It does make you go hmmm. It's an interesting thing to think about. I can understand your frustration of not getting a satisfactory kill with your bullets and then getting stabbed from behind, but...
It is down right cartoonish when I have to put FOUR rounds from a semi auto rifle into a guy to drop him and then I am killed INSTANTLY by a bayonet from behind, and before I am on the ground he is running at full speed past me and I see him stab another guy and another before I have fully blacked out.
....
That being said, does anyone really think it makes the RO2 a better game when you can kill someone with your bayonet instantly - as in less than a fraction of a second to instant kill with one jab - without even breaking a run, and yet you can be shot in the guts with up to THREE rounds from an SVT or a G41 from 2 meters away - military rifles designed to knock someone down from 100 meters - and you do not drop your weapon, or fall down or become disoriented from hydrostatic shock, but instead can simply shoot your attacker dead before you slap on a band-aid and in one second be healed 100%?
With all respect to the spirit of your complaint (on one point I can agree with you), I have a lot of pointed nitpicks: you described how you
slowly died, able to watch your enemy kill two more people after he killed you. But then you described the bayonet kill as "instant," "less than a fraction of a second". This is a flat out contradiction. In all fairness, he could've hit your heart for an instant kill, but he didn't and that's beside the point because you obviously hadn't hit your target's heart, either.
Now, your four shot shots
did wind up killing the enemy you shot at before you got stabbed from behind. Assuming all four bullets hit, some of them might have been redundant to a "slow death" or even a bleedout type death while still missing the actual instant kill shot locations such as the heart or brain, or some or all of them added up to hit point depletion. If he was near enough to see you, he might have watched you get bayo'ed as his screen blacked out. You didn't say if or at what point the enemy finally died (did you see your kill before or after your own slow death?), so that's all speculation on our part. If you didn't kill you must have been missing (whether latency, hit registration or just plain miss) or hitting non-vital hitboxes.
And, this may seem like a nitpick, but it requires saying: bandaging does
not heal the wounds. Not 100%, not 50%, not .0001%. It stops a bleedout from depleting any
more hitpoints after you have bandaged it, but
no hitpoints are recovered, so, even though unimpaired, the soldier is still wounded and more likely to die for the rest of his time;
he is not healed. (Unfortunately, I saw the video where it also appears to --I don't know if this is occasional or all the time, haven't taken the time to test it...-- stop the bandaged hitbox from taking any more subsequent damage
at all. If this is persistent, it's a bad problem that needs to be fixed yesterday).
You go on to speak about how bayonet kills should slow the
attacker down more and how long it should take to finish a kill with a bayonet. These points might be debatable, but that shifts your original point of comparison based on you having shot a guy four times: namely how long it takes for someone shot or stabbed to go down. Two different issues so to compare one to the other is to confuse the discussion.
I enjoy bayonet kills. But I see many people going on bayonet rampages where they kill people as easily as poking them with a finger and keep running to kill more and more and it is absurd, especially in a universe where being hit by rounds from military rifles anywhere other than brain, heart or nuts do not make you break a sweat and are cured instantly with band-aids.
To kill with a bayonet required a lot of force on the part of the stabber and a lot of force to pull it out again. Then you would have to regain momentum from a complete stop. Often the weapon would have to be extricated from the victim, particularly if it sliced into ribs or hip bones, which took time an effort.
But in RO2 EVERY bayonet stab takes exactly one second and imparts no loss of energy and you can go right back to a Jesse Owens sprint in the bat of an eye.
A lot of exaggeration. Soldiers were trained to be relaxed when using a bayonet so they could preserve energy and use speed to their advantage. A
single bayonet thrust would
not deplete a significant amount of energy, and a proper thrust delivers kinetic energy from the whole body in as efficient a way as possible, and I need not say that a sharp bayonet is by design able to pierce a human body without very much force required (this allowed a pre-wwI tactic of extending the bayonet with
one arm to gain the advantage of reach to be formidable until everyone was using it --or expecting it). Force is required more for speed and to go through parry attempts than for the knife to pierce vital areas. Also, the "sprint" in the game nowhere near approaches a "jesse owens" quality, also noting that the stamina bar doesn't last forever... if they've expended the stamina bar already in the lead-up to their first attack, then "sprinting" is a casual jog at best.
Again, I do not have as much a problem with this as I do putting this kind of insta-death from a knife into the same battleground where a big-@$$ army rifle shoots someone from close range and it had no more effect than giving them a hard shove.
When will being shot actually cause people to drop weapons, be knocked back or spun around (in the case of being hit on the side of your hip or shoulder) or dropped to the ground?
Soldiers with adrenaline pumping might not be stopped as easily as you imagine or as is shown in the movies. Rifle rounds penetrate the body and kill if the right organs are hit, and this is what they will do best. If you want pure stopping power you want something that isn't going to penetrate the body at all, such as a bean bag. Thus rounds that are designed to stop
and kill are quite a bit larger than regular rifle rounds because you need a balance between penetration and energy transfer. Which means the more a round penetrates the body, the less actual physical "knockback" it will produce because the flesh is being separated and giving way rather than resisting intact and being pushed back. If the bullet goes
through the body as it often does in the game, it's hardly going to knock the victim
back at all. But that's a debate for ballistics and physiology experts because it really is obviously quite complicated will depend heavily on hit location and other factors, and not fully understood owing to lack of willing test subjects how it happens that one is or is not knocked back by a bullet. It's beyond my knowledge. I do know that in the game I can see people that I've shot noticeably
slow down. And if they do happen to stop to bandage while I'm aiming at them? They're dead, period.
When will running at top speed and stabbing with a bayonet on the end of a heavy rifle and then driving into the victim with great force, require the stabber to STOP, work hard to pull the bayonet out and then exert energy to change directions and pick up speed again?
Here is where I can agree with you. Running into another person for a hand-to-hand kill and extricating your blade from them should probably take a little bit more time than it does currently. But it really should not be that long. A single thrust and removal from a trained soldier should not take much more than a second.