Melee is...lukewarm?

[Asherogar]

I completed almost all currently available content, just need to clean up the left bottom part to get the last 3 achievements, but the game for the last few hours felt like a chore and I don't want to sour my experience with a game, better just come back after some patches. I did all the game from start to finish with 1H weapon + Shield and half-assed backup bow to deal with flying enemies. So I fought against every single enemy multiple times and in every possible situation.

Now I want to go into detail about every aspect of the game from the point of "pure melee" character with 1H weapon and shield.

1. Enemies are too tanky.

That's probably the most universal problem on every stage of the game and especially prevalent later on where you can't just bruteforce with overlevel and overwhelming stats. Interestingly, it's a result of several other problems and root of a bunch of others. Let's start with why the enemies are tanky:

I. Too much health.

That's the obvious one. Trash enemies are generally fine, they die in 3-4 hits if we count only HP, but elites are extremely obnoxious, but I will talk about each one later, because certain other mechanics and nuiances make them truly unbearable.

II. Block multiplies enemies tankiness.

If the trash mob, let's say vukhar, takes 4 hits to die, it will also take ~4 hits to break his block. So now he literally doubled his already big health bar and you need at least 8 hits to kill him. That's assuming a good build and up-to-date equipment. Doesn't sound that bad.

But the same applies to the elite shield guy too. He has truly massive HP bar, ~infinite poise bar and constantly blocks. Killing them is a massive chore and they drop nothing, they have a drop table of a trash fell enemy like a pikeman for some ungodly reason. I have every single +poise dmg from the skill tree I can get and the only reason why I sometimes manage to break their poise is because their HP pools is on par with bosses. And the elite with a sword is not much better. At least their poise bar is only ~half infinite.

Poise bars in general make no sense as they are now, trash mobs can block a few hits at most, but when they die to a few hits, those few wasted ones are very impactful on their general survivability. Elites are just insanely overtuned, their poise bar is so massive that you maybe break it when the enemy is already below 10% HP.

Either poise bars need to be filled with normal hits too, or they need to be massively cut down.

Now, what this tankiness results into:

III. Excessive wear on weapons.

I keep with me 2 weapons and even then I multiple times run in a situation where I simply run out of durability on both. And that's with me using backup bow against flying enemies.

Simply because enemies are too tanky and you need way too much hits to kill them, your weapons break too fast. I don't know if devs need to tweak weapon durability or just fixing bloated HP pulls will do the trick, but it is currently a problem.

My weapon has 300 durability, I killed 2 shield elites, no trash mobs, just 2 shield guys. My weapon lost ~50% durability. If every hits reduces it by 1, then I literally spend 150 hits to kill just 2 enemies. With top gear and endgame food and skill tree.

IV. Combat is too simplistic and repetetive.

Spam LMB and occasionaly hold RMB to block and get out of stunlock. All 1H weapons animations are identical, there's no special strikes or variation, different weapons have a functionality of a skin.

And general tankiness of mobs makes it much worse, because now you spend way too much time swinging at one enemy. In Valheim combat is not that much deeper, but enemies are much softer and and hit harder, so your actions whether offensive or defensive asre more impactful.

There needs to be either actual different weapons or maybe some actual skills and special strikes, instead of current garbage.

2. TOO. MANY. FLYING. ENEMIES.

Remember I whined about enemies being too tanky? Yeah, now they're flying too. By the time you reach desert, half of the enemy line-up decided to say "f you" to melee and ascended from this sinful ground.

Usually, devs make flying enemies pretty fragile, even in games where everyone can shoot the air, like Borderlands. But here for some reason everything with ability to fly also has a dump truck worth of HP. And you can't deal damage with your melee weapon to a flying enemy, unless there's some wonky hitbox clip.

Those flying enemies like fell mage are balanced around you having a full set of up-to-date armor, top tier bow, top tier arrows and a full skill tree, all boosting your damage. You have it, boosting your melee damage, which you can't deal to a flying enemy. You pull out your crappy bow and deal 1/3 of a damage that dedicated ranged DD character does.

There must be way to deal with it for melee character too. For example, make it so weakpoint shots do a microstun to an enemy and it falls to the ground. You still need to use your bow, but with well-placed shot you don't need to worry about boosting your ranged damage. Or let me spend my stamina and yank enemy to the ground with my hook.

Give. Me. Tools/Options. To work with.

