#41

My thoughts:

Melka meele is intended to be used right after a reload (envenomed target) right after her last hit when target gets pushed use claw lunge if you have the instante reload you can follow and finish your target.

Her nerf comes from her high hability to survive almost any situation, shooting from afar while getting closer untill range of spike and fly away, with her low cd and movility it made melka rly hard to pin and kill. Reason to both nerf.

Melka real power was keep a target’s shield off for 8s (tick)+5 initial recharge, her meele window was better but she wasnt being played as intended.

My suggest would be:

With every succesfull meele hit increase the Venom tick 1 sec and increase her meele dmg, with low hp and low range her meele should be buffed with this two risk conditions in mind.

Melka nowsays is a high risk mid reward character, you cant use 1 skill to attack and if you did it totally should worth your movility lose. Because lets be honest spike and lunge are all the movility she has, her quick meele increased her slow speed.
Damn even deande can atleast dragón kick to the sky and desorientate players.

#42

You did pretty good, but you forgot to factor in the time it takes to reload her TMP and the damage of a 0/30 canister. You get that for me and I can do the exact calculations. :+1:

#43

But if they wanted to her to be played like they intended they should have improved her melee, instead of that they reduced and her health and shortened her melee window.

#44

I have to strongly disagree here. It makes perfect sense for the base melee secondary to do less damage than the base ranged primary. For starters, if it did more damage (DPS specifically), it would become their primary. Second, it’s a melee attack. Melee attacks don’t suffer from the same DPS loss due to imperfect accuracy on ranged weapons. The only argument for melee attacks being more powerful is because of the risk associated with positioning yourself to attack, but I don’t feel that outweighs them being secondary attacks with an imperfectly accurate ranged alternative. Even a masterful 70% accuracy with Caldarius gives his current secondary attack more effective DPS even if you are only 85% accurate with his melee (which I feel is reasonable). Buffing his melee DPS to 120% of his range would effectively see him become primary-melee and secondary-ranged (and would also be ridiculously powerful, with the augments his melee is already very powerful).

Especially with Mellka, you have to be either very close or fighting a large target for your ranged accuracy to compare to her melee, just because of how inaccurate her weapon is at any sort of range. While I totally agree that her melee is super weak at the moment, if it were made stronger than her primary at base, it would become her primary attack, which is something I’m sure most of us would not want and is something the developers do not intend. Now, I could get behind making it stronger (even by 20%, like you suggest) than her primary while the target is envenomated, since that does seem to be the playstyle the devs are promoting.

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#45

Fron my (limited) experience in playing Melka so far there is only 1 situation I can justify using her melee combo.

First let me establish 2 simple premises.

Premise 1: when in close/melee range, it is easier and more likely to miss shots fron your pistol than it is to whiff melee strikes. (since the melee strikes have a slightly wider and more forgiving hitbox and targets rarely stand still when you’re in melee/close range)
Premise 2: if a canister from a reload misses, the time it takes to reload (after the canister fires) and the time it takes to accurately adjust your aim can give a low health opponent time to flee to safety.

If you agree with premise 1 and premise 2 then there is a quick obvious scenario that melee becomes (slightly) viable… if only out of necessity.

That scenario is as follows:
(Imagine your in the close quarters chaos of the supply station bunkers in overgrowth)
•in close-quarters your bring an enemy to low health.
•you notice that your target begins to flee and attempts to evade you, making it difficult to land more ranged shots.
•to prevent your target from fleeing to safely and evading your shots, you don’t risk waiting for the reload animation to finish.
•instead you chase them while using your melee combo to secure the kill.

This is the 1 and only scenario I’ve found myself using her melee combo and yielding successful results.

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#46

This is the weakest point of your argument and, at the same time, the key point for melee/ranged balancing - the amount of risk of going into melee. Looking at survivability of melee and ranged characters, I see that melee IS more risky and thus should be rewarded.

#47

What’s the issue with both primary & secondary both being comparable in damage? They have their own means to apply the damage. So saying that, doesn’t it just add to the characters play style to use both vs just utilizing primary 95% of the time?

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#48

Lot of good stuff in this thread, too much to address by phone.

I will say part of me just wishes they made the left trigger or secondary attack button a zoom for her pistol that increases accuracy but limits mobility.

Or they just buffed her melee damage to above her pistol, or at least equal to it.

Or her melee stays as is, but each hit applies venom.

I don’t have the answer but it is very clear it needs to be addressed.

1 Like
#49

The biggest thing Melka has going for her at level 8+ is that part of her damage comes from venom, which is reapplied with every shot and reload canister hit.

