Actual SUGGESTIONS on melee builds

As I've seen by now, many people argue and complain about melee being useless, worthless or even "trash", but I don't feel it'd be of any use to just cry and complain if noone really seems to have anything constructive to say / suggest about it. So I open this thread to actually make some suggestions that could help to re-balance melee builds to make them a true option against CI infinite leeching casters. So I'd appreciate if we keep it as a suggestion thread instead of getting it dirty with pointless discussion and crying.

We all know that the lack of melee players is not because nobody likes them, it's because of the expected lifetime and capability to goal achieves they can have. Let's not discuss if Melee Splash is truly melee or not, or if a Frost Blades build counts as melee build or it doesn't. It's not about the romantic vision of characters and skills, just about effectiveness.

That being said, here's my suggestion:
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The whole solution to this unbalancement is on the passive tree, melee aspect of the game doesn't need new support gems or better items, just the base idea is wrong. The tree is designed as an opposite of energy shield, evasion rating and armour. This is totally wrong, since evasion rating and armour are mitigation (only non-spell the first, only physical the second). Energy shield is not mitigation, it's EHP! ES is EHP for everything, including spells that are not included in evasion rating, including non-physical damage that is not included in armour. It doesn't include chaos damage unless you go CI, that's right... oh wait, armour also doesn't protect against chaos, and the only chaos damage you can evade is viper strike (from caustic cloud you can avoid the hit but not the cloud, and almost every other source is spell-based), and neither armour or evasion rating can pick CI to just nullify that problem.

That's why casters will always have a higher EHP pool and will in fact be tankier even without losing any dps than any non-ES based build. Even if not going CI, a caster can easily hit over 13k EHP, absoultely out of reach for any other build-type. The solution to this is to just upgrade HP nodes outside the witch / top templar / top shadow area. This should be enough to rebalance all survivality unbalances reffering EHP pools.

A little analysis:


So I ask, how the f... is this possible!? Where have you seen spell-casters being the best tanks and the best dps at the same time? GGG has to notice that ES is EHP instead of mitigation, and thus they have to "unbalance" HP nodes favouring the melee part of the tree, so ES comes to rebalance it instead of heavily unbalancing it, what's what it currently does.

This would completely solve this issue, but we still have another one: the capability to regen/leech that EHP, whatever source it came from. An easy way to balance melee builds with caster ones in this sense, can be written in three words: move Vaal Pact.



So if melee has lower EHP, lower chance to avoid big hits (sry but I'm not going to count armour or block since most times it comes from an elemental / spell / both elemental and spell source, or they're just that hard that you'd need to stack crazy amounts of armour to make a noticeable difference)... do they need to fk their builds just to get the same node that works miracles on ES casters in terms of survivality, even if they're going to get a big drawback that casters don't? Wouldn't it make much more sense to be just the opposite? Most leeching nodes are on the duelist area of the skill tree, what's the point on being Vaal Pact so absurdly far from any melee option?

To reduce the impact this would have on casters, it'd be nice to replace Vaal Pact with a new keystone, something like "X% Spell Damage leeched as Life", and add leeching speed to Ghost Reaver under the form of "Energy Shield leech rate is further affected by Energy Shield recharge rate". This way they could keep most of their tankiness and the passive tree would be more reasonable.

Even if it's not the main reason this thread exists, I'd also point that stacking ES should actually give some kind of mitigation (if we pair EHP pools for melee users and casters, we should also give ES users some kind of actual mitigation to pair with evasion and armour). I'd suggest one of these methods (both would become somehow a double-dipping defense):
-Grant +1% to ele resist and max. ele resist every amount of ES (like +1% ele res each 1k and +1% max ele res each 2k, for example)
-Grant some reduced spell damage taken on a similar way of how armour works on physical damage (but at a lower rate, otherwise it would be even more OP than now is)

In conclussion, my solution to the actual situation of melee builds would include:
-Severe increase in hp nodes quality near marauder start and proximities.
-Lower increase in hp nodes quality near ranger start and proximities (since they can be ranged)
-Move Vaal Pact to the bottom part of the tree, where it should have always been.
-New keystone for spell leeching and faster leech rate on Ghost Reaver.
-Maybe reducing regen rate by half on Vaal Pact, instead of totally erase it.
-Maybe include some kind of elemental or spell mitigation for Energy Shield
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Sry for the long post. Constructive feedback and ideas are highly appreciated, to build a solid suggestion

My recent (may be small in standarts of "pro's") experience with gladiator (before I always played different marouder builds) tells, that spell block + fortify mechanics makes very big difference in survival chances.

With 75% spell block (under Rume flask), even most hard-ass spell-bosses are far easier.

So yep, spell spam one of the most evil melee RIPers.

Ways to help melee:

- Reduce how BS things like Volatiles are.
- Make Volatile like BS things for ranged characters to deal with
- Make Life, the EHP that is closest to a majority of melee node, not trash compared to ES
- Make melee splash (And all the melee attacks that require it) not hot garbage
- Do something about Vaal Pact/Ghost Reaver to make them not insane
- Make Armour and Evasion meaningful (Would likely go with making Life better to be honest... At least in my ideas about the topic)
- Give 2 handed melee users some sort of mitigation or stat advantage (Bows have Quivers, Staves have Block (Albeit shitty block), Swords, Axes and Maces have ????)
- Make Fortify MELEE only. None of this BS ranged using crap like Shield Charge/Whirling Blades with Fortify support to get uptime on it...

Just my 2c.

Could go more in depth, but ehh...