PC Regarding Melee mechanic

I don't think it is an FOV issue because I also set mine to 90 via the F1 command.
For me melee is one of the few things I am actually happy about in A17. In A16 it felt like the zombies arms were just as long as mine with a bat, so if I was close enough to hit them with a bat, then they were close enough to hit me without one, which i didn't think was right.

Now I can actually hit them and not get hit in return at the same distance.

The only thing I really really miss is how I could smack a body part, and it would explode off. A couple of times I managed to smash all a zombies limbs off before popping it's head. It was an endless source of amusement for me.

...wow, actually verbalising that makes me sound a bit like a psychopath. haha
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Your not the only one I miss doing stuff like that too when I was bored. It'd not work so well in A17 though, as the headshot mults aren't as insane as they were in a16. female zombies have 125 hp, male 150, fatties are 250 for female 300 for male, tourist/soldier have higher (type dm and hit numpad 0 to see a popup come up with a ton of info on any entity nearby). On warrior diffculty you hit for about 20% less, however sadly the items stats don't drop to show this like in A16. I used to use taking out the legs as a mechanic for dealing with night zombies, turn them into crawlers and they are a lot less of a threat. Then again I also miss wooden spikes being a good weapon, usually in a16 it'd kill a zombie costing 2-3 stages, in a17 they can walk thru like 2 wood spikes and still be alive.

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Are you suggesting this or is this how it is?
If suggesting, I disagree. If it's how it currently is, I strongly disagree. =)

...it takes player skill entirely out of the equation in lieu of random dice rolls.

Might as well make it a turn based game.
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Reminds me of Morrowind, hitting a enemy depending on your skill in that weapon type, so you could swing at it all day but if you have low skill you'll mostly miss. They changed that in oblivion and above, where if it looks like it hit, its a hit.

 
I truly can not understand the issue. So many people have been complaining about melee hits that there must be something going on. I can't understand why I don't notice it though. I melee zombies from day 1 with little issue. I wish I wasn't so lazy or I'd figure out how to make a video of my melee combat.
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Yeah I don't really notice all the problems people have with melee in A17, I've always meleed since I started the game, I only use the bow at night to kill zombies, or in poi's to get a 2x+damage bonus headshot for fast takedowns. Like someone said the main diff is now the animation is synced properly, so the actual hit is right when the weapon passes the crosshair (remember this!), I've gotten able to pre-swing with slower weapons like the fire axes and the sledge and still connect a headshot just as the zombie walked into range. In a16, the "hit" part was always badly desynced so you had to aim a bit above the head to actually land it.

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For me melee has become my go-to, way more so than any ranged. THe only ranged I use is compound bow with stealth for headshot kills. I haven't even touched a gun in my current playthrough, I don't need it. Way too much work to keep it in ammo when I can melee stuff down and kite or stealth and headshot with a bow, using a tiny fraction of the resources and not drawing attention.
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I only really use guns if its bloodmoon night, or I have to deal with a suddend pack of ferals. Otherwise its sledgehammer and compound bow for me. My gun of choice in A17 is the shotgun, or ak47, or both. Ak47 with the semi-auto trigger group is an awesome gun. Bascally becomes a 30+ round pistol that hits like a truck. Pistol with a mag extender mod is pretty legit too, 22 round clips then.

 
This doesn't really prove anything, but if there are enough targets, about 50, it's difficult to miss.

No, i am not happy with the videoquality. Wish i knew how to make it better. Suppose i could

search for how if i really bothered.

 
lets try this...
* base system for melee gets redone and starts out at lowest stats

* sometime player misses target and hit closest body part (wild swing)

* player finds mod for club "swing like babe ruth" now when players swings at targets head and if makes good contact... targets head is sent out for a home run

* players till misses now and then

* wait, there is a perk now available - "getting better" now player is 50% better and not missing as much

* oooh whats this mod for "broadside of a barn" appears now every swing will make contact, just cant miss.

get the idea... but the base had to go in and all stats have to be at a descent lower level in order to allow for perks and mods for improvements. and this will take team work and time the ground works had to be fixed.

hope this explains it :)

of course i know many will want to argue me down... good luck.. i will not participate. :) i said my piece and i have as much right as anyone else.
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Bruh, there's this new thing called "hitbox" that even the scrubs who made Soul Calibur got right. If I swing horizontally and the target dodges into any point of that horizontal swing, they get hit. If I swing vertically and the target is anywhere that that vertical swing is going, they get hit.

The way the melee currently works makes it seem like you're stabbing with a club or sledgehammer at a specific point. It's like the polar opposite of "broadside of a barn" and much more like "you missed the head by a single pixel, so therefore you miss the whole zombie." It's not like it's a new concept. Just make more of the weapon animation capable of hitting the target.

