Melee

Melee

Tooltip

Melee Attacks are those that directly hit with a melee Strike or a Slam, dealing Melee damage. Melee attacks usually scale from Weapon or Unarmed damage.

Any Projectiles these attacks create do not count as Melee damage.

Melee generally refers to one of two things:

• A playstyle defined by a set of skills (usually attacks) performed while either unarmed (meaning to have no weapon equipped), or with a martial weapon, where your character either performs an attack at a target within your strike distance, or performs a slam on the ground to hit all enemies within the slam's area of effect.
• A gem tag denoting skills that use the aforementioned melee playstyle

Melee weapon types

Weapon class	H	Martial	Dual Wield	Off-hand	Strength	Dexterity	Intelligence
Maces	1/2			Mace, Shield/Foci, Sceptre	100%	0%	0%
Axes	1/2			Axe, Shield/Foci, Sceptre	75%	25%	0%
Flails	1			Shield/Foci, Sceptre	75%	0%	25%
Swords	1/2			Sword, Shield/Foci, Sceptre	50%	50%	0%
Spears	1			Shield/Foci, Sceptre	25%	75%	0%
Claws	1			Claw only	0%	100%	0%
Quarterstaves	2			—	0%	75%	25%
Daggers	1			Dagger, Shield/Foci, Sceptre	0%	50%	50%

Melee skills are limited to specific martial weapons, meaning that bows, crossbows, sceptres, staves, traps, and wands cannot be used for melee skills. Any specific melee skill will generally be limited to one weapon type- for example, Ice Strike requires the use of a quarterstaff.

Terminology

Combo

Combo is a counter that is that tracks the number of melee hits done by the character in the last 8 seconds. Some skills (example: Tempest Bell) can only be activated by achieving a certain combo number (for Tempest Bell, it can only be activated after achieving a combo count of 4). Some skills can be transformed into combo skills using the Combo Finisher support gem, which causes the linked skill to deal 40% more damage, at the cost of requiring a combo count of 5.