#21

I’m pretty sure she is SUPPOSED to be the fairly rare assasin type, the one that harasses you even after leaving (the 8 sec venom) and having you for later because of how vulnerable you become

#22

100% spot on. The meta is always changing around Mellka, and for reasons unknown she’s been nerfed twice. She’s never been top-tier, top half at best, she was the flavour of the month early in Battleborn’s life but that’s because she was hard to handle. Now with so many characters having hard CC and DPS increases she’s been left behind, while her venom has a decreased duration and overall decreased damage for the duration. It’s not until venom bullets than venom is a killer anymore, the most integral part of her kit is now sub-par at best. She’s never had the burst potential of the other assassins, save for maybe Whiskey, she’s more of a skirmisher and she’s far from “easy” to use. But unless you’re exceptional, like you, she’s now at the bottom of the meta tier list. She deserves the attention that many other BB have received, you mentioned Caldy for example, he’s had wound added to his melee and his TMP damage has been increased. His melee isn’t even a proper combo yet it deals more damage than Mellka’s after venom, that’s not right. The answer isn’t to nerf Caldy, he’s in a great place right now, it’s to bring Mellka up to his standard at least and make her a contender for a spot on a team once more.

The problem with the final hit of her combo (sixth I believe) aside from the low damage is the knock-up. It can actually help an enemy escape as it also pushes them back and breaks the melee string, so even if the damage were adequate there’s still an unnecessary effect at the end of the combo that further lowers DPS by knocking enemies out of melee range which is not what you want if you’re circle-strafing an enemy with melee.

3 Likes
#23

Well I know very little about melka but if we are trying to make it more viable for her melee what if we put a slow on her melee hits for an envenomated target?

1 Like
#24

Her internal name in game files is MutantFist, so her melee is essential by design.

1 Like
#25

The melees of both Caldarius and Mellka dealing less damage than their gun primary makes zero sense. The fact that Mellka has an ever worse melee makes it more stupid.

With Caldarius I already have to try really hard to get any benefit from the melee. The only purposes are:
a) doing slightly more dps to minion waves via hitting multiple minions at once - which is only viable if no one is around the hammer you, otherwise you are way more effective zipping around and tmping the shepherd
b) applying wound to someone miko is hugging, and even then I usually don’t bother because it doesn’t last long enough to be worth risking my skin.

I will very, very rarely melee a target in a one-on-one. If I get within melee range, I will still unload my tmp point-blank because it does more damage. Make sense? No.

The melees of both should be around 120% of their primaries (with their primaries probably being slightly weaker than presently, but not too much). Buffing mellka’s melee will not make mellka more effective or somehow push her into OPness. What it will do is provide her another avenue to be equally effective. Same with caldarius.

ATM: mellka gun focussed = balanced. mellka melee focus = lol underpowered
With melee buff: both playstyles balanced
Buffing her melee won’t make her OP as a character, because it does not enhance the only thing that presently makes her viable.

I remember loving Caldarius in the CTT because the melee felt more powerful than the gun (no hard facts to back this up), so you were always trying to find ways to get in and out. Now it’s just skirt-around-all-day-at-midrange.

4 Likes
#26

The points are all valid but lets consider what the Devs were thinking and how they drew out the balance.

Imagine Thorn vs Mellka.
They are both looking from a distance at each other.
At this point Thorn probably has the advantage. Probably.
As they get closer both have major potential.
Still balanced at this point.
Once they are within attack range of each other things get hot.
I’m wondering if this is the point where the balance came into play?

1 Like
#27

Caldys badassery keeps him alive thank you

1 Like
#28

If that was true, then El Dragõn would be invincible

#29

No one can handle the blade of caldarius, no one.
Caldarius blade is a symphony of suffering, causing all those who meet the end of it to see the end of their lives before them. The blade reaps the blood and tears of whoever it touches, destroying whatever was left of the miserable being who thought they could withstand it.

El dragon may be a champ in the ring, but caldarius… He’s the champion of hell

1 Like
#30

Well, if Melka’s melee talent is sucha big deal to use, why won’t it have some useful bonus like venom AoE, small stacking bonus for, say speed, or something?

#31

…Shane’s just smiling at that.

1 Like
#32

I doubt this is how they balance heroes. It could only work if the only PVP mode we had was 1 on 1 battles.

#33

We’ll never know, because…Reasons

#34

Weird I dunno mang.

Her base damage is 41 and everything in this game scales 5/1 usually in damage, so it scales to 91 which is 3 higher than that guy says. The vemon increase is also 17%, so tack that on at level ten and she hits for 106.47 an attack.

Then he says what she attacks at 2.14, so we take that and times it by 106.47. We get 227.85 dps at level 10. When they are envenomed. It’s 182 dps when they are not.

If you were to throw in says Vow of Vengenace because why the hell not her base would be 107.38 or 229.79 dps un-venomed. When they are envenomed the damages is 125.63 an attack or 268.84 dps. These are numbers I’ve seen playing level ten melka and melee’ing with her.

Now if you were to throw in the 20% attack speed her attacks a second would be 2.57. So her un-venomed dps would be 233.87. (in practice it’d be a tad lower until you hit for 2 seconds because you’d gain and attack)

I’m sure sometime today you will be a level 10 melka and you can back checkShe scales just fine into clawing it out if you wanted.

