Bungie tried in year 1 of d2 to make shoulder charge a less annoying ability by not letting it one shot.
What it did in that year of misery, was it gave you a melee advantage over your opponents.
Instead of taking 3 melees to kill (that's right, 3) it took 1 shoulder charge and a follow up melee.
Although that sounds like a substantial advantage, most of the game was plagued by camping, team shooting matches.
In year 2 they gave it back its power to one shot and although since then it's been largely talked about as being annoying, the frequency at which it was actually used was among the lowest of the 3 titan subclasses due to not just riskiness with the charged melee, but also a lackluster neutral game.
This upcoming nerf is gauged around shotguns being less of a counter to them due to reducing their range, and so they are deciding to reduce its damage in an effort to balance out abilities across the board.
Where this becomes an issue, is that reducing shotgun range doesnt reduce their effectiveness as a counter due to the lunge SPEED and slow animation recovery.
You go into a match and you can definitely get kills with shoulder charge as it is right now, but most of the time it's against opponents who weren't wary of your glorious presence or who weren't fast enough to react to being charged.
This, however, was more uncommon than it sounds and becomes rather unlikely in upper tiers of pvp.
Bungie's attempt to balance out the fact that it's no longer lethal also doesn't go far enough to give the actual ATTACK of the melee value.
You can lunge quite a bit further, but that tracking speed still gives your opponent time to fill you with buckshot.
The decrease in damage means it can't be used to rush an unwary fusion, and with it's slow animation recovery it means you are guaranteed to be sent to the shadow realm even if you do connect.
And although it can be charged up a little faster, it ultimately won't have any effect on its usage because it's all or nothing as is.
So what do they do?
Honestly I'm not entirely sure.
As a MELEE it's only real value was that it one shot because the aoes and effects they had were an unlikely occurrence to even take advantage of.
Shoulder charge as an offensive ability may very well be dead, because unlike shiver strike and ballistic slam it's not incredibly fast or much more potent as an actual attack.
Even in pve, their 25% damage buff only really applies to mid tier content because it's already weak and insanely risky to use.
Personally, I don't think they put enough thought into how the actual melee works and I mean MELEE, not movement ability.
Sundering, suppression, and blinding are cool effects, but you arent doing any of that in difficult content from a melee.
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1 ReplyYou can still OHK with charges abilities in the crucible, at least if you want to be technical about it. You have Peregrine Greaves, Synthoceps, Worm gods Caress, Heart of Inmost Light. So it's definitely still gonna be possible. Just not without some build crafting and maybe an exotic armor piece. You know actually making a build centered around your melee.