This game was intended to be melee focused in the first place. When you can just sit there in one spot and kill everything with 0 consequence before they even get to you, I see no fun in that. Ranged is better than melee in every way right now because of no limitation on ammo. If there actually was a consequence to using ranged too much (running out of ammo) the game would be more balanced between melee and ranged. This wouldn’t even be changing fundamentals of the game, it would just make it so you can’t use ranged literally 100% of the time.
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You know just playing ranged is actually pretty bad.
But still this is skittergate(legend) total outcome at the end and the run was quite exciting with no real problems.
I have to admit that ammo regen is quite the thing. I just started to use crossbow as saltz and didnt even need the ammo trait for blessed shot. Scrouger is enough to NEVER run out of ammo.
I dont know who said it but when only 1 player goes into melee and not all thats a real problem. Most players i see do not really know when its time to go into melee combat and when not.
Maybe we need some mobs which do not get really damage by ranged attacks.
By the way i once did skittergate with only melee chars.-> Unchained, Footknight, Slayer and Zealot. This was quite fun, BUT it took ages to kill bosses. That’s what concerns me the most in contrast to v1 where there was never a problem with character choices of players. Here its really important. Otherwise you cannot kill a troll 
Only certain charters have the potential to do that and it’s because that’s their entire identity. They did it in V1 as well, only better vis a via tf bow, pistols staggering, etc. Everything people complain about in V2 was present in V1 to a greater degree without there being any complaints.
The game does a good job of making sure you’re forced to sweat on ranged via specials and variation in horde spawn. Even in a perfectly positioned game, unless you cheese the map hard by waiting things out, not every horde politely funnels in in a single file line. It also takes skill to aim and there is still management involved on those characters. Melee is fun and all but “spam lmb (or w/e your weapon pattern is) and dodge forever” isn’t exactly compelling.
If you have a group with 3 range characters and you’re primarily melee it just becomes boring sometimes. At least to me. 
Depends on the map and situation of course, as you point out, so it isn’t always the case through the entire level.
But when everything dies before you can get to it, that just isn’t much fun.
You just trudge through the level trying to get your hands on any enemy you can before he gets shot.
And when you have a firing line down a corridor/alley you can’t just run in there.
Unless you want to hinder your team or get shot a lot.
I don’t know… It just doesn’t feel like you’re contributing much, only when the ranged firepower isn’t enough to deal with the threats do you get engaged. Might as well play something with unlimited ammo and help out. You can still contribute in melee anyway.
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Honestly I think the solution is to give melee characters more mobility and better ranged options themselves. In V1, pretty much every ranged weapon is balanced but in V2, melee Kruber for example is just fubar in the ranged department compared to everyone else.
Ranged doesn’t feel any better in that sense, you sit there and left click spam while everything dies because ranged actually penetrates targets in this game. I don’t know why you think I don’t want there to be ranged at all (because it seems like that’s what you think), I just want there to be a balance between melee and ranged in a melee focused game. The only practical way I see to do that is by nerfing ammo generation. Leave enough that you can sustain ranged weapon use, but not use it for literally every part of the game.
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I get you want there to be ranged, I’m just saying I think it’s better to buff melee character’s ranged options, like they are in V1 and give them more melee advantages and mobility than what they currently have.
You also have to take into account that there was no class system in v1, it only makes sense that ranged weapons were balanced between characters in that game. V2 introduced the class system and ranged is much more prominent combat wise in v2 than in v1.
This wouldn’t address the wail of arrows down your neck if you’re trying to engage with mobs in a 3 ranged group. Then when a horde comes up you’re suddenly left on your own with a group of 3 backpeddlers that don’t know how to stay alive in melee. Pair this with “mob saturation” that I use as a word to explain excessive death balls of stacked mobs and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
I guess fixing some of the melee issues might help but people might as well rebind their ranged weapon to the 1 key now in some groups.
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Stacked mobs are a serious problem indeed. 
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It really feels like @MistyKale wants this to be For Honor, and can’t for the life of him/her understand that making the game more fun for MistyKale might make it less fun for others.
Making everything in the game melee removes diversity and removes several playstyles that a lot of people enjoy.
