All Thunder Hammer abilities should be armor-piercing imho, the combo skill is outright ridicolous on an armored target compared to the left-click attack.

I'm finding the melee combat quite disappointing. Melee is my go to class/spec in pretty much every game I play. Crushing, stunning and slamming groups of guys and see them explode and go flying with a big two hander, or battering my way into the ranks behind a shield for some protection and some smashing groups back with it, I love that stuff. 

The scenario in Inquisitor seems to be this: I'm ranged. I head into a room full of guys, jump behind cover, and blast the crap out of guys sluggishly heading towards me and then the ranged guys, taking breathers when I need to regain some suppression and reload. Room clear, maybe 20 seconds.

I'm melee: I wade across the room getting blasted from all sides by rockets, bullets, fire, whatever. I make it to a bit of a group who are slightly spread out and I have to get seriously close to them to hit them, my aoe arc doesn't hit more than one guy, sometimes two. The shield aoe ability seems no better. I churn through one guy at a time,  and by the time I've gotten to the last guy my suppression is all gone, my health is low and it's taken me three /four times longer than the simple "stand back and blast em all of ranged"

This is from a standpoint of not being geared or specced much in either setting. Just right off the bat. I love melee, but The discrepancy between the ease and speed of ranged versus melee seems so ridiculous that I can't bring myself to slog through a mission playing how I want. So I play as ranged and don't really enjoy it. 

I have similar feelings about melee (going to try ranged after posting this), although playing sword 'n' board does wonders for blasting foes away. It's the one thing about melee I like - I can see and more importantly feel my enemies being obliterated. I made the mistake of selling a one-handed sword somehow and ended up with a shield or a two-handed mace, and it was the former that kept me alive longer. After much struggling I almost finished a mission, but died one too many times insisting a two-handed hammer would do more damage at the cost of survivability. After a while it occurred that what I was doing was simply not practical.

I hope my criticism doesn't come off as too harshly. I understand this is Alpha but I'd like to highlight a glaring flaw, especially when the game is as slowly paced as it is. With its current camera controls, pathfinding and enemy aggro duration, I don't feel as though melee is currently worth it. The thing is, melee's the most interesting thing to me in 40k so I'd prefer that than the ho-hum ranged combat we're with at the moment.