How's melee going?

I'm curious how melee is going for those who went for it.


Myself, I started with wild strike warden, dual wield swords.

I toyed around with retaliation skills, and they were great until I started reliably freezing enemies, and well, frozen enemies don't trigger retaliation + some bosses almost don't attack, so while I had a lot of fun with swordstorm, it got axed at right about white maps.

The build still progressed fine to red-maps, at which point I had to face the reality that with warden, no tinctures = no damage, so I had to go full tinctures, and thus Avatar of the Wilds went in the trash bin (it was a lot of fun until then though).

The build hit kind of a wall at t16s though, where too many map mods brick the survival aspect (-block? death. -spell suppression? death. -aura effect? death. -max resists? death. -enemies resist ailments? death. -enemies cannot be slowed? death.).

I would have probably survived that alone, but what got me was how bad being actually melee was in fights against multiple bosses (I love using Maven's extra boss summoning), where it's nearly impossible to dodge everything when there're 3-4 bosses spamming stuff all at once.

So, wild strike went into the trash bin, and I respecced into 'melee' - lightning strike, with pretty much the same build.

That one is working great so far.

I went for an old favorite of mine, dual nebuloch tecslam chieftain. I had to scrap the build after 3.15 because the damage simply wasn't there anymore but with the new slam crutch... coff... i mean overexert support this is no longer an issue. To make it even sweeter, there is battle mages cry which makes it easy to get 100% crit even with 5 base crit weapons.

The build isn't great but really fun/satisfying to play because he outright oneshots just about everything including map bosses and tecslam has a pretty wide area of effect so one click and everything in front of you dies during mapping. With some more investment i might try taking it up a nodge and use tec slam of cataclysm. I don't think i can scale it high enough to oneshot ubers but pinnacle oneshots should be doable. Overexert won't survive this league so it's now or never.

Bleed Groundslam Chieftain is slapping hard. Been a very successful start. :-)

started chieftain perforate. tried getting crushing fist in there but after a while overexertion works so well with warcries that you re start missing sockets and had to ditch retaliation.
Went for relatively slow attack speed like 2 a sec, it s nice to slap hard but it has a sluggishnesh to this type of gameplay. Wasnt expecting to 5-6 shot elder lol. Damage is really there no doubt. But the gold pressure is so high, even though i maxed my town buildings with perforate, i just switched to static strike wich was massevily buffed. pretty fun. I am casting a lot of warcry that s for sure.
I hope to reroll one char to do the meme impaler keystone shenanigans too. Tincture even give 150% "free" crit chance(even more with effect of tincture).
I think i should have went zerker first for attack speed, or used a despot axe.

edit : considering defenses, and that s why i went chieftain, well chieftain get so much. even exerted clusters are really good when you happen to have a ton of exerted attacks.

only big negative part is the move from onslaught away from marauder near the precise technique keystone. I saw it ofc before league start but wasnt expecting such a satisfaying feeling to finally activate it. night and day in terms of gameplay. a bit of a dick move for marauders.

Bleed ES going strong.

The very promising bleed gladiator looks like crap!
I'm stuck on T16 bosses, it's just obvious that there isn't enough dps, no matter how much I put into the build.
I tried melee, not that I haven't, but for a more serious end game build I have to restart for some caster build, of course.

lol retaliation

I started playing on Friday eve, started leveling to make a ground slam build with the big boi Marauder and I ended up rerolling half way through the campaign the next day. Leveling felt worse than what I remembered when I started playing three years ago with a berserker ground slam build.

Lacerate gladiator has been pretty smooth. 3 Voidstones were easy, I could probably do uber elder, just haven't gotten the frags yet. I should probably just buy a set and complete my 4th voidstone. Haven't tried T17 maps yet, I've just been doing T16 blights and blight-ravaged.

Got to T16 with just Jack, the axe and finally upgraded my axe recently. Super smooth and easy build, really tanky and okay clear. Not top tier, but a lot of fun.

Lacerate bleed glad is pretty ridiculously good for most content, absurd dps in comparison to investment and not wholly made of glass. Unfortunately fragile due to the main survivability layer being block and a fairly low phys max hit leading to lots of scuffed fights when I get unlucky but more than enough dps for voidstones (I got two at more than 300 ms of lag because GGG fucked their lighting engine something awful this league). Its also very good at clearing even pretty juiced content (I ran with blight and delirium up through to t16s without too much issue even on delirious blight bosses (although spawning five firestorm delirium modifier bosses at once sucks, very few builds can tank that much fire DoT)).