Yeah, proximity shields are annoying… and unfair if you play a summoner, since even if you minions attack from close range, the game still requires your character to be within the shield to deal damage… but their whole summoner class is a poorly hacked ‘tack-on’ to their old system, so I’m glad LE has that sorted out from the start.
It’s easy. If you only have a melee weapon vs ranged weapons you do 2 things. 1 run like hell untill you are in afavourable spot where ranged weapons are useless. 2 If you can’t you charge the ranged attackers, flank them, overwhelm the, as fast as possible.
Easy solution: Every enemy should be able to charge or leap or whatever so everyone who isn’t inside X range will be pounced on. Most “realstic” thing to do in a world full ofa magic, time travel, revives and so on and so forth. Problem solved and ranged dudes need to build tank as well.
On a more serious side… ARPGs suffer from this for a long time. Ranged classes simply have more controll and therefor most of the time more dmg output untill they need to kite. Kiteing in a ARPGs suxx balls bigtime so ranged classes get CC as well, disengages and all the neat stuff. There need to be tradeoffs for being pretty save… less dmg… maniacly charging enemys… enemys that pull out their shields and have a good laugh… range dmg over X units away is ignored bubbles… ranged DDs do less dmg so they have to kite more and use their skills to it’s fullest and so on and so forth.
Now this will result in a lot of troubble because almost all ranged class players will dislike this pretty much. I think the best way ist to balance the dmg of all ranged skills arround the ease of gaming vs melee skills or disable stuff like leech from ranged skills reduce status effect chances or stuff like that.
I have no realy good idea as you see and I’, pretty sure there will be no real middleground here. I still think the best way to make things better are enemys with more movespeed, that dodge attacks, don’t run straight at people and stuff like this. Right now the AI of LE is so bad I can’t remember any swear word to put there that mirrors how bad it is… and I’m no native speaker and the first things I was teached is how to swear like a maniac.
I am not preaching for ranged to get blapped by teleports or leaping monsters as it won’t solve this problem, just add more to other classes.
If you go more in detail with RPGs or MMORPGs of which the latter require quite a high balance because they also have a strong PVP you will see that the melee classes and all archetypes and roles have good defined strenghts and weaknesses which have been improved over the course of by now 30ys of mmos.
I will leave the squishy melee dps archetype but will describe the tank that does exist in mmorpgs and is quite a pillar in there.
It has not the best damage, many times it needs a healer/buff/dps behind him to complement but standalone it has the strongest CCs and debuffs, it is incredibly thick near to unkillable and also in many games it has a mount so it basically can lockdown its target, normally in pve it has a signature weak single target but a good deal of aoe so it plays/farms by ‘mobbing’ a large number of low hp trashmobs and kills them all together. Normally tanks are neutral towards other tanks, strong vs squishy dps as they outtank them, strong vs ranged as they can’t escape a tank CC, weak vs mages as they have some antitank magic skills.
I know ARPGs are a different breed because it is only rng PVE and you cannot choose your farming area and are expected to kill everything presented to you, but here and in POE and on the contrary of Grim Dawn (where you can become really thick) there is basically no balance and moreover when you go into melee you may get some temp buffs but these are more than neutered as you get swarmed by extra 2x dmg slams + ground dots which i find unnecessary and unneeded.
If LE wants mobs to have some melee nuke spam then make melee have a true flat 90% dmg reduction from all sources or make it have 5k hp before resists and reductions.
And make melee have ranged melee weapons.
Please, this isn’t PoE… Melee weapons/attacks should have 2-3m max range, not clearing the entire screen with a “melee” skill.
If one doesn’t want to give melee classes significant damage reduction, or massive amounts of health (since most of them can have ranged builds as well), give the melee skills (all of them) a baseline debuff to the target’s outgoing damage (like Vengeance but the other way round). You could even give different melee skills different effects, one might reduce the target’s hit damage by 25%, another might reduce the target’s attack/cast speed by 25%, a third might make the target’s chance to hit lower, maybe a fourth might buff the user such that any mob that hits them gets knocked down, a fifth has a debuf where the mob has a chance to damage itself instead of the player.
Melee builds need to have ways to be tankier by default because they spend more time in the danger zone, in addition to taking longer to get into a position to damage the target compared to ranged builds.
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I was making an unoriginal joke and I don’t know if you know but I’m most known for my Reave build 
I personally really enjoy ex-nu-pseudo-quasi-melee skills which blast the whole screen - there’s just something about waving your sword in the air and monsters dying to it.
