And do these people kill with the rifle? To me "putting up a good fight" or "getting a few good side swings in" is not enough,
Yes I've see quite a few kills a rifle butt, in fact I've been pummeled to death on a few occasions in duels and have just managed to get the upper hand on a few occasions. Now I am not the best at melee but I am certainly not the worst either I was like 16th - 18th on the LCC stats list for the Australian servers for a while (haven't checked it in a bit).
with a few side swings or hits you should be able to kill the person. I don't go into melee with a rifle with the intentions of putting up a fight or getting a few hits in, I want them to die so I don't die and can carry on with the round alive instead of spectating.
I know that's what you want, hell everyone wants that but using that logic would suggest a wanton for a 1 kill bommyknocker of a rifle whose sole intent is to entice everyone to play for all of the perks and none of the cons.
All I really want is the bloody melee to be kept the same for god sake. Why is it so hard to get the idea that it is not fun to get hits and not kill a bloody thing in melee when they can kill you in 1 or 2 hits when you hit them 4 or 5 times. A game is meant to be fun and when it becomes complete bullshit when you can't actually do anything in melee then I start to lose faith in people's idea of balancing.
Yes a game is meant to be fun but the whole idea of balancing is to make it fun for everyone and not just you and other rifle users.
And also yes of course you don't have to play as the class to realise how shit the melee was, people complaining obviously don't understand how to fight against a sword, so why haven't they been nerfed to the same level as a rifle? The rifle out of all the 3 main melee weapons have the worst damage, so already they were at a disadvantage, so why change it to be more useless than it was?
Most likely to force or encourage its users to stay out of melee and use it an absolute last resort. The way the class was intended.
TL;DR, Keep it as it was or if you really want to encourage skirms to shoot, get rid of their ability to melee entirely.
Well you can always hit people from behind and/or if they're already wounded thus increasing the potential for a 1 hit kill.
Otherwise you should technically be staying behind friendly lines under the protection of friendly units.
Nope, they do not knock people over.
In which case I am not bothered by it tbh but I can understand the goal of making rifle melee a chore to force the class to retreat or not commit to melee unless absolutely necessary. As it stands now I have been seeing people just shoot the rifle men whenever possible because they're dangerous at range and not exactly harmless or a pushover at close range unless you really know what your doing.
Again, I've said several times and anyone who has actually used a rifle will agree that two of those four attacks are useless (the downattack can sometimes work if you catch someone totally by surprise) in a fight. As for the knockdown, no, rifles can't knock persons down.
I've had my head knocked in from overhead attacks from Rifles enough times to take what your saying with a grain of salt, not to mention the fact that I am reluctant to take a single opinion as factual given the inevitable tirade of contrary opinions that follow. I've seen skilled riflemen use the upper attack and the thrust to great effect. It may not be a one hit kill affair if you've got a full health bar but it certainly left an impression and the rifleman was able to follow through with good foot work and follow up side/up or even thrust. D:
Afaik the rifleman is also the fastest infantry class on foot so he has the most accurate weapon. This makes for good footwork against slower classes.