Enemy melee attacks make the game more interesting because they limit your options.
Instead of being able to cheese the game by dashing around and being uncontrollable, the threat of taking big damage from touching an enemy forces you play more passively.
It turns into an obstacle course rather than purely a dodging game. Enemies can surround and corner you, then what happens? If they have no melee, you just walk out and their positional advantage is meaningless.
When they have strong physical attacks, they can punish you for trapping you. Are you going to take the extra damage and just get out, or are you going to inevitably take damage from their projectiles until you can get a safe way out? Either way isn't optimal no, but that's what you get for being flanked/surrounded.
Maybe an option could be added to turn it off, but losing melee completely would take most of the tactics out of this game (the main reason I play this game), so I'm not a fan.
Also concerning melee, I play on Master Hero and my three main spells are Forest Rage, Death Touch, and Energy Slice.
Death Touch is very useful in that it provides massive burst damage. When you need something dead now, you smack it with death touch. In our current assortment of spells, the price of massive dps is it coming in a very short-range melee attack.
Maybe other spells can be made outside of melee range for this job, but the idea of high-risk high-reward is fair, and keeps the game interesting.
This.
In particular, the part about risk/reward.... that's one of the things that the melee system causes, and it's a GOOD thing. Generally in any game, this is a good thing. Alot of big modern releases barely bother with this, and really, I think it makes them even MORE boring. THIS game though, this one does it well. The risk is getting close without taking a heavy blow..... but the reward is the monstrous damage that you can deal at a close range.
If there WASNT that risk, I'd honestly say that the melee spells (pretty much ALL of them) would be extremely unbalanced and probably well overpowered, since the difficulty in getting close would be dramatically reduced.
I wonder if there's some kind of higher-tier melee spell that you're using that I don't have access to. I've been using Death Touch, and my choices are pretty much to shoot an enemy one to three times to kill it safely and effortlessly from range, or move in to probably kill it in one hit with death touch at massively greater risk. Typical ranged enemies, in my experience, deal about twice as much damage if you run into them as they do with their shots. What's more, it takes about as long to close with them to punch them as it does to just shoot them twice anyway.
Can you elaborate on what you're doing that makes you find melee is so effective? Just from glancing over the spells, Death Touch is pretty close to efficient long-ranged spells in damage per mana, and while it does have very high paper DPS it can't sustain it past one or two casts because of the cost.
The spell I'm mainly using for melee is Ice Burst. Usually, using it without any enchants to boost it, since the attack-boost enchant I've been using for the current continent has always been an Air type. This is with a Draconite, who tends to have a really high attack power (over 200%). This is on Hero difficulty, so enemies have fairly decent amounts of health (some, like worms or those bloody Clockwork jerks, have ALOT). I do tend to Storm Dash in short little bursts, which can let me get close to an enemy really fast if done correctly (takes practice though to do this without getting hit by something).
I'm also using a Fire Shield, though I rarely turn it on in basic combat against normal foes, but it can help with this type of attack.
Part of the reason I do this so much is because I'm used to this sort of thing. Danmaku shmups (the really crazy ones with 80 kersquillion bullets onscreen at once) are my favorite genre, so I'm pretty good at dealing with alot of things at once; most enemy patterns are fairly simplistic and have obvious timing, so it's not too hard to get close to them and smash them with the Ice Burst. I tend not to get hit all that often, and actually am probably going to ratchet the difficulty up further, though I wanna beat continent 4 first (and maybe start a new world). I usually only crash into enemies if I actually fall on them, or if I'm being impatient and Storm Dashing too much (and THAT hurts).
It also depends on the enemy though, as to what spell I'm going to throw at it. Ball Lightning is my main spell right now, so Lightning Espers are a pain and take almost no damage from it, so they're one of the main things I use Ice Burst on. Though I'll smack other esper types with it as well.
Though I'll also use it on things like the Nightmare Octopi (yes, I can get close without getting hit there, though it's difficult), since those guys have way too much health and are dangerous as heck, I usually want them dead RIGHT NOW, so Ice Burst is the way I do that. Also used to deal with pretty much any of the "background" enemies like the Gazebos or Slimes or those hateful lions.
I'll use it on some bosses (the wasp in particular).
It might be worth comparing it to Death Touch; the hitbox on Ice Burst may be a little bigger..... it wouldnt be much, but even a small increase in hitbox size might make it that much easier for you to melee enemies, and Ice Burst is a VERY strong spell, so I dont think you'd be sacrificing damage. Probably worth experimenting with.
Other than that..... I'm not using any special spells or enchants for this. It's just something that takes practice, in order to be able to do it easier. It probably also helps that I'm aggressive by nature and will tend to charge at things to begin with.