3. Parry is meaningless.

Place a well-timed block and you will parry an enemy, dealing some poise damage and...and what? That's it. Parrying trash mobs is pointless, because it's simpler and faster to just whack them a few more times until they die. Parrying elites is meaningless, because you're risking to get a solid hit in the face, instead of safely blocking it. Even if you succeed, there's no benefit. The damage to poise is negligible compared to the size of a poise bar for an elite enemy and if there's any bonus damage, it's so low, I haven't even noticed it. You can't even counterstrike the enemy properly, because while it's stuck in short stagger animation, you're stuck in parry animation.

There's a skill tree effect that doubles melee damage to an enemy for 2 seconds after you break their poise. Why is it not a default effect for parry? And instead of atrocious mistake like Bash, do an automatic charge hit to a parried enemy with a guaranteed crit.

Block completely nullifies the attack, free and requires no timing or skill to use. It's infinitely superior to trying to boost your ego with parry. I don't know if block is currently broken, but I never got my poise broken and never even noticed any stamina drain from blocking.

4. Animations are way too long and restrictive.

I didn't find any proper animation cancels. Usually, to make the movement feel more responsive and fast-paced, animations have points where you're able to start another move or stop the animation prematurely. I don't think it's being done here at all. The easiest to notice it is felling axe. After the hit you're stuck for a whole second, where you can't do anything. You're not able to interrupt animation earlier to change the direction if you start hitting in the wrong one. And it feels real bad. There surely should be ways to cancel out the overly dramatic swings to start moving or raise your shield.

5. Melee skill tree is a mess.

I'm not going to dwell too much on this one, because even melee part of skill tree deserves a whole separate review on it and I hope the whole tree is more or less a placeholder and will receive an overhaul, but i will point out a few pain points:

I. Melee skills.

Merciless strike is a joke, why it doesn't have i-frames? On top of it, you need to break enemy poise first to even use it and I already described all the problems with poise. By the time you do so, enemy is either already dead or has less than 10% HP. And health orbs from merciless kills is a separate perk deep into the tree.

Evasion strike is an another anecdote. You need to spend a bunch of stamine to roll, then you enable slow-mo and epically...deal a normal strike to an enemy. Running towards the enemy is literally faster, spends less stamina, you're less vulnerable and instead of epic slow-mo you can hit enemy 2-3 times and deal far more damage.

Just make it a dash/charge towards enemy, activated if you attack while running and enemy is in range. You spend some stamina, like on a roll, do a very fast dash, deal some good damage to an enemy hit and stun them for 0.5 seconds. That's it, you have fun and useful skill.

Jump strike at least has some use. With 2H weapon you're not going to notice it being slow too much and the skill has an actual multiplicator on it's damage. It just needs some polish like making the animation faster and not nullfiyng momentum on use.

II. Melee nodes.

Node placement is wacky. Jump strike makes sense, it's close to 2H tree and adjacent to Double jump and nove that boost dmg when you do double jump.

But "Tank" (oh god, this name is awful. Change it to "knight" or "sentinel", "paladin" anything, it's a slang and it's completely out of place with other branch names like "trickster", "ranger" or "warrior") has no nodes to shield? In fact stuff like Bash (aside from being some sick joke on devs part) and increased poise damage from parry are all over the place.

Boosts to specific damage types are in 1H tree. This tree also has a crit node that works on all melee damage, but 2H weapons tree has an additional crit node for 2H weapons only.

Strenght keystone locked behind 2H keystone, so you're out of luck if you go with 1H weapon, you can only gen some constitution.

Battle Heal is a mandatory node for any melee and it's in a magic tree? On top of it, locked behind Evasion attack (why it's in magic tree, instead of ranger?) and a dead end, because all nodes after it are either magic weapons focused or for mana recovery.

It's such a mess.

6. Some enemy types/attacks are too anti-melee.

Flying enemies are obvious, but I moved them to a separate issue already. On top of it there are shroud pods, traps, exploding barrels, exploding bugs. I swear, those bugs are bugged. I died multiple time from them spawning directly under my feet, instantly exploding and one-tapping me. I have 1500 health. How. Matrone and big shroom enemies explode on death too, but they have a ~2 second delay, even if you kill them. And I have no problem with them, if you got hit by it, it's a skill issue. Do the same with shroud pods and red bugs.

A lot of boss attacks are unfair for melee. Monstrosity fires this shroud mortar that creates a massive field. If you're ranged, you literally do not care, this does nothing to you. Then the shotgun attack. At range you can walk out of it, in melee you're stunlocked, because projectiles have no travel time for melee range. Matrone still will most likely one-shot you with her acid attack, while ranger with a bow can leizurely walk out of it.

