Lowered shield difficulty, cool, everyone can bring a shield and with proper use deflect most of the ranged.
Lowered shield weights, no good to anyone tbh, just because you want to move 1 2 meters a minute faster, now shields get stunned in half of the melee hits.
The problem begun when archers relied on STR builds. Sorry, archers were forced to rely* on STR builds. It was meant to make archers slower, because of epic kiting cancer, but it did more harm than it did good. Now archers can bring in the most broken weapons ( i am looking at you spathovaklion and 1h barmace) with huge amounts of PS into the field and become near invincible. This wasnt a problem few years ago, but in time everyone became good in melee and most optimal builds became ranged builds. Why go pure 2h or 4d polearm while you can inflict the same damage in melee as an archer or crossbowman? Giving more 0 slot melee options for ranged players was a part of this mistake too. In general everything should be able to counter everything approach we suffered through the years was wrong and should change asap.
Another problem is that melee isn't fun to play. Before someone arrives and says "I play melee in NA1 everyday I have fun speak for yourself" lol, %99 of melee fights end either with someone getting ganked or one of the players get bored of swinging and blocking and starts spamming, which you'll most likely fail if you arent using one of the broken hitbox weapons like long maul spamitar barmace etc.
Melee is dumbed down to the point that it has no flavor or anything you can add to your playstyle. Quickest solution to this is removal of the turnrate nerfs.
Another thing that keeps certain people away from playing is that some weapons are extremely powerful compared with other options. I.e I want to play shielder and wanna do it with a knightly arming sword. But every other shielder plays with scimitars, barmaces, spathovaklions. I will be outcompeted everytime against them unless I truely tryhard and there isnt much reason to play shielder if I am not willing to switch to the said meta weapons or their variants.
Edit: one more thing to add, is that players having huge IF builds especially since after a point you receive HP instead of skill points makes many fights go unconcluded for so long and ending up with someone getting ganked. A part of melee not being fun.
I wrote this on phone it may be weird to read
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