Anti-Parry Melee Item

[technicalwaffle]

A lot of melee builds revolve around heavy melee, and the only mindgame that you can realistically play is just dashing around and about enemies trying to get them to parry. Though that's effective enough right now, I feel like this kind of interplay would get a little parry-skewed as people just get better at the game. Heavy melee can pretty realistically be reactively parried, so as the general playerbase gets better I feel like the risk of heavy melee would be far too high for its reward.

I'm not sure if the devs are just waiting for this general skill curve to even out before making changes to the system, but I think adding a new layer to heavy melees with some sort of anti-parry item would be interesting. Since most disabling interactions in this game are governed by item counterplay, I feel like it would be fitting to use your economy to buy anti-parry items. Some suggestions below:

Shock Absorber - 3000 souls (Vitality)
+Health
+Melee Damage
+Stamina
Passive: Reduces parry stun duration by 50%. Gain bullet shields when you get parried.

This is designed to be more of a reactive buy than a proactive one. The idea is that the base stats are still pretty good for most melee builds but you would want to spec into this one specifically if you're looking to either take isolated fights more often where opponents are more likely to parry you or are getting parried often in general.


Crushing Blow - 6,300 souls (Weapon)
+Health
+Bullet Armor
+Melee Damage
Active: Your next Heavy Melee is 25% slower, deals bonus damage, and cannot be parried.
Bonus Damage - 20% of opponent's missing health
Cooldown - 20 seconds

Once you use this item, your next heavy melee will cause your fist to glow red and play a unique sfx to indicate its usage. Since this one's a 6,300 item, it acts as more of a capstone proactive buy to round out melee builds or fit nicely into up-close melee ones. The bonus damage scaling off missing health helps add some depth into its usage, as it can be used as a guaranteed first strike or held as a finisher to keep enemies guessing.

 

[MIJAMIJAMIJA]

Parry is there for a reason, melee hits hard as a truck and if you remove the threat of a parry it becomes way too overpowering. I know abrams players generally have forgotten they have a gun, but you have a gun. You can shoot people with it while they parry, then go back to your melee spamming.

An item that nerfs parry seems absurd. In that case why not an item that nerfs enemy melee too? +50% melee resist, enemy who melees you are slowed for 60%. That doesn't sound very fun to you, as an Abrams player I am assuming? Probably because it wouldnt be, in the same sense an item that removes a necessary tool to deal with abrams melee spammers also wouldnt be very fun for people.

The Crushing Blow item seems on the surface fine though. Expensive items can be a bit BS, part of a moba, and a single choreographed heavy melee thats unparryable is a lot more sensible to deal with than actually nerfing other players parry for 3k.

 

[jzf]

An item that nerfs parry seems absurd.

An active item that invalidates damage seems absurd...
An active item that invalidates CC seems absurd...
An active item that invalidates active items seems absurd...

Absurd is what we're here for. Welcome the Cursed Apple

 

[technicalwaffle]

Parry is there for a reason, melee hits hard as a truck and if you remove the threat of a parry it becomes way too overpowering. I know abrams players generally have forgotten they have a gun, but you have a gun. You can shoot people with it while they parry, then go back to your melee spamming.

I played abrams for a few games cuz I was curious about the melee build and made this post from my observations while playing him. The main advantage melee Abrams has over other other characters trying to go melee is his ability to completely ignore the parry mechanic. Quite literally the only time you SHOULD be heavy meleeing is right after a wall stun or ult stun. Every other case is very VERY situational from what I've experienced.

This brings me to my main gripe with the melee/parry interaction. I might be completely off the mark but it seems like the intention behind melee specific items was a path towards pressure-drawing rushdown tools that force enemies to interact and pay attention in a different way than just a gun dps build. Whereas gun builds forced you to find cover or win the dps contest, melee builds were particularly punishing against channeled abilities because they always out-matched whatever value they were putting out and forced enemies to stop them to parry. This kind of interaction is GREAT and I think this is a great niche for melee builds to fulfill. It drags the build away from full damage to more of a disruptor role that really forces interaction. The problem right now though is that the risk of being parried right now far outweights the rewards of landing that heavy melee. A big chunk of damage is in my opinion worse than a 2 second stun and lowered melee resist during that time. In 90% of cases you're basically going to get -100% value from getting parried because you're going to get heavy meleed back at pretty much the same damage you dealt to you opponent, all while being stunned.

This is not to say that counterplay to heavy melee is bad. I think counterplay is extremely important for something as strong as heavy melee. If a tool this strong exists that has to match the value of channeled abilities, the risk has to be high as a baseline, but I think this is where this interaction's similarities with other interactions in the game ends. Every single other form of agency in the game is able to be mitigated somehow by itemization, and melee/parry agency is very skewed towards the player performing the parry. Even if you intentionally miss heavy melee, you're still at a disadvantage until your ENEMY messes up, which I feel like is the main imbalance to address here.

Shock Absorber (very intentionally) doesn't remove the counterplay completely, but mitigates it so that you have more situations where the risk of being parried is more equal to the reward of landing the melee. I do admit the added bullet shields might be too overboard, since those are a positive net gain kind of unrelated to direct mitigation, so if I were to do a second pass on that item I'd probably remove it completely or change it to something less directly rewarding.