Maybe melee isnt that underpowered, but magic is the one that is OP

Given the ridiculous damage numbers that magic can put out, especially with combos like ice arrow + lightning bolt or gravity + earthquake, perhaps its magic that is OP and its not really that melee is that underpowered.

Sure, melee has issues with accuracy and scaling damage, but one thing stands out to me : how difficult it is to get magic resists compared to physical resists.

Almost every piece of armor has some DV/PV. Unless you are a fairy, you can easily hit 150+PV with a set of armor made from higher end materials, then you can stack even more PV using feats, mutations, enhancing armor (up to +10 PV per slot, including rings and amulets) and holy shield (which works for all physical based attacks). Getting 200 base PV without buffs is quite doable if you are doing level 100+ nefias, and this prevents you from being one or two shotted by physical damage up to danger level 200.

Becoming decently protected against physical attacks is simply a matter of upgrading to better materials and getting more feats/mutations, which provides more DV/PV. You can also train your evasion, greater evasion and armor skills to add more layers to your defense.

Magic wise, there are simply too many resists to effectively stack resists for all of them. Elemental shield only affects 3 types of magic. There are no feats or mutations that will help you stack magical resists. There are 11 commonly used magic types in the game, not counting holy or ether. It is simply impossible to stack sufficient resists for all of these.

Instead of simply doing higher level nefias and upgrading to higher end materials like rubynus or spirit cloth to get more DV/PV, you have to gamble on getting at least 8 different types of resists on your gear...and im talking about the random rolls, not the built in resists on materials. This is virtually impossible due to the RNG required, and this is assuming you have a high level elemental shield or itzpalt faction bonus that can cover fire, cold and lightning, otherwise you would need 11 different types of resists on your gear.

The end result is that if a caster mob spawns at a higher level and you do not have a high resist to their damage type, you can easily be killed in 1-2 hits. I did a battlefield quest up to danger level 200 recently, and a boss level Imp spawned and just one shotted me from full hp with a magic arrow at the end. There was pretty much nothing i could do to resist this, i dont think magic resist can even spawn as a random roll on gear.

Currently, the only partial solution is to spend years of in game time grinding Endurance via food (while largely ignoring your other stats except for Str, because Str is really easy to get via corpses) to hopefully get a big enough hp pool to avoid being killed in 1-2 casts of a spell. This is obviously not a good solution, even my pet with 800 hp almost died to a level 200 Floating Eye boss earlier because magic just hits that hard and all her DV/PV is useless against magic.

Whereas with physical damage based enemies, you never end up in a situation where you get 1-2 shot like this with no way to recover because there are so many layers to mitigate and avoid physical damage. You just have to get good material gear and cast holy shield. (This doesnt apply if you are doing crazy void levels that the game is currently not balanced for)

I think it would have been better if PV worked to mitigate magical damage as well. It would guarantee that you always have some protection against magic, even if it was magic element damage or impact damage (earthquake). And maybe resists would be used as DV to calculate the odds of resisting the spell. A 100% hit rate for attack spells regardless of what stats or defences the target has is just too OP in the game imho.

As it is, the most dangerous enemies in the game are not a shub niggurath or big daddy, but an imp or bishop that can cast magic arrow to one shot you...as well as a spiral king that can cast sound ball. And it leads to a huge imbalance because maybe you can handle the boss of a level 200 nefia just fine...UNLESS its a caster boss, in which case you cant do anything because it will just one shot you. Which just encourages people to save scum every level of a nefia so they can avoid a caster boss because its a huge spike in difficulty.