I suggest a two stage fix:

First, in line with Pantagruel, I think one of the easiest and quickest solutions to melee is with the energy builders. The best way to do this is have every Melee EB perform some sort of lunge mechanic if outside 7’ and inside 50’ and have a decently powerful slow built in.

Given the long wait, I would really like to see this be something awesome by having the mechanic tied to our slotted travel power. IE: if I use teleport, I teleport right next to my target; if I use swing, I swing; tunneling, I do an quick dive and up; etc for all the others with the default for the tutorial being a lunge. However, giving them each some sort of unique method of closing the gap would work too. The animation from click to being right next the target should take no more than 1 second. There should also be some thought to balance the values with this new mechanic compared to ranged EB's; perhaps around a 5 second cool down for the lunge function, sort of like how Shuriken works with Chained K. advantage. You could always have some of the EB's have a Chained Kunai pull fuction instead of a lunge too.

EDIT: So people do not lunge if they donot want to with an auto toggled EB, we could make this function only activated if you clicked your EB. We could then make "shift+EB key" toggle on/off the auto toggle; this way we do not shut off the toggle when wanting to lunge. Thinking about this with travel powers, where by the time you hit they are out of melee, you can add a very shot non-resistable root of say 1 second; just enough time so that when you land/appear/stop your are right next to them or they you.

Granted this would make Thunderbolt Lunge and Mighty Leap lose value, but we can buff them to make up for this; my suggestion would be modifying them to serve as a Crowd Control. Which if you made one a “jump and grapple hold” maintain you would make a lot of people happy… making them both some sort of leap/teleport and grapple CC would just be gravy. (have them similar to Heat Wave and Binding Aratron: one does good damage one can be used for a perma type grapple.)

The above would really make a huge dent, if not fix, the “close the gap” problem of melee for both PvE and PvP. If your design is melee does 25% more damage, then the slow should allow melee to keep in melee distance 80% of the battle for PvP.
(4 seconds * 100 dmg per second = 400 dmg ... 3.2s * 125dps = 400d)

Second, I really think every power should be good with an open system, even between tiers; with balance being a problem across the board right now. With that said, why not start your balance sweep with melee. Once you get say Haymaker, there is not a lot of reason to do anything but tap spam it; leaving the rest of the non-utility powers pretty much pointless. Look at the damage per activation and damage per energy cost of the following powers (based on a bare lvl 40): Putting the rest of melee on line with them would be the second part of the fix. Then removing any root and rethinking the "cool downs" on powers.


Chainsaw

• Damage: 224 (full maintain 2240)
• Energy: 31 (22) (full maintain = 251)
• Activation 0.67 (.5) max 5 (full maintain = 5.67)
• Damage per Second: 395
• Damage per Energy: 8.9

Laser Sword

• Damage: 255 (765)
• Energy: 31 (93)
• Activation .35/.7/.8 (1.85)
• Damage per Second: 414
• Damage per Energy: 8.2

Haymaker

• Damage: 271-1154
• Energy: 34-93
• Activation .5-2.83
• Damage per Second: 542-408
• Damage per Energy: 8-12.4

An excerpt for my Passives Wishlist, which touches on Melee and Bleeding here with a backdrop of other concepts and mechanics discussed before and after this:

Holy crap.

That's brilliant.

Do this.

IMO, players do not see melee’s charging them as a threat. A couple of hits … meh. BUT, it should be like … as melee player close the gap they are being whittled down piece by piece. Once they are in range, all that whittling down is returned in a jaw shattering punch.

When I look at damage I see something like this:


Each tier would have its own damage scale. Endurance builders would have different from tier one, tier one different from tier four. Then the damage would be varied dependant on additional build in properties (ie stuns, holds, bleeds). Properties bought through advantages would not change anything but give those advantages.

However single attacks should then be more specific powers and power sets. Unarmed and Might would largely stay as is. Claws, DB and SB would then be changed to more Cone and AoE with a couple/one single attack. This could be explained by the swiping movement. As a blade travels in a horizontal motion, it will cut everything in its path. The plus side is that no animations have to be changed, a lot are swiping animations.

