Do Zombies Dream Of A Good Nights Sleep? (Zombie feedback)

[BoBoSlap 4]

Alright, so I have came in contact with zombies very very often as I just start out and have yet to find a gun and all I have is a melee weapon or even just my fist. Well, my problem is I will attack the zombie and you know move around dodging it's hits while trying to get my own that's all easy, but I will be hitting the zombie over and over and over etc. and It will not hit it. MAYBE once out of 30 it hits!? I have used just about every melee weapon in the game, from the garden hoe to the fireman's ax and even my fist. I will obviously be hitting the zombie and it will not hit the damn thing. I don't understand why. I'll stand still and you know get hit myself and I'll hit back right when they do and what not, still no hit.(And yes, I am aiming for the head)

 

So, I think the accuracy for melee weapons is off, so I'll you know, hit the wall to see if it will hit where I aim. It hits exactly where I am because whatever I hit has an animation of something breaking right on my cross hair or at least RIGHT next to it. Zombies though, impossible to hit.

 

I wouldn't find this a problem if I could run from the zombies, but from my experience it's pretty impossible to run from something that can see and run through every wall it encounters and the only time's i have ever have managed to escape a zombie was getting a lucky knock out on it and running just as fast as i could straight away from it.

 

I see all these videos on YouTube of people hitting zombies every time like it's nothing and they will just run around a corner and break the zombies line of sight and be done, but I can't seem to hit any of my attacks, and I can't seem to break a zombies line of sight by running through houses, around corners, up stairs, down ladders and etc. -_- Am I doing something just absolutely wrong?? I mean I am somewhat new to the game and the melee thing and running from zombies is only seemingly an issue when you first start off because you are pretty much defenseless from them until you get some sort of gun. But I sure would like to know how I can properly run from a zombie and it not chase me around the earth or be able to hit them more often than not with my melee weapons.

Edited August 6, 2014 by BoBoSlap

[hombrecz 832]

Just had unsatisfying fist fight with a freshie on experimental.

Not sure if it was desync or what, but he sometimes appeared behind me, I had problems hitting him....and yeah,I lost O_o.

But oh well, char on experimental has minimal value and he can enjoy the akm drum mag I found.

 

As for zombies, if you have axe, you should not have big problems dealing with them.

Sometimes you need to take few steps back to hit them though.

 

Breaking line of sight is almost impossible, but you can lock them up in houses.

Edited August 6, 2014 by Hombre

[ruullor 56]

I believe there is a bug right now with hitting zombies, that was just added a week or 2 ago. I havent had much problem killing them but some people do. If you just got the game you'll get better at killing them with some practice. Axes work the best, if you use a gun all your going to do is bring more zombies after you.

[Avant-Garde 229]

Don't use the crosshair to aim with melee, use the attack animation as a guide to where you will hit. Play a bit in 3rd person so you get usued to the animations and you will be good.Sometimes I don't even aim at the zombie/player, just drag the animation to it. The crosshair is the worse reference you could have.

 

Oh also, when you get usued to the animations, you will see that you can increase the range of your melee attacks (when its an overhead animation) by hitting your target with the end of the animation. To do so, you go running towards what you wanna hit, start the attack before getting to close, look up and try to land it at the very last second of the animation (the melee weapon deals damage the whole time it is swinging). Other thing, if you want to hit your target faster then you usually would do, get in facehug range, look  a bit down and attack, you will hit your target with the beggining of the animation and thus, making the hit land faster (really userfull against other players, against zombies you might wanna use the range trick I just told ya). But this does not apply to weapons that doesn't have an "overhead" attack animation (pitchfork, baseball bat, fists etc), for them you have to use diferent technics but with this same principle.

 

Once you mastered this logic, melee will be A LOT easier. In CQC I'd rather use an axe then a pistol and it works nice because people panic.

 

EDIT: Looks like this mechanic is out of the game for now, seems that it was lagging a lot so now you will have to find the "sweet spot", thats it, the frame or part of the animation that deals damage. Before, you could hit walls on your side or behind you because the during the whole animation it would deal damage, now your weapon will phase through things (walls, zeds etc) just like the DayZ mod's axe.

 

I'm really expecting that they fix it and bring it back, it was an awesome mechanic and quite realistic.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Avant-Garde

[Parazight 1599]

In my experience, hit boxes are smaller and axes hit to the right of where you are aiming.  Try aiming for the left side of the zombie/player, you may have better results.  good luck.

[sabre05 351]

There's a bug on stable where melee is fucking dreadful with something like a 40% chance of actually hitting something when you would have before the stable patch. It's being fixed atm.

