Honestly the solution is easy which is why its frustrating melee is still in a bad state.
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nerf every class by buffing uniques and champions. Make their health pools so high that crushing blow becomes necessary. This will make melee the best at elite sniping.
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revamp melee runewords or make new ones that are actually useful at lower levels.
Honor is stupidly hard to make because 5os weapons are rare in norm/nightmare.
Hustle was nerfed and now not even an attractive option for melee. The Ko rune makes it too late of a weapon for when it would be most useful (in nightmare).
Make better deterministic blue magic crafts. Make a recipe that has %ed guaranteed. This way you have a decent chance to roll blue ed weapons with 2 sockets.
Honestly what melee/physical builds in general need⌠is some flat damage on their skills. And that flat damage needs to come before ED.
Most melee is fine with their end game setup, but they are misable to play without twinking. Bowa isnât AS bad, as it actually has some early decent runewords, and can fall back on an ele build, but the rest other than smiter(who had flat damage might I add) are basically garbage due to lack of early damage.
It doesnât need to be a ton either. Just something for the ED to scale off of earlier on. It doesnât need to be some massive late-game change to make the playthrough experience at least offer something other than âcaster or gtfo.â
For example if Throwing mastery, or double throw had like⌠60 total + damage on it⌠my current damage on this 72 throw barb would basically double lol.
I mean I personally donât mind the challenge of it, but it is pretty terrible. 
Sad part is I could put together a halfway decent hammerdin/foh pally with Spirit in a 44 all res/hand of blessed light/vipermagi/nagel/10% fcr all res ring/a 20/20/20/60 circlet/and a +1 pally all res ammy/mf-res/and some dual res mf and gf boots already just trying to get the Barb capable of existing.
Yea apparently the old hustle was too op. Even though it needed a ko while spirit exists which basically allows you to ignore fhr, fcr, +4 skills plenty of reses, mana, vit all for the price of normal crafting runes (higher drop rates).
Look at grief. It is mathematically the best possible damage you can get on a weapon, and melee is still subpar compared to casters.
They need to remove the Ko rune on hustle and switch it to Sol and the devs shouldve realized this if the people who provided feedback actually played melee. Think thatâs OP, wtf is Insight then?
Honestly Hel would have been an decent choice as well. Be interesting for the minus requirements if nothing else, and take far fewer NM countess runs to farm. Because really physical doesnât start to struggle until basically act 2 NM.
Blizzard however just went âhurka der⌠Ko has dex on it, that sounds fast!â
I mean Hel makes as much sense, as one could imagine it making the item âlighterâ and would not only be easier to access, but let you put more into vita early on.
As Helâs main usage early is rerolling spirit⌠would have been nice for the non casters out that that actually need to worry about reqs⌠Blizzard just canât think that far into things though.
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