If she missed 30% of her shots (as you suggest,) her ranged dps (until she has to reload) is then

298 * 0.7 = 208.6 dps from bullets
209 + 48 = 257 total dps

Compared to 15% misses in melee (also suggested by you,)

204 * .85 = 173.4 dps from melee
173 + 48 = 221 total dps

Even including the venom, it is still significantly less dps, though really the venom should really be considered dps while the bullets are flying and a flat damage amount doled out over time after that, meaning

48 dps x 4 seconds = 192 damage from the final instance of venom

So we really should actually be comparing

257dps + 192 damage over the next four seconds

to

173 dps

Which means the VENOM does more total damage once you stop shooting than one second of Melka’s melee combo (with your assumed miss percentages.) So doesn’t that mean it’s better to try to land one last shot as they round the corner, as it deals more damage just from the venom than an entire second in melee range?

To me that’s the whole story right there. If her melee damage were increased, you would still want to always start by envenoming your target, and always try to land a canister (or a bullet after level 8) just before they drop behind cover. You might be using melee a larger percentage of the time that you do now, but on anyone you haven’t been able to finish with skills, you’d always want to reapply venom just before they turn the corner, rather than close to point blank to keep meleeing behind the enemy lines.

3 Likes
#50

The numbers I gave were incredibly generous and geared towards Caldarius (who has a much more accurate weapon). My best ever accuracy with Caldy is 72%. 70% accuracy with Mellka against players would be unheard of after her accuracy got nerfed (and probably even before it got nerfed).

Like I said, I agree that her melee is very weak right now, and that the buff against envenomated enemies is pointlessly small. I also agree that the helixes that promote her melee play are too weak to be useful (compare to Caldy, who gets his 20% AS buff at level 2), especially at level 5 where you have an incredibly strong 300 health buff to compete with. However, the point of my post is that I disagree that her (and Caldy’s) melee should be a greater source of DPS than their primary ranged weapon at level 1, due to accuracy (or rather lack thereof) making the primary DPS lower than advertised.

I would love to see melee become an integral part of Mellka’s kit. However, if such a buff were to be made, there would have to be sacrifices elsewhere. She is one of the few waveclear capable characters untouched by the recent waveclear nerfs. She has great burst damage in her skills, a good deal of DoT from both Spike L2 and venom, and a very strong late game. While she’s squishy early on, she’s hard to kill with her plethora of escape options (both abilities, air stall, and her ground slide), and a single piece of flawed gear combined with her level 5 health buff are good for 790 bonus health. She may not be a meta character, and I too wish that her melee was stronger and allowed her to be played differently, but she’s in a pretty good (maybe even strong) place overall right now in my opinion. Something would have to be sacrificed for her melee to be made stronger, and I can’t really think of anything I would be willing to give up.

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#51

Melka can only get 300 extra hp from her helix, everything else gear works for caldarius too.

Caldarius and melka have 2 skills to escape, caldarius meele from my experience has more utility and over all dmg. As caldariud i jump close to montana and stab stab and jump away, if miko is behind i flash bang to cut the healing beam and reduce the survavility of montana.
As melka i need to flank montana then envenom get closer and spike, lung if i am in a bad position or run away.

Caldarius has more movility while melka has 3d movility.

Melka is easy to focuse, easier than caldarius. Melka already lost hp and her meele reach is the worst i think is enough to buff a bit her dmg… also she needs to envenom first to deal a better dmg.

1 Like
#52

Outside of the variables in canister damage as @khimerakiller pointed out it all seems solid
Except for starting your melee combo with an elbow and getting 8 hits off would give you 203 DPS in 3 seconds.

Still crap though

#53

…We trust you, because you obviously have brains in your head. :sunny:

#54

C’mon GBX give Melka a buff or a rework. Show that space elf some love! Even if you accidentally make her OP for a little while, itd be nice to actually see people pick her for a change!
Good post @EdenSophia, ive bin waiting on you to put one of these out for awhile now, nobody can make a case for Melka like you can :wink:

2 Likes
#55

WE NEED BALANCE CHANGES EVERY WEEK. NO MATTER HOW SMALL.

Baby steps toward the ideal situation.

3 Likes
#56

Thanks everyone for the agreements and disagreements alike. :heart:

A lot of good points have come up here. I want to do some more tests later today to get her reload speed and also to measure, as best I can, her melee hitbox.

Some observations I want to touch on first:

This is a solid observation, but there are several precedents for secondary attacks doing more damage than primary attacks.

