Melee weapons in PlanetSide 2 are represented by a large variety of knives. They can be used as a finisher in close quarters, for stealthy assassinations and as a last ditch effort when you exhaust all your ammo.

All knives can be used in two ways:

Quick-knife attacks can be performed with any non-knife item in your hands. They are nearly instant and easy to hit, but take a long time to recover.
Wielded melee attacks are performed when you specifically equip the knife. They are faster, and can hit the head for bonus damage, as well as swung out of sprint, but they require better accuracy.

Knives can also be split into two groups:

Standard Knives

Chainblade

Mag-Cutter

Force-Blade

Cosmetics

Classic combat knives, fast and versatile. There’s a lot of them, but they all have identical stats, and can be treated as cosmetic variants of your starting knife.

Power Knives

Ripper

Carver

Lumine Edge

Power knives have lower swing speed, especially when quick-knifed, but in wielded mode they can be “activated” to do more damage.

To activate a wielded Power Knife, press Switch Fire Group key (default “B”). If you intend to play with Power Knives a lot, it may be a good idea to rebind it to something more convenient for you.

When activated, Power Knives deal 1050 damage on body hits, and 2100 damage on head hits. Effectively, you can kill normal infantry even if you touch their toe, and you can take care of shielded Heavy Assaults by going for headshots. Being able to oneshot such a formidable foe is an incredible perk, and should not be treated lightly.

Activated Power Knives emit sound effects. Toggling the knife on and off is especially loud, and can alert enemies to your presence. However, it’s possible to activate the knife and swing it right away, killing the enemy before he gets a chance to react to the sound.

You can activate and deactivate a power knife while sprinting.
All wielded attacks with Power Knives show your minimap signature to enemies within 5m.

Facts and Stats

	Damage	Headshot Multiplier	Time Between Swings, sec
Standard Quick Knife	500	N/A	0.95
Standard Wielded	500	1.5x	0.4
Power Quick Knife	500	N/A	1.125
Power Wielded	500	1.5x	0.675
Power Activated	1050	2x	0.675

Knife damage is not mitigated by Nanoweave, but affected by Heavy Assault’s overshields and Safeguard‘s damage resistance.
MAXes have 20 000 effective HP against knives, so usually trying to melee them isn’t a good idea.
MANA Turrets, Spawn Beacons and other deployables can be damaged by knives.
Base Terminals can be damaged by wielded strikes, but they take very little damage.
Vehicles are immune to melee damage, except for MAX Punch.

Quick-Knife

Quick knife attack is almost instant and deals 500 damage to one target in a wide arc in front of you. To do a quick-knife attack, simply press the melee attack key (Middle Mouse Button by default).

If you tap the key, your character will switch to the knife, perform the quick melee attack, and then equip the item you had in hands previously.
If you hold the melee attack button, your character will wield the knife instead.
Quick knife cannot be performed when you are wielding the knife.

Quick knife is best used as a finisher and against mobile enemies. It is perfect when you need only one swing.

Quick knife basically forces you to re-equip your primary weapon, and for some large weapons, it takes a considerable amount of time. If the enemy survives your quick knife swing, or if there are more enemies, it is usually a good idea to immediately equip a sidearm after the swing.

If you try to perform a quick knife attack while sprinting, you will slow down and perform the quick knife swing after “Sprint Recovery” amount of time, equal to 0.3 seconds.

Quick knife instantly interrupts weapon reloads and cycling a pump or bolt action weapon. Weapons with tube magazines are an exception – their reload will be interrupted with a delay.

Quick knife can sometimes (always?) damage enemies behind force fields.

Melee Combo

It’s a common technique to make a few close range shots and then finish off the enemy with a quick knife swing, resulting in fast kills and ammo conservation.

Incorporating melee attacks as finishers during close combat skirmishes is extremely important, as it allows to cut away a significant portion of time to kill, and get the kill right then and there, as long as enemy is within striking distance.

It is a great equalizer for low DPS weapons, such as most “accurate” automatics, and Internet Delay will give an advantage to whoever closes the distance and strikes first.

How much damage before quick knife is lethal

If the enemy survives the knife swing, you’re gonna be at a huge disadvantage, because there will be a delay before you can shoot or take another swing. It is important to make sure the enemy is damaged enough before doing the knife swing. Nanoweave is a fairly popular suit slot, so to guarantee the swing will kill, you have to act like all enemies have full nanoweave.

