[Suggestion] Knife Buff Suggestion

(Edits in progress) Knifing needs to be a dedicated playstyle all on its own, a unique different playstyle that is just as viable as any playstyle in certain situations. Knives as they are right now are incredibly underpowered.

For background information, I am a dedicated knife only PS2 player. This being said, I have much experience with the knife, having auruxiamed both the force cutter and I am about three quarters of the way to auraxiaming the lumine edge. For my next few suggestions, I would be honored if the community would contribute to this discussion and help me polish my suggestions to make the knife as balanced as possible.

Buffs for ALL Knives

+10% Sprint Speed while knives are held
+0.5 meter range to help with hit detection

Buffs for Power Knives

Sound while activated balanced to be somewhere in between the TR (loudest noise) and NC (softest noise) to balance all the power knives to be equal to each other, this will effectively be a buff for the TR power knife and a nerf to the NC power knife with little to no change for the VS power knife

Thank you for reading, please add your comments below, and call me out on anything you find unreasonable as I want to help make Planetside as balanced a game as possible!

We started with an assertion that is unsupported and I believe should be expanded upon to improve reception.

At the same time "certain situations" will need further development.

Thanks for calling me out on that, I will try to edit the post as soon as possible to clarify what I mean exactly.

I do think the melee system could be expanded on. I would go as far as to suggest larger melee weapon options such as a field machete which would deal more damage and reach further but swipe slower.

I'd like a knife that had only 400 damage per swipe but had a super fast swipe with quick swap back to your main weapon.

Knives as a dedicated combat style? There's absolutely no reason for that. It's like asking for side-arms to be a dedicated playstyle. With the exception of the Stalker side-arms are all there as a weapon to fall back on when your primary is out. If you choose to dedicate yourself to it, that's your problem.

What you can ask for is new melee weapons and balances to the current knives ofcourse, but not with the main goal of making knives a primary weapon style. They are there to give the player something if you run out of ammo, not as a replacement for the weapons you have.

I'd like a knife that can hit people moving away from you. Someone backpedaling from you is impossible to hit with current mechanics. (unless something was changed that I'm unaware of)

Also a 1m range is well within reason for an equipped (non quick knife) attack. The arm of an average height person is 25" plus a 6-10" knife the ability to pivot your shoulders and torso means that there should be no issue thrusting a knife into someone 1m away without moving their feet or hips.

I really don't like the idea of running faster with your knife out. It leads to silly game play. In counter strike everyone would run around with their knife out just to move a little faster it looked ridiculous. I wouldn't mind a secondary attack that could lunge you forward an extra meter (2m attack range) but would leave you off balance (50% reduced movement speed) and unable to lunge again for .5 seconds after. Power knives would not get this ability.

With the 1m attack change power knives should show up on the mini map when you activate or swing them (while activated) to anyone within 10m.

All power knives should have the same volume level during use. I agree.

I really don't think other melee weapons besides the knife really have a place in the game besides maybe cosmetics. Though an infiltrator with a sword instead of a primary would be cool.

physically it doesn't make sense.
When you stretch your arms to either side, the length from fingertip to fingertip should be around as long as the length of your heels to the top of your head. Measuring my own arm length just now, I come out at 74cm or 0.74m from shoulder to fingertips (for those counting, I'm not 1.48m tall because there's this whole torso thing in the middle of my arms that you still have to add up). With a good long knife I would be able to reach 1m, but I wouldn't really have a lot of thrust left when I reach it and any half-combat trained person would disarm me, if not drag me into range and start some stabbing action himself while my knife-arm is stuck somewhere behind his shoulder, now possibly without holding a knife. If I am overextended like that pulling me close will mean I'll not be able to stop his incoming knife/pistol attack or I'll have to fall down on my face, which isn't going to be doing me a lot of good either.

That said, game mechanically it can make sense.

How about this: When you swing a knife it projects 2 hit indicators. 1 deals damage, 1 simply detects if enemies are nearby and has a much wider and longer range. If you swing your knife while enemies are nearby you get a speed-boost, otherwise you don't get anything.
This way you discourage constantly running with a knife on, but the moment you are nearby an enemy and chasing them you can at least catch up to them instead of having them move out of knife-range after the first hit and then never really being able to catch up to them. You could envision it as a constant lunge towards your enemy, and since you aren't burdened with having to keep a weapon steady in your hand there's no reason to allow it.

A Hammer to cause a concussion effect on your enemy
Shoulder-mounted fire-nozzles for LA's, allowing them to use their jumpjet fuel and set off a small explosion in front of them, add a smoke effect after use to further confuse enemies and it's a great tool!
Allow HA's to short-cirquit their overshield, creating a small electric AOE attack around them.
Allow Medics to hold the knife-button and drain their healing AOE nanites, dealing a small AOE damage attack while active.

Just a few random idea's, they could need tweaking ofcourse.

20 Stalkers running all around with buffed knifes ?
People focusing on 1 or 2 shots kill you with buffed knives and buffed sprint? Because it would have a way shorter TTK and would require less skill than using their fire arms ?
No, thanks. That's not really what i'm waiting for while playing any mmo-FPS. There are good knife-only maps in Counter-Strike.

+10% sprint speed - why? It makes no sense whatsover. Earlier fps like counterstrike had this but later ones dropped it because 'switch to knife to run fast' was obviously a silly immersion breaking mechanic.

+0.5m range - again, why? All you've said is 'buff what I use, because I use it'.

Knifers already have the advantage of permacloak, something found in pretty much no other FPS. If anything needs to be rebalanced it's that.

Archer AM-rifle says hi.

Ok, 2 extremely niche class+ability/weapon combinations.

stalker + knife combo is fun bring some EMP's if you need to and shank and run. Would be fun to have new melee weapons with a little range and a lot slower attack but that's wishful thinking lol.

The... uh... I forget what it's called.. the adrenaline module? Whatever, there's a suit slot that will give you that 10% movement speed increase if you want it that badly.

I personally have a "ram only playstyle" much like your "knife only playstyle". I will not fire my weapons and try to accrue as many ram kills as I can by running over players with land vehicles or aircraft.

Because of my personal, unique play-style, I believe the entire game should be changed to accommodate me personally.

Give 100000 base HP to all vehicles, make the hitboxes for ramming increased 200%, and allow ram kills to "chain", where when I ram 1 player, the nearest enemy within 50 meters also explodes- which can also chain to the nearest enemy 50 meters from that target, and so on until no chains can be completed.

I think this is a fair and balanced way to fix the game.

In OP's defense, this is incredibly exaggerated. In your defense, it would be absolutely hilarious.

10% Sprinting speed. Unfortunately when you knife you move to walking speed or whatever they call it. Then there's the whole problem of when you start knifing, you first slow down to walking speed before you swing.

a group of 20 people just with flashbangs would destroy you the same way.

The only buff that knife need is allowing to sprinting attacking with a knife, so you can catch enemy that backpedal.