Maybe make a melee strike a secondary attack for the blaster?
Actually, I had that idea on IRC too. Here's the problem, though. You can fire an infinite number of times with the blaster from a distance. How can you make a melee attack useful, especially when getting that close is going to be suicide?
The blaster idea sounds good.
With a blade on the blaster.
The blaster would be stronger for use as melee weapon, than for distance.
The use case is not to run to the aliens for a melee fight, but wen they get close to you it could be a option to block strong attacks from a Tyrant, or kill Dretches without wasting ammo.
The problem is that if you can use a blaster as a melee weapon, why can't you use other weapons as melee weapons too?
I say, give us a knife or a fist.
The Idea is to give the Humans a Knife with a short range, that they must stand really close to Aliens.
The Knife could deal 50 hp damage. 1 hit can kill a Dretch but he is hard to get with the short range.
The Battlesuit gets instead of the knife his metal hands as weapon to punch aliens in the face. :D
I actually allready have 'mellee' blaster already in my lolards qvm doing 24 dmg, twice per second, and its pretty OP. It doesnt even instant kill dretches. And the range of my blaster is just as short as a psaw range.
With mellee, people can swing pretty fast if they're strong, so we should keep the damage lower than '50' at least and repeat rate between 0.7 and 1 second.