7. Damage types do not work.

EDIT: I'm talking physical damage types only

Why do they work in Valheim? Enemies are either vulnerable, neutral or resistant to specific damage types. You can craft different weapon types and those weapons will deal a specific type of damage. So you have control over what damage you're dealing.

Enshrouded: here's your sword, it deal equal parts of Cutting, Piersing and Blunt damage. On top of it, it Poisons and deals bonus Shroud damage. Enjoy. You hit an enemy with it and see Effective and Resistant at the same time. That's not how it supposed to work. I still have absolutely no idea what damage types are and how they work, but I can list you off what enemies are weak to what damage in Valheim and I last played this game like more than a year ago.

8. Damage stats are bugged/confusing.

In the capital, where you fight the wyvern, you can find a lvl 25 sword on the third storie of one of the homes. Lucky me, I had the same identical sword, with the same name and dmg type distribution, but level 16. So my sword has 26 damage listed and this new one is 47. That looks like a huge upgrade.

It deals 30% less damage overall.

???

It's the same, identical sword, it deals the same damage types and distribution, it even has identical name and yet, despite almost double the difference in base damage listed, it deals less damage somehow. Less damage, while hitting the same identical enemy.

And stuff like this happens regularly later on too, where weapons with less damage listed sometimes deal far more damage or instead high level weapons hitting like wet noodles.

And I can't even craft weapons with specific damage types to try and learn about enemies weaknesses.



In the end, I still completed all the content in the game with 1H melee build, so it certanly viable at least. But there's a lot of rough places that require polish. I will be back after some patches for sure, but for now time to try something else.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

There's some good observations here. However:
Point #7 is just wrong. Damage types DO work. That, however, does not really factor into melee, as resistance/weakness to specific melee damage types doesn't appear very often. Mountain Dew skeletons are basically the only enemy I can think of off the top of my head that have "unusual" melee resistances, and they're rare.

Before trying to argue that your anecdotal experience 100% guarantees damage types don't work: Play mage from the start of the game to the end with only a single element of spell/wand, then come back.

Point #8:
The level 25 sword in the capital is a bugged spawn. It's pretty well known. It's actually a level 25 sword and functions really well in that capacity provided you upgrade it.

That said, weapon damage values only show the base damage of the weapon, which is tied to level. If you have a max-upgraded legendary melee weapon that started at level 16, there's a good chance that the now-level 21 weapon does far more damage than the non-upgraded level 25 sword because - and this should come as no surprise - the upgrade bonuses on melee weapons is almost always damage of some sort or another.

[Asherogar]

Originally posted by Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

There's some good observations here. However:
Point #7 is just wrong. Damage types DO work. That, however, does not really factor into melee, as resistance/weakness to specific melee damage types doesn't appear very often. Mountain Dew skeletons are basically the only enemy I can think of off the top of my head that have "unusual" melee resistances, and they're rare.

Before trying to argue that your anecdotal experience 100% guarantees damage types don't work: Play mage from the start of the game to the end with only a single element of spell/wand, then come back.

My bad. While I mentioned melee specifically, I should've said I'm talking about physical damage only. Most wands/spells i've seen deal primarly or exclusively one type of damage and you can actually choose what damage you deal, so the system works as intended, just like in Valheim.

Physical damage meanwhile is a confusing mess. I know only one single weapon in the game that does one damage type and it's craftable club. All other weapons deal a combination of 2 damage types at least. And I'm still clueless to what this damage types do and how they interact with different enemies.

Originally posted by Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

Point #8:
The level 25 sword in the capital is a bugged spawn. It's pretty well known. It's actually a level 25 sword and functions really well in that capacity provided you upgrade it.

That said, weapon damage values only show the base damage of the weapon, which is tied to level. If you have a max-upgraded legendary melee weapon that started at level 16, there's a good chance that the now-level 21 weapon does far more damage than the non-upgraded level 25 sword because - and this should come as no surprise - the upgrade bonuses on melee weapons is almost always damage of some sort or another.

That's the thing. I have a weapon with 30 damage, i enchance it with +9 blunt damage 2 times and it's "Damage" stat increases to 35. ??? I don't understand what this vague "Damage" means. Why it doesn't increase properly with upgrades, how it correlates to an actual damage I deal? Why the legendary fully enchanced lvl 21 bow has ~20 "Power", while lvl 16 pine bow has 27 and hits harder, despite having only 0.6s draw time?

Would be nice to have an actual damage listed instead, based on your bonuses and current equipment/stats. Otherwise I feel blind choosing a new weapon, because "Damage" stat is completely arbitrary. Trying to pick a new weapon is a lottery.

