Vault Hunter Review Series: How to Fix Melee Amara

Borderlands 3 Amara the Siren
#1

Let me begin by asking a few questions. Did you want to play amara as the mystical melee juggernaut she appeared to be, only to realize that your melee damage just couldn’t cut it in higher mayhem?

Have you lost count of how many times you’ve died in mid-air due to phaseslam?

Do you wish Amara could have powerful, fun, hand to hand combat without absolutely requiring a facepuncher, white elephant, that dang phaseslam or some other cheesing?

Then you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve come up with 4 points that should greatly improve melee play and are also relatively simple to implement to not create a huge burden for developers.

  1. Make the melee speed increase on action skill damage from “Find Your Center” permanent and not related to activating action skill. (and increase the speed of that bonus by about 30%)
    On purchasing the skill she gets the melee damage increase, plus the speed increase to her melee strikes as a permanent bonus.

2.Decrease the cool-down and increase the range of “blitz”. Both by a factor of 2.
So, cut cool-down in half to 4 seconds, and double the range.

Also change the skill reset to any melee kill not just blitz kills.

  1. Add a component to personal space that gives health up to a portion of damage taken based on distance to the enemy.

So it would be healing up to 12, 24, & 36% of damage taken from enemies at close range(same range personal space activates in), the closer amara is to the enemy the greater the bonus.

This isn’t damage-reduction, in practice she would take the full damage then the skill would calculate the amount and add it to her health (in full not over time) as close to immediately as possible. Maybe after 1/3 of a second at max.

Her health should go down, and then visibly go up by the recovered amount.
*This skill should only calculate on health damage taken not full damage
It has to be fast to ensure successive hits don’t reduce her to zero before the skill can take effect.

This would put her on the same level as previous borderlands melee characters as they had melee specific life-steal or health regen mechanics.

Krieg had 2 mechanics similar to this, his action skill would 100% refill his health on kills, and his elemental empathy gave him healing on a portion of damage taken from the burn status effect.

4.Replace the action skill speed bonus of Find Your Center, with a damage multiplier.

Make each of her phase arms that hit with her melee after activating her action skill, each count as a separate melee attack doing her full melee damage.
Essentially increasing damage output by increasing her “fire rate”.
A complete revamp of the skill and without even having to change the animation!

Personally, I prefer the idea of each hit producing individual damage numbers, though they’re all hitting at once, instead of one large combined number. But that’s just my personal aesthetic, if just multiplying the damage by the number of arms attacking the target, including her regular palm strike, is easier I have no objections.

These changes would increase the viability of melee Amara.
By giving her a safety-net to help her get into melee range without dying.
Making Find Your Center useful before activating her action skill and in between
cool-downs.

Making Blitz function as a reliable means of getting safely into melee range/positioning.
(because right now it’s never there when I want to use it again)

And finally giving her the melee damage boost she needs to contend in m4, thus unchaining Melee Amara from the Phaseslam.

P.S. An additional point, providing the ability for all melee to have a crit chance would also add a lot to play variety. Not as a skill or class mod, but a fundamental change to melee.

My thought is to make it work like moze’s pull the holy pin.

Giving every melee strike a 1 in 4 chance to crit without time delay between reactivation.

*Scaling melee for mayhem 2.0
With mayhem 2.0 in mind and even higher mayhem. I see only one fix for ensuring melee remains a viable option. Since each level of the new mayhem will have even stronger guns than the last, the same multiplier used on gun damage for that level should be applied directly to base melee damage.

So before all melee calculations are done, multiply base melee by the percent increase. And it would be perfectly scaled no matter what changed.

*edit this was assuming gun damage would scale exactly with enemy health, since that wasn’t the case. melee damage, action skill damage, pet damage, pet health, grenade damage, and vehicle damage should be scaled to enemy health increase at each level of mayhem using a base value that works for the most players.

My solution to this was to use something between the shield/armor values for m4 and m3, to help those that couldn’t make it on m4 with their builds.

so current mayhem level bar increase/650 {weighted value to get old mayhem 4 shield/armor closer to m3 to preserve the most build variety} =scaling multiplier.

