As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
My proposed change is this: Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die. You will have full health and 0 shield.
> As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
>
> My proposed change is this: <mark>Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die.</mark> You will have full health and 0 shield.
They tried this with Halo Reach. It was not a well-met change.
They already tried that.
Bleedthrough is necessary because it is very annoying to not get a kill with a melee because they have one bullet worth of damage remaining to strip the shields. However, I do agree that the threshold for a one-hit-kill melee is too high. Perhaps they could try having melee do less damage to health so that more attacks that bleed through don’t kill. The idea, of course, is to do this while making sure that one melee attack still completely strips shields and will still kill an unshielded opponent.
I don’t think they’ll try that again. With default sprint there would be no reason to shoot at mid-to-close range because you can sprint towards the enemy and double melee faster than they can shoot you down.
How about 3 hits to kill from full shields with bleedthrough?
> > As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
> >
> > My proposed change is this: <mark>Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die.</mark> You will have full health and 0 shield.
>
> They tried this with Halo Reach. It was not a well-met change.
Indeed. This was about the only thing that bothered me about Reach, which sucks because I otherwise loved that game completely.
I would highly suggest that if they intend to change core mechanics that remained unchanged for almost the whole series, they test it on a special playlist on Halo 4 before making the kind of error that Reach was subjected to and just shipping a whole new game with experimental mechanics.
Three hit melee might be a bit too nerfed, but if they could configure it for two and a half (resulting in three assuming full shields) that might actually make things a tad more interesting. It’d give you more incentive to fire on someone before getting into a fistfight without breaking anything and would help alleviate rush-beatdown behavior.
Its not the melee that is the problem, its the health.
In every Halo game past CE, shields have had the lion’s share of overall hitpoints. In Halo 3 and Reach the ratio is 70 hitpoints for shields and 45 for health.
Any damage you take your shields makes you much more vulnerable to explosives and melee.
If you want to fix the melee(and grenades for that matter), we need to bring back the equal health and shield ratio that CE had.
Say we have 100/100 shields and health(the specific numbers don’t matter). If we have a melee that does 100 damage, it takes two melee attacks to kill an enemy with full health, but you won’t ever kill someone with full health in one melee as long as they have some shields left.
Unlike the no bleedthrough system in Reach, damage still transfers damage so no one is losing any damage. A player with 10/100 shields/health would be able to survive a melee attack with 0/10 health left. This solution has all the advantages of the Reach system without the drawback of losing ‘leftover’ damage.
This would not affect killtimes in general, but it would make both melee and grenades a lot more survivable.
Nothing is wrong with melee damage in Halo 4. You just so happened to put yourself in that situation to be KO’ed after losing half your shields. That’s not Halo 4’s problem.
> As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
>
> My proposed change is this: Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die. You will have full health and 0 shield.
I wasn’t a fan when they tried this with Reach. The reason being the following situation (among other things).
Let’s say you’re sprinting at me for a melee and I get a couple shots into you with whatever weapon, but don’t break your shields. We then melee each other, and in this case, we are left with the same health.
Now how is that fair exactly? I expended ammo while you didn’t only to end up with the same health as you on the same strength attack.
I would be fine if they just took away melee lunge and made it so that the second hit that connects is faster. It stays two hit kill but is much more difficult.
> How about 3 hits to kill from full shields with bleedthrough?
I’ve been thinking this ever since the implementation of the 2-hit melee in Halo 3. From that game onwards, you would see people relying on melee more so than their weapons to get a kill, a problem which has been worsened by the addition of sprint.
Turning melee into a 3-hit kill would allow it to continue to be a useful tool in order to get kills, but would not diminish the role of automatics as it has in the past.
Alternatively, they could use Halo 2’s system where melee would be influenced by player movement speed. There were three different levels of damage. The first was when the player was not moving, the melee hit would take down a small amount of shields. When a player was moving, a melee attack would take down half the shields. If the player was jumping, almost all of the shields would be stripped. While this system was more complex, it still remains to be rather intuitive and, in a way, skillful than it is presently. It would re-add some complexity that people have been asking for, all while being something that many players already know and understand.
> > As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
> >
> > My proposed change is this: <mark>Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die.</mark> You will have full health and 0 shield.
>
> They tried this with Halo Reach. It was not a well-met change.
I believe it was a change for the better. If they just reduced the melee damage to half I don’t think anybody would have a problem with it. Could have even made the core gameplay better.
> > > As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
> > >
> > > My proposed change is this: <mark>Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die.</mark> You will have full health and 0 shield.
> >
> > They tried this with Halo Reach. It was not a well-met change.
>
> I believe it was a change for the better. If they just reduced the melee damage to half I don’t think anybody would have a problem with it. Could have even made the core gameplay better.
Or we could simply ‘buff’ player health and get all the benefits of the Reach system without losing any damage.
> > > > As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
> > > >
> > > > My proposed change is this: <mark>Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die.</mark> You will have full health and 0 shield.
