I mean melee is quite literally just getting up close and swinging about.
melee
noun
me·lee [ˈmā-ˌlā ]
mā-ˈlā
a confused struggle
especially a hand-to-hand fight among several people
If mosaic sin isn’t melee… then this isn’t either…
I mean I already played that game… it was called Grim Dawn… and it did it better lol.
Mosaic sins are as melee as tesla paladins are.
Their "melee " is just a trigger for their real damage … a lot of casts…
As a mosaic sin you are more worried about landing hits in order to proc your gazzillion casts… teslas are just there doing pulse damage .
Both main damage part is unaffected by attack rating /phisical resistance.
Lets imagine this . Imagine barb find item triggered “fist explotion” (phisical damage corpse explotion) … the barb needs to be in melee range to cast it … would you consider the fist explotion barb a melee ?
Agreed. Alot of the suggestions in the OP are very similar to the changes outlined in thread below, specifically buffing base weapon damage, buffing 2H-weapons, adding damage reduction to medium/heavy armor and having Zod runes add ethereal status along with indestructible…
Yes. Yes I would. If you’ve got to be in melee range to do it… It’s melee. Words have meanings my dude.
If a cleric in D&D uses inflict wounds, it’s still a melee attack roll.
Melee refers to the range at which the action is done. Not what animation is played.
Barbs are in a good spot.
The problem with melee is a mix of things, in large part the playerbase which is mostly comprised of ignorant players who have never played a ssf melee build or on ladder start.
Hustle solved none of melee’s issues and the player feedback just turned it into an early game merc stat stick that isn’t even valuable to melee builds in the early game namely because:
Kos can only be reliably found in hell countess, where you need decent gear to farm.
by the time you get a Ko it’s better used for a lawbringer, obedience, etc as decrep has higher priority than movement or atk speed
melee doesn’t have a spirit equivalent. At best you can use an insight early game but it lacks crushing blow which is mandatory by nightmare. Hustle did not help bridge the gap between normal and nightmare, nor nightmare to hell.
caster spell scaling is based on +skills which means casters always get stronger. Melee is so bound to gear that you hit constant plateaus that requires you to farm for gear. You could argue that casters should act the same way but to do so would require nerfs and nobody would stand for that.
Potential solutions:
Buff the base damage of weapons.
Buff the affixes of magic items and make cruel and its equivalent affixes more common. This can be done by revamping the 3 gem blue item reroll recipe. Make a targetable recipe that guarantees a %ed roll with gems on magic items.
Additionally, they could bring back the recipe chances that made cruel colossus blades of X a thing. Because they cant be eth they wouldnt be meta anyways.
Buff the damage from strength and dex scaling for 2handers. Have 2h maces scale 1.5x per point of str, axes 1.40x, polearms 1.25x with 1.15x from dex, swords 1.10x with 1.30x from dexterity (this scaling would only apply to 2h swords). Buff the strength and dex scaling from daggers and claws to be 1.5 from both str and dex. Dexterity and strength should be a good investment for trading off vitality. What this means is using maces with 200 strength equals 300% skill ed rather than the 220% it is for maces like thundermauls right now. Honestly testing would probably show that 2x or 1.75 attribute scaling with 2handers wouldnt be op either.
Add FCR to energy where you can get 10fcr per 100 energy investment or 5 per 50 fcr. Yes this makes casters better potentially, but not many builds stack energy and this incentivizes people to trade off vitality for energy which is a dead stat in most cases and would also incentivize hybridization (this change also only really buffs subpar uniques and sets like aldurs and eschuta’s anyways). With perfect torch and anni and eschutas youd have 70 energy. This would incentivize a non meta weapon, to potentially get 30 more energy from stat investment for 10 fcr. Since sorcs start with 35 energy, a eschutas with good rolls and torch/anni gets 50fcr which is a nice buff to a subpar weapon. It also makes perfect attribute rolls on torches and annis more appealing. Again this will really only buff hybrid builds where its harder to balance fcr on gear. Most hybrids will have 5-10fcr to work with which is already the bottleneck for such builds.
Vitality: the same. It shouldve always be treated as a dump stat or pvp stat.
Please consider this great suggestions Blizzard. This thread shouldn’t be ignored.