So I made my favorite barbarian - Frenzy. Battle orders, frenzy, synergies and all that jazz. Slapped on some fairly sensible gear on top. Nothing too fancy or expensive. Just stuff of a quality that can be expected when enterng hell difficulty.
Proceeded to get my hiney handed over to me in act1 hell. I reckon a physical zeal paladin or assassin is going to have the same issue.
Try a physical amazon mate itās even worse. They have no natural immunity for resists and no runewards to help their spears along. At least frenzy barbs can make a Black runeward or something similar. Spearzons have nothing till you can obtain a Zod (LOL). Melee needs help all around.
Iām curious were you missing constantly/what was your AR? I made a Zealot and have been farming Chaos to test out things and heās doing ok. AR is a bit low for my taste giving a 76% chance to hit, but I got it the best I could with the gear they gave us.
I think we need to point out to them the issues with AR and physical attackers ability to hit things. That is the main issue I have been finding in most builds/skills I have tested.
In my mind this is all balancing and trade offs. Granted assassins and paladins have a far greater toolkit defensively, but you could max out both BO and Shout, invest in merc gear and let an act2 or act5 merc do all the tanking, The trade off is a loss in damage. This goes the same for an assassin or paladin. Progress in levels and gear and dependence on the merc goes down. But does it suck, ya, I donāt like playing like this either.
Base values on weapons need a buff overall. In vanilla, mobs health used to be tremendously lower and weapons actually did damage on top of melee actually being stronger then. Skills like iron maiden were actually good because of mob health.
LOD actually destroyed the game in a lot of ways. With synergies and buffing of mob health, casters just reigned supreme for no investment at all. You can be naked and beat the game.
Buff base values of weapons and make them usable. You can give bosses a 30% dmg reduction to physical if you feel melee gets overtuned or something.
I honestly canāt tell. I got rudely reminded that a lvl 85 character with a mixture of elite and exceptional uniques and a runeword to boot is woefully undergeared. I had trouble gaining back mana for frenzy in spite of having like 40% damage to mana. I mean, my gear was nothing interesting, to be honest, but nonetheless, Iād expect to at least be able to clear act1.
@Squibz
LoD worked fine in 1.08 and 1.09. granted, due to a few bugs, but nonetheless. At the very minimum you could heap some proper life leech and sustain myself on the battlefield by means of being a vampire. I had several barbs with āHonorā blades and it worked fine.
It is 1.10 patch that broke everything. Life and mana leech was nerfed, monster damage got buffed, and nothing was done to offset this with different progression of skills and items - barring the āuberā runewords. Getting elite uniques was hard enough in 1.09. Having medium-high runes as a cost of entry into melee pretty much made barbs nonexistant. Which is sad, considering he was the class up to 1.09.
I think that buffing weapon base damage is a solution. However I think it would be more interesting to add basic damage to all physical skills ( so bashes, frenzies, zeals, furies and so on ). That has the upside of making barbs, and other weapon dependent classes to be, well, less dependent.
I have a cleric paladin whose merc is doing more damage than a barbarians of equal level. This is sad.
On my P8 playthrough with my barb, I maximize strength for WW and focus on the first 2 hit frames to rapidly attack, the next 2 being influenced by attack speed. Might merc, and optimized dmg and its still slow compared to a naked caster. I actually enjoy the progression of the melee and would ideally have casters tuned down to the level of Hell being a barrier of entry as it should be.
The easiest solution is to simply like you said, buff damage and base values.
I think all us spearzon fans could use a big group hug in these trying times. 
I think melee/physical builds just need some love with the added requirement of AR. Really hope they do something to shake up the meta to at least allow people to make their first characters melee without being punished so heavily.
Bring in it brother, Iām in shambles <3.
you need mana leech. try the tal mask (it is on the sorceress) to get ML. damage to mana is fine if YOU get hit, but thats not what should happen
you need mana leech
other way to get that: 1 or 2 BOTD weapons
please give it a try, maybe it will help (alot)
Huh? You must be playing it wrong?
I have no problem clearing trav with my Frenzy barb and heās not using any uber gear. Azurewrath on one hand and eth balrog oath on another. A good resist 90% resist all act 2 merc (Guardian angel + Kiras) and councils donāt stand a chance.
I can also clear chaos with this. When I get swarmed, howl will disperse them for me to pick them off.
Physical immunes? 1 point berserk and azurewrath with take care of em.
You must not be playing em rightā¦
lol, Azurewrath is not a ārun of the millā weapon that drops often. Itās pretty damn good for pvmā¦
I think most of us are talking about physical melee without pre-farmed or bought gear.
Physical build will always rely on mid-tier gear like azure/lightsabre and above, they are are not suppose to be viable with crappy gear unlike casters.
What youāre suggesting is a big fundamental game mechanic change, good luck with that. I for one will definitely not vote for that.
Iād prefer they fix physical build where even mid-tier gear and above is useless like spearzons
barbs are Very weapon dependent and itās very noticeable once you reach hell. I wouldnāt
say itās brokenā¦ just going to take some effort in finding / crafting better weapons.
Itās notable that, for Paladins at least, the elemental aura builds are far stronger than physical damage builds (ie fanaticism and zeal) and yet it was the elemental auras that received buffs. In D2, every class needs a way to do elemental damage because physical damage is just way less effective.
Same thing with the zon, although Iāll say that at least some of the zonās physical damage skills got a buff in the recent patch.
Melee with a few exception, has been bad for a long time.
A simple splash damage would solve the most major issue, AOE, but all the purists go nutsā¦with doommongering, āyou are turning D2 to D3!ā
The splash damage does not even have to be same as the physical hit, 50-60% would go a long way.
Also some movement skill to close gap faster like wolcen would be nice.
For those that do not know. In wolcen, you can op for a toggle that charge to your target( within certain range) with a melee target . It has a short cool down so you cannot spam.
This massively help melee.
I once mad a mod to D2 in which the barbarian was meant to be the āDPSā archetype. Essentially - all skills gave insane damage bonuses ( like +50% damage per level and extra +25% for hard skill points on top ). Even white elite weapons became capable and single-blow damage rolls of 20k were the norm.
On the flip side, block chance was capped at 35%, to discourage S&S builds and life/level was somewhat lessened, as well as bonuses from BO.
It was insanely fun, because the character was always dancing a tight rope between being dead and murdering his way out because just about any regular monster died in, literally, one hit. It played like Doom Eternal does now. Exposure to damage was high, but so was damage output. You were to be on top unless, you failed to read that the next fellow is physical immune, extra fast, multiple shots, lightning enchanted. Then you were on the bottom.
I donāt think melee needs splash damage. I think what they should aim for is having different builds with similar grade of equipment having similar clear times. To get melee barbarians anywhere close to the clear time of most sorcs, they would need a significant buff.
They have to take into account things like the survivability of the class. So, even if sorc should have higher DPS because they are generally more frail, the barbarians DPS is lower than it should be when comparing their survivability.
I remember reading in one of the patch notes that monsters in hell got 50% physical damage reduction - if this were removed, I think it would largely make up for it. Or perhaps reduced to 25% physical damage reduction.
I think adding some type of splash damage that is linked to weapon range wouldnāt be too bad. It would boost weapon Aoe while providing a little bit of an incentive to use two-handed weapons with longer reach.
Ideally a system like PoE would be good.