I’ve been noticing more and more melee veterans lately, and doing the Orthus offensive last night… I’m not even joking, I kept seeing only melee veterans, and honestly, why? The class doesn’t have a pure melee build, you suck at melee, and you don’t have the survivability to just stay in melee. If you want to play pure melee just be an Ogryn or Zealot, seriously, it’s insane. Am I just going crazy or has anyone else noticed this as well? Is it as big of a problem as it felt to me last night?
EDIT: I want to clarify I’m not annoyed at a Veteran using their melee weapon, I’m talking Veterans who ONLY use their melee weapon, never bother targeting snipers or bombers that I can’t hit with my braced bullet hose. I can mark them, I can’t hit them and I don’t want to run a revolver on EVERY build because I can’t trust players to play their class at all.
I have a plasma vet and only pull it out for specials. I melee like 80% of the time. With the chainsword and chainaxe, you can do damage just fine. Thanks for judging, though.
with all seriousness, i use katachan sword mostly because i can parry the Rinda, damage her and stay alive. i have lots of stamina to use and some perks that can help me survive a melee encounters, and my katachan sword is based to mostly deal with either ragers or lots of poxwalks.
maybe players trying to save ammo for a fight? because sometimes its easier to melee bosses, save ammo and focus fire on weaker enemies to deal with them faster
I’d say its fine, the skills and weapons are there for a reason.
Ehhh, I’m not thinking thats not fair, some people might be roleplaying? Or maybe they just love the powersword or something?
Besides, I main Vet and always have in this game. Melee can be really fun, and it feels very hybrid, like it should!
As for have I seen more, and especially in Karnak Twins? Yeah, its people using high dps builds, likely because they found going middle-tree too reliant on the team. Poor guys, it can be a struggle queuing random. I finished that fight with a support veteran build eventually.
You do know that the director will often straight up spawn chaff, and sometimes disablers or elites/ragers in the blindspots of Psykers and Vets whenever they’re in ADS, right? It’s their equivalent of trappers spawning inside hordes for Zealots, Ogryns, and melee specialists in general.
I mean Melee is half of everyones build whether you like it or not, yes the Vet has a range focus but the game does not care for preferred style of play and at any reasonable intensity will try to bury you in melee regardless. And what if your ranged weapon isnt great with flak or carapace? Guess you’d want to take a melee with good AP to deal with those guys too.
A vet isnt as good at melee as a zealot, it would be stupid if they were, but they arent going to wait for you to notice them being dogpiled so you can come over and kill their problem more efficiently when they have their own tools and a a will to live.
For Orthus specifically:
its an arena fight - No good chokepoints or corners means theres always a melee blob coming from a direction they arent shooting at
the bosses have shields - That means like any assassination mission you will want to use the appropriate tool, and not everyone is rocking something like an autogun to crack it at range
the bosses wont respect your personal space - Even if Rinda isnt charging the vet down, her brothers plasma bolts and landmines and the tox gas phases are enough to keep a vet moving and short on space to do extended periods of aimed shooting
TLDR outside of specific builds most Vets will not have a lot of time or space to do anything more than short bursts of shooting when they need to drop elites or specials, and depending on the build their melee may actually be their best tool for the job
The game is really, really hostile to ranged play now, with the whole ‘yes you entered executioner’s stance but we’ve spawned three poxbursters to smack you in the back and instantly kill you silently’ problem. Vet is moving more to melee because the game is making ranged fights less viable with recent patches.
What are you going to do on Orthus offensive with a ranged Vet build? If you only play Vet/want to play Vet on that mission you’re better off going for melee/support.
