Are you sure that the jankiness you describe is not related to you not being close enough to the enemy for it to count as a point blank hit? The engine does a simple distance check which is rather unforgiving, and if you utilize the range your melee weapon affords you, you will fail this point black attack check. This is just a guess on my part, but it's the #1 reason I've seen people be perplexed at seemingly inconsistent melee stealth takedown behavior.
If you first push yourself as close as you can get to the enemy model and attack the general area of their torso, it works every single time. But again, this is just me taking a guess as to what the problem you're referring to is!
Well that's the problem. In the first mission you have to figure out to stun the enemies in the center of their back rather than directly in their head. Its super counterintuitive and probably leads to many players not getting past the first mission.
The minicrossbow is even harder than the prod, especially at lower skill levels and with no weapon mods. The prod at least stuns enemies momentarily. With the darts they still stand around shooting at you and set off alarms, and that's if you manage to hit them at all. You can run up to a guy and get a guaranteed stun in the time it takes him to spin around like a dumbass to look at the source of the footsteps.
My first playthrough, when I was 12, I opted for the GEP gun, but had to go to the minicrossbow after running out of ammo, thereby leaving me with no pistol skill. The worst of both worlds on the very first mission. Ended up climing up the back of the statue of liberty and throwing gas grenades. Good times.
The GEP gun is ironically the pro choice to make if you know what you’re doing. All of the other weapons on offer can be found in the first level, and the GEP works as a fantastic “lockpick” even if you never fire it in anger.
This is true, but the upside of the crossbow is that for most soldiers it only takes a single shot to take them out, even if it takes a while, and you can do it from a safe spot, this can be beneficial if your JC sucks at combat or is low on ammo.
Also if you have to stun them in a pinch, they just stand there being spastic, you can knock them out by prodding a second time, but if you do it right away the hit won't register, you have to wait half a second and move around a bit or something. This is very annoying since it wastes precious prod charges.
This may be because the 'headshot' multiplier is lower than the regular multiplier (1x vs 2x) for the prod and baton. For most weapons the headshot multiplier is 8x (or something).
If you first push yourself as close as you can get to the enemy model and attack the general area of their torso, it works every single time. But again, this is just me taking a guess as to what the problem you're referring to is!