I was also slightly disappointed when I first started up Last Epoch and wasn’t able to murder air around me.
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VK already has time rot stuff that reduces attack and movespeed and it is basically useless when 10 monsters hit for 1k each and then some 1mil fat mob starts spamming until it’s dead 3 waves later
I like the approach of TL3 in that department. As soon as you hit with a melee attack or skill you get X% dmg reduction. This makes life easier for melees while ranged players mostly stay untouched. It closes the gap s oto speak because the dmg intake for melee skill users is flatten by a good junk.
I was joking a bit on the first paragraph of my post ^^. I would setup enemys behaviour in another way and would make faster overall so you need to kite as a ranged DD or you need to build tank. Right now it looks a bit wierd if you can make some big CC happen and have the opportunity to stay save in the back while dealing a load of dmg.
You can murder air around you, just not around mobs in the ruined era when you’re still in the ancient era…
Yeah, time rot, that slow isn’t big enough, I’m not talking about a measly 15% slow. Additionally, if different melee skills had different effects, it might encourage people to not just have 1 attack & 4 buff skills as they might want to take advantage of multiple defensive effects.
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It’s indicative of an overall issue with the base game itself. Maxing out Defensive skills because it is required is sickening enough. the fact that even when you go as far as you can one shot still happen and they can happen in a situation you cannot avoid or even see coming. How is that fun for a system that builds on your victories when you know it can all end through no fault of your own?
I’m fine with building for defense as a melee build, but it is clear there’s little to enemy design and AI that can’t be very easily overcome as a ranged character by just kiting, using slows and whatnot to make kiting easier, all that boring stuff that makes combat easy but not very engaging. I’d say enemy AI and general behavior in skill use still has an “alpha phase” feel to it, it has gotten incrementally better but I wouldn’t expect release to happen without a big review on enemy design. Right now it’s eaither you have a big conga line of little weiners waddling at you, or after you, or you’re in a big cluster of massive, flashy aoe attacks with half the screen covered in gigantic enemies. It’s silly and not in the usually good way arpgs can get ridiculous.
Also, it’d be nice if melee builds for all their tankiness were allowed to squeeze in some damage. I’ve been considering retooling my sentinel to warpath eventhough it’s not at all what I built for because the growing emphasis on manually avoiding aoe’s (as discussed, usually within melee range) means stopping your attacks to move. With some of the monolith bosses if feels like you spend more time running around avoiding aoe markers than you do hitting things unless you’re defensive enough to just tank through them, by which point you’re just sitting there holding down m2. There’s not really many options for using a skill with high damage and a cooldown to make those kinds of situations more fun to deal with either, especially when it’d mean giving up one of your buff skills.
I’m finding this a lot with my melee mage.
All the “bosses” seem to have attacks that completely bypass defenses that will one-shot me leaving me with ward still active, a full red globe and 0/xxx life.
Siege golem, ice serpent, marsh beetle, osirian gorn … etc.
It is always a frontal attack - meaning melee have to constantly move behind the boss as soon as it faces them. Any minor mistakes in position is insta-death with no warning for the player - no time to react.
Would it be better if some melee mobs had a pull & some slows that they use on ranged players? Kinda like the charge that some of the wengari have.
Don’t think it’d be good to mess with the players position but enemies charging, teleporting, using specific skills only at range, blocking until you’re in their melee range, having safe gaps in their aoes (the big rock swinging guys already have this), all that kinda stuff works well. Players already move pretty slow and don’t have many movement options, throwing CC effects on the player sucks enough as it is when you’re chilled/slowed and it’d be nasty to have more of that around, especially because there’s no real way to distinct between “player running away” and “player trying to run to enemy”.
It’s a big ask but enemies just need to interact with the player’s position more, a good start would be revising pathfinding and spawn groups so enemies aren’t just a trickle of trash mobs or a blob of giants. Though enemy skills and designs play a big part in making the melee vs ranged experience engaging for both without dragging the other down.
I have read a great point on other topics that is about damage that is bypassing: glancing blows, block, and dodge (and some stuff bypassed ward?). And it seems to be those cone and dot and anything dot-like and who knows what else?
So after some calcs I think that this plays a great part in the perceived melee range nuking and moreover if a dot-like ability is bypassing shield it should be made incredibly more weaker than it is now!!!
