Melee special attacks and TLS balance

[Demonic Spoon]

Alright, we all know that general melee isn't all that useful. It doesn't do any more damage than a safer ranged build, and has the same weakness: inability to deal with crowds. This is why choppa meks are rare, and Farseer (who can only do damage in melee, few raw damage abilities) isn't liked

An interesting way to balance straight melee builds would be to double melee special attack chance: 5% to 10% for most weapons. Thoughts?

[konfeta]

Might still be too random - Tyrant's Crushing Claws have a very good special attack that occurs fairly often, but it is probably the last thing on the list of things that makes Tyrant good in melee. What's the point of a Farseer that can do an small AoE attack every 10 hits at expense of most of her HP when a 'Let the Galaxy Burn' nukes an entire crowd? Buffing special attack chance would be a sizable buff on a team that already soaks a ton of damage, but won't really help the weaker melee builds when they are the sole melee of their team.

Personally, I feel that such melee builds have the other problem - most of the supposedly "melee" Wargear utterly fails to give a decent boost for survivability, and in most cases, a ranged character can take the exact same survivability items and be just as tanky at range while having safer damage output. Giving a good number of melee weapons a speed boosting passive as well as some measure of armor or health regeneration would go a long way towards making them more viable overall.

[Demonic Spoon]

There's nothing wrong with melee being more dangerous than ranged...that's how it is in the campaign, and that's how it is in normal MP. However, for that to work well, melee has to do appreciably more damage than ranged. When you just have one hero vs a horde of stuff, a large percentage of your already meh damage is wasted on pathfinding and moving between targets.

of course LtgB nukes crowds better...But melee character should still be able to deal appreciable damage.

[konfeta]

"Glass cannon" melee (basically most of it in TLS) has been proven to be a fundamentally weak concept again and again in almost every RPG game I played - they are typically made viable by being given overwhelming damage output or ludicrously powerful abilities. I just don't think we need to see even more damage in this game mode.

Plus, again, speaking from perspective of team compositions - melee is weakest when you have overall low tankiness of the whole team because melee has to commit to taking damage to deal any. When you have a lot of things to absorb enemy fire, melee tends to do well, but the problem is, incredibly powerful ranged damage dealers tend to do even better under those circumstances. An improvement as as the one you listed won't change the cheesy team compositions unless the numbers are buffed to the point where melee damage becomes cheesy on its own; but the improvement will also not do much about improving viability of melee on teams that can't absorb damage in the first place. Which is ultimately my objection to it - I would like it if melee was fun in pubs rather than arranged games where someone is carrying a game with something stupidly tanky or is a walking nuke.

A Captain with a Power Axe already kills appreciably faster than a Captain with a Plasma Gun. But he has to eat disproportionately more damage to dish it out.