How about something in the middle? Start the charge, if the target leaves the range of the power, it automatically activates.

It's all been said before, and will be said again by others, but just a few notes off the top of my head.

Damage
Melee attacks simply MUST do more damage. MUCH MORE damage. We spend so much time maneuvering to get into range or stay in range that our DPS is utter crap compared to ranged attackers that never need to move at all and can pump out attacks non stop. You keep saying they're on par and we keep telling you you're wrong. Of course if we had some way of increasing our maneuvering speed it would help immensely. Run speed is painfully slow and there is no way to increase it, which only makes playing melee characters even more painful.

Charging
Long charges on melee powers makes them virtually unusable. Nothing sits still long enough to for you to get a full charge (yeah, I'm talking about you Haymaker), and once they skirt out of range the power and energy is lost. This just shouldn't be. And we simply don't have enough controls in our arsenal to keep things locked down so we can charge. One possible way to make things better would be to allow us to move while charging. Another would be to do only one range check at the start of the charge, so even if they move out of range a charged up power will hit if initiated while they were in range. Yet another would be to put more immobilizes and/or stuns in our melee attacks so we can keep things from running away. Right now all we have is Mighty Leap on a 12 second timer. And sorry, but I'm not wasting 4 advantage points just to get that down to 9 seconds.

Roomsweeper
Any chance this can be changed to only do KB when fully charged? Sometimes you want em to go flying, and sometimes you don't. It would be nice to have the option. And the stun advantage... kinda meh on that one. What's the point of sending them flying and then stunning them? I would rather have them kept close to me and stunned so I can charge something without them running away. In a perfect world I'd like to see the stun advantage kick it at 50% charge and KB at 100% charge. Again, so I have complete control over how things work, and have the flexibility to use the power in whatever way I need it.

Defenses
Another basic -- melee characters are going to get their asses handed to them much more than ranged. They are the front line, up close and personal. They can't use geometry or line of sight to help them like ranged attackers can. There is also no way to stay out of the path of more powerful incoming melee attacks (or even see them coming half the time cause we often can't see above their heads). There has to be some way of beefing up the defenses of primarily melee characters that doesn't require us sacrificing half our powers to defenses, while everyone else gets to take other things. Perhaps there is a way to give characters a defensive boost based upon the number of attacks from melee frameworks. The more of those powers you have, the more you get from defensive passives.

Defiance
Currently it's a joke. I understand there are some changes coming, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. But currently, even at rank 3, it takes too long to fully stack and disappears too quickly when you're done fighting. The stacks either need to last longer or there needs to be a way to keep refreshing it that doesn't require something to hit. Now if we were able to move faster from mob to mob...

Enrage
Pretty much useless by the fact that Defiance is useless, and by itself the buff is trivial. The damage buff you get is not worth giving up all your defenses and having to wait another 18 seconds. If Defiance worked better this would be more useful. Another possible solution would be to make the buff you get from the power worth a lot more than the stacks you get from other powers, either by making it a higher value or by having the power grant you multiple stacks at once.

Defensive Combo
The 3rd power in the Defiance-Enrage-DC trio. If you don't take Defiance there is no point to this power now that it cannot stack more than once. Unless you're exploiting build switching, which is something I simply have no interest in doing. Ever.

Retaliation Advantage Punitive Pummeling (or something like that)
This is the one that randomly KBs critters. In the name of all that's holy, WHY? KnockDOWN would be useful. KnockBACK is utterly counterproductive. Upon reading the description I thought "hey, this sounds cool, when things attack you there is a chance to reflect the attack back and knock them down". And then I actually used it and was like WTF??? So you're blocking as you close in on a m/s/villain and ooops! you just knocked them away from you. LAME. On top of the extremely flawed design its execution is wonky on top of it. If you're attacked from range and the advantage is triggered you'll do the flying kick, which of course does nothing since they are out of range. But you'll keep on kicking. And kicking. Over and over again. Pure phail on this one. Please take it out back and shoot it already. Can we please get an advantage in Might's block that gives us an actual buff of some kind, like Laser Knight? Y'know, something useful for a melee toon???

