As someone who plays between 24 and 25 hours of Halo Infinite a day, I know a thing or two about getting your ass kicked in the multiplayer. I've also had time to observe how players like to approach problems and which approaches do and do not work. One of the most common mistakes I see is people charging in to melee an opponent like they're Conan the Barbarian and getting knocked on their backside. Sprinting into punching range has always been a questionable habit, but in Halo Infinite especially, the players and environment are in rapid flux, meaning that you can't select one strategy and then go onto autopilot. You must decide whether or not it's appropriate to melee on a battle-by-battle and even second-by-second basis. But explaining why that's the case is difficult.

If you will permit me, I'd like to go gentlemen classy mode for a minute. Imagine a round of poker. In this round, one player has 10 chips in front of them, and another has 30 chips. A standard bet at this table is 10 chips. Which player is in a better position? The one with 10 chips or the one with 30? You might be tempted to say it's the player with 30 chips because they have more. However, we must remember that if you spend the last of your chips in a round of poker, going "all in", you get to see the hand through to the end, and if you have the best cards, you win the pot. The pokerer with only a handful of chips can buy their way to potentially winning the hand with only 10 currency, while their rival would probably have to spend three times that amount for the same reward. And we can apply that principle to Infinite's combat encounters.

In Halo, you're not trying to protect a stack of plastic discs while draining your opponents', but you are trying to conserve health while wearing down other spartans'. In many scenarios, the big-brain way to get there is to approach adversaries while firing and then enter melee range to finish them off. It's an easy technique to execute that makes it harder for the target to retreat and will give you a reliable hit rate with weapons that fire wide, like the Assault Rifle. It will also get you a shot at punching your foe, which deals a lot of damage in a very short time. Note that when I say "melee" in this article, unless I state otherwise, I'm referring to a melee hit on the front or side of an enemy without using a weapon that makes melees a one-hit kill. So, back smacks or impaling them with the Energy Sword would not count.

Despite the advantages of the melee rush strategy, it should give you pause that if you are at a distance where you can melee your opponent, they can melee you too. That might not sound like something to worry about because the damage you and your opponent can do with a melee hit is fixed, so it doesn't seem to put you at a disadvantage. A lot of sources online will tell you the damage of manual hits varies, saying that, in Infinite, whoever has more shield in a melee clash lives, and whoever has less dies. At least, providing both players have fallen below a certain shield waterline. This was originally how 343 calculated melee damage, but that system proved to be confusing and frustrating to players. Hence, the studio reverted to the standard melee attacks doing a set amount of damage in May 2022. But that still doesn't put two close-range opponents on equal footing. For one thing, different weapons strike at different speeds.

Meleeing happens on a delay of about 1-1.25 seconds, depending on the size of the implement you're holding. Smaller weapons melee faster than larger weapons. The one item that falls outside that time range is the Oddball, which is tiny but strikes like lightning at a speed of roughly 0.55 seconds. At the pace Infinite moves, half a second is a significant gap. Knowing these stats might change what weapon you approach with and who you step to. However, if you're a casual player, you might decide that Oddball aside, these differences in speed are fractional enough that this is nerd shit. That's fine. But even if you and your opponent have the same weapon when you melee, thinking that puts you on level ground is also repeating the misconception from the poker example. We can't just consider what each player has to gain by entering melee range but also what they're gambling.

In the space of about a second, a melee attack can do a lot more damage than most munitions. If a player is at or below about 40% shield, a standard melee hit will kill them. If a player is meleeing with a Banished weapon (the Skewer, the Mangler, the Ravager, or the Shock Rifle), they can do about 10% more damage, killing an opponent at about 50% shield or lower. Weirdly enough, the same is true if you hit the default melee button while wielding the Gravity Hammer. The explosive power cores strewn about the maps are also an exception to the regular damage rules, needing your opponent to be well below 40% shield for you to beat them to death with one, but no one in the history of the universe has ever meleed with a power core, so we won't fret about that.

The point is there are situations where you and your opponent's shield values are such that they are almost certainly about to die from gunfire, but your health is at a value where you'll probably survive unless they get a melee hit on you. In these encounters, if you just stayed shooting your opponent from a distance, you could kill them and live, but if you move into their personal bubble and get walloped by them, you'll die. Sure, you can melee your opponent back if you're quick enough, and they'll die too, but below a certain amount of shield on your opponent, that high-damage attack doesn't give you any advantage over shooting; your foes can't be extra-dead. You're just getting the kill you would have gotten anyway while putting yourself in danger. Running in to sock your opponent in the visor is engineering a situation where your opponent has 10 chips, you have 30, but you're both subject to the same costs and reward potentials. Why gamble your own life when you don't have to?

If the target you're about to melee is crafty enough, they may also be able to jump or dodge out of the way as you approach, leaving the cone in which you can see and hit them. Losing sight of them is particularly confounding in ranked play where you have no minimap with which to track other players. While reducing the distance to your opponent makes aiming easier if they're still, once you're close enough, small movements on their part can mean large relocations across your screen, making them harder to hit. If my advice sounds incomprehensible, look at the following table, which shows what happens when your opponent is very low on health, but you have enough that it would be hard to shoot you to death but easy to melee you to death:

You want to be on that top row if at all possible, and that means not making a beeline for your opponent whenever the opportunity presents itself. Now, this is not me saying that melee attacks are never the answer; they're often the answer because of all the advantages I mentioned earlier, but it's contextual. If your opponent is low on health and you have it in spades, go in, fuck 'em up, crack their egg. If it looks like they're staring through a sniper scope, that's another opportune moment to go hand-to-hand, assuming you approach from an angle. If you're on your last dregs of health and you don't have an ace up your sleeve like a Plasma Grenade or the Plasma Pistol/BR combo, you might as well try a melee; you may be able to trade a life for a life. But if you have okay health and your opponent is at death's door, you're throwing away a win by moving into their personal space. So, why settle for 1 kill and 1 death when you could get 1 kill and 0 deaths? The big stick that is melee also means that if you're a little ahead of an opponent in a fight and they start coming for you, you'll want to back up.

