There's enough gripes on the power knife nerfs (that nobody wanted), so there's no reason to go there, but knives in general are SO hard to hit with! not being able to sprint while knifing makes zero sense, the area that a melee can even hit with is tiny in comparison to any other game, and the moment you start to knife, you move to a crawl, making it impossible to knife a sprinting enemy. At the very least please lower the directive requirement so completionists can get back to playing this as a shooter, and not a 6 month hell to get 1200 kills.
I take part of this back, the amaterasu is good, but the basic knife and it's variants are a nightmare.
You're trying to max your score? Sure didn't make it sound like you want the Aurax knife heh. Well ye adrenaline run, stalker, deep op is needed, catwalk helps. 1 smoke grenade. Adrenaline is a must. I'm the main knifer on us west. lol I love the knife. I won't reply with get good, only good luck. Know the enemies blind spot. Backstab like a WoW Rogue. PS2's melee reminds me of Skyrim. To be honest it's not all that diff, the swings. If the devs realize this, they could add so much more to the melee aspect of this game. Swords, spears, shields, rolls, melee uses. For now I favor my 2 hit Victory knife > over the past Lumineree overplayed 1 hit energy knife. Killing just as fast & silent. This is why people want 3 implants, since deep op is mandatory. Been shot by enemy scout rifles at medium range, while I'm Invis running as Infil. if I don't have deep op, everyone shoots you when ur invis, so yes it's required. Speaking of implants, to help the knifer. Would need a better speed implant. Survivalist giving a tiny bit of speed when a shield break barely is useful, for speed infantry mains. Fleetfoot or w/e isn't useful for knifers as we don't reload nor take falll dmg. & Athlete implant is so slow it barely seems like it added any speed at all. So there's no good " speed improvement " implants. Theres just wannabe speed implants ones that aren't up to par. Or don't toggle unless for some niche reason like reload / fall dmg / or shield break all of which a stalker doesn't have happen often enough to use.
P.s. Why is their so many replies over power knives? Not speaking of this thread, the other thread that had many replies for knives. It's kinda funny. I never saw someone use them & I played the power knife for 1.5 years. Now all of a sudden theirs 120 replies over the knife? Obviously not from my server or else they are posers. I've been killed by amaratsu more. However I like the spotlight for melee.I don't even believe my allies use the Lumineree. If its popular for other servers tho, good. Then the enemy factions knives were louder, they QQ'ed about that, which is my favorite enemy sentence to hear. Maybe give the knives a poison effect, like it does kill with 1 hit, tho only does half the dmg & the other half is poison if the person doesn't have a medic kit or medic, they'd die within 10 seconds. " poison " , sounds like a good way to make medics more useful. The damage over time, would have to be slower than a halloween grenade for any poison to be worth finding a medi over. As a 2 hit kniver now. I'd say having a 1 hit knife around, makes my skil lvl seem less honorable. So there's that. If not poison, well yes other utility abilities for knives to unleash. I personally want a mini wrist shield the kind a nc max holds up, with a button to hold the shield forward for stalker. Maybe a defensive shield spec, where you keep your adrenaline speed, tho lose 33% dps on all pistols or knives.
I like the idea of those shields, probably a big one as a heavy variant, and a small one that only protects the head/midsection. I'm trying to get the black camo, it's frustrating as hell with knives, I bought a bundle with AE weapons, and got all of the feasible weapons out of the way, but all I have left is the Icikill and the gallows, and the Icikill is so frustrating to use when you're trying to knife somebody walking backwards, and have to zigzag while trying to time your knife perfectly and missing like 4 swings while they're trying to 1 shot kill you with a flashlight Barrage.
Well, they just nerfed the Amaterasu due to whining from the folks who can't be bothered to pay attention to their surroundings, so it's 'less good' than it was. I doubt the nerf made the victims better players, to be honest...
it's still the best knife, both the basic and amat are 3 hit kills, but amat has range and aimability
I'm still knifing with the icikill, 230 more kills to go, but I have to completely disable myself from playing the game just for this ONE grind, imagine doing this with other melee weapons.... If the melee system remains this busted, I'd never buy another cosmetic knife ever again.
