Melee/Shield feedback
I made a quick video of a T6 meteorite on testing, here it is (might still be processing):
Now for some of my feedback on melee. I chose to use a gem sword instead of a lucent one because that’d be the most likely scenario for me in the live universe and also this was a toxic world but the lucent shield use was because I didn’t have a diamond one ready yet. Even unforged, they both feel decent to use.
One of the things I’ve taken away from this is that action speed on shields feels kind of important, as during that small delay between raising the shield to its ready state feels like a very vulnerable state since you can’t attack or use any other item while the shield is going up or down!
This makes it feel a little awkward to use a slower shield (like the rift one, not shown in the video) and having a better look at the skills, I wonder why the Shield Mastery skill doesn’t increase action speed the same way that Melee Weapon Mastery does.
Shield protection against bombs, fall damage, knockbacks generally felt good. Again, the only main issue I felt was with the action speed/ready state delay; it just feels like raising a shield makes you more vulnerable than it should.
Maybe as the animation progresses to its finished state, raising a shield could start providing a (linearly relative to the animation time) portion of its protection during the raising/lowering. So that at 50% of the animation it provides 50% protection. I don’t know if this would be simple to do/add.
In addition, I wonder why there is no Shield Epic, it could be an Epic linked choice between Shield Epic and Melee Weapon Epic, this would make more sense in my mind than the complete absence of a Shield Epic; but like with the Shield Mastery, I think it could/should give an improvement to action speed.
The blink shield is pretty quick at 65 action speed with all the skills, but the rift shield for example at 25 action speed felt very sluggish. 65 is probably just fine as the top-end of the action speed range for a shield but of course forging might be able alleviate the sluggish feel of a heavier shield if they can be forged with action speed (need to check).
The melee weapon cleaving felt very good. Unforged reach seems like it could be better but different weapons have slightly different reaches and at 4m, the diamond sword wasn’t terrible, though it didn’t always feel like it was actually 4m/blocks (but it was in fact working correctly, I checked).
Overall, unforged the weapon felt generally quite decent in terms of damage output; not too slow or too weak. Element boost worked as expected against the relevant creatures. Using the melee weapon against Wildstock and Hoppers felt somewhat dangerous though; unlike with a slingbow it’s not as simple as trying to keep them in a lower ground since the reach is much smaller vs a slingbow/fist.
Using third-person camera for fighting felt weird for me but it’s always been the case. I think that camera view really could do with changes for it to be more useful across the board in fighting situations, since the character blocks so much of the immediate view.
That’s it for now, until I think of other points anyway.
