You need to understand the basics of how melee works, and practice blocking and movement. Noways I find that the person who moves better wins.
BASICS OF HOW MELEE WORKSEssentially: The basic mechanics behind the game are very simple, basically
melee works in turns:
Your turn, His turn, Your turn, His turn and so forth. This is an important concept, that most new players do not understand and the old hands know inside out. Many players tend to get hit when they ignore the his turn, my turn paradigm. Basically they try to force another turn once their turn is already over. When they try to force another turn they naturally get whacked, because its not their turn anymore.
While feinting is nice, first understand the simple concept of his turn my turn, if understood properly it will save new or struggling players tons of frustration.
OTHER CONCEPTSFeinting serves two purposes:
1.) Get your opponent to misjudge the direction he should be blocking from.
2.) Goad your opponent to attack during your synthetically extended attack phase.
Number 1 is self explanatory. We will talk about Number 2 at greater depth:
When you synthetically extend your attack phase, you are on borrowed time. You cannot indefinably extend your attack phase, as your opponent can judge your feints and attack you midway feint and hit you. He will be able to hit you while your are feinting in your attack phase because you were synthetically extending your attack turn into his turn.
Another way of synthetically extending an attack turn is using movement. This is tricky to describe you have to see it in action, a really good player to spectate to understand this is Balb. But essentially, most new players tend to have only 2 types of movement only forward or backward and they usually stick to that type of movement all the time. If you watch the old hands, they move forward and backward but what makes them really good is their ability to attack people at angles and rapidly shift from one angle to another. This does two things:
1.) Confuses the hell out of many opponents getting them to misjudge blocks
2.) Makes opponent players orient the wrong way giving the old hand the ability to get "free strikes in"
Another idea you should get rid of is the idea of getting wed to your immediate opponent. In siege or in battle allot of the fighting is done in crowds, in those instances many new players tend to face and concentrate on only one opponent. This is a mistake, your job when fighting is not to fight one guy its to win the map. Switch opponents, after one or two attacks if you are not making progress fighting your current opponent (aka. he is still standing) try disengaging and attacking someone else, then turn back to the first guy. Many times you will be able to hit a guy in the back and give your teammate help in getting rid of his opponent, so then he will be free to help you with yours.
When fighting two or more opponents, try getting rid of the weakest player first. How do you know who is weakest?
1.) You can usually tell by the way the players move
or
2.) The player with the least armour.
In this way, hopefully you will be able to quickly get rid off one of your opponents and give yourself some breathing room.
Also when fighting 2 or more opponents do not let one of them flank you or get to your back. To prevent flanking, try stringing them along, you can do this by moving in a zig zag pattern backwards. In this way it will be hard for your opponents to know which way you are going to go next and prevent them from flanking you.
Hope this helps
P.S
My old really long thread on melee, that talks about many of the things covered here:
http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,1545.0.htmlMy two favorite teaching videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9jHcZjWw9U <-- Very good basic tutorial
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZZnl09qBKM&feature=related <--Shows people dying mostly due to timing problems
