Consider buffing "close range" melee damage

for a classless game, it is not possible to buff melee without buffing other builds.

how do you determine what is melee even? now that we have easy weapon swaps. if fortify was reintroduced, non melee-ers could simply have a melee weapon and socket it to emphasize fortify effect/duration and slap an enemy once in a while. so theres no way ggg can determine if a class is melee now.

unless of course ggg makes it "built in" into ascendancies such as titans being able to get 15% max life as an ascendancy.

to me i dont like that solution.

on another example, if GGG buffed defences at close range, which is where melee is supposed to excel at, non melee-ers would simply move closer to the enemy whenever they feel threatened, making it a weird dynamic that ranged characters are SAFER at close range but still get the benefit of attacking from range. they still get the same benefit.

thus the ONLY way to make TRUE melee great again is to make melee attacks gain something similar to "close quarter" support gem. and make it inherent to all melee attacks.

make it STRICT where this radius is 1-2m and if theres any portion of the attack that is an AOE or have projectiles will NOT get this bonus if its outside of this 1-2m radius.

this way GGG effectively rewards players who are playing "true melee". without any fear of indirectly buffing other non melee builds.

also for the sake of this discussion i will need to point out that most people agree that true melee is bonking the enemy with your weapon and doing damage when your weapon hits the opponent.

i will contend that its not easy to determine what is true melee or not, and thus the best way to "homogenize" the definition of truemelee in a computable/programmable form is by simply making it any melee attack hits within 1-2m's distance to the player.

GGG "kind of" fixed melee in poe1 by simply giving melee a damage boost. but since they buffed "all melee" without "true melee" consideration, true melee still is the weaker version of melee in poe1. look at lightning strike in poe1 for an example. the buff helped lightning strike much more than any true melee skill. players were spamming the skill from practically any distance they liked. theres no real reward for playing close range or "true melee".