I would like to propose a question, why do melee specific classes in this game exist? Lets take a look at the capabilities of the two melee classes and compare them to the capabilities of the ranged classes.

The damage of melee weapons was pretty obviously seen mostly as an afterthought when designing this game, after all your primary weapon is supposed to be where the majority of your damage comes from right? Your melee is just the fall back for when you are out of ammo, right? That philosophy works for some games, but not for this game. Yes melee has infinite "ammo", but it has to be used where the enemies are the most dangerous, right next to them, and hence has the highest risk. There is also a lot of skill involved with having to know enemy attack timings and patterns to not get caught out in an attack animation and not be able to dodge that chaos flamer that just teleported directly on top of you and instantly started an unblockable aoe, among normal parry timings and whatever. 

As of now, any time I as a bulwark and occasionally assault main (or anyone else), end a match, we consistently are either somewhere between being on par with or being well under the performance of any other class in terms of damage and kills. For example, the highest damage I have ever seen an assault end a match with was around 20k. My friend who is a heavy main consistently ends matches between 30-40k damage, sometimes even hitting as high as 45k on longer maps.

I will not sit here and act like melee should be outperforming heavy's, not at all, heavy's have their own set of strengths and drawbacks which make their damage make sense. The thing that doesn't make sense, is why does EVERY class that has a primary weapon consistently outperform both melee classes. Anyone who has ever played Assault on a chaos map knows what absolute hell it is to get into a fight without having all of your armor instantly removed and health stripped by the dozens of ranged enemies that are surrounding you (since you, ya know, have to be up by the enemy to engage them in melee). You make it through that match playing the best you ever have only to see the tactical out damaging you by almost 2x, whos only real moment to moment risk was missing shots and wasting ammo.

Speaking of assault, lets get into the two classes specifically. Assault is the melee damage class, he's supposed to be entirely risk and reward, you have no shield, no ranged weapon, just a big hammer and a soul full of spite. The risk is certainly there, without good knowledge of enemy attacks and patterns you can very easily get combo'd to oblivion, and ranged enemies are basically a death sentence unless you have ground pound up for a stagger. The problem is there's no reward, all you get met with is less damage than any other ranged class except maybe vanguard on the occasion if you were playing particularly well that game. Your melee damage is certainly better than the potential melee damage of any other class, but its still nowhere close to where it should be for the risk involved.

On to bulwark, bulwark is in a pretty good spot right now simply because he does more than just melee. His banner is versatile and oftentimes provides full team heals. His shield makes him at least somewhat capable at dealing with ranged enemies without getting shredded, and intimidating aura is simply busted. The problem is that there doesnt feel like theres a gameplay reason hes a melee class, sure theres the lore reason, but in gameplay terms it just feels like they saw bulwark doing a couple things well and said "yeah now neuter his damage potential". His melee damage potential should not be as good as assaults, but again it should not be as horrible in comparison to ranged as it is. And he should ESPECIALLY not be out damaging assaults simply because intimidating aura exists. The right way to fix this would be to nerf intimidating aura enough to where the parry gunstrike combo doesnt one shot majoris, and then buff his melee weapons to compensate. AND BUFF ASSAULT.

The last thing I want to talk about is chaos vs tyranids. It is widely known right now that noone likes fighting chaos, the vast majority of people simply fight tyrannids. The simple reason is melee enemies are fun to fight, and ranged enemies are annoying. Focus, you have designed a pretty fun and interesting melee combat system, PLEASE take more advantage of melee based majoris and extremis enemies. No one is having fun when 3 biovore show up and simultaneously pump the map full of spores that chain react and two shot players, all while they sit rooted to the ground impossible to headshot and tank melee after melee with their 600 hp pool. However, whenever 3 raveners or lictors show up it is a lot of fun, because those enemies are actually interesting to fight. Unfortunately, chaos is almost exclusively ranged enemies, and any time a class gets an enemy into melee they have a solid chance of their target teleporting away and immediately opening fire again, or a different target teleporting in and immediately doing an unblockable. These problems with ranged enemies are felt on ranged classes, but are EVEN MORE ANNOYING AND DIFFICULT TO DEAL WITH on melee classes. Dealing with enraged unstaggerable tyrannid shotgunners is already practically impossible as a melee class, but then you go into a chaos map and practically every enemy is a shotgunner and its just hell. Not to mention tzaangor enlightened have an affinity to simply float above your melee hitbox so you cant engage them unless you use a groundpound or charge an aoe attack, which most melee weapons cant do.

