The vanilla melee block sucks.
This is not news to you. What might be news to you is that even a blocked attack still does almost all its damage to you - in vanilla, blocks only mitigate 25% damage base.

The twitch-parry's worst problem is that it's effective for half a second, leaving you vulnerable for the rest of its useless spazzy animation, during which time you get stabbed, slapped, stomped, skewered, and probably pretty steamed.


This mod's damage-immunity burst makes it more like a sustained block, not a half-second muscle spasm.  OBSOLETE: see main mod page

To get the most out of melee (weapons or HTH), there's some stuff you should do:

First and most important is go into ESC and Settings and Controls, on PC with Mouse/Keyboard, and set your Bash/Power Attack/Grenade key to F - or another key you can hit very easily. If you use Hotkeys or a mod to bind Power Attack to any other button, or separate it from the Grenade function, or in any way avoid the vanilla setting, you are missing half the melee combat system!

NPCs will wind up an attack before taking a swing at you. If you are in range and hit your Power Attack key in this window, you will execute an evasive countermove that will dodge all damage from the NPC and counterattack for a free hit or even several hits or possibly an instant execute. This works with melee weapons, or unarmed, or the HTH weapons like the Knuckles, etc. There are a LOT of special animations. You may never have seen many or most of them before. The timing is very Elden Ring / Dark Souls-ish but not as harsh.

> These countermoves, being animation-based, only trigger in third-person. Beth simply did not remake all of them in 1stP. Also: they will NOT trigger with any "slow time" effect active, so switch them off before engaging! <

When an NPC is in the middle of their attack (after the "wind-up"), this is the window to Block.

Note that after a successful block, immediately hitting your Power Attack/Countermove will frequently result in a free special move or even execute!

The weird delays and Dramatic Posing in Beth's idea of melee are incomprehensible in general. If you haven't flipped a table yet, go get, say, a Shishkebab. Attack with it. After you leftclick to start your attack, look how long it takes for you to actually swing the blade anywhere near where it might hit an enemy. First you pull back, then you pose dramatically, then finally you start to swing it.... now imagine all guns behaved this way and fired a bullet 1.75 seconds after you pulled the trigger. Useful, eh?

All this is quicker to do than read about really. Follow the above steps, and an ammo-sparse Survival run or Homicidal Axe-Wielding Raider or Pickman Devotee will be a viable playstyle.