Instead of all the "ah woe is me" could you guys actually look into actual solutions? Solutions that dont rely purely on a broken cloak to be useful? You know something as simple as making wielded knives use the same attack style as when quick knifing which already solves the "cant hit" problem. You can then augment it with left click=quick slash and right click=a lunge stab (that doesnt auto-lock on a target) which puts your swings on a cooldown and slows you for a moment afterwards. That gives knives a one-two capability by slashing first and lunging after to catch up if the target runs. Expanding the melee system should also be possible. Longer reach but slower attacks, special abilities or even expanding beyond actual melee. Examples: Plasma Messer (VS): short enough to still be quick-knifed, has a 0.25 second delay when quick-knifing both when grabbing and when putting it away. Slashes in a horizontal line and hits all players who are within that slash. Longer reach than knife. Wielding it is still slower (but again: longer reach and hits everything). Plasma sword (VS): same as the Messer but with longer reach. Cannot be quick-knived. Concussion hammer (NC): hits only one person, creates concussion effect on that person. Same disadvantages as the VS Messer. Bigger version exists with same disadvantages as its VS sword counterpart. Chainsaw (TR): If you've got a chain knife, you have to have its bigger brother lying around somewhere right? Especially with a base specifically dedicated to logging on one continent. Hold the trigger for a constant damaging cut in front of you (deals damage in a small thin volume in front), rightmouse uses a slash across the screen. This is the big version with the same disadvantages and advantages as the plasma sword, someone else may invent a small TR weapon. But ofcourse why only melee weapons? Especially quick-knifing can easily be replaced with class-specific quick-abilities, which eat a % of ability energy of the user: Medic: blasts a stream of disassembling nanites in front of the Medic, eats infantry alive. Deals a bit of damage to vehicles. Eats some of your ability bar which limits the total you can use it in quick succession. Secondary: launches disassembling nanites in all directions. LA: nozzles on the sleeve can blast out jetpack fuel and ignite it, creating a cone-shaped blast in front of the LA (or if you really like it, a flamethrower that keeps throwing flames until you release quick-knife or run out of juice). Alternative: dumps a canister full of jetpack fuel on the ground. Shoot it for an explosion (great for setting up ambushes). HA: for a split second the shield emitters create random shields in front of the HA, cutting and tearing anyone caught inside a small volume in front. Alternative: overloads the shield generator and causes a shockwave to flow outwards. Deals damage and pushes anyone hit away. Engineer: creates a hardlight spike and launches it a short distance. Alternative: launches many small hardlight spikes in a row a short distance. Infiltrator: a lightning-fast hack at short range disrupts the target's suit causing it to go haywire and damage the user (if the suit can keep you walking after several hits to the knee, it has the ability to tear off your limbs as well). Alternative: a longer ranged hack which deals no damage, but erases all spots for the target person and anyone nearby. Inserts some random spot blips on the screen instead. These are just for flavor idea's, dont take them as gold standard you can disagree with. If you dont like a specific ability, invent your own.
Some tips/suggestions for people grinding knives. 1. You do not have to play Infiltrator. 2. You can stabby-stab while jetpacking, Drifter jetpack is generally faster than running and can be harder to hear than footsteps in a active fight. 3. You can jump and attack, just like with a medic/engineer you also slow down if you start to heal/revive/repair but you can do it while in the air, maintaining some speed forward. So basically what I am saying is that you would probably get more/faster kills with knives if you were playing a LA in most generic fights because you can more easily get to enemy infiltrators in many bases but especially Tower bases, you can more easily/faster get behind the enemy infantry by flying over walls instead of crouching around cloaked and once behind you can quickly float up to them and stabby-stab even if they are running. Finally if you are playing Infiltrator you might want to try running after someone and instead of stabbing them while you are running on the ground you jump, then stab to keep the running forward speed in the air while you swing at them. Though honestly if you are going for Aurax the best idea is to look for specific bases where you know there will be lots of opportunity to get knife kills, like bases where you know its popular to have lots of infiltrators in some area sniping their little hearts away even if it means intruding on a fight where your own faction has nothing to do. I just got a funny idea for some meme kills. If you have a NSO friend you two might go on a silly adventure on a Javelin, driver putting some shots into someone while you sit behind and stab them as the driver goes through them, its really hard to get road kills with the Javelin so it would probably work!