I'm sure this has already been mentioned, but the engery builders are a big problem. I didn't notice it as much just running quests, but the second i'm up against another player i spend all my time chasing them. One this that seemed like a step in the right direction was the energy builder for the bloodmoon event hunter class. The contextual Ranged/melee was very slick. From a customization standpoint it would be nive to choose between two energy builders, one ranged and one melee, that would automatically switch depending on one's distance from the target.

REMOVE the animation associated with the "Marked!" ability attached to melee energy builders!

It triggers in the middle of combat, and the character pauses for almost a second -- halting any input! It is the most annoying thing and makes the game feel very unresponsive!

Melee suffers more in PvP than PvE. But it still suffers pretty badly. Give melee energy builders a secondary ranged attack. I would be against making this an advantage but that might be the best way to balance it. This ranged attack would only go off when targets were out of melee range. For Might it could simply be tossing some large rocks at the target and ninja stars for DB, SB and MA.

The second issue with Melee is the DMG vs. Charge. Yea I get more DMG when I charge my Haymaker...but you know it really sux when the MV steps to the side out of range. Not even a dash away just a step...its like he is laughing and rubbing his slick mustache at me! There definately needs to be a True on activation type of an attack or at the least increasing the range or reducing the charge time. With that said the DMG only needs to be changed if you do not change the charge time or the range.

HOWEVER, the advantages need to be reworked. Aside from the old STC and Nullifying punch the other advantages are lacking. They either don't debuff long enough for a melee toon or they just don't do what they are supposed to.

Rebuild claws. Rebuild most of Martial Arts from the ground up. I know, it's time consuming. And not easy. But it needs it. It needs that kind of work.

Melee needs to function better in gameplay. Right now, even the best melee powers plod along in PVE and are outclassed completely by ranged in PVP.

This problem is so large in scope for me that it's hard to give specific pointed fixes. But I'll try after I read more of my fellow players' suggestions as I bet quite a few of them cover what I want to say about the issue of melee.

EDIT: The stuff I reserved space for ...

I think a complete rebuild is needed for Melee.

I think the basics need to be hammered down before anything fancy happens.

I think what should be done is feedback in this thread gets gathered. And the devs pin point the melee powers that WORK. The stuff people say is working good.

Take that list ... and look at it.

Build a brand new "baseline" melee from that feedback. And then break them down to their basics. Like say Haymaker. It's popular. Use that as a baseline for what a melee power at that spot in the "baseline" build is supposed to do.

Build this baseline. Then rebuild the melee sets AROUND the baseline. Using advantages and differences in the sets in terms of animation and other functionalities (one is bleeds, one is knockback, one is debuff) to give each set its FLAVOR. But keeping their baseline intact so that ALLLLLLLLLLL the melee sets STAY FUNCTIONAL.

This gets rid of the gap. This stops Chainsaw from being soooooo much more useful than Burning Chi Fist.

It's simple. It's basic. It's a lot of work. But I think that in the long run, using a baseline and building from there will make it much easier to keep melee "balanced" the way you like it.

As it is now, there's too many quirks that either work too well (chainsaw, laser sword) or don't work well enough at all (momentum, whatever the heck you think claws is doing).

And synergy. The sets need synergy. Melee needs some overall synergy improvements.

That's my feedback. It's really just a strip everything down and rebuild it suggestion. And it's not going to incorporate many of the amazing ideas from this thread. Because I think the core of melee is rotten right now. And that needs to be fixed. So that THEN these amazing ideas can be built into it.

It's a huge process.

It's one of the few ways I can see Melee being able to work better.

Fix the foundation. And then let yourself have this working basic functional mechanic that can add all of these wicked cool ideas being offered here.

Good luck. You're going to need it devs. This is not a simple solution. And I don't think the work I've seen done in the past is an indication that the fix is coming in the future.