[artofwar]

I also just finished all available content using only Melee, with the exception of using wands to hit flying enemies and to cheese Scavenger Matrons from high ground (because otherwise I would get one-shot killed by the puke attack).

Personally, I did not find enemies to be too tanky. But, I also invested almost all of my points into increasing melee damage.

However, I do agree that combat is too simple and repetitive. I also would prefer crafted weapons and armor to be better, because after the first part of the game it seemed like "optimal" game play was to just farm chests until I got a good 1-handed weapon from RNG.

Edit:

Originally posted by Asherogar:

That's the thing. I have a weapon with 30 damage, i enchance it with +9 blunt damage 2 times and it's "Damage" stat increases to 35. ??? I don't understand what this vague "Damage" means. Why it doesn't increase properly with upgrades, how it correlates to an actual damage I deal? Why the legendary fully enchanced lvl 21 bow has ~20 "Power", while lvl 16 pine bow has 27 and hits harder, despite having only 0.6s draw time?

My understanding from my (minimal) testing is that the bonus damage from upgrades does not get factored into the main damage weapon stat that is displayed, but the damage does get added when you attack.

So a 25 base damage weapon with three +7 blunt damage upgrades will actually do a total of 46 damage per hit (ignoring resistances), while a 30 base damage weapon with two +7 blunt damage upgrades will do 44 damage per hit.

Separately, all weapons get a small increase to base damage when you upgrade them, even if the upgrade is +defense, for example.

[Asherogar]

Originally posted by artofwar:

I also just finished all available content using only Melee, with the exception of using wands to hit flying enemies and to cheese Scavenger Matrons from high ground (because otherwise I would get one-shot killed by the puke attack).

Personally, I did not find enemies to be too tanky. But, I also invested almost all of my points into increasing melee damage.

However, I do agree that combat is too simple and repetitive. I also would prefer crafted weapons and armor to be better, because after the first part of the game it seemed like "optimal" game play was to just farm chests until I got a good 1-handed weapon from RNG.

Probably my damage is not as good as I thought, because I didn't understand how stats on weapons work and this lvl25 sword in capital confused me immensely.

Still, IMO, while HP bars are more or less okay (aside from elite shielder and flying enemies, those are way overtuned), block drags the fight out to an obnoxious degree. There should be poise damage added to regular attacks or poise bars nerfed or even both. That is just not fun to whack two shield guys for 10 minutes straight with 0 interactability or options and then find out you spent 150 durability on your weapon of just two enemies.

[....]

I actually like the combat - the only thing i think should change is that many of the things that are skills right now should be standard and they should add real special moves as skills.

And yes - combat without the skills is a bit boring. And in general the enemies should be harder - the game feels best when enemies are about 3-5 levels above. Hopefully we can mod the game soon or get difficulty options.

[finalfantasy]

Yes... i assumed relatively early in the game that melee is underpowered... now in the "endgame" i'd call melee as completely broken.

Damageoutput is far to low in general. Durability of weapons is pita. Blocking is almost meaningless.
And finally you can not target at all. Like with the pickaxe and the axe. The pickaxe has the circle showing you where you are targeting and you also hit there. The axe in opposite only hits directly forward. You can't hit a target below or above you. Melee weapons seem to work the same way. Fighting a rat on stairs is pure pain, because most times you just swing over them, because you can't aim down. Same applies to everything that is flying. Even if the wyverns in the dessert are flying directly in front of you, you just swing below them and don't hit em at all. So generally as a melee fighter you are wrecked against everything that is flying.
Not even mentioning that without being able to aim at all, you can't even do "headshots" or similar.

In general i miss damage(types) in the stats. For a sword, the bars show ~50% cutting damage, 25% blunt damage and 25% shroud damage. I guess that's only for the base damage. Because upgrading which may add another +9 fire damage doesn't even appear on the bars.
Also no display anywhere including the character skills. So my fighter has +10% + +20% cutting damage skill. The used weapon has a base damage of 47 and a damage distribution of only 50% being cutting damage. So i have to do the math on myself and estimate i do it correctly. So basically 47 + ((47/2) * 1.3) = 77.5?
Also i do not know if e.g. a sword deals additional fire damage, would +fire damage skills from the mage branches also increase that for my melee weapon, or do they only apply to staffs?

