If anyone wants to refer to these in a video or whatever go ahead . I would appreciate my most used online name “RaynStargaze” being mentioned in the description though.
Most noteworthy results of my testing (numbers below):
Slide and Ground Pound do NOT scale with melee %damage increases and both are not worth using in a melee focused build.
Slide damage scales with going down slopes (movement speed in general?) but only very little. Slide overall is extremely weak and disappointing as a melee option.
The slide hitbox is TINY to the left and right - you have to hit deadcenter. It does however have a fairly high “ceiling” meaning you will actually hit psychos jumping over you while sliding under them.
Ground Pound scales with height when ground pound was activated - more than 100% scaling possible. Ground pound scaling depends on when you ACTIVATE the ground pound. Late ground pounds after falling will result in significantly reduced damage.
Animation canceling is impossible with guns that have special melee animations (all guns with +%melee damage bonus) BUT this can be fixed when using Amaras increased reach melee skill since that activates a new melee animation which overrides the animation of the gun.
This means that unless you are using that particular skill with Amara you will most likely lose DPS when using melee guns since you can not melee/shoot/melee/shoot, you simply can not shoot before melee is available again with weapons that have unique melee animations. (Unless melee scaling is multiplicative or your melee damage is MUCH higher than the damage+crit of the gun you are using - using slow guns is obvious)
Interesting tech (but useless due to how bad ground pound and slide are):
The optimal dps of a melee character can be achieved by;
Slide>shoot>slide hits target>melee>shoot. Because of how irrelevant slide damage is, this is unfortunately not worth the effort.
It is possible to animation cancel jump melee into ground pound even off tiny Elevations. In order for this to work you HAVE to use a running jump - without running this will not work - immediately melee after jumping and immediately spam crouch during the melee animation. This will not work if youre using a gun with a special melee animation since again, animation canceling is impossible with those guns.
Since the damage off ground pound doesnt scale with melee it is not recommended to use this tech with a melee build. (Because the game hates fun).
Method of testing, number results and more minor details:
All tests were made on ratch near the Meridian drop pod area. All high ground pounds were made off the truck in that area to reproduce height accurately. Character level 13. Melee damage increase achieved by using/not using Amaras skill that gives 100% melee damage bonus and increased range after action skill.
More repetitions were made to assure accuracy, not all numbers recorded will be listed.
no bonus melee: 55 55 55
no bonus slide on flat ground: 36 37 37
no bonus slide down a slope (speed increase): 40 38 42 48
no bonus ground pound - low: 55
no bonus ground pound - high: 110 134 105 115 128
100% bonus melee: 110 110 110
100% bonus slide on flat ground: 37 36
100% bonus ground pound - low: 55 59 46
100% bonus ground pound - high: 122 103 125 107
Delaying the ground pound while falling from high ground reduced damage significantly and gave the following: 75 81 66 54
Personal request @Gearbox:
Please make slide and ground pound scale with melee% bonuses. Melee is questionably useful considering how powerful some of the weapons in the game are. This would be a nice way to make not only more viable in general but also more fun.