  • Ambra’s secondary, her Scorching Strikes, does more DPS than her beam (contingent on Heat.)

  • Reyna’s secondary, her plasma pulse, does more DPS against shields than her primary.

  • I believe Shayne’s ranged secondary does more DPS than her primary only if she uses the boomerang bounce helix (and can be further improved with a boomerang damage helix.) This is especially true when Shayne is missing Aurox, which lowers her primary DPS but not her boomerang DPS.

  • El Dragon’s clap hits multiple targets with his l3 helix, so in theory would deal more DPS when he is targeting more than one enemy.

What’s striking about these examples is that so much of it is contingent. Reyna’s plasma is usually weaker than her pistol, but not against shields. Ambra’s secondary scales with her character resource. Shayne has to take certain helix choices, avoid others, and be without Aurox for her secondary to really outstrip her primary. And Dragon needs to clap multiple targets or else his primary DPS is far higher.

My suggestion is that Mellka (and perhaps Caldarius) could also enjoy contingent competitive secondary melee damage. This wouldn’t make them primary-melee characters any more than Shayne is primary-ranged because she can potentially kit herself out to be a boomerang monster.

What I think is the case right now is that Mellka and Caldarius are meant to have symmetry with melee characters who have ranged alt fires. For example:

Deande - her thrown fans do 61% the damage of her melee fans
Shayne - her boomerangs (without the bounce) do 69% the damage of her melee hits w/ Aurox
Pendles - his throwing stars do 36% the damage of his melee

The problem is, these lower damage outputs makes sense because the alternative is no damage. If Deande can’t reach an enemy with her war fans, then her ranged is the best option she has. But if Mellka can reach an enemy with her melee, she can also reach them with her ranged. So while these appear to be symmetrical design decisions, in practice, they leave Mellka (and Caldarius) with an attack option that is never clearly superior - in the way that thrown fans are clearly superior to not attacking at all.

I’m going to test her melee hitbox today because I suspect it’s not nearly as forgiving as the melee hitboxes of other characters, including Caldarius. But on the subject of accuracy:

When Mellka misses ranged shots, the damage drop is less serious than if she misses a hit from her melee chain, in which each hit counts for more. Consequently I am not certain that the accuracy argument is quite so cut-and-dry. Mellka has poor melee range and lacks a stun to keep a character stationary long enough to reliably crit them; if a character moves out of Mellka’s effective melee range, she will miss regardless of how accurate she is, whereas if she is firing her primary, this isn’t an issue.

Now, caveat: I’m almost always stuck on a red bar connection. Melee is miserable for me on Mellka because the server conspires to ensure that a moving character, even slowed, is always just out of reach of my hitbox. I don’t have nearly as many problems with Galilea, whose hitbox is incredibly generous and whose spin is always reliable.

If you are right on top of a Montana, Attikus, Kleese, or Toby, you may as well open fire - you’ll hit them. If a Thorn is darting around you, you’re likely to miss many shots from your primary, but given the fact she’s not only moving laterally but also away from you, you are equally likely to miss a hit or two from your melee combo, which is a proportionally greater decrease to your DPS.

I agree completely with your analysis and suggestion. Her venom really is the nail in the coffin for her melee potential. There is no way to apply venom via melee secondary (unless we count Spike, but that’s on cooldown); there are two ways to apply it using her ranged primary. Therefore, to effectively melee, you have to first initiate with ranged anyway - so why simply stay at range, where it’s safer and both your damage and accuracy are better?

I’ll post more later when I do some more tests!

6 Likes
#57

Hey I imagine you would but you know about the jumping elbow right?

#58

Yes! I was actually thinking about it as I dozed off last night. It might do decent damage when thrown out opportunistically, because it’s effectively the final hit of her combo, front-loaded. I have gotten aerial KOs with it before and it’s always glorious :wink:

#59

Oh cool
I haven’t tested it but it has knockback right?
Is it so much that you wouldn’t be able to follow up with the rest of the 7 string?

#60

I plan on testing it out today. Rather than follow it with the melee string, though, I would probably mix it into a melee/ranged combo - land a canister/venom bullet, jump into melee range and strike with the elbow, Spike, shoot down into their crit spot as I fall, Air Stall them, and continue shooting at their crit spot as I land at a safe distance. It gives opportunities to work in a Blade Launcher or Lunge too.

One of my biggest issue with the claw melee is that it grounds you, which makes Mell vulnerable - and with a seven hit string, that’s a lot of vulnerable flailing for an overall damage decrease.

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