If players would choose just purely on power everyone would just go Hybrid Gunlugger Ogryn on that mission anyway.
be prepared. mostly people do one-enemy-target builds because “aye, poxwalks are not a problem to deal with!” and dying because they dont have any crowd control items that could save them
reason why i pick katachan as my main weapon before even skilltree update was simply because of ragers. its so nice to just redirect all of their damage back to them, stunning and making them simple targets after. yeah, thats bad against crushers/maulers, but ranged weapons and krakks do well against them, especially when you add a brittleness from melee hits
Current meta favors melee simply put. Ranged focused builds are very much still viable but you need to get dank, rank sweaty to make it work. So people either run VoC + 'volver or Plasma or just go commando vet pure or hybrid if they don’t want to go through the effort of building up and learning an Ogryn or Zealot.
NGL, as a Vet main that prefers running ranged builds, and loves lasguns and autoguns it’s kinda frustrating to play now at times. When it works it’s glorious, and you feel like John Wick or Jack Bauer. But that’s only like 25% of my runs either because of technical issues that are currently making the game barely playable (latency + audio f@ckery), or melee specialists that play like the rest of the team doesn’t exist. The first is more frequent than the latter, but having a pavlovian response of switching into one of my low profile infil builds whenever a zealot with a low horde clear set up, or an Ogryn above lvl 300~ pops into the lobby can get annoying at times.
It’s not like I camp the Heresy soloq or something either. I’m one of the sweatlords that camps the auric STG, and auric maelstrom ones instead, and probably one out of the dozens of players that somehow manages to make non-revolver executioner’s builds work there too. I don’t necessarily mind the extra pressure, but I can’t blame other folks for not even bothering with anything that isn’t a heavy weapon, revolver, or PS commando build anymore.
Under the current spawn pattern counterplay the director can get real cheap and annoying at times. Especially when you’re doing well enough in a run that all of a sudden every ranged elite, and disabler focus you the moment you mess up your positioning or have no allies in one of your blindspots. You will often get hit by 2 to 3 dogs + 2 mutants just consistently getting spawned nearly on top of you every engagement. The usual chaff blindspot spawns will get replaced by either rager flashmobs that spawn within less than 20m of you and focus you in last samurai charges, or duo rager, mauler or single crusher spawns, all in your blindspots while you ADS. Sometimes even, all of the above at the same time.
Idk melee vet is a ton of fun and very good. Yes you trade survivability that Zealot has, but in exchange your ranged is much stronger than Zealot. Especially both chaxes are a bunch of fun to use and you can hit some nasty breakpoints, as Vet has higher damage attacks but less attack speed and tankiness.
Pair it with the fact that the Mk 6 Power Sword is one of the best weapons in the game, and the mk 3 sapper shovel is the best single target melee weapon in the game and it’s not suprising people will try it out.
Although yes pubs will be pubs and be bad with any build. And I’m not sure if it’s the play for the boss fight, but its still a ton of fun.
Veterans have access to Shovels.
That alone is enough reason to play them. With onslaught, exploit weakness, rending strikes, and Shovels having uncanny strike, a veteran can be almost target-agnostic, too.
Granted, it’s a squishy build, but a well rolled revolver solves many problems.
See my previous post, it’s not like I’m stuck in Heresy pub purgatory and refuse to learn how to buildcraft. Even my most specialized builds are balanced enough to have some anti horde, and anti elite component. But the rate at which something will try to play grabass with you whenever you’re trying to drop a disabler, grenadier or flamer in high diffs can genuinely get kinda grating at points even for some of us sweatlords. Personally I wouldn’t have it changed though, but I wouldn’t act like it isn’t a problem for players that aren’t no-lifers like me. The real problem for me here is that these can feel brutally unfair when coupled with some of the near ubiquitous technical issues that seem to plague the game, at least for me.
Again, the problem isn’t the buildcrafting, it’s that the current spawn pattern paradigm is designed to overwhelm even the most prepared, and well rounded of builds. It’s even more noticeable if you’re an average player, and/or still aren’t quite there yet mechanically. Then if you are just straight up having latency problems it can make runs borderline unplayable if your dodge and push skills, and situational awareness don’t border on precog esp reflexes.