Quick knife deals 500 damage that bypasses nanoweave. So to make sure the quick knife is lethal, your bullets have to first deal a certain amount of damage:

DAMAGE BEFORE KNIFE IS LETHAL	Base	Nanoweave	Aux. Shield	Aux. Shield and Nanoweave
Heavy Assault (NMG / Adren)	950	1188	1000	1250
Heavy Assault (Resist)	1167	1167	1250	1250
Infiltrator (NAC and cloaked)	667	667	734	734
Infiltrator (Hunter / Stalker)	400	500	450	563
Other infantry and uncloaked NAC infil	500	625	550	688

As you can see, the amount of damage before quick knife is lethal varies greatly.

However, in vast majority of cases, doing 625 premitigated damage to a target will ensure it will die from a knife swing.

Leap Combo

(Credit to CuteBeaver for this idea).

You can’t fire weapons or use quick-knife while sprinting, and even when you stop sprinting, there is a 0.3 second delay before you can do any of that. This means that any melee attempts can be countered by the enemy simply moving away. You can counter this by performing a Leap Combo: sprint at the enemy, jump and perform the melee combo while in the air.

You will preserve your forward momentum during the jump, and extend the effective range of your combo. Naturally, Leap Combos are most effective with a weapon that requires only one shot before quick knife is lethal.

Against Heavy Assaults

If you’re trying to Melee Combo a Heavy Assault, make sure he’s unaware and his overshields are inactive. If he does activate overshields, you are better off just shooting him until he dies or wielding the knife.

Heavy Assault with overshields has too many unknown variables:

current health + shields
rank of nanoweave
overshield type and its energy level
auxiliary shield

And it is impossible to predict the amount of damage you need to do before knife strike is lethal.

What to do if enemy survived Melee Combo

You have several options to finish him off:

wait for primary weapon to return and shoot
equip a sidearm and shoot
wield the knife and stab
wait for another quick knife swing
do (1) or (2) and then instantly do another quick knife swing

After you do a quick knife swing, there is a delay before you can use the item you had in hands previously. That delay is equal to:

0.1 sec + Unequip Time + Equip Time

Unequip Time is equal to 0.25 seconds for all infantry weapons.
Equip Time for most weapons ranges from 0.55 to 1.25 seconds.
Pistols have Equip Time of 0.25 seconds.
Knife Wielding also has Equip Time of 0.25 seconds.

(1) Waiting for a primary weapon to come back is long, but it leaves you the most combat effective and versatile. Depending on the weapon, of course.

(2) Wielding a sidearm is quick, but how much damage you will be able to do depends on the sidearm itself. Revolvers, for example, are excellent finishers, but require good accuracy.

(3) Wielding a knife is also quick and gives you the most alpha damage, but requires close range and good accuracy.

Interestingly, you can start switching the weapon immediately after the knife swing without any additional delays beyond the 0.1 second it takes to perform a quick melee strike.

(4) Another quick knife swing is the longest. It gives you a lot of damage and easy to hit, but requires melee range. You can perform quick knife swings roughly every 1 second.

(5) Finally, you can use either of your weapons to perform another Melee Combo. It frontloads a ton of damage, but if THAT fails to kill the target, most likely because the enemy is shielded HA, you will be at quadruple disadvantage and may as well /suicide.

In case of most weapons, the delay is less than the time between quick knife swings, meaning that you can wait for primary weapon to come up or equip a sidearm, fire the weapon, and then perform another knife swing at no time penalty.

In that case, option (4) is directly inferior to this.

However, some weapons, like most LMGs, have long Equip Time of 1.2 seconds, making the total delay equal to 1.55 seconds, and then of course simply taking another knife swing would’ve been faster.

Every situation is different. You will have to do a judgement call each time.

Quick Knife Interactions

Quick knifing has a couple of bug/feature interactions with some weapons:

You can perform quick knife attacks while firing a fixed burst weapon, such as NS-45 Pilot, NSX Yumi or Rocklet Rifle. Learn more here.
You can perform a quick knife attack during Bolt Action Sniper Rifle, Pump Action Shotgun or Hunter Crossbow rechambering animation. Learn more here.

Wielding

Any knife can be wielded as a standalone weapon. To wield the knife, hold [melee attack] button, or use Gear Slot 8.

Tip: equipping and unequipping a knife can be heard by nearby enemies, so when sneaking up on somebody, be careful not to pull out the knife too early.

Wielded knives can perform melee attacks much quicker, and they also can get headshots for 150% damage (200% with an activated power knife). You can also melee out of sprint.

However, they use a different hit detection model: effectively, you’re firing large invisible bullets, and you don’t perform any actual slashing, so in order to hit the enemy, you have to aim at him like you would with a firearm.

Wielded knives have an appropriate stabbing animation, which explains the required accuracy.

It’s suitable to wield the knife when you need more than one swing, for example when you intend to kill someone with a knife from full health, or even ambush multiple enemies.

