Please note that I have no knowledge of modding UT2k4 so dont yell at me telling me certain thingz arent possible.
I beleive melee combat can be greatly improved.
First of all, like I've seen most people say, the strikes need to be a little faster.
I'm not sure if this is an origonal idea, but it would be awesome to intergrate adrenaline into duels to let the player do special moves at different adrenaline levels. Adrenaline would be gained through successfull hits, successful blocks, and defeating opponents. For each successfull hit and block, the player would gain 15-20 adrenaline and for defeating an opponent they would gain 50 adrenaline. Special moves would be able to be activated with 50-99 adrenaline, for a weaker move, and 100 adrenaline for a powerful move. Of course this system could be changed, because balance is everything. Special moves would be weapon specific. Another cool but optional touch would to have the name of the special move flash over the players head when activated and/or have an annoncer say its name. Adrenaline carries over to other matches, even if player lost.
Here's what some special moves could be for certain weapons:
Katana
lesser move (LM, Ninja Shadow)- Player becomes invisible.
greater move (GM, Chaos Ninja)- Player becomes the chaos ninja and is shrowded in black: player gets acrobatic moves and dodges, has a higher jump, runs faster, and strikes faster
Double Axe
LM(Axerang)-Top half of axe detaches and can be thrown like a slow-moving, guided boomerang.
GM(Bladefire)- Player slams axe into the ground and makes lines of cutting energy travel along it. The cutting energy starts as a single strand and then spreads out into five lines. The cutting energy strands look like glowing little circular blades that move through the ground and leave behind trails.
Axe
LM(Beam of Lethargy)- Axe shoots a black beam in the direction you point it. If it hits an opponent it makes them run an strike slower for 15 seconds.
GM(Chaos Cloud)- Axe shoots a flowing black cloud in the direction you point it. Any opponent it hits gets stuck in place and gets disoriented vision. When opponent is stuck in place, he or she can still pivot in place and strike.
Bastard Sword
LM (Fire Sword)- Sword lights on fire. Deals more damage and can light other players on fire for 15 seconds.
GM (Call of Chaos)- Player's sword points toward the sky and a beam of red-black light comes down and hits the player. From the player a shockwave of fire/chaos energy branches out and damages opponents. By doing this, the player also recieves 25 points of damage.
Daggers
LM (Death Portal)- Player slashes an X in the air, cutting a portal to the Realm of Chaos in the air. From the portal comes the head of a demon who breaths a cloud of fire onto opponents.
GM (Blade Tornado)- Player holds blades straight out at sides and spins, making a blade-tornado. Does lots of damage, but once you press a direction key, you move in that direction till you hit a wall and controls become very slippery.
Mace
LM (Energy Blast)- Player twirls mace, generating shock energy. Mace shoots a blast that does damage, and knock the opponent out.
GM (lightening Strike)- lightening comes down from the sky and supercharges weapon for 20 second. When player makes a successfull strike, it does more damage and causes lightening to travel from striked opponent, to any other opponents, dealing them damage.
Warhammer
LM (Earth Quake)- Player strikes the ground with hammer making a fissure in the direction you were facing that damages opponents.
GM (Crippling Blow)- Warhammer grows to twice its normal size for 5 seconds. Any succesful strike made on an opponent within those 5 seconds flattens them and is an instant kill.
Templar
LM (Holy Power)- Works like regeneration.
GM (Excalaber)- Sword is engulfed in multicolor energy and player goes into a slashing fury in whichever direction he or she points.
Some of my ideas for new melee weapons are the Chaos Sickle (a black sickle with the chaos skull on it), Chainsaw, Ball and chain, Nunchukas or w/e (the two wooden things attached by a chain), and a bladestaff (a staff with a blade on each side, kind of like a double edged sword).
Also Chaos UT needs a team DM gametype, and some chaos vecz for onslaught would be awesome.
After the next version for Chaos UT, heres a cool mod you guys could work on if you want. I'm not sure if any of it will be possible, and itd b a bigass project to work on, but it's a cool idea I just thought of:
REALMS OF CHAOS (cue dramatic muzik)
This would be a melee only, medival, RPG mod based on the chaos melee weapons and chaos UT flavor. First off, players would choose a name, and a race (skaarj, Legion of death (those nightmare guys), humans, mokara, or timetravelers (Xan and his cyborg crew) Each race would have its own special abilities (i.e. Skaarj can run fast, jump high, and are strong, Timetravelers wield energy, Mokara use tribal magic, etc.)
Every player starts at level one, but gains experience through servers. After a player chooses his race, they select a gametype named after their race. Players can not choose a gametype that is not named after their race. When a player joins the server with the gametype of his race, they start in a town with other members of that player's race. Towns keep the flavor of the player's race (ex- Legion of Death's town is dark and gothic with heads on sticks and stuff like that, Timetraveler's town has futuristic flavor.
In the town, the player can purchase weapons (the chaos melee weapons), purchase items (health potions, potions of invisibilty, potions of power, etc.), and learn the basics and earn abilities in gyms. Also, towns will have a specified center for chatting, like a restaurant where players will also be able to play mini-games. Also a cool touch 2 restaurants would be getting drunk, where players would lose control of their character for about 30 seconds and does funny things. In restaurants, players can also trade or but/sell items and weapons with other characters.
Another feature of towns would be the travel hut. The travel hut allows players to switch to other servers that run the mod to do specified tasks to gain experience. The things you can do in a travel hut are explained below:
Supremacy Duel- Creates a new, seperate server where you fight in duel gametypes with other members of your race on your current server. There would be many different types of duels you could do: 1 on 1, 3-4 way, or team. In each of these duels you choose what the varibles are: clean (normal chaos duel with no magic, player levels, gained abilities, or invintory), Normal (players retain all experience, special abilities, magic, and items gained with their avatar), Ante (players bet money on themselves, whoever wins the duel, gets the money).
Grudge Match- Finds a list of players that are within 2 levels of your avatar's current level in other towns of other races. By double clicking on a player from the list, they get a message asking for a duel and explaining the specifications of that duel (Ante, clean, normal, ect.). If the player accepts you and that player are transported 2 a duel arena.
Racewar- Requires two or more players. You and your teamates challenge a town of a differnt race to a melee battle.
Raid- Requires two or more players. You and your teamates raid a town of another race to steal items and money, or just cause chaos by killing other players and destroying buildings. When you and your teammates raid another server. Players in that server's town are alerted of your raid. If players on that server do not stop your raid, they all lose experience. Likewise, if your raid is not successful, you and your teammates lose experience. For a raid to be successfull, you must either gain an amount of kills equal to 2ce the amount of poeple on that server, or loot and cause destruction for an amount of minutes equal to 3x the amount of players on that server.
Town dungeon crawl- creates a server that only members of your town have access to. In this server, you can slay monsters to gain experience and loot, fight boss monsters, and search for legendary items and weapons.
Personal dungeon crawl- creates a server that only you have access to. You can fight monsters on your lonesome.
Normal Dungeon Crawl- Join or create a server where all races are alowed. In this server, you cannot kill other players, only monsters.
If you guys are interested in making this, i culd go more into detail about how everything wuld work. This wuld probly be tha coolest mod out there if you guys manage to pull it off.