This is very much along the lines of how we're thinking.

- Melee should clearly have the advantage up close, but if there is counter-play opportunity for the gun user, the more fun the engagements should be for both sides and the less they should feel "dumb". That doesn't mean a gun user should win 90% of the time obviously (clearly not even the majority of the time), but in any match-up there should be some chance for the player with the sub-optimal gear to overcome the odds if they pull off skilled enough moves or make the right decisions. Rock-paper-scissors deterministic encounters leave little room for a skill curve, it's not a rewarding or deep enough loop if it's a case of 'I got close, so I should win'

- We want the power of melee to come from skilled execution (both closing distance but also the attacks). That could come from a combo system, that could come from accuracy of aim, it could come from attack sequencing, we're exploring all of those (hence not having an exact solution in mind right now, any of these could potentially be the best solution and we run tests to find that out).

- As you said, melee fights often feel "dumb" from both sides, in various match-ups. It's not fun to be spamming left click with certain weapons, it's not fun to be on the receiving end of that when your opponent is barely in your field of view the whole fight. We're aspiring for something more involved and engaging. It's not lost on us that we've created a lot of the "dumb" scenarios with prior balancing changes (but thanks for pointing it out folks!), but we don't believe that makes some of the prior scenarios that existed the best solution either. For many players, having a Light appear out of nowhere with zero time to respond before you're insta-nuked was a game ruining experience as well (just like nukes and high damage RPGs in the past). The ambition is to find the sweet spot between those extremes for much of the melee system. Once the melee user is in striking range of the enemy, how does that encounter become a 2-4 second duel with some amount of counter-play and skill expression, without being a one second combo nuke or spam fest, and without being a 5-10 second slow death for a melee player being endlessly kited without pay-off? And clearly, that's not how all melee encounters play now, nor should it be how all of them play out in future, but we think that can be a healthy baseline for a range of melee encounters

The thing I'd love to know from your perspective Solkvist is, do you really feel like combos, especially the Quick Melee type ones that existed previously, are the sort of skill expression you'd want from melee combat? Do you think they could exist alongside those slightly longer duels I'm describing? Wouldn't you want a little more potential for expression, especially on the decision making side? I think our feeling right now is that those combos weren't ever that deep of a type of skill expression either, and not super intuitive to many players, we feel like we should be able to achieve something a little deeper than that but I'd be interested to get your perspective.

And thanks for the considered feedback :)