Similarly, when I aim at a clump of grass and swing 14 times, I should not miss the clump of grass and hit the ground behind it. This is not a small problem. It is a serious lack of Development expertise that should be viewed as a learning experience toward the evolution of the company.

 
It may be that there is some sort of a bug there.

I initially tried melee with the first melee weapon (wooden bat/whatever it's called) and could not hit for the life of me, up close or from further away, so gave up on the idea.

Found a candy cane (nothing invested in the perks) and I am hitting them. Not perfect, but can hit and finish them just fine, so the system works as intended for the most part. That first weapon may either be glitched in some way, or the stats are so low that it mostly misses regular slow zombies.

 
Bruh, there's this new thing called "hitbox" that even the scrubs who made Soul Calibur got right. If I swing horizontally and the target dodges into any point of that horizontal swing, they get hit. If I swing vertically and the target is anywhere that that vertical swing is going, they get hit.
The way the melee currently works makes it seem like you're stabbing with a club or sledgehammer at a specific point. It's like the polar opposite of "broadside of a barn" and much more like "you missed the head by a single pixel, so therefore you miss the whole zombie." It's not like it's a new concept. Just make more of the weapon animation capable of hitting the target.

Similarly, when I aim at a clump of grass and swing 14 times, I should not miss the clump of grass and hit the ground behind it. This is not a small problem. It is a serious lack of Development expertise that should be viewed as a learning experience toward the evolution of the company.
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For the grass there is one grass model that is a pain in the butt to hit, it the one in a diamond shape, you can only really hit it from a few certan angles.

 
Your not the only one I miss doing stuff like that too when I was bored. It'd not work so well in A17 though, as the headshot mults aren't as insane as they were in a16.
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You can add dismember chance with tags="leg,arm" to only have it affect limbs. I have this on a few weapons like the fireaxe at 66% chance and it's a lot of fun. What really makes me sad though is they seem to have taken out the dismember damage thresholds in favor of purely chance based, so doing higher amounts of damage doesn't mean higher chance to dismember. I had to go to great lengths to mod it so I got way more dismember chance without constant insta-kills - a calculation is done to check how much health the zombie has left and only increases the chance if your next shot would kill them anyway.

 
This doesn't really prove anything, but if there are enough targets, about 50, it's difficult to miss.

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Cool video. While I admit you made the point it is possible to take out 50 ferals melee it is also fair to say you were doing it with some serious end game skills. IE 200 stam and hp bars and serious parkour perks too I assume. So while I agree with you that melee is working pretty well in A17 I'm not sure that is the type of video to use as an example.

 
Cool video. While I admit you made the point it is possible to take out 50 ferals melee it is also fair to say you were doing it with some serious end game skills. IE 200 stam and hp bars and serious parkour perks too I assume. So while I agree with you that melee is working pretty well in A17 I'm not sure that is the type of video to use as an example.
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It was just made in response to the op's last paragraph, and he/she was not level specific. And even with 200 stam+perks,

i was pretty starved of stamina in the first half, before the group had been weakened enough for powerattacks to start

killing, and sex-rex giving back 50 stamina pr kill. But yes, parkour is pretty fun late game.

In my normal play, i put all zombies to walk during daytime, thanks for that change, and use a sledgehammer, or whatever

weapon i carry.

 
The issue is the animation doesn't match the implementation.

Currently, the implementation is that EVERY melee attack is a precise stab. It hits the closest thing in range (which is sometimes grass clipping thru a prone zombie) SPECIFICALLY at the point of the crosshairs. Every melee weapon is a stab...sledgehammer stabs, club stabs, knife stabs, axe stabs, shovel stabs, etc. All of them impact ONLY things in a straight line from the player to the crosshair, out to the weapon's range.

The problem is that, with the exception of the shovel, EVERY melee weapon slashes or swings in an arc. So even though the weapon swings in a side to side, vertical, or diagonal arc, which would imply the possibility of impact along the entirety of the arcing swing, the implementation makes it function like a precision stab.

Now while i would love to see a spear implemented in the game, and I'm picturing a nice 7 foot haft, 2 foot blade, and a crossgiard at the base of the blade to stop anything you stabbed from advancing....man that'd be nice...

ahem...anyways, while i'd love to see a spear in the game...it isn't. All the weapons are chopping, slashing, or bashing weapons, and all of those weapons have the niche they do as effective weapons because ANY swing made in range forces the defender to dodge an entire plane of attack or deal with the strike (parry, block, etc.)....that currently doesn't exist in game. Instead, what we have are short spears of varying length and effectiveness that we're encouraged to strike for the head with...which is a dubious prospect with a spear even vs. living opponents

 
This doesn't really prove anything, but if there are enough targets, about 50, it's difficult to miss.