So, back to the question at the start, why DO melee specific classes exist? Well as far as I can tell, it is exclusively for lore reasons. There is zero in game balancing that makes it balanced or necessary for two of the six classes to not have a primary weapon. There is a ranged class that can do anything the melee classes can do but better while also being safer. The sole exception is bulwarks team support, but that alone does not warrant his melee damage being as dog as it is, the only reason he competes at all for damage is exclusively intimidating aura.

So how do we fix this problem? Simple, melee needs buffed. If you dont want the melee on ranged careers to be too strong, then theres two routes. Buff the melees that are specific to bulwark/assault, buff bulwark/assaults melee damage outright, or some blend of the two. I would personally say that straight up adding a passive to bulwark and assault that increases melee damage by some amount (maybe 30-50%, would need testing) would be the best route as that lets melees other than power fist and thunder hammer at least somewhat compete and be viable, but im not the devs so ill just say they need buffs around the board. The other thing I would change as well is increase the contested health regen from melee weapons. I dont have hard data on this so I could be wrong, but I do have qualitative data.

Just follow with me on this, while playing bulwark, I can kill a tyrannid warrior in around 20 headshots with my heavy bolt pistol, and a warrior has 308 health, this means im doing ~15 damage per headshot. When regaining contested health I get somewhere around 1/6th of a healthbar per headshot. Comparing this to my melee weapon, a fully charged power fist followed by the followup and one light attack will put a majoris into execute, and one more heavy attack will kill it. Doing this full combo in game typically wont even net me a third of my health bar of contested health. So for melee ~300 damage equals 1/3rd of a healthbar. So, my ranged weapon builds contested health roughly 10x better than my melee weapon does. Why is this a thing. Ranged weapons are already easier to build contested health with since you can shoot them at range, but this stupid stat makes it so melee classes live and breath off executions to refund contested health, choking their teammates out of executions and breaking up the flow of combat. You want to reward aggressive play in the style that doom does? Then make melee weapons actually be able to duel with enemies without spending the entire game watching animations.

Ok, rant over, if you made it this far then I commend you and hope I got my point across.

TLDR: Bulwark and Assault severely lack in melee damage and sustainability when compared to the ranged damage and relative safety of other classes, which is unbalanced as the reward is simply not worth the massive risks of being melee focused. Bulwark mitigates this somewhat due to having more than just melee damage to his kit, but he should still not be as far behind in damage as he is (with the exception of intimidating aura).

I want actual damage numbers...not 10+.

Absolute: I can triple charge shot a majoris within 5s from range with a Plasma Incinerator (no doubt this build will get nerf'd). TTK for melee is way out of wack it will take close to twice as long to kill with a melee weapon and that doesn't take into account all the other enemies asking you to parry while you do it.

Just for the record this complaint isn't about difficulty, its about fun.

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tomi392 wrote:
I'm not good at English so I don't understand all the sentences, but I agree that melee weapons are inferior to long-range weapons.If I have a good Tac, Sniper, or Heavy on team, all the enemies will die before I can get close, and it's boring. lol
I think that if there are so many enemies that you ran out of bullets, there would be more opportunities for melee classes to shine.

That could just be me not taking enough time to word things well so sorry about that. It really does feel like the game was supposed to be balanced in a way where ranged weapons were powerful but limited, with every class having to make use of melee combat at some points to preserve ammo. Instead ammo is so plentiful that melee has just been left in the dirt, desperately trying to crawl after the ranged weapons that are sprinting towards the finish line