The parry also depends on the ping, if your ping sucks (200+) parry sooner because sometimes enemy can just bypass your parry even though you have parried at the right time
A little pointer for parrying scavs that have more advanced tactics, press r when you feel like your about to enter melee range, this gives you time to react if they decided to ready a heavy attack or grapple while still protecting you from light attacks, also for newer players please remember this: you CANNOT parry attacks with YELLOW auras, nor can you parry sicklers.
And please berserkers, parry attacks, sure you heal every kill while in bloodlust and you have damage resistance, but you restore more bloodlust when you parry versus just killing, the game is literally telling you to parry while berserk.
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.
you forgot to mention several things You can parry while not even facing an enemy (to avoid backstab entirely) If an enemy landed 2 light attacks combo on you, 3rd hit (with yellow blink, just like the one you can see on arbiter's knuckleboom) cant be parried. Damage is nearly equal to heavy swing. (Shovel and wakizachi scavs have that) Parries can stop enemies from shoving you, however shoving them while they are trying to shove you wont work (Unless you shove them while you are stunned. Also just pointing that out) Last thing I forgot to mention is that parrying recovers your stamina (as i remember, since i rarely pay attention to it, until i run out of it)
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
most of them are similar, you also have to learn the probability of the attack decision of a scav, of course its also how a game works where you have to die to learn
if they decided to do heavy attack and you missed your parry, don't hesitate to use Q - shove. Except when their eyes grow red then you MUST parry. Sickler, Hidden, Hanger, Skinner can't be grappled so don't even bother trying to melee them unless you're apostle.
Skinner and hidden are parryabble. Meleeing them is easy enough. Hanger you can melee pretty easily, just back up after a few seconds so when you get the self unalive thoughts you have enough space between you two. All the rekigons can be dealt with only melee with the exception of the sickler, which is just an unstoppable monster unless you're drifter with throwing knives, Executioner with high bounty, Vagabond with 10 stacks, apostle, berserker with all your buffs and a weapon above tier 3
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
Ok so, my strat for parrying is as following: When the enemy gets close enough to attack, I parry. If they do a heavy attack or grapple I have enough time to time it right. Also, parrying can be important even if you have a one shot melee. There are a couple reasons for this, first of all I am bad at fighting with range using melees and the damage stacking up can be punishing, even with many medkits. Now you should especially still do it if you are a beserker since they refresh their ability duration upon parrying, and also parrying in general refills stamina.
i hate it when berserkers on my team think they can solo sq and scav war, as well as night 10, but they dont know how to press the r key and they keep giving 4 morale
@@rickfrancisong3010 which is a really rare occurance in decaying winter, considering how even at the start of the game you fight 4 scavs from night 1-2
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.