this is gonna sound really obvious, but the best way to parry groups is to not do it at all. if you only have a tier 1 melee playing a backliner, and round the corner into 6 melee scavs, it's best to just run away. if it's during a wave, you should use your abilities and resources to deal with it, instead of relying on pure, raw skill. example: if you're playing Sovereign, trying to fight 6 scavs at once is a death sentence. throw a dagger close to some scavs, and use something like Throwing Knives, Hunting Axes, firearms, bows, or even try to pick off a scav with your melee so you can use your ability. once you do that, support the spawned thralls to keep up pressure and damage. once it's down to 1 or 2 scavs, you can easily finish them off yourself, unless you have 4 stacks of morale and suffering from starvation and dehydration. Melee is to pick off stragglers that survived/dodged explosions, abilities and bullets, and to hunt scavs during the looting phase. they're not a main, reliable way to deal with large groups, unless your Perk (and your team) supports it. a good example of Melee being a primary source of damage would be Berserk + Lazarus. Zerk with Laz buff is very tanky, killing most melee and firearm scavs while the Lazarus stays back to shoot at scavs that deal high damage per shot (i.e the SSShitstorm combo: Shotguns, Sledgers and Snipers) if there's a huge crowd of melee scavs, the Laz should stun them with its ability, so the Berserk can kill a few of them and not be beaten to death immediately (melee scavs often bypass death prevention, due to high damage on heavy swings) if you wanna go crazy with it, add in Immolator to the mix. now, the Laz can save bullets by letting fire damage do its job instead of following up a second headshot, and your Berserk will one-shot God himself with a heavy swing. another analogy would be defeating Sledge Queen. can you do it fists only as damned with Honorable only? i mean, yeah, you can... but just because you CAN do it, doesnt mean you SHOULD. instead of relying on pure skill to beat her, which is extremely difficult, you should instead plan ahead and use whatever's at your disposal to kill her. C4, proxy mines, Tickspider mines, Dynamite, Blitzer grenades, Riskrunner's minigun, AKMs, KSGs, Stims, you name it. TL;DR: dont try to melee hordes of scavs. use your resources and abilities instead, unless your perk and team supports melee.
The most basic parry is literally walk up to a melee scav, parry. If not parried, shove. If parried, melee hit once or twice with how heavy your light hit weapon is.
just parry, if missed, parry once more, if missed, parry again, this applies to melee scavs only, depending on the scavs, you either double, or triple parry sometimes
(lyrics) "she robux on my tix till i roblox, im the one, knockin on ya door i got gold glocks little somethin on ma wrist, bitch i got gold rocks yuh they call me perfect, bitches call me goldilocks keep the double barrel sawed off on me, blow back ya face , make you look deformy disappear for centuries, then make you look before me, i aint post on any socials, got them lookin for me"
Berserk's ability adds 40% melee damage. the Specialist Knife deals 46dmg on a heavy hit. melee can be further improved by being Nourished (+10%) and Quenched (+5%), or by using Koldera Black (+10%), the Methodical trait (+15%), using a Combat Stim (the purple one, +35%dmg), and some perks already have naturally higher melee damage like Vagabond, Berserk, Arbiter and Drifter. most scavs have 80 to 100hp. Sledger's the only exception where it truly matters, with 150hp. Pitchfork scav is a joke. certain melees have ridiculously high damage by default, like Maria's 80 heavy swing damage, or the Executioner Sword's 120+ dmg swing.
Me when drifet spawned to delete tomahawk scav:HOLY SH#T WHERE DID YOU COME FROM(also at first i was wondering how he teleported then remebmered "hold f to place and anchor")
Being an Apostle, hidden are my dessert. They are really, really easy to pick off if you know on what you are doing and you have the tools to deal with them.
another thing you can do to learn parrying is learning about the enemy types, theres scavs you can parry as soon as they get in your range like the lead pipe, combat knife, crowbar and ice axe scav but then theres enemies like sledger and the boar spear scav
using methodical on BERSERKER, a class that literally gives you heavily increased melee damage, is idiotic and should never be included in a berserker build.