#35

What would be your estimation of her level 10 primary damage with Refined Canisters, which obviously adds the venom DOT to every bullet hit (and an immediate tick of venom?) And shouldn’t melee be most useful early game when many characters are still yet to unlock their best CC, ults like Wrath of the Wild and Blink Storm aren’t in play, and legendary gear isn’t online?

Having it scale well at level 10 (when I’m positive Venom Bullets still outputs more damage) doesn’t seem answer the question of why she should melee at all…

Btw, I haven’t been a level 10 Mellka in a long time, unfortunately. Every game I’ve played with her this week has ended in early surrender. I haven’t even gotten to unlock venom bullets lately (I’m sure the minion xp bug didn’t help.)

#36

Am totally going to open up a private match and test this as best I can, though. I should be well asleep, but I’m suffering from a nasty fever :disappointed:

Edit: data acquired. Analysis soon

4 Likes
#37

I love how much you actually care about Mellka’s character. You continuously advocate for her and that’s wonderful. I’ve always thought that her melee was rather pointless (I thought they meant press the quick melee button for the longest). Her arm is some weird eldrid mutation or something so they should allow it to transform into something more mid ranged I feel. There are a couple of characters that feel “almost done” but they kind of phoned it in at the last second. I think everything in her kit needs to have purpose and her helix choices should allow diversity without it being a detriment to her gameplay.

3 Likes
#38

Her and Deande with through too may changes too close to release. To repurpose anyone this far in though very easily can produce backlash though, so I understand.
@EdenSophia
If Mellka was the same as in that one video, would you still love her as much? Or more somehow? All ik is that refined canisters being opposite air stall would be sad

#39

Out of curiosity I tried out an attack damage build last night like you mentioned @EdenSophia recommended… it was unbelievable.

I dealt the most damage on our team: 130,000 (which was 10,000 more than our Atticus). I actually had their Toby and Ghalt running from me when they saw me… it felt good to be feared. :innocent:
I went 13-3.

I still used a legendary health regen item with attack damage as the secondary stat to get some extra regen.
I also used a legendary max health + attack damage item
And lastly I used a flawed rare attack damage item that gave added attack damage for 5 second after taking health damage (which is all the time for any Eldrid) and it gave a negative shield value of some sort, which doesn’t bother Melka one bit.

Highly recommend.
Very kills. Much Melka.

2 Likes
#40

@hexhammer

Okay. Here’s the numbers. I’m going to spell this out in detail because I’m a word girl, not a numbers girl, and I want people to correct my reasoning where they can. :stuck_out_tongue:

At level 10, Mellka’s primary does 32 damage per shot. The Battleborn Bible is pretty close speed-wise: I measured one shot every .107 seconds.

I don’t know how to do the fine math here. This is my humanities degree attempt…

In one second, she does 9.3 shots. 9.3 * 32 = 298 DPS (rounded up.)

This is not including venom ticks. Venom ticks for 24 damage every half-second during these shots. It does not apply on every shot (as I misleadingly wrote above), obviously, because that would be insane, haha.

However, if we do add the venom damage to her ranged damage at level 10 (and we should), we get:

298 DPS primary
+48 DPS venom

= 346 DPS ranged damage at level 10, no modifiers.

Now let’s do melee.

Unvenomed, a melee hit at level 10 is 55 damage. However, the final hit of her melee combo, the elbow that sends them flying, does 139 damage.

The time delays between strikes are as follows (in milliseconds)

(1) 0000ms - 55 damage
(2) 0435ms- 55 damage
(3) 0382ms - 55 damage
(4) 0401ms - 55 damage
(5) 0467ms - 55 damage
(6) 0264ms - 55 damage
(7) 0711 ms - 139 damage

Full combo chain time: 2660 ms (2.66 seconds)
Total damage: 469 damage
Total DPS: 176 DPS

Melee is 59% of primary damage (Not counting Refined Canisters venom)
Melee is 50.7% of primary damage (Counting Refined Canisters venom)

So at level 10, base melee is half the damage of primary, without the venom damage increase.

Now let’s add venom:

Every 55 damage hit increases to 64 damage a hit (a 16.3% increase)
The 139 damage final hit increases to 161 (a 15% increase - I might go back and check this)

545 damage dealt over 2.66 seconds
204 DPS.

Venomed melee is 68% of primary damage (not counting Refined Canisters as primary damage, because target is already venomed.)

So in summary:

At level 10, Mellka’s primary damage: 298 DPS + 48 DPS applied
Her unvenomed melee damage: 176 DPS
Her venomed melee damage: 204 DPS

No gear modifiers, no helix speed modifiers.

So our base figures for unvenomed are fairly similar - you suggested 182 DPS for unvenomed, I measured 176 DPS.
Your estimation for venomed damage was higher than mine - you suggested 227.85 DPS, I measured 204 DPS.
My estimation for her primary damage (298 + 48 DPS) seems to suggest that melee is overshadowed in every case, as per my initial post. But my means of measuring her primary DPS might be mathematically totally flawed. I am not smart with the math.

I can say categorically that ranged DPS felt substantially better than venomed melee, and far superior to unvenomed melee. But that’s subjective.

Perhaps things scale differently when you apply a Vow of Vengeance. I don’t know. I’d be running a Symbiotic Gauntlet to boost both her ranged and melee anyway. :wink:

@Vicks_Toire @khimerakiller would you like to check my math for me? :smile:

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