Played her (Melka), multiple times. Is ■■■■, is now too reliable of her team by herself she can’t do much. Before it was her job in early game to be a nuisance, now she is laughable.
At this point she needs the whole complete rework and not this a set of “nerfs”.
At least you could have returned the duration of the venom to 8 seconds and buffed the HP a little, but as she is right now, is useless but against new/inexperience players.
They buffed El Dragon recently so I believe resurrection is possible.
Hotfixes can only tune numbers and not remove specific helixes.
She was top tier when the game released. Hell, I’d say she was still a top tier assassin before her most recent herf.
Top tier, but as in A, not S. She was excellent without being ridic in the way Benny is. And that’s one of the many reasons to love her.
I don’t know much about Caldy post patch. How much edge do you think he has over her now?
I haven’t played him aince the update but looking it at now, there really is no reason to pick Mellka over Caldy. He excels in pretty much everything over Mellka except maybe mobility.
the guy burns crater sized holes in things with ease
I’m not happy about the nerf to venom, but I will say choosing the level 8 right helix (forgot the name) is actually a very fun way to play. Moving that fast is kind of a rush. Her melee is still very…lame. But I am starting to melee more as practice for when the inevitable buff comes.
I miss killing Gali and Boldur behind their shield with canister splash. I miss it so much you guys.
At least you can still help by applying slow and wound with Spike while body blocking them, so your team can jump on them kill them!
Bye, babe. 
Sad 
what’s happened to her
This sucks.
Weren’t ANY of the devs loving Mellka before the WU? And now another hotfix nerf.
I’m upset. She was BB to a lot of us.
Gbx, your original vision is no longer viable without some non-Hotfix type changes to her Helix tree. I mean major revisions.
But even then… this sucks. Your thought process on this whole thing, it’s just stupid. That’s the nicest word for it.
Idc what you originally intended for Mellka, she became what she was, and that was FUN.
I ask again, weren’t ANY of you devs loving Mellka before the WU?
@GhostArray They ‘Loved Her’ Like they love all nerfed Battleborn; Love in the word, but not actuallity. You know, to make it seem like they where doing the right thing. And now they have taken Eden from us too, untill next major patch or Till Aussie servers actually, you know, work.
Till Aussie servers actually, you know, work
Not holding my breath 
Just writing this here…
I was on a discord ranting to my friends about how GBX is screwing Melka, and someone mentioned that maybe it was because the game is being balanced for consoles (like exclusively) instead of having different builds for PC and console ( as the “the game that shouldn’t be named” as done already).
But console players are also mad! So to who exactly is GBX is trying to cater?
Because it seems they don’t listen to the players that know more the character they play, as when they did with El Dragon and now to Melka. As a friend jokingly said: “Did Melka win the Prologue to many times to be nerfed?”
Rant over 
I’ve actually been curious as well,
@Jythri in the mysterious “data” you use for balancing are you able to see the outliers? i.e. The people who’ve become true mellka/el dragon prodigies?
Or is it more generalized like “el dragons have killed XXX times and died XXX times?”
We were speaking with a dev (I believe it was Grant?) yesterday about various balance concerns and trying to get their perspective on them, and Mellka naturally came up. He commented that her changes stemmed in part from them not liking that players were spamming her reload as a primary source of damage rather than using her standard attacks and supplementing it with the reload canister.
I can understand this perspective: it doesn’t make much sense for a “gimmick” part of a character’s kit to become a large source of their damage at the expense of the “core” parts of their kit (e.g. gun and melee damage). The direction they intend to take with her is less “venom is a source of damage” and more “venom is a source of tech and buffs”, some of which they have balanced for now, and more of which will require helix changes that can only be done in a update. I can dig this direction. I don’t really like it, since her venom was a huge reason I had fun playing her, but I can understand.
However, it’s worth investigating why this spam canister playstyle came to be the primary way of dealing damage with Mellka. It’s pretty obvious to me: a few months back, Mellka’s accuracy took a huge hit, and she lost a good chunk of health. Because of her reduced accuracy, her effectiveness with her primary became limited to close-range encounters; because of her reduced health, close-range encounters were not an option for her. Her secondary has never done remotely respectable damage, and once again, her small health pool prevents it from being viable. Thus, players were left with one option: spam canisters accurately from safe range, guaranteeing some 100+ instant damage with 144 bleed over time, until you grow into the late game and actually have enough health to get in close and secure kills.
While the recent balance changes for Mellka have certainly moved to dissuade players from spamming her reload as a primary source of damage, they haven’t done much to fix what cause this playstyle to develop in the first place. Sure, Mellka’s primary now does 174 DPS including reload, but you still have to get so dangerously close with her very small health pool to be effective with it because her accuracy is poop. Despite her melee buff, it still does pretty garbage DPS, and the buff provided by meleeing envenomated enemies is so small that it only just breaks even with Caldy’s base melee (which has a 20% DPS buff available at level 2, and which you can actually chase people down with while using). The buff provided by claw lunging envenomated enemies is equally as bad, and doesn’t provide any incentive to use claw lunge as a finisher as opposed to an escape (also making that cooldown helix unpickable). I believe both buffs are on the order of 16%; if it were something like 30% and 50% respectively, then she might start looking juicy. As it stands, on the path to venom being a buff tech, the only decent buff in her kit is the wound on spike.
The common role comparison for Mellka is Caldarius. Right now, here’s now they stack up:
Used to, you could say about Mellka “I take her over Caldy because she has a great DoT component, good waveclear because of it, and has a nutty as hell late game, which Caldy lacks”. However, as you can see from the above comparison, there really is no reason to take Mellka over Caldy right now. He’s just categorically superior.
there is a lot of reason to use the canister over primary fire that was in no way out of place or overpowered. For one, the AoE makes it much better to hit waves with than her primary fire, ST damage is just bad waveclear. Another example is a habit I have from MMO’s while kiting. Continuing to move forward while jumping up turning in mid air, turning, and shooting the enemy chasing you with an ability. In this case that ability would be the canister, which is a lot easier and longer lasting than spraying and praying a short burst from your gun. Also, we have to take gear into consideration, such as gear that gives + reload speed after a reload (not really the best for melka, but it’s an example) and things likve vryns quiver, where your exta regen is directly related to how many shots you have left in your mag when you reload, encouraging early reloads for more survivability.
Venom really wasn’t too powerful, and there are more aspects in the people using it often than just spamming it. Especially the factor that it is a DoT, repeatedly using it doesn’t do any extra damage, it just refreshes the duration. not to mention the duration is (was) only 4 seconds, so even if they’re using it every 4 seconds they’re just doing exactly what the devs are trying to have people do now! use it every 8 seconds to keep your “buffs” up, while they did it every 4 to refresh the dot for the same reasons!