[Fherrit]

I don't have nearly the analysis summary the OP does, but yes, melee is unsatisfying. I'm currently playing 2H barbarian melee with a fair bit of Survival and Tank. Nearly everything can break through my blocks to stun me, can interrupt my attacks, and yet, I can't do anything to interrupt their attacks. I'm literally *forced* to stand with a block, and while I prevent damage, I can't do anything to interrupt them. Its *very* one sided.

That's the regular enemies, if I run into 2 of the dual wield poison cleaver wielders, I have to run and kite with bow. They attack so quickly that I have no choice but to block and attack 1x to their chain spam, and their attacks drain a hefty amount of stamina. If its just one, it's manageable , but if its two, I again have to do cheese kiting.

Ranged has a very clear, and decisive advantage. Not to say that you can't finish the game solo playing melee, but it comes down to effort and satisfaction. Melee flat out sucks compared to ranged, be that magical or bow. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the dev's either hate melee, or have never played as such. The amount of damage that magic or bow can do vs melee is ***obviously*** disproportionate. And the fact that if you don't jump cheese encounters, you'll gimp yourself.

Now that said, I recognize that its early access and is designed to be tuned based on feedback. Given that, the devs need to *seriously* sit down and analyze the discrepancy between melee play style vs range. Its bad enough that you're downright masochistic playing as melee.

Even if you're not ranged/magic, combat is stale and simplistic. Either you're fanning the air with a wand, spamming bow shots (and having to farm arrow mats for *way* too long), or you're playing supbar melee that routinely gets interrupted, stunned, and tagged for large hits. Its less about how effective ranged is with taking chunks of health, and more about the huge gap between melee and ranged/magic. Opponents take a lot more effort to take out via melee, anyone who claims otherwise is just being disingenuous. I'm not advocating any nerfs mind you, but the discrepancy is just glaring.

The game has potential, but combat is so unsatisfying and repetitive to the point that if you're not beguiled with the building, the game just winds up being boring and shallow. Sorry, hate that say that, but even vanilla Skyrim combat is vastly superior to Enshrouded. While I get it, its early access and all that, the game just doesn't engage me enough. I'm shelving it till they figure out how to make combat less of a one sided snorefest.

[Asherogar]

Originally posted by Fherrit:

I don't have nearly the analysis summary the OP does, but yes, melee is unsatisfying. I'm currently playing 2H barbarian melee with a fair bit of Survival and Tank. Nearly everything can break through my blocks to stun me, can interrupt my attacks, and yet, I can't do anything to interrupt their attacks. I'm literally *forced* to stand with a block, and while I prevent damage, I can't do anything to interrupt them. Its *very* one sided.

Oh, that's what I forgot. Yea, stagger and poise in this game is super one-sided. Enemies are unstoppable juggernauts, whose actions cannot be interrupted by anything. Meanwhile you're getting staggered from enemy sneezing in your general direction. It goes to the point of small scorpions in the desert stunning you for 2 seconds on their basic attacks. That's just ridiculous, I'm wearing heavy armor and have 1500 HP, what stun?!

[Outlaw Mugen]

Completely agree ( especially with Parry being useless, skills like dodge attack costing too much stamina while not providing any damage boost on top of missing sometimes.... )

Bottom line : Combat needs rework. It's way too simplistic, floaty and button mashy.

[Jollykitty]

Originally posted by Asherogar:

I completed almost all currently available content, just need to clean up the left bottom part to get the last 3 achievements, but the game for the last few hours felt like a chore and I don't want to sour my experience with a game, better just come back after some patches. I did all the game from start to finish with 1H weapon + Shield and half-assed backup bow to deal with flying enemies. So I fought against every single enemy multiple times and in every possible situation.

Now I want to go into detail about every aspect of the game from the point of "pure melee" character with 1H weapon and shield.

1. Enemies are too tanky.

That's probably the most universal problem on every stage of the game and especially prevalent later on where you can't just bruteforce with overlevel and overwhelming stats. Interestingly, it's a result of several other problems and root of a bunch of others. Let's start with why the enemies are tanky:

I. Too much health.

That's the obvious one. Trash enemies are generally fine, they die in 3-4 hits if we count only HP, but elites are extremely obnoxious, but I will talk about each one later, because certain other mechanics and nuiances make them truly unbearable.

II. Block multiplies enemies tankiness.

If the trash mob, let's say vukhar, takes 4 hits to die, it will also take ~4 hits to break his block. So now he literally doubled his already big health bar and you need at least 8 hits to kill him. That's assuming a good build and up-to-date equipment. Doesn't sound that bad.