[Killawife 599]

Hacked a hundred zombies to death yesterday but they got me in the end. Used maybe twenty rags to bandage myself but the screen got greyer and greyer and one last hit done me in :/ As stated theres something that makes the hit detection way off but you can manage if you take em on one at a time. The crawlers/hoppers are quite annoying though.

[ZomboWTF 527]

Zombies need to be hard, but also understandable, in the mod you could prone right next to a zombie without the zombie seeing you, which was very good for stealth gameplay, yet aimlessly running around you had about 10 of them behind you, please ignore the whiners riht now, the only thing that needs changing is melee combat and zombie aggroing and respawning

[DreadGrunt 16]

Zombies need to be hard, but also understandable, in the mod you could prone right next to a zombie without the zombie seeing you, which was very good for stealth gameplay, yet aimlessly running around you had about 10 of them behind you, please ignore the whiners riht now, the only thing that needs changing is melee combat and zombie aggroing and respawning

 

This just about sums it up.

[Caboose187 (DayZ) 3036]

the only thing that needs changing is melee combat and zombie aggroing and respawning

[DustyMayFire 0]

So ever since the newest update, I've been having lots of trouble actually hitting zombies with melee. My aim is fine, I am close enough to them, but my swings never hit them. I've tried standing absolutely still (still to the point where they double hit me) and swinging but that doesn't work. Guns work fine, and I'm not having the bug where pressing the LMB does nothing, it's just the swings are not connecting. Anyone have any idea what could cause this/how to stop this? The next time it happens, I'll try to record it and post it here (if videos are allowed on this site. This is my first time on the site/first post).

[Reg Park 160]

you're right, it's broken at the moment.

[IkaikaKekai 1957]

Yes, its broken, the hotfix made it so that you hit what you aim at, rather than what your weapon's swing runs into.  So crosshair on the head will hit the head.  Not the best solution in my mind but it's a quick and temporary fix, which is fine with me.

[ld-airgrafix 403]

Yes, its broken, the hotfix made it so that you hit what you aim at, rather than what your weapon's swing runs into.  So crosshair on the head will hit the head.  Not the best solution in my mind but it's a quick and temporary fix, which is fine with me.

How do u explain standing still, lining up the cross hair above, middle and below the head, and hits still dont register?

[IkaikaKekai 1957]

Can't explain it.  Last two melee kills I got on zombies were white dot on the head and 2 hits they went down.

[The Evolution 12]

Not sure if I was just imagining it but badly damaged melee weapons seen to be harder to hit with - what I've been finding anyway

[hothtimeblues 128]

Not even God can explain Dayz controls. Question, are any of the Bohemia coders that made Arma game controls working on DayZ? Arma controls were 1000 times better than what we are seeing here in Dayz.

[sokaku 50]

It's a fair bit better in experimental (0.48) so hopefully this will be patched into .47 otherwise we'll have to put up with it for a while in stable. Main thing is you need to learn how to avoid zed attacks efficiently while lining up your own attacks, don't expect to go toe-to-toe with them and kill them before they hit/kill you. Once you can dance around the zombie attacks then you can take them out, albeit it will take a bit longer due to the whiffed strikes that normally would connect. I normally have it down to an art with an axe, but on stable it takes 2-4 swings to get a connect typically. On exp. the occasional one misses, but the real difference is I cannot reliably hit them as they pass like I could in .46.

[Sebidee 167]

After hearing about the big update I decided to play for a few hours with friends. I hadn't played for a while but my friends were already kitted out and gave me everything I needed. Despite a few bugs, like not being able to shoot or swing occasionally I was impressed with some of the stuff added. Eventually we were killed by some players but I've got used to that by now.

 

However, when I tried playing on my own as a fresh spawn I found the zombies to be too annoying to play, for several reasons.

 

 

• First of all zombies are way too fast. They are actually faster than I am. I found that when running in a straight line the zombies will gain about 2 or so meters on you every second. So you can't just run away from them. When you spawn in you are almost immediately spotted by a zombie and then have to have a long chase which sounds exciting but gets old very quick. 

   

   

• Zombie spot distance is too damn far! I would be creeping along, trying to sneak up on zombies or avoid them, then see 5 pixels half a mile away and zoom in and watch it to see if the smudge on the horizon is a zombie. Then that smudge turns around, spots me crouching in the bushes and sprints towards me. If it is too far away for me to see it then it shouldn't be able to see me!

   

   

• Zombies appear to follow you like bloodhounds. Somehow they can follow you even when you break line of sight and even when you cut through buildings. If you can't run from them then you should at least be able to hide or trick them.

   

   

• Zombies hit from too far away. This is probably a bug rather than a design decision but zombies seem to be able to hit me from a few yards away.