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I feel like we can agree from a lore perspective though that every class should be able to fulfill its roll w/o artificial constraints. Part of the issue with melee right now is that the weapons are all artificially bad compared to their V1 counterparts. E.g… 2h hammers, which are still decent, are way less useful in V2 because there are so many more mobs + superstacking + ghost/running lunges that it doesn’t perform the same. The less cleave a weapon has, the less its potential. Hordes in V2 are sooooo big compared to V1 that or melee should have a much greater impact than what it does.
Needs to be a major look at either melee weapons or melee character mobility/lethality/stagger. Another good example is shields. Like… Wtf is up with shields not having enhanced knockback in V2?
Make it so melee characters can engage faster and do so more safely and I think the whole thing will not only be more balanced but more fun. Compared to V1, melee in V2 kinda just makes you feel weak instead of like a (compared to your enemies) giant unstoppable murderbeast.
My ideas would be:
Faster enemies, slow down players’ backpedalling and lateral movement with ranged weapons more significantly, lower dodge count with ranged weaponry, increase the likelihood of being flanked/surrounded by hoards, update pathing so that enemies are less likely to come single-file, and more likely to form a mass, sprinkle in more elites and shielded enemies but make sure players have more counters to shields available and consider making shields have finite HP values. Remove traits that grant ammo for headshots and critical hits, consider replacing them with traits that grant power bonuses to melee damage or cleave. People would hate it, but I’d say swap grimiores from lowering HP totals to lowering ammo totals and remove curse resistance. Ditch the level 20 talents that allow HP on kill/crit/boss along with that change, and suddenly you’ve made damage prevention and teamplay and CC roles important.
There might need to be something that addresses HP differences in classes and curse resistance as well…
New special chaos sorcerer that creates a barrier vs. ranged would be sick.
I think a big issue is that a lot of the solutions will change the essential gameplay and people in the forums will get all negative no matter what. People just can’t discuss changes in a game they play in a mature manner, and immature knee-jerk emotional responses sway metacritic reviews, steam reviews, etc.
It irks me to see a pure melee class so absolutely outshined by everything else.
I’m not trying to make the game just melee, I have clearly stated that multiple times. I enjoy using ranged, I just think that there isn’t any downside to it over ranged even though it is safer and just as effective, if not more effective. I want there to be enough ammo sustain to where it is still enjoyable for everyone, but not enough to the point where you can just spam it for everything and never run out.
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I’ve seen Slayers keep pace with me on more range oriented characters and I am an extremely aggressive and kill-stealie player. I’ll admit though that that’s very hard to do, much harder than it should be. Tbh I think Slayer is a good example of the election melee should go: way more mobility and lethality.
FS should be keeping melee on a better spectrum of mobility: stagger. The more mobile, the less stagger and vice versa. They kinda do this but it’s at V1 levels despite the horde size more than doubling, so low mobility weapons feel pretty bad right now.
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Sure, the design of a game is subjective. Fatshark has the final decision for any changes and what direction their game goes in.
But the devs have stated this is a melee focused game, so if there isn’t primarily a melee focus it’s understandable for there to be confusion. I don’t understand why ranged is so strong and self-perpetuating myself. No one honestly wants zero ranged and that wouldn’t even be feasible because of some specials.
I don’t expect Fatshark to ever go into depth on this topic (because of how people twist those interactions), but I’d love to hear their thoughts for design decisions like ammo generation (or their opinion of current balance and the direction for balance going forward).
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Well they surely showed how not to do it with Zealot - and Slayer isnt that far off, considering their abilities, that are mainly just mobility, have such a long CD, but the thing is, buffing it would break it aswell.
I can already see Slayers jumping through half the map to rezz teammates … oh and the community who is “annoyed” that a player isnt waiting for them.
The waystalker discussion about this still haunts me …
Yes many of the weapons are less effective in v2 than in v1. Like your example of the 2 handed hammer, if I remember correctly it hit an infinite amount of targets in v1, but doesn’t do that in v2 even though v2 has more enemies to kill. Shields are in desperate need of a buff and many of the other weapons also require similar treatment. And like you are saying about slayer, he is a very strong melee class and a good example of how others should be alongside unchained, but sometimes he barely gets to do anything which is the problem I have. Melee simply isn’t on par with ranged as ranged can be used in almost every situation and it will be just as effective with lower risk and higher reward.
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