(650 should be used every time)

multiply the scaling multiplier by the base for each of those fields listed above to appropriately scale them for mayhem 2.0

The levels below current m4 aren’t a problem, and while this equation could be applied t every level of mayhem its best if it’s only used for every level above the current m3.
as otherwise it would result in reductions in damage for those categories.

So this scaling should only kick in at m4 and above.

To scale the values of:
melee damage, action skill damage,
pet damage, pet health, grenade damage, and vehicle damage.

(pet health needs to scale because of the excess of multipliers that do extra damage to up close combatants, so with new mayhem pets would take far more damage more frequently than before, using half the multiplier should be enough for pet health)

p.s. just a personal request if ties that bind shares all damage between enemies can we get it to share damage from status effects please. it doesn’t make sense for dot to be excluded from that.

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Borderlands 3 Patch and Hotifx Notes [04/23] - Revenge of the Cartels and Mayhem 2.0
Goodbye Iron Bear
#2

In order to make gear still meaningful at higher mayhem tiers, I think they simply need to improve the percentage bonuses of certain skills like melee damage. In other words, if a gun as 60% bonus to melee damage at mayhem 0 or 1, it should have something like 90% at mayhem 2 tier gear, 120% at mayhem 3, etc. repeat for relic melee bonuses, etc.

class mods need a new modifier instead of a numerical increase to skill numbers. It should be a percentage multiplier to skill numbers instead. That would really push class mods to alter play styles and improve as the tiers of gear improve.

I think They should also add melee weapons with damage numbers instead of just guns. Allow other classes to switch to them and use them if they want. Allow melee oriented characters that option.

#3

well bonuses to the same category have diminishing returns so even if you gave a melee bonus of 1,000%, it would do practically nothing if enemy health is increasing each level.

that ten fold increase is calculated on base melee and not current damage, so at 1,000% you just add about 20k to melee damage, which at this point would be equivalent to a 100% melee bonus if it were calculated on total damage dealt.

I had an idea for scaling melee but i guess I forgot to add it in.

#4

I was thinking yesterday that if increasing Mayhem levels gives your character the natural perks of going up a level without awarding you a skill point then it would go some way towards helping this. For instance, roid shields would not be busted because the VH would receive a max health boost equivalent to the number of mayhem levels. Likewise, melee or FL4K’s pets would not be busted because they would receive a natural boost equivalent to the number of mayhem levels. It may even be that part of the reason they are introducing Mayhem 2.0 is that balancing such things will be easier on future.

#5

unfortunately that’s not likely, for one thing, leveling only increases health and melee damage, while even in current m4, enemies have far far more health than we do.

So even if our health were to increase by some small margin it would do nothing to help us survive because enemy damage is also increasing. Also the small increase in melee damage with a gained level would do nothing for bridging the divide in enemy health.

In all cases having more skill points would be more desirable, if i had all my current skill points and weapons, but were reduced to level 20 parameters otherwise (for health and melee), it would make little difference in my ability to tackle m4 as it’s the abilities and gear that make the most difference.

it wouldn’t help fl4k’s pets either, they already lag far behind in their damage output against m4 enemies, putting aside all the skills and functions for pets that are just blatantly not working right now, the small increases with level would do nothing because enemy health would be going up much faster.

The only way to save both pets and melee in the coming mayhem 2.0 is to somehow tie their damage directly to the scaling system so they do proportionally the same damage they do now at each level.

But the current issue is that these features, melee and pet damage, already grossly
under-perform.

But if we had more skill points about 10 more going into the new mayhem that would help some and at least put a bandage on the problems.

#6

Actually, as of right now it doesn’t. You can tell by looking at FL4K’s pet with the He Bites skill. The damage it reflects doesn’t change no matter the Mayhem mode you’re on.

#7

oh I’m talking about mayhem 2.0

Since the enemy health and damage will increase with each level.

that’s gonna be a killer if they don’t provide built in scaling.

