if you can find a reaper’s toll, it casts decripify - lowering physical res AND slowing people, decripify works on ALL characters, yes even diablo, baal, and nihl. you’re welcome.
you could also find something that casts amp dmg.
you already have these tools available.
Yes, make it all work the same. I would love to get 350% dmg against Demons on my Ele chars. Not forgetting Mana and Life leech. Oh and all the extra dmg against Undeads too…delicious.
Standard Jewels come in +40% ED, this is pretty nice. The only way I’d be interested in a physical facet is if it gave on weapon base damage. That is really what is needed but I’d rather see all weapons get more base damage. The physical damage issue needs to be fixed from the bottom up. Adding 1-5 damage for normal weapons 5-10 for exceptional weapons and 10-15 for Elite weapons will help immensely. That’s being conservative, I won’t argue with more.
Physical build just need AR/Block to be modified to really shine… That and a boost in the early game for some flat damage so they get a chance to start farming by themself for items =)
Even with those things, elemental damage builds outgun physical damage builds hugely. There is no comparison. Even with dual Grief, a barb can’t compare to a sorc, paladin or even assassin in raw daimage output. Plus leech is limited in effectiveness.
A while back, I proposed a Rainbow Facet-equivalent unique jewel for the physical element, and named it “Obsidian Facet.”
Obsidian Facet
Required Level: 49
100% Chance To Cast Level 45 War Cry When You Level-Up / Die
Adds 10-25 Physical Damage
+3-5% To Physical Skill Damage
-3-5% To Enemy Physical Resistance
Such facet will not help anyway for melee.
Standard endgame is Grief, Death, Enigma, Spirit/Rhyme/Phoenix shield/Grief offhand. Runewords in general. So no sockets for facet.
There is only really one option to put sockets: Helm. Usually one socket = one facet.
Only users that can get more and be beneficial is Tornado druid and Warcry barb. Thats just again - caster builds.
Lets help physical melee other ways.
It would be nice if they fixed the damage jewel bugs that are present as well.
Exactly - the fact that endgame kit is always rune words is another problem that should be fixed. It would be fantastic if unique jewels made uniques and sets now BiS.
Letting leech take full effect, an innate 30% reduction to enemy Def stat across the board, remove immunities from the game outright and just rebalance enemy resists, and make melee skills that don’t suck to replace the current ones.
Starting to get ptsd from d4
30% defense nerf would do a LOT less than you seem to think it would. 
Reducing Baal’s Defense by 30% would take a typical barb from 37%-39% chance to hit, to 39%-40% (taking block into account.) Ignoring block it would go from an 83-87% chance to 87-90%.
30% monster defense reduction only adds around 4% damage. People REALLY need to stop harping on AR being the issue, the math doesn’t check out.
That said, physical facets would be basically useless. They’d be weaker than ED/IAS jewels, or runes in most of the few cases you’d have room for them, and most builds don’t have open sockets for them to begin with.
why should it? Physical damage is not very “rainbow”
It’s not useless, it’s very good. I use it all the time, especially good in Arcane Sanctuary.
TBH it wasn’t even “useless” before buffs (just too many good things on a barb to spend skill points). The only change i want for grim ward is, let me make it from more monsters (why can you corpse explode a ghost, but cannot make a grim ward from it?)
Sure, that’s fair. It’s just an off-the-cuff idea. Having sub 50% chance to hit makes any melee painful to play, though.
True, but to be fair it’s only on those rare cases with high block rates combined with high levels. For the most part most melee have perfectly fine hit rates 87%+ from 85 onward against everything else.
Heck in the few cases there are high levels, and block rates (mostly Diablo/Baal) they also have crushing blow, and kill faster than a lot of caster builds.
I think two big steps for melee, real melee buffs is:
After these two, melee would feel awesome. Trust me bro.
No. Physical damage has many unique bonuses casters rightfully do not get. Next.
Changed your tune eh? I remember when you were against expanding the corpse choices when I suggested it last year.
Feedback: Grim Ward should be usable on all corpses - General Discussion - Diablo 2 Resurrected Forums (blizzard.com)
I suppose I did say all corpses which might be excessive but you should certainly be able to make a Grim Ward out of a damn skeleton haha.
Looking back at my post there’s a problem with my suggestion, the flag that allows monster corpses to be made into a Grim Ward (“soft” in monstats2.txt) is also what allows Find Potion to be used so you’d get some silly situations like making potions from a skeleton corpse. 
If only they weren’t tied to the same flag.
I’ve come to understand your point of view in that post, in retrospect I think GW is fine as is with the current corpse restrictions but I won’t complain if they expand it either.
Yeah you’re right I’ve gotten softer. Perhaps I was more right back then. I know one thing, when gamers are given EXACTLY what they ask for, they lose interest quickly.
But Grim Ward is still quite a rarely used thing anyway. And the worst part is that skill description doesn’t explain “soft” corpse requirement.
It’s not the damage that is the problem for physical damage, it’s the aoe. A good physical build can 1 or 2 shot most monsters but the rate that it applies damage is much slower that spells. It doesn’t matter if your attack does 100k per swing if they only hit 1 monster at a time, caster will clear out mobs faster even if they do 20k damage but can hit 20 monsters at a time.