Melee Attack

Seven performing a heavy melee attack.

Every hero can perform a melee attack to quickly finish off an enemy or do damage while reloading. Melee damage scales with levels and with certain items like Melee Lifesteal and Lifestrike. A light melee attack can be charged up to a heavy melee attack to lunge forward without using up any of the player's Stamina and do more damage; however, the amount a player can turn is reduced during the attack animation. Compared to a normal dash using one Stamina bar, a heavy melee attack lunge travels the player approximately half of the distance. Charging the melee attack can also be done in the air. The default keybind for melee attacks is Q. Pressing Q triggers a light melee attack, while holding initiates a heavy melee attack.

The cooldown for a heavy melee is 1 second, if you miss your heavy melee it will increase to 1.3 seconds.

Overview

See Melee Damage for a list of all heroes' base melee damage and scaling.

Melee attack damage benefits from 50% of all Weapon Damage buffs.

Last hitting a Trooper with a melee attack will prevent its Soul Orb from appearing and give player the full amount of Souls they would have gotten if they shot the Trooper and its orb. Players can perform melee attacks to secure orbs, though they can only do so after a short delay when denying enemy Soul Orbs.

Melee attacks that hit a player climbing an object, such as a ledge or rope, will cause an 80% slowdown that ramps down to 20% over 2 seconds. Heavy melee attacks that hit a player carrying the Soul Urn will force them to drop the urn.

Melee attacks are the only way to interact with the Sinner's Sacrifice and will cause 80 retaliation damage (regardless of whether a Light or Heavy melee was used).

Heavy melee attack is the only way to get the Buffs, claim Rejuvenator or loot the bag of unsecured Souls dropped by a killed hero.

Performing a melee attack will decrease the player's speed shortly after. The amount of speed decreased varies between heroes, and additionally varies depending on if a light or heavy melee is used. The speed decrease can be mitigated through items that give resistance to movement slow effects, such as Fleetfoot and Enduring Speed.

Melee attacks will interrupt reloading when performed. Light melee attacks (with the exception of Billy's) instantly freeze the reload timer on use, while heavy melee attacks will instead freeze the reload timer once the attacking hero begins lunging. Reloading resumes once the melee animation has completed.

Parry

Parries (Default key: F) are a defensive move that is available to every Hero.

After performing a parry, a Hero briefly enters a parry state. The parry animation lasts 1 second, during which any incoming melee attack will be parried for the first 0.75 seconds. During the parry state, the player can fully absorb melee attacks and apply the following status effects to the melee attackers: stunning the attacker for 2.75 seconds (cannot be reduced by debuff resistance), preventing incoming melee damage, and making the attacker susceptible to increased damage in return (+25% to all damage sources, not just the individual who parried).

A successful parry has a brief 0.3 second window exiting the parry animation in which the player will not be able to perform anything, after which any action (including another parry) can be performed. Holding the parry key allows the player to parry multiple heroes. An unsuccessful parry has a cooldown of 4.5 seconds before another parry can be performed again.

Debuff Resist does not impact the duration of those status effects from being parried. However, Unstoppable (and abilities that grant the same effect) does prevent being stunned by a successful parry.

Counterspell and Rebuttal give additional effects to parries, with Rebuttal also decreasing parry cooldown to 2.5 seconds.

You can parry Troopers (blocks damage but doesn't stun them) and Guardians (blocks damage and prevents them from attacking for a short period; parried Guardian will not attempt another melee attack for a short while). You cannot normally parry Walkers or most abilities, with an exception of Viscous' Puddle Punch.

Heavy Melee Cancel

Heavy Melee Cancel is a technique that allows you to interrupt a Heavy Melee attack by using specific Active Items or Abilities. This is particularly useful for melee-focused builds, as it can bait enemies into wasting their Parry.

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Baiting Heavy Melee by canceling it with Fleetfoot.

How to Perform

To execute a Heavy Melee Cancel, follow these steps:

1. Buy an Active Item or select a Hero with an ability that enables Heavy Melee cancellation.
2. Initiate a Heavy Melee attack.
3. During the lunge phase, activate the item or ability to cancel the recovery animation while maintaining momentum.

Items that cancel Heavy Melee

List of items

Name	Cost	Category
Fleetfoot	1,600	Weapon
Fury Trance	3,200	Vitality
Vampiric Burst	6,400	Vitality
Colossus	6,400	Vitality
Unstoppable	6,400	VItality

Abilities that cancel Heavy Melee

Some Heroes can perform Heavy Melee Cancel using their innate abilities, but they may be locked out of immediate follow-up attacks due to ability restrictions.

List of abilities

Hero	Ability
Dynamo	Singularity
Ivy	Stone Form
Kelvin	Ice Path, Frozen Shelter