You have been tasked with making melee in PvE less focused on DPS racing. What changes do you make?

Game Discussion
1

The near-foolproof formula for beating (pretty much) all NPCs right now is to camp outside their effective range and use whatever projectiles can you can land over that gap. NPCs spam random attacks straight at you constantly with no downtime, and being far enough away means the travel time will save you from taking constant hits.

The problem is, there’s a whole bunch of skills and even an entire stat build dedicated to close quarters combat, however when placed in PvE melee skills lose nearly all viability except for straight up DPS racing the enemy, as getting close guarantees that every single bit of the non-stop flow of attacks will collide with your character.

It’s also been confirmed that NPCs won’t have aimbot anymore which is a massive W, but even NPC inaccuracy won’t matter if you’re too close for them to miss.

So, my question for you is, given the absolute authority to make any changes you deem necessary to fix this problem, how would you go about solving it? It can be anything, no matter how unreasonable.

(save PvE berserker vetex :pray:)

2

make it to where parrying enough attacks in closerange can briefly stun enemies

3

delete fightning styles and make everyone mage
this would probably harm me (i main warlock) but it would be funny

4

The only thing that really comes to mind is to give all FS armors some resistance, you’re gonna be rushing enemies with FS move spam so that should give some needed survivability

5

make the NPC’s innacuracy comically large up close
like if they “miss” their attack goes 180 degress away from you

4 Likes
6

that can happen with players funnily enough, since if someone is closer they move (relatively) faster so you have to move your camera all over the place

7

yeah but spells have aoe so a blast in close range might not hit directly but if you aimed at the ground and they were next to you it might hit

8

Make all npcs receive massive knockback from all FS attacks

9

This is a terrible one, but hitting a character while they’re in start-up or charge could increase the skill’s casting time (by using a logarithmic BaseHealth/Damage formula) under the pretext of pain hindering your focus, but that wouldn’t make sense with experienced fighters and would make attack speed outright overpowered.
Maybe the real solution is to make NPCs track their enemies through raycasts or a field of view instead of just an aimbot. If made modular, this could allow for a wide variety of behaviour based on context and some pretty unique fights.

5 Likes
10

making enemies more player like :face_holding_back_tears:

11

Plus it would make NPCs feel more like actual characters instead of the same bot in different flesh molds.

12

Alright the mission is simple.

Try to NOT mention pilgrammed in this post, alright? Got it me?

Override the game’s melee combat into pilgrammed melee combat rahhhhhhhhhh

13

Pilgem

14

give NPCS a reaction time so you can crash shockwave then dash out and they’d fire a blast at where you were a second ago instead of instantly locking onto you

2 Likes
15

give NPCs priorities- if the player is too close, the NPC will dash away- then counterattack. if the player is too far, the NPC will either attempt to close the distance or to snipe with long range moves(piercing shot, beam)

this way NPCs don’t just continue to throw out their 300 damage blasts whether you’re in close range or not

16

Add stances to weapons/fighting styles.
There would be 2-4 different stances that give you different bonuses when you use them.

  1. Basic stance
    The Basic combat of stances, no downsides or upsides
  2. Defensive stance
    Your blocks are more effective, but you are slower when combat tagged
  3. Evasive stance
    You have higher move speed when you have a weapon/fstyle equipped, but you deal less damage.
  4. Offensive stance
    You deal more damage, but your blocks are less effective.
17

this is great just make it only affect npcs so it won’t be overpowered in pvp

18

NPC’s can’t turn their heads 360 degrees and still be able to locate you perfectly

Also they’ll refrain from using long ranged moves in cqc

19

i remove melee. problem solved.

20

Higher level npcs are less inclined to try and be ontop of you and will prefer to keep at least some distance depending on what moves they have. (Which may cause some npcs to try and flee while you are standing next to them rather than attempting a point blank blast for a dps race, allowing you to push the enemy back rather than have them push you)

also if you are running up into their face aggressively enough a npcs accuracy may decrease from “Panic” with you constantly in their face instead of it being the other way around (npcs of similar level and above should have a reduced chance of their inaccuracy increasing)