2. Uncounterable Chambers: I would like to point out that I find this the most annoying because I can never do it; people always manage to block or chamber me but I ALWAYS get uncounterable chambered. It completely has to do with ping. Anyone who has had experience with chambers knows that it is possible to counter chambers with good timing. In the past this was true, but now there is a way to cause uncounterable and usually unblockable chambers. This is generally an unknown tactic, and it is also very hard to master. I won't go into how to do it, but what happens is when your attack gets chambered by a player in a certain way, the attack in uncounterable unless the player uses a combination of split-second timing and there being a distance between the two players to allow for the first player to be unstunned. This stun is generally used against the up-stab, but can be used against the down-stab with a little less success, but at a very close range, but not close enough to glance, the down-stun-chambered can be completely unblockable.
That is the skill ceiling of chambering; making your chamber uncounterable. It was achievable in MM by the very best duellists and thoroughly deserves to be rewarded. Ping probably does factor into it and that aspect probably can't be fixed, it's at ingrained part of the Warband architecture. The other half of it is footwork, that is a great determinant of whether your chamber is hard to block or not. That all said, I personally want more agility when chambering, it's currently a very defensive-oriented move. If they increased the turning speed slightly I think it'd give one a lot more control over chambering, especially for attacking players, with the added side effect of making unblockable chambers harder to master and less common.
3. Glances: I understand that glances are realistic in close quarters when a player butts the side of his musket against another, but when you stab a player from a long to medium distance in the head with your bayonet, I believe the other player should take some damage... Therefore, I would really like to see the true range of the bayonet re-calibrated because in an intense duel a glance can be all it takes to end another players life, despite the fact that they may be spamming the right-click button in an attempt to block, but nothing happens.
You will get more glances if you increase the length of the bayonet. The exact reason why FSE was advised to reduce the length was to reduce glances, and it worked. You can now to a lot more at close-range with stabs, especially the down-stab, precisely because of the reduced length. Increasing the length of the bayonet again will make close-quarters combat a glance-fest again, meaning outnumbered players will have an even harder time fighting their way out of 1vs many situations.
4. Ghost Reach: The previous topic leads me directly into this topic, because it relates to the ambiguous range of bayonets. Ghost reach occurs when a player is hit by another player's bayonet when, visually, the bayonet should not have reached that far. This can easily be replicated by maneuvering the bayonet, but I will not describe it here.
Ideally they'd change the bayonet model to account for the shorter length, but doubt they'll want to devote resources to that, away from their other projects. Therefore the compromise of having less glances is more ambiguous hitboxes.
5. Kicking: Kicking in NW is way slower, and way more inaccurate than kicking in Native. I believe if kicking was a little more faster and precise, then there would be a whole new level of skill to melee in NW. What I want to see from kicking is kicks that are faster and more precisely calibrated to where you intended to kick (hard to explain but its buggy). However, by more precise I do not mean that I want kicks to hit people when the shouldn't have visually.
Kicking is the same as Native, it's just the slower turning speed relative to Native that makes it harder. Again, a slight increase in turning speed would make it more accessible.
6. Speed Stabbing: The only problem with momentum and spinning causing attacks to be faster (which i believe to be an important tactic) is when lag causes the animation for the attack to be skipped, making it very hard to block in time or otherwise tricking the player into believing that they will be able to beat the other player in timing because they haven't even pulled their musket back yet.
Most of the time invisible animations are due domestic graphics rendering or data packet corruption issue. Some of that is solvable through changing your router or adapter settings, or tweaking graphics drivers/options, but the game is pretty poorly optimised so it's unavoidable.
8. Stabbing stuns: Rarely occurs when a player is stabbed by another player who then attacks the first player again using a speed stab that the first player is unable to block. This can also be related to groupfighting where a player is stunned after being stabbed and is unable to block a secondary attack from a 2nd attacker. This also occurs when the player is stunned after making a successful block, but cannot simply move the bayonet up a few inches to block a second attack. I believe if a player could block based on his active timing, without being annoyingly stunned), then the game would be far more intense, quick, and skill based. Right now, players win groupfights by spamming another player in different directions. Obviously it is a different story if the 2 attackers attack in different directions at the same time. I just believe that the way too long 1 second stun should be lowered dramatically to allow for faster, realistic combat.
Again, I believe this is a latency issue to do with internet (ping perhaps) and also hardware. I have had dramatic reductions in stun by simply reinstalling my USB ports, leads me to believe my USBs might be faulty or there might be some corruption in my drivers somewhere. Internet packet loss or graphics card problems can make the beginnings of your stab animations invisible and thus trick you into thinking you've been stunned - that happens to me a lot lately, or it can indeed be genuine. It's all to do with latency, not much devs can do I think. Just experiment with hardware and settings.
9. Spamming = Teamkills: https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=6190.new#new
10. Bad hitboxes: This happens when one teammate stabs an enemy causing a stun stab. You can tell it is a stun stab because the players hitbox lags and if a second player attacks directly afterwards then their bayonet will go right through them. You can only hit this person if you wait the same amount of time as if you were the first player stabbing again to kill after stun stabbing someone.
That's an issue with the Warband engine which ought to be fixed but never has been.
11. Backwards blocking: You stab some in the back and they block even though they are seen facing the other way
12. Getting blocked by a person behind you when you aren't even facing them: Self-explanatory
It is annoying and a small turning speed increase would give attackers more ways of holding/delaying or concealing the direction of their stabs, thus making it easier to deal with persistent blockers.
Basically, my stance on this is that NW melee only needs 1 very minimal change: an increase in turning speed. There just needs to be more agility, not necessarily to MM levels, but more than there is now. The reason backpedaling/blocking/uncounterable chambers/defensive play in general is so much easier is because of how easily stabs are telegraphed before they're initiated; it's too easy to see what's coming from an attacking player. That's the only thing that was good about pre-patch melee, the speed and tempo. They just need to inject some speed into this melee to make it good. With a faster turning speed a lot more playing techniques and moves will flourish. Intelligence = mental agility, the melee will be more intelligent.
They're reluctant to ever do that however, always have been for some reason. I guess they're afraid of lolspinning from MM.
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