Glancing Blows dumb down the game

[Undefined]

TL;DR: Go to the "For example" part and read that.

Background: I've been interested in Glancing Blows because I main Blade for melee and the Glancing Blows bonus for Deepcuts T3+ has always intrigued me.

Anyway, it turns out that *nearly* every weapon has Glancing Blows.

What is Glancing Blows, you might ask?

Essentially, it attempts to take into account the weapon's swing into whether you connected when attempting to melee a zombie. This means that your crosshair doesn't have to be aimed at the zombie for you to connect on a melee swing.

HOWEVER, the devs have it completely wrong on many weapons!

Many of the Glancing Blows do not make any sense and actually have their swing projections way off.

For example, in the video below at 3:17 (watch it in slow motion). The red trail is showing us the Glancing Blow and it basically means that your melee attack would connect if the zombie was caught in the path of the trail. As you can see in 3:17, the player is not aiming directly at the zombie when they swing their melee weapon, but their attack still connects because of the Glancing Blow. HOWEVER, if you pay attention to the swing the of the Wooden Club, you will see that it doesn't match the trail of the Glancing Blow. In fact, it doesn't even come close! The Glancing Blow is way longer than the Wooden Club swing animation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbL8PW7vKe4

Oh, and in the case of the sideways swipes, the zombie could be at the very edge of your screen and you'd still connect on a melee swing. Insanity!

Glancing Blows dumbs down the game and turns zombie fights into e-z mode.

I know that they're not a very well known feature of the game, but it turns the game into easy mode because players are "connecting" on attacks that they had no right to connect on.

Personally, I think the trails need to be tweaked to match the weapon swing animation or be disabled altogether.

BTW, I mentioned earlier that nearly every weapon has Glancing Blows enabled on it. The two weapons that don't? Bone Knife and Hunting Knife. Yes, that's correct - two weapons with skills for Glancing Blows (that you pay for) do not have Glancing Blows enabled on them. This means that, for Bone Knife and Hunting Knife, you actually have to have your crosshair on a zombie's hitbox when the swing completes.

[Undefined]

BTW, if you want an example of what Glancing Blows should look like when implemented properly, check out the Spear's Glancing Blow trail at 3:28. THIS is how it should be because it actually comes close to matching the swing animation of the Spear.

[Energy Melons]

This is really timely information for me, personally. I started a new game with the intent of doing mostly blades and sneak attacks, etc. And I read the bit about Glancing Blows in the skill tooltip and wondered what it might be referring to. This must explain why I've felt some melee weapons are "♥♥♥♥ everything in this general direction" while knives are like performing surgery in comparison. lol

See, before I saw this, what I had *thought* Glancing Blows were, was when you strike a zombie and it tanks the hit without flinching or reacting. Similar to "super armor" in fighting games, if you're familiar. This is most noticeable when bonking a helmet wearing zombie, but fatties and lumberjacks also eat hits. There's probably something completely different going on with that, though.

[DthBlayde]

Originally posted by Energy Melons:

This is most noticeable when bonking a helmet wearing zombie, but fatties and lumberjacks also eat hits. There's probably something completely different going on with that, though.

fatties, bikers and lumberjacks are bullet sponges and have the most HP out of the "normal" zeds, so their tankiness is from boosted numbers. Zeds wearing helmets (soldiers, bikers , workers) are not just cosmetic, but actual head armor so their tankiness comes from reduced damage from headshots.

Both would result in even less perceived and actual damage from GB's

[Brevan]

Glancing Blows have been in the game for quite a while. It's worth mentioning that they don't do much damage when they're further from the crosshair-spawned targeting trail (in the video, there are usually areas in the trail where the blows are very close together, I think those showed the areas of full damage, but I'd agree the video showed them inconsistently). I could have sworn there's other videos out there where the Glancing Blows feature was explained fully, but it's been years since I've seen them. In this video, around 2:50 it showed the Glancing Blows trail for Hunting Knife, so I'm not sure what you meant when you said it didn't have one.

You can still try this yourself:
1) Press F1 (bring up the console)
2) Enter `dm` (Debug Mode)
3) Enter `showswings` (View the attack trails)

Power attacks create much bigger attack trails, since they're power attacks.

[onanonehand8]

To paraphrase James Gumb AKA Buffalo Bill, "you puts the X on the head."