The key issue melee faces is that a melee character needs to be able to stay in melee range of his opponent as much as possible. It needs to be as effortless for him to maintain toe to toe with his opponent as it is for an opponent to remain "somewhere within 50ft" of his opponent. There are a few good tools for this:
-Contextual lunge on all melee endurance builders.
Basically, all endurance builders, if activated when more than 5ft from your chosen target (or auto-target), should cause you to launch yourself at the very least 25ft to their location and land one hit. From then on the attacks would continue into the standard endurance builder combo.

Ideally, this would allow a character to enter a pack of enemies, spaced randomly at various distances, and each time he finishes one off he immediately lunges at the next without having to manually move in that direction, just as a ranged character would immediately target and begin firing on the next opponent.

-Make more/better lunges with no cooldowns.
There need to be more lunge moves than just Mighty Lunge. There should be one that uses a super speed effect, one that uses a teleport effect, one that moves through the target to attack from behind, one that ends up above their heads, etc.(feel free to combine some of these effects). These moves need to launch you up to 50ft on the longest range ones, and at least a few of them need to be cooldown-free, so that you can spam it indefinitely like you used to be able to do with the existing ones.

The problem that came up was that the secondary effects or damage of the existing ones were too high to allow them to be spammed, just don't add those effects to these new powers. The primary benefit is that it brings you from point A to B, and that's all it needs to do.

-Make sure that lunge effects work on the Z axis.
If you're flying above a target, you need to always dive down at them, if bellow you need to launch up at them.

-Make Follow work right.
No slow down to a crawl as you get close, Follow should keep you locked in at whatever your max speed is. If you activate Follow on someone from 50ft away and you have Super Speed, you should be moving at full Super Speed from start until you can smell his breath, at which point you should come to a dead stop. Two characters should be able to have super speed, one Following the other, and have a super speed battle, in which the first is setting the pace, moving however he wants, while the other is automatically locked right on to him, unshakable.

If a player wants to shake a character that intends to melee him, he should have to use actual abilities, like holds, roots, snares, etc. It would really make snares much more useful if it were impossible to shake a meleer with anything less.

-Give melee attacks a "self-juggle" effect.
If you launch a melee attack against an airborne opponent, that attack should give you the "flying" state for the duration of the attack+ a second or so. Basically if you launch yourself up at an opponent 50ft off the ground, then as long as you continue to chain melee attacks at him, you should stay up there with him.

-If a melee attack has a charge-up to it, and it roots you in place while charging, then it also needs a built-in lunge.
Basically if I run up to you, and start to charge my cool attack, and you move 20ft away from me before it finishes charging, then when I release the attack I need to get launched in your direction so that the attack can land.

-Conversely, if a melee attack has a charge-up with no lunge, then you MUST be able to continue moving during the charge.

-Minimize any "self-rooting" in melee attacks, at any point in the attack.
As many melee powers as possible should be usuably at a full sprint, without missing a beat. Like in my above example, if two charatcers are running at super speed, attacking each other with melee attacks, they shouldn't be a bit slower than if they were just running.

-Melees need a bonus against CC.
When a ranged character is rooted or snared, big deal, they can still use their abilities with barely any loss (maybe some AoE positioning issues, but nothing major). When a meleer is rooted, they are completely gimped. They need some bonus. I'm thinking something like when you use a melee attack while under a root or snare, it does bonus "damage" to that effect relative to the default "fighting it off", and it also applies a very short duration defensive buff, so that if you keep rooting or snaring a melee character, they are very hard to hurt while in that state, leading to a bit more of a stalemate, rather than a sitting duck.

I hope that changes along these lines would result in a much more "kinetic" set of abilities, allowing for running battles and allowing a melee character to be as "engaged" in the fight as a rnaged one, rather than drunkenly scrambling from one target to the next, as each is picked off by a ranger just sitting there.

[edit]
Oh, and Righteous Fists specifically, ditch the "Spastic Spider-Man" animations. They aren't bad, per se, but that is supposed to be the "unarmed martial arts" core attack, and they don't look anything like martial arts, they are more an untrained reflex combat thing. Shift that animation set to a new power, something like "Super Speed melee" or something, unlinked to the MA powerset, and shift the Righteous Fists animation back to what it was early in beta, more of a dignified punching combo. If people want to throw in kicks then they can chain in Thundering Kicks.