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This is a fun little test, but it doesn't really say much about real in-game situations. Being perked out all the way, in an open space, with zombies hitting each other more than they hit you and blocking each other's paths, etc. You're just swinging into a big pile of flesh, obviously you're going to hit something. And even then, you whiff a few times, which only serves to prove the points people are making in this thread.

The problem, to me at least, are situations where a couple of zombies are all up in my face, I swing my huge club/hammer, and it doesn't connect to anything because the crosshair went off-pixel for a split second (almost impossible to control with the current animations/hitboxes). It feels like the weapon is in some other dimension from the zombies. At the same time, zombies will almost never miss if they're that close to you. I even get hit while sprinting past them.

 
It's a bit of a running joke among the people I play with that a sledgehammer requires the same precision targeting as a sniper rifle because of the way it's implemented. It has an ingame impact too, since there are certain generic zombie types we consider harder because of how much their heads move around during their basic walking animations, with construction zombies, 'tweakers' (the shirtless guys in jean shorts), and hoodies being the biggest offenders.

On the other point, I'd rather hit more often for partial damage than have the all-or-nothing of melee headshots. My sledgehammer power attack is great and all, but it really is a gamble - If it hits I'll probably kill whatever I hit, but if I miss by even a pixel I have to back off and wait for stamina because of how much it costs. I'd rather hit more often for less damage (having narrowly-missed hits be body blows at the expense of also having some headshots be body blows) than feel like I'm just wasting an attack to a spastic animation.

I also feel like these wide-sweeping stamina-devouring power attacks should have an AoE component to them, letting me clear out hordes effectively and giving me a melee defense against being swamped by low-HP but numerous and erratic enemies like dog packs. This would give power attacks something to distinguish them beyond them being 'regular attacks that deal more damage' and could also allow for perks and weapons that improve on this aspect (allowing for more AoE damage, a wider swing arc, etc).

This is all personal preference, of course. I understand some people really like the precision aspect of it. I just happen not to, mostly because my aim sucks.

 
I also feel like these wide-sweeping stamina-devouring power attacks should have an AoE component to them, letting me clear out hordes effectively and giving me a melee defense against being swamped by low-HP but numerous and erratic enemies like dog packs. This would give power attacks something to distinguish them beyond them being 'regular attacks that deal more damage' and could also allow for perks and weapons that improve on this aspect (allowing for more AoE damage, a wider swing arc, etc).

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I kinda agree.

A melee attack with blunt weapons should be an AOE , but only affect the (1) target closest to the crosshair.

 
You can add dismember chance with tags="leg,arm" to only have it affect limbs. I have this on a few weapons like the fireaxe at 66% chance and it's a lot of fun. What really makes me sad though is they seem to have taken out the dismember damage thresholds in favor of purely chance based, so doing higher amounts of damage doesn't mean higher chance to dismember. I had to go to great lengths to mod it so I got way more dismember chance without constant insta-kills - a calculation is done to check how much health the zombie has left and only increases the chance if your next shot would kill them anyway.
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Does it still make that same satisfying blood explosion sound when you pop a limb off?

 
This doesn't really prove anything, but if there are enough targets, about 50, it's difficult to miss.

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Thanks for posting that.

I think it illustrated quite beautifully how often you missed when swing into a great big pile of meat.

However as was mentioned, if you had 5-6 zombies in a room or in a house even with all the perks and what not I'm pretty sure you'd be eating a lot of damage and missing quite often.

While the animation and the impact might be "tighter" or more accurately synced than ever before, if feels more wrong and inaccurate because of the only point of collision is that one pixel that if you move even slightly, or if the twitching zombie moves ever so slightly it's a flat out miss. Where a swinging weapon still would make an impact in the body, causing either some damage or stumbling because it's still contact.

 
So as far as the devs are concerned the melee combat is the way it's going to be?

All we've seen here, from devs, is defense of the system saying it's the way it always was and that it's more in sync with the animation.

Therefore it's not getting a "Swing" or "arc" to allow for logical collision to coincide with close quarters combat?

We just need to learn to accept misses that should hit and that all melee weapons behave like guns?

 
I wonder if the devs have ever tried to melee a bunch of irradiated zombies in a tight space? Preferably the ones with animations that cause their head hitboxes to swing all over your screen while they tear you a new one?

We need some crowd control options that actually work.

 
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