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About melee. It sadly sucks to some degree in all other ARPGs. 

I played quite a lot of games like tok. Diablo 1-3, sacred 1-2, torchlight 1-2 or path of exile. I even played lesser known games like R.A.W. or space hack. I was thinking about improving melee while I was working and here is what I came up with. 

Melee in Tok has two problems. Hard to avoid damage and low damage output compared to spells / ranged weapon arts.

I came up with multiple ways that might fix these problems.

Adding more movement options, like shield dash weapon art or haste ability would be a good idea. Dash would simply launch your character quickly forward and stun the enemy you hit with it. Haste would increase your movement speed. Both could be used for attacking and escaping. I believe these two abilities should be enough to make avoiding damage easier, but reworking shields might be a good idea too. I will talk about that later.

Low damage is a problem because you can only hit one enemy while attacking, other weapon types have AoE weapon arts or spells. This makes melee weapons too weak once more enemies start appearing. Adding weapon arts like cleave or ground slam might fix that but then again, this won't make melee weapons on par with other ranged options, since they have better range while also having AoE abilities. 

Best option I think would be giving all melee weapons some form of default splash damage. When you hit an enemy, other enemies around you get also damaged. Number of enemies and damage percentage could be influenced by weapon type or strength level. Blunt weapons could hit one enemy for 80% damage, two handed axes 4 enemies for 40% damage and so on. Would also make picking a melee weapon slightly more involved than just looking at higher damage number, since weapons hitting more enemies would be better in levels with a lot of weaker enemies while weapons hitting less enemies would be better againts smaller, stronger groups.

This alone would make melee have its niche. You risk taking damage, but you will be able to kill groups faster without using any mana. 

Also, reworking shields might help make melee better too. 

Shields could work as a secondary health bar. Once it runs out, you start getting health damage. Shield could get restored by attacking / killing enemies in melee. Seems better than just letting it regenerate over time. Points restored could be affected by the amount of enemies you are hitting at once, so hitting four enemies with splash damage restores 1 point per hit while hitting only one enemy restores 0.2. This would make it less overpowered againts single enemies like bosses while making you thougher when overwhelmed with large groups. Two handed melee weapons could have some shield points too. 

Right now, using a weapon / gear without life leech is a suicide whne using melee. This seems like a good alternative.

It's possible none of these are going to work once put to a test, but they seem like good solutions on paper. Up to you to decide, but I hope I helped a little.