> > >
> > > They tried this with Halo Reach. It was not a well-met change.
> >
> > I believe it was a change for the better. If they just reduced the melee damage to half I don’t think anybody would have a problem with it. Could have even made the core gameplay better.
>
> Or we could simply ‘buff’ player health and get all the benefits of the Reach system without losing any damage.
I really don’t see how buffing will help if two melees still result in a characters death. Also, buffing health would make head-shot weapons more OP and leave non-headshot weapons UP since they have more health to chew through.
> > How about 3 hits to kill from full shields with bleedthrough?
>
> I’ve been thinking this ever since the implementation of the 2-hit melee in Halo 3. From that game onwards, you would see people relying on melee more so than their weapons to get a kill, a problem which has been worsened by the addition of sprint.
>
> Turning melee into a 3-hit kill would allow it to continue to be a useful tool in order to get kills, but would not diminish the role of automatics as it has in the past.
>
> Alternatively, they could use Halo 2’s system where melee would be influenced by player movement speed. There were three different levels of damage. The first was when the player was not moving, the melee hit would take down a small amount of shields. When a player was moving, a melee attack would take down half the shields. If the player was jumping, almost all of the shields would be stripped. While this system was more complex, it still remains to be rather intuitive and, in a way, skillful than it is presently. It would re-add some complexity that people have been asking for, all while being something that many players already know and understand.
Wasn’t that melee system only in halo 2s campaign?
> > > How about 3 hits to kill from full shields with bleedthrough?
> >
> > I’ve been thinking this ever since the implementation of the 2-hit melee in Halo 3. From that game onwards, you would see people relying on melee more so than their weapons to get a kill, a problem which has been worsened by the addition of sprint.
> >
> > Turning melee into a 3-hit kill would allow it to continue to be a useful tool in order to get kills, but would not diminish the role of automatics as it has in the past.
> >
> > Alternatively, they could use Halo 2’s system where melee would be influenced by player movement speed. There were three different levels of damage. The first was when the player was not moving, the melee hit would take down a small amount of shields. When a player was moving, a melee attack would take down half the shields. If the player was jumping, almost all of the shields would be stripped. While this system was more complex, it still remains to be rather intuitive and, in a way, skillful than it is presently. It would re-add some complexity that people have been asking for, all while being something that many players already know and understand.
>
> Wasn’t that melee system only in halo 2s campaign?
It was also in MP, in some of the TUs Halo 2 received Bungie slightly modified the melee damage for some weapons as well such as the Brute Shot.
> Its not the melee that is the problem, its the health.
>
> In every Halo game past CE, shields have had the lion’s share of overall hitpoints. In Halo 3 and Reach the ratio is 70 hitpoints for shields and 45 for health.
>
> Any damage you take your shields makes you much more vulnerable to explosives and melee.
>
> If you want to fix the melee(and grenades for that matter), we need to bring back the equal health and shield ratio that CE had.
>
> Say we have 100/100 shields and health(the specific numbers don’t matter). If we have a melee that does 100 damage, it takes two melee attacks to kill an enemy with full health, but you won’t ever kill someone with full health in one melee as long as they have some shields left.
>
> Unlike the no bleedthrough system in Reach, damage still transfers damage so no one is losing any damage. A player with 10/100 shields/health would be able to survive a melee attack with 0/10 health left. This solution has all the advantages of the Reach system without the drawback of losing ‘leftover’ damage.
>
> This would not affect killtimes in general, but it would make both melee and grenades a lot more survivable.
Now there’s an interesting take on Melee.
> > > > > As of right now, if you have 50% shield and full health, a melee will kill you. I feel this really decreased the skill involved in CQC battles.
> > > > >
> > > > > My proposed change is this: <mark>Melee deals 100 damage, but no bleedthrough. If you have 1 shield and you get melee’d, you will not die.</mark> You will have full health and 0 shield.
> > > >
> > > > They tried this with Halo Reach. It was not a well-met change.
> > >
> > > I believe it was a change for the better. If they just reduced the melee damage to half I don’t think anybody would have a problem with it. Could have even made the core gameplay better.
> >
> > Or we could simply ‘buff’ player health and get all the benefits of the Reach system without losing any damage.
>
> I really don’t see how buffing will help if two melees still result in a characters death. Also, buffing health would make head-shot weapons more OP and leave non-headshot weapons UP since they have more health to chew through.
That is why ‘buff’ is in quotes. The only thing that changes is the ratio of shields to health. The only thing that changes is melee and grenades. The specific hit-points don’t matter it is the ratio of shields to health.
The main change would be fewer deaths from a single melee or grenade. Essentially it would make 2 hit melee kills more common/necessary without out losing any damage to no bleedthrough. It improves the two-melee system but it can also support a three-melee. Equal health and shields ultimately makes balancing everything simpler.
Am I the only one who finds setting up a perfect one-hit bleedthrough takedown an extremely satisfying challenge? 
2-shot BR, 3-shot magnum, etc. Would hate to see that strategy go.