Wielded Knife Mechanics

Different hit detection model from quick-knife:

When you click “fire”, after 0.075 seconds your character will fire an invisible projectile. It has 0.2m collision radius (0.1m for Power Knives) and travels forward at a speed of 13 m/s for 0.12 seconds.

If during that time the projectile will hit the target, it will count as a hit.

The projectile does not inherit your speed, and it will not fly further if you use the knife while moving.

Maximum effective range of a wielded knife attack can be calculated as:

0.12 * 13 m/s = 1.56 m

It is ~6% longer than maximum range of quick knife swing (measured by using /loc command).

The projectile is fired from your camera, so if you stand above an enemy and aim downwards, you may need to crouch in order to reach the enemy (/u/PasitheePS2). If you stand right on someone’s head, wielded attack will reach them, but you will have to crouch to hit with a quick knife.

Wielded knives do not have Sprint Recovery time, and can be swung right from the sprint.

After a wielded knife attack, there is a 0.25 seconds delay before you can sprint and 0.3 seconds delay before you can use abilities such as Cloak.

Wielded attacks can be performed every 0.4 seconds with Standard Knives, and every 0.675 seconds with Power Knives.

Sprinting

In melee combat, you want to stay as mobile as possible. To ensure you start sprinting as soon as possible after a swing, release the sprint key immediately after a swing, and then press it again and hold. This way you will “buffer” the sprint command, and your character will start sprinting as soon as possible after the “Sprint Override” delay is over.

Reverse Melee Combo

This trick is based on deep understanding of item switching mechanics. It is simple and easy to perform:

You start with a wielded knife in hands.
Stab an enemy once. You can do it out of sprint.
As soon as you click to stab, switch to your sidearm.
As you as press the sidearm key, start spamming the quick melee key.
The quick melee will come out, hopefully killing the enemy, and you will be left with a sidearm in hands, ready to engage the enemy if he survives, or any other enemy in the vicinity.

Reverse Melee Combo is not as fast as simply performing two wielded knife strikes, but it leaves you with sidearm in hands, and the second strike is easier to connect.

Performing two quick melee attacks takes longer than Reverse Melee Combo, and cannot be done out of sprint.

Known Bugs

Currently, there are two:

1) Tapping the “melee attack” key to perform a quick knife can unintentionally equip the knife, even when you didn’t hold down the key.

2) Sometimes your hands will get stuck after a quick melee, leaving you unable to fire or use melee for a few seconds.

There are two ways to avoid these bugs:

Bind melee attack to mouse wheel scroll.
Use an AutoHotKey script:

Originally posted on reddit by Boomfreeze:

Download AutoHotKey (3MB)
Create a text file with this content

*MButton::
send {MButton down}
send {MButton up}

Replace “MButton” with your assigned melee button according to this AutoHotKey help page. If you melee with your keyboard, replace “MButton” with your key.
Save this file as “something.ahk”
Double click the file to start the script. You will need to do this every time you launch the game. You can make another AHK script that will launch the game and this script at the same time.

Keybinds

“Quick Melee” should be bound to a key you can conveniently press while moving in any direction. “Wield Knife” should also be rebound from [8] to something more convenient.

Keybinds are always personal, and you should feel free to use whatever is the most convenient for you. Still, here are my personal recommendations:

1) Bind Quick Melee to Middle Mouse Button, and Scroll Forward and Backward.

This way you can use your middle finger to perform quick melee attacks independently from index finger holding the left mouse button to fire. Quick and convenient shoot + stab combos.

You can be imprecise with your movements; even a rough strike to the mouse wheel is guaranteed to trigger a melee attack. In frantic close quarters combat, wild hand movements are common, and you don’t always have the luxury of being careful with your keypresses.

It prevents accidentally wielding the knife by holding the button for too long, since it’s physically impossible to hold mouse wheel scroll. For the same reason, it allows to avoid mentioned known bugs.

2) Bind “Wield Knife” (gear slot 8) to TAB, and scoreboard to T.

TAB is a more accessible key than T, and actual combat actions, like pulling out the knife, should be given priority over scoreboard that you have no reason to open outside safety.

3) Bind “Switch Firemode” to a thumb mouse button, so you can conveniently wield a power knife and activate it at the same time.

NSX Amaterasu

Amaterasu is a unique cross faction melee weapon. For the most part, it is identical to standard melee knives, except it only deals 350 damage per strike.

However, when wielded, player can hold “aim down sights” to activate ranged mode, and in that mode swings will create energy projectiles that deal medium damage.

Essentially, Amaterasu is a “ranged melee weapon”, however awkward that sounds.