But the same applies to the elite shield guy too. He has truly massive HP bar, ~infinite poise bar and constantly blocks. Killing them is a massive chore and they drop nothing, they have a drop table of a trash fell enemy like a pikeman for some ungodly reason. I have every single +poise dmg from the skill tree I can get and the only reason why I sometimes manage to break their poise is because their HP pools is on par with bosses. And the elite with a sword is not much better. At least their poise bar is only ~half infinite.

Poise bars in general make no sense as they are now, trash mobs can block a few hits at most, but when they die to a few hits, those few wasted ones are very impactful on their general survivability. Elites are just insanely overtuned, their poise bar is so massive that you maybe break it when the enemy is already below 10% HP.

Either poise bars need to be filled with normal hits too, or they need to be massively cut down.

Now, what this tankiness results into:

III. Excessive wear on weapons.

I keep with me 2 weapons and even then I multiple times run in a situation where I simply run out of durability on both. And that's with me using backup bow against flying enemies.

Simply because enemies are too tanky and you need way too much hits to kill them, your weapons break too fast. I don't know if devs need to tweak weapon durability or just fixing bloated HP pulls will do the trick, but it is currently a problem.

My weapon has 300 durability, I killed 2 shield elites, no trash mobs, just 2 shield guys. My weapon lost ~50% durability. If every hits reduces it by 1, then I literally spend 150 hits to kill just 2 enemies. With top gear and endgame food and skill tree.

IV. Combat is too simplistic and repetetive.

Spam LMB and occasionaly hold RMB to block and get out of stunlock. All 1H weapons animations are identical, there's no special strikes or variation, different weapons have a functionality of a skin.

And general tankiness of mobs makes it much worse, because now you spend way too much time swinging at one enemy. In Valheim combat is not that much deeper, but enemies are much softer and and hit harder, so your actions whether offensive or defensive asre more impactful.

There needs to be either actual different weapons or maybe some actual skills and special strikes, instead of current garbage.

2. TOO. MANY. FLYING. ENEMIES.

Remember I whined about enemies being too tanky? Yeah, now they're flying too. By the time you reach desert, half of the enemy line-up decided to say "f you" to melee and ascended from this sinful ground.

Usually, devs make flying enemies pretty fragile, even in games where everyone can shoot the air, like Borderlands. But here for some reason everything with ability to fly also has a dump truck worth of HP. And you can't deal damage with your melee weapon to a flying enemy, unless there's some wonky hitbox clip.

Those flying enemies like fell mage are balanced around you having a full set of up-to-date armor, top tier bow, top tier arrows and a full skill tree, all boosting your damage. You have it, boosting your melee damage, which you can't deal to a flying enemy. You pull out your crappy bow and deal 1/3 of a damage that dedicated ranged DD character does.

There must be way to deal with it for melee character too. For example, make it so weakpoint shots do a microstun to an enemy and it falls to the ground. You still need to use your bow, but with well-placed shot you don't need to worry about boosting your ranged damage. Or let me spend my stamina and yank enemy to the ground with my hook.

Give. Me. Tools/Options. To work with.

3. Parry is meaningless.

Place a well-timed block and you will parry an enemy, dealing some poise damage and...and what? That's it. Parrying trash mobs is pointless, because it's simpler and faster to just whack them a few more times until they die. Parrying elites is meaningless, because you're risking to get a solid hit in the face, instead of safely blocking it. Even if you succeed, there's no benefit. The damage to poise is negligible compared to the size of a poise bar for an elite enemy and if there's any bonus damage, it's so low, I haven't even noticed it. You can't even counterstrike the enemy properly, because while it's stuck in short stagger animation, you're stuck in parry animation.

There's a skill tree effect that doubles melee damage to an enemy for 2 seconds after you break their poise. Why is it not a default effect for parry? And instead of atrocious mistake like Bash, do an automatic charge hit to a parried enemy with a guaranteed crit.

Block completely nullifies the attack, free and requires no timing or skill to use. It's infinitely superior to trying to boost your ego with parry. I don't know if block is currently broken, but I never got my poise broken and never even noticed any stamina drain from blocking.

4. Animations are way too long and restrictive.

I didn't find any proper animation cancels. Usually, to make the movement feel more responsive and fast-paced, animations have points where you're able to start another move or stop the animation prematurely. I don't think it's being done here at all. The easiest to notice it is felling axe. After the hit you're stuck for a whole second, where you can't do anything. You're not able to interrupt animation earlier to change the direction if you start hitting in the wrong one. And it feels real bad. There surely should be ways to cancel out the overly dramatic swings to start moving or raise your shield.

