Melee is a really fun mechanic, but often feels like a great risk to low reward given how long parry now lingers, this is extremely frustrating as some times you actually successfully bait out a parry, wait out the blue glow effect, but get punished anyway. And with rebuttal being a niche, but crazy powerful counter to any melee characters aside from those with access to stuns, there should be a way to overcome this.
Melee cancelling is a mechanic, and currently its most accessible use is fleetfoot a T2 item with a long enough cooldown that in lane phase its not super viable for the melee cancel itself; I suggest adding a T1 active who's entire point IS to melee cancel, to complete the rock-paper-scissors dynamic of the melee system against T1 rebuttal.
Feint - T1 Weapon
Passive: +[10]% melee damage, +[5]% debuff resistance, debuff resistance also applies to being parried
Active (12s CD): Cancels your current heavy melee and lunges you back; If an enemy within [3] meters is parrying within the ~0.5s window of using this item, the target's parry ends, you restore 1 stamina then perform a feinted heavy melee.
Feinted Heavy Melee: No wind up, and deals +25% damage. Sets item cooldown to 5s on hit
Numbers are tweak able, but the intent here is so that you heavy melee in, and use the active to cancel the melee attack; Refunding a stamina I think is good because it only works IF the enemy chooses to parry, giving you an opportunity to chase or retreat as needed. Melee resistance reduced should be slightly less than the bonus damage given by rebuttal, otherwise it will create the same imbalance as is currently in game, only now in melee's favor. Lastly, parry specifically ignores debuff resistance, but an item that lets you overcome that would be good; theres also no T1 item that currently offers debuff resistance, so 10% feels small enough to start off with given the next lowest item is reducer at 25%. The small dash backwards lets you disengage even if the target does not parry, but otherwise simply wastes the ability.
Visually, the player should glow orange or in some way flash to indicate when feint is performed, orange/yellow makes the most sense since the melee itself is a similar color and parry is blue. I don't think it needs its own animation, but could just be the backwards dash animation with an orange glow. The icon I made a quick mockup in gimp from a random stock image but it just needs to convey the player forgoes their melee, then lunges back in for more.
An item such as this lets players engage with the melee system more openly early on, and reduce some but not all the risk in doing so, similar to rebuttal. I think the item allowing parry stuns to be reduced means some players MAY choose to keep it until late game (again, similar to rebuttal, as it fills a niche no other item does), but due to it being T1 it may not be worth a slot past the early game. Most importantly, it makes the already present melee cancelling accessible as a T1 item rather than requiring fleetfoot as the earliest item that allows you to do so.
This is my first post like this so I'm not sure if its formatted right, let me know what should be rebalanced and any other thoughts
Melee cancelling is a mechanic, and currently its most accessible use is fleetfoot a T2 item with a long enough cooldown that in lane phase its not super viable for the melee cancel itself; I suggest adding a T1 active who's entire point IS to melee cancel, to complete the rock-paper-scissors dynamic of the melee system against T1 rebuttal.
Feint - T1 Weapon
Passive: +[10]% melee damage, +[5]% debuff resistance, debuff resistance also applies to being parried
Active (12s CD): Cancels your current heavy melee and lunges you back; If an enemy within [3] meters is parrying within the ~0.5s window of using this item, the target's parry ends, you restore 1 stamina then perform a feinted heavy melee.
Feinted Heavy Melee: No wind up, and deals +25% damage. Sets item cooldown to 5s on hit
Numbers are tweak able, but the intent here is so that you heavy melee in, and use the active to cancel the melee attack; Refunding a stamina I think is good because it only works IF the enemy chooses to parry, giving you an opportunity to chase or retreat as needed. Melee resistance reduced should be slightly less than the bonus damage given by rebuttal, otherwise it will create the same imbalance as is currently in game, only now in melee's favor. Lastly, parry specifically ignores debuff resistance, but an item that lets you overcome that would be good; theres also no T1 item that currently offers debuff resistance, so 10% feels small enough to start off with given the next lowest item is reducer at 25%. The small dash backwards lets you disengage even if the target does not parry, but otherwise simply wastes the ability.
Visually, the player should glow orange or in some way flash to indicate when feint is performed, orange/yellow makes the most sense since the melee itself is a similar color and parry is blue. I don't think it needs its own animation, but could just be the backwards dash animation with an orange glow. The icon I made a quick mockup in gimp from a random stock image but it just needs to convey the player forgoes their melee, then lunges back in for more.
An item such as this lets players engage with the melee system more openly early on, and reduce some but not all the risk in doing so, similar to rebuttal. I think the item allowing parry stuns to be reduced means some players MAY choose to keep it until late game (again, similar to rebuttal, as it fills a niche no other item does), but due to it being T1 it may not be worth a slot past the early game. Most importantly, it makes the already present melee cancelling accessible as a T1 item rather than requiring fleetfoot as the earliest item that allows you to do so.
This is my first post like this so I'm not sure if its formatted right, let me know what should be rebalanced and any other thoughts
