Let's talk about the elephant in the room: punching.

Did someone get focused punched on landing 1 too many times ?

Hey, it's best to engage with the ideas presented rather than just being dismissive. 


It would be interesting to shake up the melee game, and the idea of variable swing times and damage per legends is interesting, even though it would take a lot of balancing. 

I could see a melee nerf, but I think dropping it to 15 would be far too much, I think Respawn want folks to use punching as a viable part of combat.

As for the damage being unrealistic, you nailed it already and it's just a gamey/balance thing.

We even have the Heirlooms showing this, where getting hit by a big dude swinging a giant freakin' hammer (which also splashes you with acid) does the same damage as a punch from 5 foot 3 inch Wraith. 

Oh also @Doc2FX please be sure to proofread when posting, your initial post had a very inappropriate/confusing word that I assume got autocorrected in. Thanks!

@EA_DavidThanks a lot for that answer! 🙂

Edit: maybe you're right, simply passing to 5 punches to kill someone unarmored would be nice.
22 damage / hit could be interesting IMO.

And sorry about the language, I guess this is coming from my native language to English realtime. 🙂

@Doc2FXI landed some kills as I have good "leg moves" while I can aim, so I guess that I feel the same for the damage part. The recoil/little stun is nice for me but it is less present from bullets (and while recoil should be inferior as bullets don't deliver as much kinetic energy or much more focused, the stunning effect should be improved).
This should be balanced so it is only a last resort option, not something people will try because they feel they can outplay you if your connexion is a little slow and to keep bullets.
So I would make it like p2020 (unless you land in the head, where it would be twice damage) so it is not too low, but half damage/regular damage on shield or helmet.
Still I would add tasers batons (20 dmg, 5 second haze and slow move), tonfa (15 dmg, twice the "stun" of punch) and bayonets (20 damage, armor piercing for half damage) as means to compensate and as "personal guards" for last resort.
I could add a lot more, but pole weapons and swords are a little out of place. Maybe energy versions? But still in the current state, it is indeed a little strange that you punch more than you do damage with light guns or even heavy smgs single bullets.
Attack rythms is still slower than guns, and you got to get close (and it mostly only can be done by jumping people or preventing their movements) so it would be fairly balanced.

I would make damage for all gun weapons point blank twice, also, so that it takes more than being lucky to kill someone in close combat.

Edit: alternative ID: make fist damage temporary: if you KO the enemy with it, it is also temporary, you have to execute to really frag, else health points get back at the same rythm than Octane (Octane gets twice, or triple if you think that he heals better false damage).

That way you can really KO an enemy but killing him is much more difficult.

Melee in this game needs to be tweaks. It is really annoying and BS, specially with Octane. 

Punching is a bit OP. The main problem tho is the ridiculous range and randomness you are getting hit, and its all because of the server lag/tic rate and so on.

Its really a pain where you both are super low, and you are both on reload, he just punch you and you die. 30 damage its kinda a bit.

They either have to lower the range, and make it possible to dodge the shots(cause right now its pretty much 100% random) and/or still lower the damage a bit. 20-25 damage for a punch will still be a lot.

But being on 30% of your health, and to die by 1 punch is ridiculous.

This is a shooter, not fighting game at the end of the day.

@nebwise Season 9 drop loot update temporizes this a little.

The core problem (which I won't address in details here) is the addressing of brutality, animalty and stupidity of players. Which... Works.

Against all the odds, it's part of what generates money on this game, so don't expect it to be wiped away.

If you imagine Apex Legends with less primitive/bestial functions, that would be awesome, but part of the player base wants those things.

Which includes:
- Octane (we all know it, this character is for kids and immature players, and guess what? It works like a charm. Any Octane on our team drastically lessens your winrate, I did stats, this is mind-blowing), this would need an option to check "Disallow in party", but that's too controversial and not really "public relations friendly".
- Ordnance (which was adressed with march 3 patch with stack removal, season 9 arcstar stun removal)
- Hammer Points hop-up (adressed in season 9 vaulting)
- Bloodhound scan (still to be changed, however it is done)

- Hot drops and primitive cannon fodder behaviour (this was partially solved by may 12 location challenges removed, see next point)

- No game training (no tutorial, I mean, the game tutorial is about anything but battle royale, just about items) and no map discovery training (this is intentional, partially solved on season 8 first 15 days with damage-free exploring). Like simply telling people "you need 1m50s at least in time-to-action between two games, if you die before 1:50 in game, you basically spend half your time in lobbies". This was partially addressed with the addition of arenas in season 9.

- Melee damage (partially adressed in season 9 starting loot patch), the loot removal of players' drop positions doesn't really help that to change.

- Solo drop possibility (this should be allowed 100m from the ground only)

- Banner ping / beacon ping limitations to one

- Battle Pass quests-only gameplay and dumb grinding, this was adressed with ranked penalty, but only for ranked (even though ranked penalty actually affects all "Play Apex" modes).

Without those things, the game would be more interesting. It's really cool like that, but I still personnaly regret those aspects not being taken into account every day.

But as a game developer myself, I don't blame anyone. I know how hard it is, especially when the marketing and management layer come in. 😉

As you can see: season 9 seems the be the update that adresses to people's intelligence the most so far, so even if I'm still sighing a little from time to time, we have to recognize we just had the best update ever.