So let’s make something practical, I have “tank” with a layer of 100% glancing blows (takes 50% dmg), and another layer of 75% block (takes 25% dmg). <- Against auto-attacks dps it is going to receive 12.5% of all the potential damage, this damage will go to the hp+resists
What does it mean? That a dot-like ability that bypasses block and glance deals 100% dmg vs 12.5% and this is 8 times more powerful than normal autoattack dps.
This is (part of) what makes MOF fire construct firedots & similar crazy, what makes Arena 150+ crazy and so on. You are normally receving an X amount of DPS (12.5% dmg), then something bypasses your block and glance (same can be said for dodge) for 100% dmg and the perceived result is that you are getting 8 times more damage 
That’s not how block works. If you block a hit, your block effectiveness is added to your protection to calculate how much damage you take.
So if you have 1,000 hp, 2,000 protection and 2,000 block effectiveness, if you get “hit” by a dot, you mitigate 2,000 / (2,000 + 1,000) = 66% of the damage. If it were a hit and you blocked it, you would mitigate (2,000 + 2,000) / (2,000 + 2,000 + 1,000) = 80% of the damage. Which would be 42% more damage taken due to it being a dot (21% due to the block, doubled due to glancing blow).
I wanted to keep it simple but that’s ultimately correct.
3k block effectiveness is more reasonable with the last tier shield, on a 3k ehp it effectively doubles your ehp on a block equaling 50% dmg taken (ONLY on blocked attacks and with 3k ehp). Please ignore health vs heal and regen for now, these exist it’s alright but let’s look at ehp on a monster hit.
So let’s remake some calcs 75% in truth will give 37.5% dmg received, plus the non blocked 25% equals 62.5% dmg received, multiplied by the glanced 50% -> 0.625 * 0.5 = 0.3125 -> 31.25% damage received (from 12.5%)
Under this light, dot like abilities deal ~3 times more damage than the normal dps, which is less scary but still a considerable 3x
And so far i don’t have a clear idea if and which bypassing abilities by default deal more or less damage than a normal attack
Under this light that some dmg bypasses glance and block making it less desirable, it also an option to go for dropping all skill pts and passives on block and drop shield in favor of more hp/damage and all mods into res and life (and make the ultimate meat tank? xD).
The tank is weaker vs autoattacks DPS but stronger vs dots and you will have freed pts from block that go into dmg or some strong hp passive. By how much? No idea, that’s a hell of a farm for a try
are you guys sure that you get less dot damage from block?
i thought that block like glancing blow is useless against dots.
No, that’s what we’re saying, you can’t block (or dodge/glancing blow) DoTs, which is one of the reasons they feel like they do so much damage, because we’re used to the additional damage reduction we can get on hits.
Edit: We’re just arguing how much the damage differential is between blocking a hit & not being able to block a dot of the same initial value.
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Ok, so if you have 1k hp, 2k protection & 3k block effectiveness, against 1k of incoming damage.
The 1k hit is reduced to 500 from glancing blow, the damage mitigation is (2k + 3k)/(2k + 3k + 1k) = 83%, therefore you take 83 damage from the blocked hit.
The 1k DoT can’t be glancing blow’d (so it still does 1k), the damage mitigation is 2k / (2k + 1) = 67%, therefore you take 333 damage.
The DoT is therefore 4x more damage than the hit due to the two extra mitigation layers/effects.
If you have 500 hp & 2.5k protection (but still with the 3k block effectiveness), the dot does 500 damage & the hit does 125 (so dots are still 4x more damaging).
So the amount of additional mitigation is x2 for glancing blow + whatever percentage your block effectiveness is of your health+protection (so in the above example, the block is providing double your EHP, so that’s another x2). Therefore if you have already high mitigation from protections, then adding even more from block effectiveness isn’t as effective, if you will… We already know this in principle due to the diminishing returns from protections.
So yes, a non-block “tank” with lots of naturally high protections will be safer from dots, than a block “tank”, which is not surprising. How much safer, depends on how much of their EHP comes from natural protections and how much from health. Typing that out, none of that is surprising…
TLDR - Dots will be more dangerous for players anywhere from x2 to 2 + however much of an EHP multiple you’re getting from block (if your block effectiveness doubles your EHP, then it’s 2+2 = x4 more damage from dots, if your block effectiveness tripples your EHP then it’d be 2+3 = x5 more damage from dots).