You would need lower level for some beginner epics. Game is quite generous, during my first playthrough on normal got at least 3 epics from expansion (Inquisitor armor, necro shield and new Demo armor) and stash tab of MI I haven't checked yet.

As far as I have seen on GD forum, people have problems with melee necro. Necrosumonner by my experience is the easiest class I played with. Went from 35 (where I got some rover items) to 65 without changing gear, no components, no augments, no devotions. I just went and read "boss killed, +rep", "hero killed, +rep", without checking whom my skellies kill.

Inquisitor for me felt underwhelming. I don't look for another caster to play with, especially with delays on damage, just as gunner. My best DW gunner is an Arcanist+Occultist, and nothing in Inquisitor feels like an upgrade for that. Yeah, I can get better item in slot which gives DW to my combo, but either lose best debuff in the game (CoF)+heal+reists or lose crit, invulnerability and best defensive aura in the game...

After a few mails with Humble Bundle support (they are slow but polite), I received my keys and activated them successfully on GOG. Heart of the problem: they had deleted my previous keys, and I bought the game with a mail address via Crate Entertainment different from the mail address I use on Humble Bundle, so they couldn't find me in their database. Thanks again Gremlion :-)

Probably nothing, I just looked at inquisitor and saw another ranged tree and necromancer didn't add anything to what was already there. If your thing is waiting around for ages as your skeletons slowly wear each mob down, then this will be a good class, me, my spellbreaker kills things to fast for summons to matter.
Still not got the extra chapters yet, am one of those that have to clear each map, do each quest etc. Base game is still great though.
If memory serves there was already a necro class in dail mod.

Slowly? Each?
The higher skeleton level you have, the better ones you raise.
first tier skelly - garbage melee
second tier - archer with pierce
third tier - mage with aoe fire spells
fourth tier - revenant with vitality aoe
With maxed Raise skill you rarely see first tier skelly.
At level 35+ with Guile relic + rhowari cuirass+rhowari shoulderpads my skeletons were doing ~2k dps each. I had ten of them. This is without components in armor (like bonds of bysmiel), and with 20 unspent devotion points.
I reached Longhorrean fight at level 45, his priest died so fast I couldn't even debuff him. Longhorrean fight was longer only due to him having invulnerability between stages.
That level of punishment skeletons can dish out I haven't seen since blademaster nerf in beta.

My skelemancer is only 25 and wrecking things, so I guess it's not just me. Nerfs incoming maybe I guess.

Nah, petmancers are hella strong on normal.
They would start to fall off at the end of elite. My skelemancer lvl 70 hits a brick wall at the end of elite, since pet poison resist would be unlocked at 90 :/

I played Grim Dawn for a couple of days as a Shaman/Soldier character.

Based on my experience, melee characters seem UP since they don't have minions to act as meat shields and they also don't have many powerful AOE spells. I use a lightning AOE spell but when that is down, my other melee attacks don't seem very useful...especially since most of the game consists of huge mobs of enemies so hitting them one-by-one is bound to be ineffective.

Am I missing something? Or is it just the nature of the beast the melee characters will never be that great in games of this type?

Mmm...
Soldier/Sham is the really strong melee class (the best is two-handed)
There are couple builds I can think of:
1. Savagery Lightning crits. You can see on Upheaval (shaman tree) description that it is a 100% chance on crit to do damage in 3m for 150% weapon damage. And boy, does it crit like a truck, http://www.grimtools.com/calc/w26M0EON
2. Primal strike with Mutator on left mouse button. Pure AOE skill. http://www.grimtools.com/calc/RZR9oyxV
3. Phys damage soldier, Splash is every third hit on cadence, same Upheavel, http://www.grimtools.com/calc/xZyD6PbV

I think weapon DPS is somewhat slow to do damage at lower levels in general. Primal Strike has a faster damage curve than Cadence, for example. You could even level up using one or two mage spells and respec later.

Most weapon skils eventually gain a way to splash damage, but you have to get the base damage up with good gear and a lot of skill points first.

Update has RUINED this game for a lot of people. Modded games NO LONGER have the SHARED STASH buttons.

I don't like grinding unnecessarily. So, teh developers just KILLED the game for a lot of us. This is an OLD game and a lot of modders have already moved on and will not update their mods.

smh


I mean, let's be real. The last comment before mine is over 2 yeras ago.