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#8

The built in scaling, I wouldn’t expect to see a flat increase per mayhem level, there’d be a gradually widening gap so the increase in difficulty remains steady. I never spent much time in Krieg but I believe they had a similar thing so his melee damage didn’t just fall into oblivion with the OP levels.

In any case, Mayhem 2.0 will likely drop on Thursday next week so we won’t have long to wait for our answers.

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#9

Thanks for the info, and here’s hoping for the best.

#10

I wonder why Gearbox struggles a lot this time with a melee oriented VH. Amara’s melee just feels so underwhelming. Zero’s and Krieg’s melee were extremely different, but both styles excelled at high OP levels and had their own unique playstyle. You can easily run OP10 Peak Solo with a geared Melee Zero and even Melee Krieg can do it, if you swap for a Reaper for some bosses.

Compared to these two cases of excellent melee class design, Amara just feels like some melee hybrid, that was never supposed to be a pure melee class.

Melee Amara has far bigger problems than just not enough damage. In my opinion the whole melee class design is flawed and without additional skill interaction and a better combat loop, you might as well play BL2 for a good melee experience.

#11

well the fact is their melee elements were linked directly to their action skill.

When krieg is meleeing his doing it via his action skill.

Zero had his thing as well.

The main difference is synergy. Previous games had just 1 action skill, and each skill tree built on and further emphasized it in different ways.

Now for most characters we’ve got 3 classes of action skill, with one tree devoted to each.
You just can’t pack the same type of focus from 3 skill trees into 1 so it’ll be lacking.

For amara melee really is an after thought based on how her anoints are setup, they mostly expect melee mains to only use phaseslam. But if you are using melee that’s the worst possible action skill.

You’re vulnerable in mid air unable to attack for a relatively long period. When you land, you’re stuck in position almost(or actually) longer than surrounding enemies are staggered by your attack. Forcing you to invest in stillness of mind to keep enemies off you long enough to recover, but that also has the unfortunate effect of sometimes putting enemies out of melee range because the orb is too high to hit.

#12

and what do you think of my proposed changes at solving those issues?

what other changes do you think need to be made?

#13

I feel that they inspired a lot more from Athena than Zer0 or Krieg.

Athena in TPS had a hybrid tree, where she got gun damage and melee damage from it. She has “Rend” that applied a bleed effect on the target that scales with melee damage, and her capstone is “Blood Rush” a melee override that makes her perform a dash to her target when doing a melee attack (like Amara) and that skill resets on kill (like Amara) or if you applied “Rend” to the target.

So, you could close the gap with a dash, shoot, and then execute your target. Or just go mad dashing every enemy applying a lot of bleed effects on everyone.
Amara needs the same, a way to reset Blitz, so we can close the gap, shoot, benefit from “Personal Space” and the damage reduction of the Brawler class mod, and then use Blitz again to execute, and dash to the next target.

I don’t know if they can turn Amara to a pure melee VH with her skills designs, most of her melee damage is through anointments on gear.

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#14

Yeah I can agree with that, especially increasing the utility of blitz.
If we could just use it more often it would actually be useful.

As it is now, it’s almost once per engagement (fighting area).
It doesn’t even do that much damage, so I say just let us use it more for fun as it does far too little damage to make a major difference otherwise.

It’ll destroy one bar of it’s matching element at best, then be mostly useless against the rest.

#15

I love melee amara on paper, but feel like a knife drain relic is too necessary. But then you can’t equip a melee damage relic, which you also kinda need for blitz resets. I guess you can heal with Restoration, but then it’s not really a melee build anymore, is it?
Oh, and making your hits elemental also feels necessary, but then a bunch of enemies will be resistant to your hits, with no way to switch elements on the fly like with guns. I suppose you can carry a shock weapon to strip shields with, and the hybrid playstyle isn’t bad, but I’d like a bit more flow.
And it’d be nice maybe if Blitz reset with any melee kill, not just a Blitz kill.
It also sucks that there’s no roid shield like the Love Thumper (with a long delay). They’re inconsistent as hell.

