u/Da-real-obama

These are my personal rebalancing ideas for all of Hunt’s melee weapons and tools.

The goal isn’t to make melee meta, but to give each weapon/tool its own use case and make them more fun. Right now melee balance feels dull. The Spear overshadows almost everything while being a tool, so let’s start there.

Tools

Spear
Slight increase to stab animation time and a small reach nerf. There’s no reason a tool should have the longest melee range.

Knife & Throwing Axes
No changes. They’re fine, just overshadowed by the Spear.

Throwing Knives
Assailant now lets you quick-throw knives. Double tapping the swap button lowers your gun and instantly throws one without swapping to it.
Makes them way more fluid and opens up combos like Sparks into knife. Hard to master since it throws instantly.

Heavy Knife
Biggest issue is inconsistent one-taps because limb hits often fail to kill.
Fix: holding heavy melee slightly longer charges a stronger swing.
More damage, more stamina cost, longer windup.
Same concept as Hundred Hands with the bow.
Balanced because:

1. Heavy Knife already drains stamina fast
2. Longest swing time
3. No extra range since it’s still a swing, not a stab

Dusters
Currently mostly brought for Immolators when running Riposte, which makes sense.
Change: remove the small movement penalty on heavy swings.

New variant: dual Dusters.
One on each hand. Heavy melee swings right then left rapidly like a boxer.
Looks cooler, better in PvP, balanced because you’re committed to both swings.

Knuckle Knife
No changes. Derringer Penny Shot kind of pushed it out, but future tools/AI could bring it back.

Weapons

Machete
Cheap and intentionally not amazing.
New passive: carrying a Machete lets you cut through bushes quietly and break fewer branches.
Small buff, nice utility.

Saber
My favorite melee.
Give it a meaningful range buff so it has the best melee reach.
Rewards spacing and accurate chest stabs. Still has the weakness of missing or hitting a limb

Katana
No changes.
Already strong with its trait, and now has a small weakness with the saber range buff.

Axe
High stamina, deletes bosses, goofy.
Small change: heavy attacks always one-shot Concertina wire.

Hammer
New trait: Shockwave
The Hammer’s impact reverberates through the structure. Breaking a door or window causes a second door or window in the same building to shatter.

Makes Hammer a legit breaching tool and gives teams more ways to open compounds aggressively.

Bat
New trait: Audacity
Only the bold would try. Strike thrown consumables mid-air to redirect their flight.

Light swings send them back along their original path.
Heavy swings send them wherever your hit connects.

This would so funny to mess around with

It’s one thing to have a weapon be strong or meta, since a lot of the time that just means it’s best in slot or efficient. But the bow is kind of breaking the rhythm of the game in my opinion. It’s kind of annoying and takes away the parts of Hunt that actually make it fun.

Having a weapon that can one tap at good range, stay completely silent, applies a bleed, recover its ammo, stack traits to boost damage, and still bring utility with different ammo types just dumbs the gameplay down a lot.

It also just overshadows every other similar weapon while being medium slot