Playing as a DW melee sorc, I've encountered several annoyance in the way melee functions in this game:

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Hit box issues: They just fail and don't hit targets within your reach often, and mobs in the air are not hit.

Example: Volcanic Rune is failure as a melee. You simply will not hit at least with DW normal attacks a flying mob a good portion of the time.

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Movement:

This has got to be one of the most obnoxious issues. You're fighting a mob, and in comes some ranged guy, often a bow user, who decides to knockback spam the mob. It completely screws you over as you need to get to the mob.

But....the mob aggroes to the ranged guy and mob movement actually seems to be faster in combat than player movement, so chasing a mob as melee when that mob is chasing a ranged guy makes it really hard to have uptime on moving mobs as DW.

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Weapon Swap

Most times I die, I can point my finger at the awful weaponswap delay. Sometimes the weapon won't even swap at all.

As a melee sorcerer, not being able to quickly swap and use my resto staff is lethal. My critical surge is on the resto staff, because my primary skill bar has to use storm form, blood craze, bound armaments and degeneration just to survive (and bound armaments must be on both bars for some *** reason, and I need the 10% increase to heavy attack damage).

So every second of delay you add to me renewing critical surge and slapping on a mutagen or quick siphon, is time im not attacking and getting critical surge heals that are necessary to live, and in turn I'm eating vet rank mob autoattacks that each per mob take out 1/7 of my 2210 HP bar (so it's not that I'm fragile, my armor's softcapped and I have stacked health; veteran mobs just do *** damage).

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Melee Survival

This is another big one. The amount of my skill bar that I need to dedicate to survival skills so I do not get blown up in seconds by a pack of veteran mobs is dumb. My bars use:

Bound Armaments, Thundering Presence, Degeneration, Blood Craze, Quick Siphon, Mutagen, and Dark Conversion. I often need to use a good combination of those.

Just 2 of them is not enough; nothing quite comes close to Dragon Blood for spike healing, and the problem is that while sustained healing can be good with my setup, in this game you die by damage spikes. So you need raw spike healing or really really high stacked sustained healing if you don't have spike heal skills like Templar or DK.

On top of this, leather users have no good amount of spell resist, and most of the damn lethal circles/attacks in the game happen at melee range.

So while a caster sorcerer or bow user can just keep moving around and avoid the charged up skills, melee FORCES me to walk into 3-5 mobs, and all of them are casting either uppercut or shuriken toss or stormblast teleport or a conal or a shield bash, often simultaneously. And even if I block all of them, I'm losing a good chunk of my health.

Something needs to be done about melee survival in this game, because what you see are a bunch of shield bash spamming melee or destro staff Impulse spammers in light armor.

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Spell resistance in leather

Let's not sit here and pretend that for some melee classes, especially the sorcerer who depends on crits for survival, that leather is optional to melee.

The problem with having 21% of your potential melee crit chance tied to 7/7 leather is that you have virtually no good amount of spell resistance uptime.

Veteran caster mobs, just with their staff autoattacks, hit for CRAZY damage. So do archers whom apparently for some reason seem to do damage based on your spell resistance.

Boss level caster mobs with a staff autoattack are wiping out 1/4-1/3 of my 2200 HP bar. And this is due to not sporting 5+ light armor pieces.

In dungeons a lot of the AoE attacks, many which you can't dodge without a teleport, are based on resistances as well.

Spell resistance should not be a stat tied to armor type, or some other mechanic needs to be put in place to allow nightblades and melee sorcs to cope with spell damage, because at least DK's have reflective scales.

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Class abilities costs for leatherwearers

It's not without reason that you see a good chunk of nightblades sporting light armor, because class skills for the nightblade and sorcerer cost a metric ton of magicka.

This is a problem, because the mechanics for melee sorcs demand that they stack melee crit to survive, and for nightblades their class spells actually go off weaponcrit, which is tied to leather.

The cost of class skills is too high for non-light armor wearers. Something like Encase easily wipes out 1/3 of your magicka pool. Critical Surge alone takes out 35-40% of your magicka pool.

Nightblades have similar issues with their shadow skills.

The culprits here are as follows:

-The regen softcaps. You need to remove them or increase them substantially as they are too easy to cap
-The light armor passives are too strong. They need a reduction

So we have a scenario where people say casters can spam skills for long periods like bolt escape, but that's only possible on 7/7 light armor with its powerful cost reduction passives and easy magicka regen returns.

Ultimate stat scaling

Ultimates scaling by magicka alone is crippling to stamina builds.

As a melee sorcerer I'll never use anything other than Absorption Field, ever. For the 9.5 sec stun.

Why? Because Overload heavy attacks do less than a single DW light attack, and Overload is an ultimate that costs Ultimate points.

AoE options

Simply put, if you are not a Templar or DK, your AoE option is Destruction staff Impulse spam. Which happens to be magicka based and requires light armor reduction costs.

Lightning Flood and Daedric Mines for sorcerer sucks, not to mention on top of being weak spells, melee sorcs focused on stamina have less spell damage and magicka to support these already weak spells. The same goes for Nightblades.

You need to fix the weak AoE class skills like Lightning Flood and Dark Path/Lotus Fan. For Lightning Flood, have the synergy damage detonate at the end of the cast if it is not used. Daedric Curse's splash damage needs to be 100% of the explosion damage. Daedric Curse itself could use a damage buff considering it's a 3 sec ramp up skill morphed or 6 seconds if not. Daedric Mines need a larger detonation radius as AoE damage and a magicka cost reduction along with an arming time of no more than 1 second.

MOST IMPORTANTLY:
Stamina based AoE weaponskills need severe buffing. Whirlwind needs to do actual damage before it becomes an Execute. So does Cleave.

DoT's should be reduced to deloiver damage over 3 or 5 seconds tops if their damage stays what it is. Delayed damage should always be considerably higher than direct damage.

Volley needs buffing as well. Ember Explosion and Shrouded Daggers need damage increases as well.