5. Melee skill tree is a mess.

I'm not going to dwell too much on this one, because even melee part of skill tree deserves a whole separate review on it and I hope the whole tree is more or less a placeholder and will receive an overhaul, but i will point out a few pain points:

I. Melee skills.

Merciless strike is a joke, why it doesn't have i-frames? On top of it, you need to break enemy poise first to even use it and I already described all the problems with poise. By the time you do so, enemy is either already dead or has less than 10% HP. And health orbs from merciless kills is a separate perk deep into the tree.

Evasion strike is an another anecdote. You need to spend a bunch of stamine to roll, then you enable slow-mo and epically...deal a normal strike to an enemy. Running towards the enemy is literally faster, spends less stamina, you're less vulnerable and instead of epic slow-mo you can hit enemy 2-3 times and deal far more damage.

Just make it a dash/charge towards enemy, activated if you attack while running and enemy is in range. You spend some stamina, like on a roll, do a very fast dash, deal some good damage to an enemy hit and stun them for 0.5 seconds. That's it, you have fun and useful skill.

Jump strike at least has some use. With 2H weapon you're not going to notice it being slow too much and the skill has an actual multiplicator on it's damage. It just needs some polish like making the animation faster and not nullfiyng momentum on use.

II. Melee nodes.

Node placement is wacky. Jump strike makes sense, it's close to 2H tree and adjacent to Double jump and nove that boost dmg when you do double jump.

But "Tank" (oh god, this name is awful. Change it to "knight" or "sentinel", "paladin" anything, it's a slang and it's completely out of place with other branch names like "trickster", "ranger" or "warrior") has no nodes to shield? In fact stuff like Bash (aside from being some sick joke on devs part) and increased poise damage from parry are all over the place.

Boosts to specific damage types are in 1H tree. This tree also has a crit node that works on all melee damage, but 2H weapons tree has an additional crit node for 2H weapons only.

Strenght keystone locked behind 2H keystone, so you're out of luck if you go with 1H weapon, you can only gen some constitution.

Battle Heal is a mandatory node for any melee and it's in a magic tree? On top of it, locked behind Evasion attack (why it's in magic tree, instead of ranger?) and a dead end, because all nodes after it are either magic weapons focused or for mana recovery.

It's such a mess.

6. Some enemy types/attacks are too anti-melee.

Flying enemies are obvious, but I moved them to a separate issue already. On top of it there are shroud pods, traps, exploding barrels, exploding bugs. I swear, those bugs are bugged. I died multiple time from them spawning directly under my feet, instantly exploding and one-tapping me. I have 1500 health. How. Matrone and big shroom enemies explode on death too, but they have a ~2 second delay, even if you kill them. And I have no problem with them, if you got hit by it, it's a skill issue. Do the same with shroud pods and red bugs.

A lot of boss attacks are unfair for melee. Monstrosity fires this shroud mortar that creates a massive field. If you're ranged, you literally do not care, this does nothing to you. Then the shotgun attack. At range you can walk out of it, in melee you're stunlocked, because projectiles have no travel time for melee range. Matrone still will most likely one-shot you with her acid attack, while ranger with a bow can leizurely walk out of it.

7. Damage types do not work.

EDIT: I'm talking physical damage types only

Why do they work in Valheim? Enemies are either vulnerable, neutral or resistant to specific damage types. You can craft different weapon types and those weapons will deal a specific type of damage. So you have control over what damage you're dealing.

Enshrouded: here's your sword, it deal equal parts of Cutting, Piersing and Blunt damage. On top of it, it Poisons and deals bonus Shroud damage. Enjoy. You hit an enemy with it and see Effective and Resistant at the same time. That's not how it supposed to work. I still have absolutely no idea what damage types are and how they work, but I can list you off what enemies are weak to what damage in Valheim and I last played this game like more than a year ago.

8. Damage stats are bugged/confusing.

In the capital, where you fight the wyvern, you can find a lvl 25 sword on the third storie of one of the homes. Lucky me, I had the same identical sword, with the same name and dmg type distribution, but level 16. So my sword has 26 damage listed and this new one is 47. That looks like a huge upgrade.

It deals 30% less damage overall.

???

It's the same, identical sword, it deals the same damage types and distribution, it even has identical name and yet, despite almost double the difference in base damage listed, it deals less damage somehow. Less damage, while hitting the same identical enemy.

And stuff like this happens regularly later on too, where weapons with less damage listed sometimes deal far more damage or instead high level weapons hitting like wet noodles.

And I can't even craft weapons with specific damage types to try and learn about enemies weaknesses.



