While Path of Exile's end-game is absolutely incredible, especially when you have a dozen spells working in unison, the very beginning leaves a lot to be desired. Unless you know which abilities to pick and which areas to avoid, you can end up spending a considerable amount of time swinging a slow and unwieldy melee weapon, which as you might imagine, isn't exactly fun for brand new players.

Thankfully, it would appear that Grinding Gear Games are now finally looking to address this issue. Much like the recent Synthesis update which rebalanced just about every single spell, the June 3.7.0 expansion will bring with it a major overhaul of melee abilities, animations, and combat in general.

Nothing is set in stone just yet, but Grinding Gear Games are currently experimenting with changes to the animation system in order to make the melee combat more impactful and weighty, especially early on before players get a lot of attack speed. They are also considering tweaks to some of the fundamental stats and mechanics like accuracy, melee splash, leech and fortify, all in an effort to make melee playstyles just as exciting as the spell-based ones.

Personally, I'd say that the early-game melee builds suffer from three distinct problems: a lack of health given that new players rarely prioritize survivability, a lack of accuracy for slow weapons, as well as somewhat mediocre animations when smacking monsters square in the face. If those three could be fixed, ideally without messing up the end-game balance, I think new players would have a much better time with Path of Exile.

Whatever the case may be, Grinding Gear Games will be giving us a bit more information over the next few weeks, though the bulk of the announcement will be coming after 3.7.0's announcement in May. I can only hope it'll be worth the wait because I sure do love my super-aggressive melee builds!