To act on the advice in this article, you need to know how much shield your opponent is charged with. To reiterate, most melee attacks kill a spartan with about 40% or less shield. If you're not practised in estimating your opponent's shield value, that is the largest learning curve you'll scale in working out when to melee. If your opponent is sparking away, having lost their shield, it's plain to see they're susceptible to a melee attack, but otherwise, there's no indicator. If you're wielding an Assault Rifle, 8 body shots on your opponent is enough to reduce them to meleeing health, while 4 body shots with the Sidekick will do the same, these being the default weapons in social play. However, the enemy's shield value always depends on the weapon you've been hitting them with, how many shots you've landed, and where they landed.

So, there's no simple maths to tell you whether they're ready to be bludgeoned to death. The best way to work out when to melee is to just keep playing and get a feel for it. Infinite moves at a more rapid rate than earlier Halo instalments, and melee attacks hit slightly softer now than when the game first launched. So, if you haven't played Infinite in a long time or are used to the Master Chief Collection Halos, your existing instincts on when to move into proximity with your opponent may be misleading.

There are other reasons not to get within visor-fogging distance that don't have anything to do with a spartan's shield or weapons. Meleeing is unsuitable if your opponent has nearby players supporting them when you don't, if you have a painfully slow internet connection, or if there's a grenade or other hazard in front of you. At least, it's unsuitable if you're not going for a last-ditch suicide attack. You must further be aware that if a player has a glowing blue light on one wrist, they have a Repulsor and can execute a move that pushes you back and stuns you, knocking you out of melee range. It's better not to approach repulsive players from the front without strong backup, and even then, you shouldn't do it if you have your back to a ledge. The opponent can propel you off the map right into a kill volume. If you collect the Repulsor, however, you can protect yourself from deadly melee attacks by doing the same to them. Melee should not be used by anyone who is pregnant or suffers from high blood pressure.

Often, when an opponent has an advantage in close quarters, it's better to attack from a distance, from a direction where they won't see you coming, or only go in with backup. It sounds obvious to avoid these traps when you write it out, but in the heat of battle, walking right up to a raging soldier can be so automatic that we forget to consider the room when we do it. The need for a player to avoid being meleed sometimes involves that player dancing around the opponent, trying to maintain close enough proximity to get a good shot on the opponent but enough distance that their opponent can't lunge at them. The opponent's steps are then to try and move into the player's space regardless.

Now, there's one exception to what I've stated about distance and melee. Since Halo 2, it's been possible for players to jump over the head of an attacker, spin 180 degrees, and melee them in the back for an instant kill: the "ninja". If the opponent ninjas you, they can defeat you at close range, even if they don't have a short-range weapon and you have shield advantage against them. It's another reason not to always rush towards the enemy with reckless abandon, but its existence might make it sound like ever trying to melee is cooking your own goose. The good news is that it's very hard for an opponent to pull this move off, even if they have the literal higher ground. Infinite awards a gold or "mythic" medal, the highest class of medal, for this feat due to its difficulty. If you're quick, you can also back away from an opponent trying this and ruin their day. But if there is an annoying flea on the other team that keeps wiping you out with this move, maybe keep them at arm's length.

A quick recap of our two main points:

1. If you and your opponent have the wrong shield values, moving to melee them can needlessly gamble your life.
2. When considering whether to melee, you need to take into account the speed and melee damage values of you and your opponent's weapons, the equipment you're both carrying, whether there are hazards in the way, whether they've been ninjaing you, and whether either of you has backup.

It's fascinating how deep a single mechanic in a game can reveal itself to be when we take the time to really listen to it. On the surface, Halo Infinite's melee is when you press the right stick in and do some damage to your opponent. Yet, when you repeatedly execute the move, you find a sprawling web of complex mechanical relationships. There are countless more networks of complexities we can find in games if we put our minds to it. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for the writeup! I’ve definitely squandered what could have been an easy kill because my instinct to close distance kicked in. Helpful to know the thresholds for melee damage, as well as the change last May. I don’t play as much Halo as I did in those first several months, so I had no idea things were different.

Thorough and surprisingly funny analysis/guide! This sort of dive into mechanics and/or systems is indeed a treat.

The habit of "blasting with an assault rifle while rushing forward and then doing a melee finish" comes from Halo 3 for me. I don't know how many people playing Infinite now grew up playing Halo 3, but I did and in that game I recall this being a lot more viable. Partially because the maps were smaller and more tunnel-y, I suppose, but also partially because harsh language was more effective at damaging enemy players than the Halo 3 assault rifle. This doesn't seem true in Infinite, from what I remember of its multiplayer.

Speaking of, how is Infinite's multiplayer doing these days? I haven't really played it much since very early 2022.