I love DayZ's approach to the melee system. I like the diversity of different attacks and weapons. I like that launching an attack is an actual commitment, as it locks you into an animation (that might just be my bias as a Dark Souls player) thus preventing the ridiculous sprinting in circles and spamming attack we had in 0.62

Occasionally I see it getting undeserved hate, a lot of which is centered around its stun mechanic. The common accusation is that its entire complexity, tactics and balance gets reduced to whoever gets a stunlock chain first - and the more I think about it, the more I kinda agree.

Currently, the usual stunlock chain you can get is 3 heavy attacks (and a light one at the end). If you time your heavy attacks instead of spamming, you can easily get 4 of them. I understand that getting a stun should be rewarded, but i feel like what we have now is too much. I suggest a simple tweak - a stun cooldown. Basically, after a player character enters a stun animation, there should be a few seconds after it ends, during which you can't get stunned again. That way the reward for stunning someone is another heavy hit or few light ones for free - and IMO this should be plenty.

I'd love to hear what the game design department's opinion is about my suggestion <3