   

   

• Zombies still pop through walls. Definitely a bug and it's certainly not as bad as it was before but combined with the other problem it is very annoying.

 

 

All of these reasons combined caused me to rage quit today. I spawned in and was immediately spotted by 4 zombies, I ran in the other direction and looked around to see that they were behind me. I was hit from a distance and started bleeding. I slowed them a little by jumping over fences and running around houses but I only had enough time to bandage before they were on me again. I decided to simply sprint through woods and after a minute chase with them constantly running into trees I got away.

 

I managed to get to the coast, I saw some houses and thought that this would be a good place to get some start up supplies. I knew that there would be a zombie somewhere so I decided to crouch and creep toward the buildings. I stopped to see if a smudge about 100m away between the houses was a zombie and found out it was when it literally turned round and chased me. I spent a good 5 minutes leading the zombie around the houses. I finally caught a break and lost the zombie long enough to get inside a house. I then started to search the house only to have the zombie follow me through the village, back door, two rooms, up the stairs, down a corridor and then catch me and cause me to bleed. I somehow managed to close the door and lock the zombie inside. I then went outside to bandage only to see the same zombie come through the wall and hit me again. I was bleeding with my two t-shirt rags used - therefore, dead and rage quit.

 

So it's obvious that that's not right. The funny thing is that when I was playing with my friends and armed with a gun the zombies were really good! They were a challenge and it was great to be chased by dozens of them and having to gun them down when they were too close. The zombies right now are perfect for when you are geared but when you are a fresh spawn they are too difficult and annoying. A quick fix would be to spawn with a random melee weapon but I think it would be better to change the way zombies work. Right now they are aggressive and seek out the player, instead they should be mostly sedentary obstacles that the player must overcome.

 

Suggestions:

 

• First of all, the zombies should be MUCH slower. They should move at a slow jog so that if you want you can simply sprint away from them.

   

   

• They should have poor sight and shouldn't be able to spot you further than 25m away unless you are running, this will help you sneak past them. They should still have a good sense of hearing so that shooting is a tactical choice.

   

   

• Bugs gone, obviously.

   

   

• At the moment zombies seem to spawn randomly, instead they should spawn in large numbers at important buildings. Right now the buildings with the best loot are the police stations, hospitals, schools, fire stations and military camps. So the zombies should act like a barrier between those building and the player. Going to these buildings would be a tactical choice, brave players with take the zombies out and gain the valuable items (or die) while the more cautious players can content themselves with outlying buildings with relatively few zombies. This is also pretty realistic as people would have went to those buildings anyway in a crisis.

 

 

Simply put, the player should decide whether to go to the zombies rather than having them attacking all the time. Of course there should be some zombies here and there but they should be isolated and shouldn't be a problem.

 

I think this would be great for the game and would give it a bit more depth and choice.

[flimsypremise 94]

Stuff about zombies

 

I agree with everything here 100%. I'd love to see slower, more numerous zombies that you can actually avoid with stealth.

[Bad Company 140]

It seems to me that item durability has taken a real hit, aka one punch from a zombie will turn a pristine high-cap vest to ruined, and also the jacket beneath it. 

[Jumbaliah 113]

Yup, just got killed by an invisible zombie. ill put this in the bug tracker as well but wanted you warn you all of the new skills zombies appear to have...

 

Remember that bug where we would hear zombie noises and nothing was around? Was happening to me today on a low pop server while i was looting a small town. Thought nothing of it until i got hit and started bleeding. 

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=299995054

 

edit: not sure how to post a picture directly from my steam screen shots. 

Edited August 13, 2014 by Jumbaliah

[darkrider400 76]

Zombies a little OP again?

 

 

I had a pristine High Cap Vest, with 2 Protector cases in it, then this regular civilian zombie comes up and hits me in the face while im looting, and the vest, protector cases, and everything inside the cases is ruined. It seems a little un-realistic how much damage a zombie can do right now. Like, to be honest, a regular holly-wood style zombie that this game portrays, wouldnt do a whole lot of damage per whatever attack it does. They use regular swiping motions, so it wouldnt be like machine gun rounds are tearing through your vest, i mean, the vest might get a little torn in a place or two, but its not gonna completely ruin it......

[rodolfoxiii 71]

OP zombies, really? I wonder if dayz is the first game that you ever played in your life.

[OmpaLompa 5]

It seems like equipment cannot absorb zombie hits as much, our team at the NW had to end of shooting zombies on sight, as a single hit caused bleeding and caused a real shortage on bandages. (the server was a little unstable/laggy though)

 

Personally I think it makes zombies a little more dangerous, although the critical hit bug they seem to have is still annoying.

Edited August 14, 2014 by OmpaLompa