Dual Blades is now objectively worse

I've mained Dual Blades since their season 3 release 600+ hours on them alone. Despite everyone telling me they're terrible, D tier, and getting griefed in Ranked for running them.

I'm not the best player and don't always have a ton of time to play The Finals, but it's my favorite game. I normally plateau high platinum each season, check my profile if you want to judge me or whatever.

Now before anyone rips my head off, I understand these are big changes and we've had one day with them. No one knows their full potential yet.

But melee now feels janky, unresponsive, and worse to play.

I love the stamina and precision ideas. Fundamentally amazing additions to balance the game but the execution feels wrong. I want melee to require skill, I want it to incentivize tactical play and positioning, I don't want Dual Blades to be an overpowered weapon that's easily abused. My issues are as follows:

(1.)
The lunge is inconsistent, the indicator lights up but doesn't always lunge. Lunging is a detriment if you're already in range to hit someone, as it sends you flying past them requiring a random 180 you can't always predict. Imagine every time you shot your gun, you had a 50% chance to dash behind your enemy. You'd say the game is unplayable too.

Let me turn it off or select when it happens. If not I'd prefer to have no lunge at all, unironically. Either by pressing the reload key that has no use on melee, holding down the sprint button when I attack to access the lunge, or holding down the M1/attack button for longer to trigger the lunge. Let me swing without lunging!

(2.)
Precision attacks feel inaccurate, sometimes I get precision hits I definitely didn't deserve, other times I have the center of my crosshair perfectly on an enemy in a frame by frame replay 1 inch from them and it gives a glancing blow. Meanwhile using sledge I can frequently sweep around and get precision hits on people to the far edges of the screen as long as I moved my camera wildly mid-attack.

(3.)
The Deflect was already broken, now it's unusable. Halving movement speed during deflect and doubling the amount of damage taken while deflecting feels like an entirely unnecessary kick in the teeth. It'd be much better if you reduced the damage reflected on to targets and left the speed and survivability alone.

This is ignoring the elephant in the room that is server sided hit detection. Virtually every weapon in the game uses client and server to determine hits, leading to precise, reliable, and snappy feeling combat. But the Dual Blades deflect lives entirely on the server, which means your latency heavily affects where deflections land. You can aim right on a target, but if they're even slightly strafing, you need to lead your shot a distance that's based on your ping to the server. This means many shots get "eaten" by the server, disappearing when they should have hit. This is one of the number on issues that made Dual Blades inconsistent before. If this was fixed, I'd happily take reduced power elsewhere.

(4.)
The sweep "adjustments" are crushing nerfs.
Melee weapons obviously need to get close, but how close? Apparently touching player models now. The range nerfs on spear, dual blades, and riot shield feel really bad, but have an unintended side effect I think Embark didn't consider. When you whiff a lunge despite the indicator being lit up and the target being in a straight line away, you have no range to hit them anymore and are force to wait 3 seconds to swing again. The Time To Kill (TTK) is now longer in practical situations because the sweeps are shorter and rely on the lunge to hit. This means TTK is based on distance between each hit, making it extremely variable. Which leads me to the biggest point.

(5.)
TTK is WORSE.
If you land precise attacks point blank on stationary enemies, you can get similar numbers to the TTK as before, but in my testing in private matches, that's not the case in real world conditions.

From my testing before the rework:

• Lights - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2-1 killed in 1.25~ Seconds
• Mediums - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2, Quick Melee killed in 1.55~ Seconds
• Mediums no QM - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2, Primary Fire 3 killed in 2.5~ Seconds
• Heavies - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2, Primary Fire 3, Quick Melee - 2.8~ Seconds

These weren't great TTKs before. Medium and Heavy depended on Quick Melee combos and I don't think that should be a part of the game, but they were important for lowering the TTK by upwards of a second. You only start doing this damage after getting into melee range and staying there**,** but you were rewarded with some of the worst TTKs in the game. How many Diamond or Ruby Dual Blades were there last season? Good players with good aim could track you and you'd die faster despite good positioning without whiffing any attacks.

After the rework (Stationary):

• Lights - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2-1 -] 1.25~ Seconds (no change)
• Medium - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2, Quick Melee -] 2.0~ Seconds (.45 worse)
• Medium no QM - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2, Primary Fire 1 -] 2.1~ Seconds (.35 better)
• Medium Cross - Primary Fire 1, Cross Attack -] 1.2~ Seconds (.45 better)
• Heavy - Primary Fire 1, Primary Fire 2, Cross Attack -] 2.1~ Seconds (.7 better)

Overall that seems like a buff right? Well these are the numbers for each hit landing on the first frame that they come out while precise. But remember, Embark reduced swing distances to balance lunge, meaning hits that used to hit instantly now take time to reach the target as you yourself are a projectile.

So when enemies walk backwards from you, with lunges the average TTK becomes:

• Light - 1.8~ Seconds (.65 longer)
• Medium - 2.8~ Seconds (.7 longer) [No Cross]
• Medium - 1.4~ Seconds (0.2 longer) [With Cross Attack]
• Heavy - 3.1 Seconds (1 longer)

These attacks would have previously hit instantly before. None of them previously needed a lunge to hit at this range, but they now take time to get to their targets, extending the swing animations and adding variable travel time to the kills.

In the real world, enemies don't slowly walk backwards away from you, they dodge, slide, run around corners, jump, climb, and so on. If an enemy sprints, you can add at least half a second or more to each TTK in my testing.

In other words, the fastest TTKs on non-sationary targets WHILE BEING PRECISE are:

• Light - 0.65 longer
• Medium 1.25 longer
• Medium - 0.25 longer [w/ Cross]
• Heavy - 0.3 longer

What new power was being gated behind skillful play?

[TL;DR] What I suggest they change:

#1 Allow melee players to choose when they lunge in some way. Holding down the attack button, pressing the reload key, or holding sprint all seem like reasonable options.

#2 Attacks need slightly more range again so non-lunge swings still connect without having to kiss their forehead.

#3 Please make Dual Blade's deflect client sided like every other projectile in the game already is. If you fix the hit reg, the current changes would be acceptable nerfs.

#4 If not, return Dual Blade's speed to normal while deflecting, and reduce the damage they take again as it's a survival tool for positioning in its current state. Just reduce how much damage it can reflect on to enemies by half instead, or make it so the damage they take from range while deflecting is reduce. We need the ability to reposition and survive.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk