo.

I think CV is fine as it is. Unless they have insanely high tgh, things like Ivis become glass cannons with them because there is no mercy stun and there is no stun invul to save them from damage, meaning they take shittons of damage from alphas.

Massive would be exagerating a bit IMHO, a lot of the shots will often be negated by the fatass of whoever she's hitting, and then there's your in-melee damage reduction. To have only one reliable counter doesn't feel worth what is almost a guaranteed kill for Ivis.

the anti-fun part is that in CB melee tends to NOT END. in a game like GunZ melee strings end in a knockdown and the character hit has an opportunity to roll away on wakeup and then dash away.
Melee strings in CB often end in small knockbacks that the melee can just dash and follow up on without the person being hit having a chance to get away unless they have a instant invuln subweapon or something.
There's a "anti-stunlock" mechanic but these small, built-in gaps are there to work around it and even so it takes far too long for the system to kick in anyway. It's dumb.
Cb doesn't have any sort of "knockdown" where you have a chance to get away with a smart guess or whatever. It's just you get hit, then you get hit until you die.

Melee should be kiteable land to land because everyone should have the same movement speed options. older melees used high tier boost run to avoid this, but now there are things that can tune 3x hglad and dump the rest into HP/TGH and still manage to catch things just from their melee travel and tracking. Old melees put so much into mobility that they often didn't even have max STR, but the capa hugeness these days means modern ones get 500hp, 40str, weapon tunes, and mobility. Or they skip mobility and do 3x hglad because it doesn't matter if you are slow since your melee travel moves you faster than red tier boostrun.

If you run directly towards something shooting you, you should catch it since forward run should be faster than backpedaling, but you should take a lot of damage in the process. Also melee have cheaper tuning paths than lnd gunners due to high run beta lowering TEC and not STR.
This is why the "shield" mains are stupid. If they were JUST CV to avoid stun and they still took damage, it wouldn't bother me so much, but basically saying "run at them while holding this and don't take damage while not getting stunned" is stupid.

Super armor is another problem, as it prevents an ally from "saving" you by stunning the melee that is comboing you. This is a huge part of games like gunz where pulling out your melee and doing a combo into a knockdown into another combo(generally 2 combos are enough to kill) is a pretty big window for someone to shoot you in the back and kill you, or smack you with their own melee. CB doesn't care because of HP powercreep and melee superarmor. (I blame HP power creep for a LOT of the current problems in the game, actually, but that's a completely different matter altogether)

And not to forget debuffs caused by melee attacks. The new melee tracking and damage are already insane as it is. But adding debuffs make them more ridiculous. Then again, other units (arts, sups, airs) can now also cause debuffs for defensive capabilities which makes gameplay become utter ridiculous.

You mean those that hardly work because melee can have clearance or fast recovery.
Not to mention all the laggy ones just laugh at it. Tacos lag through melt traps and sometimes just breeze through binds. I find EV useful for disabling a lot of things well but can be laughed at by clearance tuned ones. The more annoying ones would be eves and istinas but those are airs so they're meant to counter them (they're still awfully dumb tho)

Clearance tunes and fast recovery is another matter. They cost capa and reduce other cart selection in the process. However, melee debuffs like Eve's powerless, Eris' disable weapons, etc are already part of their attack feature that they really don't have to work for it and still maximize on other things. Though I have noticed an increase in melee features where they can literally, pass through melt traps nowadays.

Not a fan of free status effect on already ridiculously potent attacks. When other games do it, it adds an extra layer of complexity to the game, when CS adds it, it just makes the victim's life fucking miserable (read: anti-fun).

CS focuses solely on making the user's experience as fun as possible whilst making no consideration whatsoever on how it affects others, how it affects the gameplay and balance of the game as a whole.

Luckily, free status effect on melee isn't all that prevelent just yet, but hey, who needs that when they already freestun you to death most of the time? Eris has the tendency to bounce you at the end of the combo, but obviously, what use is freedom when you cannot shoot?

Free debuff on melee is less of the problem, most last really short, like 1s or less if opponent has FR. The only exception is probably eve's powerless that mainly help her solo other melee.

What are the bots that have debuff melee again?
- jace with shock: only help against other melee
- sunny and lax ex with powerless beta: like above
May be in some case they will prevent opponents from jetting away.

Melee is autoaim tracking based and not camera direction based. That was a really stupid idea.

most of the real disables are tacked onto secondary abilities with cooldowns separate from melee spam. Jace is really the only one who gets it for free on his attacks, though Vanessa has slow turn, but I think that's only when she has a buff active? not sure. still gay.

List of other gays:
- Resha's lexratio is a 5~ second shock with a large knockback attached to it, extremely disruptive but mainly a defensive skill due to the knockback making it hard to do followup damage. A better design.
- Land Eve has large AoE powerless which makes almost all melee unable to fight her if she hits with it, it's not actually a melee but an extremely short range projectile.(for school, I think original just AoEs instantly, not sure)
- Sunny's tornado has a pull to powerless beta, as listed
- EX laz has powerless beta on...things. mounted leaves a trail of it and mounted melee is beyond braindead. IDK about meld melee, it has it I just don't know the details of the cooldown or ability that does it. Hardly even see these.
- Corona gets melt on her dash attack weapon once she has enough heat levels

Vanessa works the same way like alcy i think, when you "hack" opponents that were "analysed" you get the type related buff while they get slow turn.

JinNJuice wrote:

Melee is autoaim tracking based and not camera direction based. That was a really stupid idea.

as much as I love melee and all
THIS is one of the biggest issues with melee
losing tracking would change the way melee works, in some cases however
such as eris' melee, the hitbox is so big that little to no effort is needed even without tracking

As Winty mentioned, some melee now have large hitbox attacks that all they need to do is spam right click even if the target gets thrown in the air which I find really annoying. (ex. Sunny)

Winty wrote:

- EX laz has powerless beta on...things. mounted leaves a trail of it and mounted melee is beyond braindead. IDK about meld melee, it has it I just don't know the details of the cooldown or ability that does it. Hardly even see these.

You read more info about ExLaz on my discussion thread owob

I don't see how Laz gallop is any more brain dead than, say, any of the heavy damage one-click-wonders like gigan bulk/sledge/machintlet (who has somehow fallen out of favour with CBEN and barely get used?).

And I'm sure auto-tracking was there to give more appeal to melee back when they are not as potent as they are today, I bet it'd be rather easy to screw up combos and even miss initial hit with those weapons without auto-tracking. Some of ye olde day mechanics are just unnecessary for nowaday melees, endless stunlock being the prime one IMHO. A brief melee stun immunity at the end of a combo should IMHO fix a lot of the problems, but then there's Slow so it's hard to say. Stun invulnerability for melees is another thing that really needs to go, that would actually present melees with some real risks, and I'm sure everyone can agree on the fact that both chain guard and CV would need some reworkings too. I'm not as fazed about all the fucking shields melees have these days and the large freestun projectile they all seem to have, these feel on-par to all the non-sensical power-creep upgrades all other types have gotten in dealing against their weaknesses: Full Boost/Homing/Long Range for Air and Anti-Melee Gimmicks/Shielding/Bullet-blocking for Arts (and Support and Land gunner get nothing!).

But enough about retarded melees, let's give some credit to "good" melees that are designed to be fun to play through broad range of interesting mechanics and gimmicks, require decent amount of skill and finesse to play with success and isn't outright gay and "anti-fun": Trize! Now why can't we have more of this stuff rather than endless hold-w-right-click-harder bullshit?

Justicia is best melee.