Melee Needs Much More Damage
Existentially, why would you play a melee character? You’ll have to get way closer to enemies, which is much more dangerous, so to compensate for that, you’re going to need a big advantage. That advantage needs to be massive damage. Melee characters should realistically be able to outperform ranged spells, AoE attacks, and the like, because melee requires you to get in an enemy’s face where you’re most likely to die. A flat 50% or even 100% increase to melee damage is honestly worth considering, because even if that sounds like it might massively shake up the meta and make melee not just a good choice but the default choice, that’s really quite unlikely to be the case. The problem is that, right now, the vast and overwhelming majority of melee builds are doing many times less damage than builds that rely on spells or magic or simply ranged combat, so a major increase to melee damage won’t make melee too overpowered. Considering how gear-dependent and expensive melee character equipment is, though, it makes more sense to increase damage via scaling via the passive tree. For example, making melee damage increase nodes add, say, double the melee damage they do now would be a much better solution than increasing the base damage of melee weapons. Another option would be adding melee-specific nodes to the Atlas tree, since during the campaign, melee is a lot more competitive with other builds, since enemies do a lot less damage and have a lot less health throughout the campaign than they do in maps, for example. This could help make melee stronger without forcing everyone to level their characters with melee.
Melee in Path of Exile Needs More Mobility
Mobility is one of the most important features of any build in Path of Exile, and while some melee skills offer up some strong mobility on top of good damage, like Cyclone, this is far from the usual. Generally, a lot of melee skills fall into the Heavy Strike category where you can do decent damage, sure, but you’ll be locked in place directly next to an enemy, which is oftentimes a death sentence. Giving melee skills in general more mobility, or offering up unlockable mobility skills through the passive tree for melee builds would both be great ways to help melee characters move around ana rea and avoid damage while still being able to quickly get into position to strike an enemy. As it stands, even the big DPS numbers melee can do, if you spend enough on it, are not going to be especially practical, considering you’ll probably have to constantly start and stop attacking, lest you want to get instantly shredded and have to start over. A lot of these problems can be traced back to mobility issues. For other builds, not only are there ranged attacks that make moving around easier, but there are generally more options for moving yourself around a map when you’re working within the context of a melee character. Giving options to people for mobility skills is great, but melee should have the richest selection of options, not one of the worst.
Melee Characters Need Better Ways to Make Money
Perhaps the worst thing about making a melee build is how outrageously expensive it’ll inevitably be. If you want to do a lot of damage, well, all your damage comes from scaling, so you’re going to need really strong gear and a really strong weapon, and those are not going to cost just a few Exalts. However, the economy is the economy, and you can’t just force prices to go down, and moreover, if melee characters get obscene ways to make money, everyone will play them, or at least play them until they get rich, and the whole thing becomes boring and not very fun. So, what could be good is if GGG introduced a new mechanic or possibly series of maps that would be designed around melee and could drop a new currency item used to buy melee-specific gear at more reasonable prices. This way, you could encourage melee players to try out this mechanic or these maps, while you wouldn’t have to worry about it being abused for making crazy cash. Now, of course, it would break the game if melee characters could get builds normally worth hundreds of Exalts for next to nothing, so this new mechanic should focus on try to give melee characters gear for around the 5-10 Exalt range max that will make a character that’s competitive with other similarly-priced builds and could complete all the content in-game without too, too much trouble or an insane level of skill required.