I honestly never understood why they nerfed power knives. Of all the complaints I ever had with this game, power knives were lowest on the list. They literally ensured that if you were using a cloak, the sound would give you away and I always hunted them with my high end gaming headphones. Even my own I primary own used for fun knife fights with other knife wielders or as an ambush weapon around corners...as knives are supposed to be used. So I don't get it.
Dont forget the one-two punch. If you see an opportunity to get in close, fire your gun just before you reach them and quick-knife. Great way for quickly dispatching enemies and saving some ammo. 1: not everybody has gaming headphones. 2: the point is to decloak and kill someone before the decloak sound is heard or they can see the decloak 3: if you can hunt them down based on the sound they are sucky infiltrators who let themselves be found. They should either kill and move before someone finds them or they should get ready for someone who comes looking for them. Its pretty much the most basic thing a cloaker should be doing: make someone think they know where you are, then ambush them from another position. The problem with the powerknives was their ability to kill someone in a way that is hard to counter, leaving you with little option to defend or improve. You quite literally have to simultaneously nerf your weapon, make you easier to spot and the way you have to check every part of a room exposes you to enemies who might enter while you look around. The trade offs are too large to be worth it.
The knife hit detection in the game has been an ongoing issue for as long as I can remember playing the game, anyone against powerknifes or knifes in general are very quick to ignore such things. You can never, ever kill a sprinting enemy. Even with implants, it doesn't matter if you catch up to them as the moment you do their hitbox prevents you from going further, and the moment you start the hit animation. As you said, you slow down to a crawl and you will miss unless clientside in in your favor (but it never is). This is what I've been saying, and quite a lot of people who don't play knifes are saying but I am very happy you spoke up as well. That if there's anything to complain about in the game, this is by far the lowest on their list. If anything, they could've made it so the powerknife had a charge up from activation.. Which would make it so it's more beneficial for knifefiltrators to activate the knifes beforehand, and increase the sound profile. Even though it's pretty loud to begin with.
1: Not everyone needs gaming headphones to counter them. This isn't like SMGs, they still need to physically touch you to kill you. 2: This is more a complaint of the games lag then anything else. If they have the knife activated while cloaked, its a dead giveaway to their position. If they don't, they cant actually activate it until they have already decloaked. More than enough time for the HA to use his overshield, the LA to jump away, or the engineer or medic to sprint out of reach (since power knives have half the reach of normal knives). Lets be frank here. If you cant hear the power knife approaching from behind you while its already activated, or the decloak and then the knife being activated (which takes roughly 1.5-2 seconds) you deserve what you got. 3: If they are using a power knife in the first place, they are typically sucky infiltrators. Even with the 2 hit, regular knives are far more adept at stealth kills because they swing at double the speed and have double the reach of a power knife. The problem with saying powerknives are hard to counter is that it is not true. HA overshields turn even the powerknife into a 2 hit kill, LAs dont stand still long enough for it to matter, and medics and engineers dont usually travel alone, and when they do they usually wield weapons that are better suited for that type of combat such as assault rifles, carbines, and SMGs. I have countered more than my fair share of power knife wielders in my time. It is a niche weapon and did not need a nerf, and now that is has been nerfed it will literally NEVER be used again.
I'll simply say that the knife nerfs were indeed things that nobody wanted. Things were fine as they were before. The changes didn't need to be made... at all. Just another moment in Planetside history where you ask for a "fork" but they give you a "spoon". I will say at the very least... I do sympathize with those suffering the "Knife Auraxium" challenge. As it should probably be reduced to 660 kills (500+160) or 410 kills (250+160) respectively. Actually... Probably should add "MAX Punch" as part of that reduced "Knife Auraxium" list.
lets be onest, the power knife nerf shold be reverted asap, maybe introduce a one hit meele weapon wit biger range also? like a machete or someting.