In the end, I still completed all the content in the game with 1H melee build, so it certanly viable at least. But there's a lot of rough places that require polish. I will be back after some patches for sure, but for now time to try something else.

yeah dont use melee use magic and wands but ehi its erarly access

[Jollykitty]

Originally posted by Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

Point #8:
The level 25 sword in the capital is a bugged spawn. It's pretty well known. It's actually a level 25 sword and functions really well in that capacity provided you upgrade it.

That said, weapon damage values only show the base damage of the weapon, which is tied to level. If you have a max-upgraded legendary melee weapon that started at level 16, there's a good chance that the now-level 21 weapon does far more damage than the non-upgraded level 25 sword because - and this should come as no surprise - the upgrade bonuses on melee weapons is almost always damage of some sort or another.

not upgraded" ok what do you wait for upgrade the lv 25 one ? what prevents you from upgrading the random leggenadry lv 25 sword?

[Jollykitty]

i mean could not be a runes problem cause you find runes everywhere at lv 25

[Jollykitty]

sooooo Skill issue?

[Sgt.JESUS]

Melee is fine, not perfect, and people that said that block is worthless arent using a shield, i block those dual wielding poison bandits all the time and strafe the bastard for some backstabbing.
Every fighter should have a bow in this game, or a wand, for those pesky flyers.
As for the damage types, the bee swarm is killable with the torch but not the sword, as it should, every single furry animal or enemy is resistant to ice damage and vulnerable to fire. Use fire on the shroud enemies and ice on the bandits, working fine.
I agree that parry is hard, i usually attack twice and then raise my shield, against bandits its almost a garanteed parry, works with those wookies too. The problem is the delay, you cannot spam block, or the game would be like sekiro, its a change from most parry mechanics, hard to adapt and since i suck at parry in every soulsgame, i miss most of the time.

[finalfantasy]

Originally posted by Sgt.JESUS:

Melee is fine, not perfect, and people that said that block is worthless arent using a shield,

I do use a shield.
However i more likely meant parry is useless, because...

Originally posted by Sgt.JESUS:

I agree that parry is hard, i usually attack twice and then raise my shield, against bandits its almost a garanteed parry, works with those wookies too. The problem is the delay, you cannot spam block, or the game would be like sekiro, its a change from most parry mechanics.

... of the (random) delay. I sometimes get it right against scavengers, but almost never on better enemies. And the real problem is, if you miss the parry, the enemy smashes almost a whole combo into your face because your character doesn't even do a normal block.

Just regular blocking is an awesome boring mechanic. Hit, block, bit, block.... And then there are enemies like the green scavengers with such fast attack pattern, that you basically can only hit once, at maximum twice between their attacks. You don't even stop their combo if you get behind them and hit them while they are doing their combo.
Then block their combo for 15 seconds and hit again once. And with that and the extremly low melee damage, you need to do this 20 times for a single Lvl30 greenish scavenger to die.
And after 4-5 of these, your weapon is broken. *lol*

Against flying enemies you are wrecked anyway. Just carrying a bow and arrows with you, wasting inventory slots and then still need 15 arrows for a wyvern, because fighter has not a single skill in archery, and so bows are pretty weak for him either.

(little bit exaggregated explained)

I don't have "the best" high end gear yet, but my melee build does like 200 damage with one hit, maybe 250 with "from behind" bonus.
My archer in opposite does like 350-400 damage with a single shot, maybe even double to three times that if scoring a headshot and/or multishot hits.
And the mage stands besides both of them, laughs, throws one fireball into a group of 5 enemies doing 1000 damage to each, basically wipeing out the whole group in one shot. *lol*
It's not only about if it's doable as a fighter but also about balancing against the other "classes". It also doesn't matter if you call a fighter to weak or a mage to strong, if there is such a huge difference, it's just bad balanced.

In early to midgame it was somehow fun to play a fighter in a group. In the endgame it became incredibly... pointless. It's both boring and cheesing together, because the fighter just runs into the enemies, draws their aggro, just blocks everything and waits for the mage to nuke all of them. It's even pointless to attack, because until you kill even just one enemy, the mage nuked them all. The archers/mages don't even need to run, hide, evade, because the tank drew all aggro. *lol*

Earthaura is even pointless, because just 10% less damage is meaningless for the glass canons and they don't stay within the 10m range anyway. Probably would be usefull for a group of fighters, but why would you play even a group of fighters if melee is by far the weakest way to go anyway?

All these bits and pieces together i would not just call melee "not perfect" but simply "broken".