They were cool, yeah, but like many things in BL2, they were kinda carried a bit by Moxxi weapons, which are missing from BL3 (in their BL2 form). I think this is a good thing overall, but melee Amara is a good example where some better/more versatile healing would be what makes the difference.

But honestly, my main problem is how janky the dash is. Sometimes a stray blade of grass is in the way and Amara refuses to do it. Sometimes she does do it, but hits a pebble at the enemy’s foot instead, doing no damage. Zer0’s Execute this sure as hell ain’t.

One last thing: get rid of the camera lock and eon-long recovery on slams, christ. (Both on amara’s action skill and on regular buttslams.) Buttslams actually seem to count as melee hits (and with some relics, also splash damage) and with the new guardian perk they could actually slot into gameplay in a really cool way, if they didn’t lock your controls for an annoyingly long time. GBX please fix.

#16

just use soulsap.
and yeah multiple elements are necessary to get the most damage out of melee.
personally I have 2 elemental ase, and an element stone prefix relic. and I got lucky with a relic that boosts those 3 elements.

Making blitz reset on any melee kill is cool i think I’ll add that to my list.

lol I feel you on the issues with the dash. Sometimes I find it funny others not so much.
I target an enemy and he vaults over a slight barrier like he knows that’s all he needs to do, and I just crash doing no damage sometimes.

And those long immobile frames are part of why I dropped phaseslam.

it is cool when blitz kind of breaks and you end up flying a super long distance to chase an enemy that tried to run away. :grin:

It’s like nope you can’t escape me! That’s also what made me want to increase the activation range, it was so fun to fly through the air like that.

#17

Tied to cooldown and delayed after you pop your skill. Can’t compete with Knifedrain.
Dragon classmod helps, but it’s still tied to melee kills, and Dragon classmod means no Breaker classmod, i.e. no +100% melee damage from +1 Find Your Center

#18

It seems that way, but I haven’t really missed it, I feel like I kill much faster too using ties that bind. When I get it setup right, I’m hitting one opponent but I can takeout five, and have my lifesteal spread between the five instead of just the one I’m hitting.

Isn’t the dragon mod her absolute worst mod?
Why would you want to use that?

The only augments that can actually activate with a dead enemy are singularity or novas, and neither are really worth it because they reduce action skill damage.

#19

Again, as I stated in my post, your changes would help, but even if they would be put in the game, I would still not enjoy the gameplay.
The main thing that is bugging me with Amara is, that she lacks any kind of combat loop with melee, that is based on skill synergy.

As an example with Krieg:

There is a clear combat loop that was mainly based on Release the Beast. You would want to setup the battlefield before you go into RTB (mainly with Slag which does not apply to this game, I know) and once you entered your RTB Rampage, your main goal was to setup a good Bloodsplosion or get a melee kill to activate Fuel the Blood. Once that skill is up, your whole gameplay changes because suddenly you start throwing buzzaxe’s that hit for way more than your normal melee. And consequently you can get a better Bloodsplosion with a thrown buzzaxe.
A similiar scenario happened with Zero and his executes. There was a clear sequence to achieve the most damage possible on your execute and keep the Many Must Fall Chains going.

Amara just lacks this kind of loop with her melee. One thing that would help
already is to make Blitz more accessible, maybe in a way like Execute (make it available below 50% HP of the enemy).
She definitely needs a skill that changes the way you approach the battlefield. I was actually really excited, when I first saw the design of the Dragon COM because you can access Remnant as a melee-based class. In theory that would have been extremely powerful and similar to Bloodsplosion. However, due to the bugs with Remnant and the underwhelming effect of the Dragon COM with most of her augments, it turned out to be underwhelming. This was just sad, because this COM had so much potential.

#20

The reliance on the Grog Nozzle/Rubi may be true for Melee Zero, but on Melee Krieg it is actually really bad to use Moxxi weapons. They screw up your Release the Beast, which is your main form of healing besides killing an enemy.