I disagree with melee being terrible, it's the only thing I play in this game and it still seems to be rather powerful. It is a bit more balanced now than it was at one point in early access. I admit it was fun to get all of your skill ap costs to 3 or 4 for weapon based skills or 1 for all other skills by stacking str to 15 and wearing +str items to get it to the 18-20 range then just steamrolling entire screens full of mobs, but that was obviously overpowered. Of course the mage could also get most of his skills to 1 ap cost as well, but they just didn't scale as high as 2H weapons + berserk + that negative resists debuff. You could 1 shot all the bosses nearly as well as arrow spray (the op ranger skill that they replaced with ricochet and moved to high levels?) with that nonsense though it required oath + zerk + resist debuff when a ranger could just hop in and win (then wait for the long cooldown to do it again).
I've also seen a 75% block chance with an orange elven shield (50% after upgrading with max smithing), 5 shield mastery (25%), and 5 smithing (not base mind you, get some + skill items, though I've seen skills now go over 5 with +skills so...) before they added item levels back then as well. It's probably still possible, but at what level I don't know. That made for an unkillable tank and with crafted + sharpened weapons he wasn't too terrible when it came to dealing damage either though 2h was clearly superior at that. Smithing and crafting are huge for melee builds imo. Honestly, the way the game is now I don't think sword and shield is worth it if you want to kill fast since the AP cost for skills is the same as using a 2H for much less damage.
What I can agree with is not liking the long cooldowns. Their reasoning for changing them was something along the lines of 'we don't want everyone using the same rotation of skills'. While that did seem to happen, now as a melee (sub level 10 at least) the game is basically all normal attack spamming. Why use dust devil or battering ram (yeah aoe + mobility line aoe + knockdown still has its uses situationally) for damage when I can put out 2 to 3 times as much damage with normal attacks for ap spent vs using those skills. I dread finding phoenix dive which used to cost me 1 ap with a 3~? turn cooldown, and seeing it be 5+ ap and 7~ turn cooldown or some nonsense. It won't see much use from me if that's the case. :\
This topic is the reason this game would have benefit greatly from having an import/export character function similar to Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gates, Icewind Dales, etc, or having a character respec option. I've had to start over several times due to my co-op partner hating the way his build was turning out compared to my OP melee self. After having 90~ hours of Cyseal from early access, I just want to get past it already. lol
