Looking for low life (right side) melee builds

Hi all,

I'm looking for melee builds that don't require lots of life and are primarily over on the right side of the tree not the left side - do they all use Iron Skin? Or just stacking tons of ES? How do they deal with getting stunned or frozen a lot?

I love this genre of game, and this one in particular, but I much prefer melee over ranged or casting, and I've long had a suspicion that melee isn't really viable in PoE without stacking lots of life/armour/endurance charges, which forces you into the Marauder space. Fine for a templar or a left-side duelist, but I'm experimenting with high EV builds, crit builds etc. (dual wielding rangers / shadows / scions). Iron Skin is a great gimmick but I don't want to need it for every build. Not only is low life a problem per se, it also means I get stunned and frozen a lot more often.

Any links appreciated - doesn't have to be able to run every map, just interesting melee builds that are playable at least through the core game and a few tiers of maps.

On a related note, what's considered the best escape skill for melee? I don't like shield charge or flicker strike because I can never find a target in a panic, and whirling blades and cyclone are too slow. So I'm experimenting with Leap Slam and Phase Run at the moment - preferring the former because you jump where you click, whereas with Phase Run you have to cast then move. (I'm thinking that escapes will be hugely necessary for meleeing Malachai in Merciless, given my interesting experiences in Cruel!)

TIA as ever.

First of all, 'Low Life' has a very specific connotation in Path of Exile that I think you're missing. What you want is "builds with less than 220+% Life in the tree"; what 'Low Life' means is "an Energy Shield build using reservations to be constantly below 35% of maximum Life, so as to use the Pain Attunement keystone for a large More modifier to spell damage, and which defends itself against Chaos damage with either very high chaos resistance or, more commonly*, Shavronne's Wrappings'.

Just laying that out there so that maybe other folks are less confused.

Second of all: right-side melee is perfectly doable, even without low-life or ES. You can stack layered avoidance mechanics, instead - Acrobatics/P. Acro with Enfeeble, a Stibnite flask, high native Evasion and the 160-180% life you can get on the right side can hold up to a lot of content. it's a different playstyle focused more on movement and active avoidance (i.e. don't stand in the Slams) than right-side 250% life 10% regen facetanking, but it's perfectly viable.

i have a (currently) level 89 Frost Blades Raider who's cleared a few red maps (can't readily find more -_-) with not much more than 4k life, using Kintsugi, Acro/Phase Acro, a nice Stibnite flask, BlasFeeble, Fortify, Taste of Hate, and multiple leech sources. Sure, you get instaganked every now and then when something gets through your dozen and a half avoidance/mitigation sources, and I wouldn't recommend it for hardcore, but you know something?

The left side of the tree can't get 96% movement speed modifier and abundant crit rolls for practically everything, so hey. Tradeoffs.