Hi guys, so I actually did some testing (and actual math) with my amara now, because…
I am fully stacked on amara now…
I have a brawler shield with phaseslam augment
i have a face puncher with phaseslam augment
I have a moar linage 120% melee with phaseslam augment
I have a lifesteal sticky bomb with melee relic
I have a 80% shock/69% random element melee relic
and the Breaker class mod for another point in “find your center”
so in total, after I slam, with shield depleted, in full damage gear I should have 1344% increased melee damage… and I STILL dont even one shot the little maliwan guys on athena…
no matter what element augment I used… well that is not how math works people… it turned out that it was quite a bit less… but actually actually quite a bit more… but still weird, as math is weird… it is actually 895% base damage, plus what ever elemental damage we add, from 50% all the way up to 200%
so I did some testing for the last 6 hours now, I respect, got rid of all my talents, tested each one to see how the numbers change, logged in and out to make sure the stats are refreshed… it took a long ass time.
Here are my findings:
Skill Tree:
Illuminated fist: works as intended increases damage by 75% of your base melee damage
Find your Center: works as intended increases damage by 100% of your base melee damage and by another 100% of base damage if you have the breaker class mod!
Blitz ‘updated’: Blitz DOES add another 100% base melee damage (there are some bugs at the moment where you might not see a change immediatly, leading me and many others to believe it only worked on the charging attack) so you might want to not only relog, but switch to a new character for just a moment and go back to amara to apply this properly (it is enough if you just click on “continue” in the menu " load character" and just click on another character and then click amara again, this will RELOAD the amara save file and will reapply all damage increases as it is intended
outdated info (might still be important):does ONLY give 100% melee damage on the actually “Blitz melee charge attack” and does NOT provide 100% melee damage in general… (this does mean there is actually insentive to NOT go for this, I’ll explain later)
SO, from our skill tree we get 375% base melee damage to all attacks, these increases are additive, this means they do not benefit from one another
Laid bare: DOES increase all melee damage by 25% after an action skill, this is multiplicative, so every other melee damage you have will be increased by 25% total. nice, but I dont run it in my final build for level 50 now
Tempest: DOES increase melee damage as well, and same as “laid bare” increases damage multiplicative (since it is the only source of elemental damage we get) so since you turn you melee into elemental damage fully, this will increase your TOTAL damage by 30%/50% respectively. nice
nice damage increase! must have!
so this is all for the tree, pretty self explanatory.
and since melee is really more like a good dps option rather than a ONE PUNCH option on mayhem 3 right now, there are reasons you might not want to go for blitz and instead pick up literally anything else. it is JUST a gap closer that does a sligtly stronger melee attack with an 8 second cooldown, it is nice to have, but dont expect to one shot people…
so now for items:
Melee Damage affix on a gun:
does increase your melee damage by a significant amount! it is just additive to your base damage, but it is the biggest amount you can get if you are holding a 120% melee damage gun. but of course a face puncher with 60% will do just fine. definitly grab a gun with melee damage!
the legendary Brawler shield:
YOU WANT THIS! this works as intended, when your shields are depleted you will gain 300% melee base damage! this is a HUGE buff, it almost DOUBLES your base damage (meaning any elemental increases and other stuff will be almost doubled as well!) turning it into a 50% damage increase overall. this turns your 36k hit into a 51k hit (this is how math works by the way)
HONORABLE MENTION:
The rough rider shield (that has a capacity of 0) is considered as NEITHER “full” and is NEVER considered “depleted”
I tested this while trying to figureall this out
I have a roid rough rider with 80% melee damage while depleted, and another one with 10% movespeed while depleted, both actually DO NOT work.
I reloged several times just to make sure.
so I tested in on zane with his freeze cooldown reset thing, at it actually just recharges health or grants you cd reset (but we already knew that from some videos)
so yeah, its NOT FULL AND NOT DEPLETED. there fore you will never get 80% melee from this!
EDIT: there is actually a bandaid fix you can do, you just need a relic with flat shield on it, this WILL make the roughrider be depleted, since you have ~1400 shield that just can never be regenerated.
Phaseslam augment:
so as I said I have a annoited brawler for 200% increased melee damage after phase slam, and it DOES work as intended, adding 200% base melee damage. which is pretty nice! it last for about 8 seconds.
BUT! what if we also have a gun with the same annointed you might ask? Well…
Sadly they DO NOT stack! I traded for a really nice gun just to test this… BUT it does not stack, you only get 200% no metter how much augments you have… also if it is on your gun you DO need to actually hold the gun the whole time for the increase!
SO TL;DR: you only want ONE phaseslam melee augment on your build, preferably on the shield so you have more weapon freedom!
(phaseslam augment for 300% weapon damage however DOES stack with it 
so get this on your face puncher right now for all the damage you ever need!)
I am happy if you want to gift me one for all my research 
(I can also trade you a facepuncher with melee phaseslam, since it IS better if you only have one :P)
Classmods:
there are surprisingly 3 options here,
-Dragon is some nice CC everytime you kill an enemy if you phaselock enemys around you or pull them together, nice if you want survivability or are in group play, does not give damage though.
-Nimbus of all mods is actuall a good chunk of damage increase IF you can get a +5 to tempest, because remember this is a multiplicative increase! i have a +4 with 50% melee damage and it actually ever so slightly does more damage then the “best” class mod for us, which is:
-Breaker. it just gives you flat 100% increased damage and some nice survivability, and as mentioned before the damage increase works just fine, you can roll 50% melee damage as an affix, I only have one with 31% cooldown right now. but it should be Best in slot then.
Now for Relics, the shocker for me personally:
I wanted to play melee in this game ever since a saw a 75% melee lifesteal relic. yes! never die again!.. and yes, it works… you will never die again. BUT… you might want to try NOT use it… (although I still will)
BECAUSE:
you know thos relics that “just” gives you 80% damage as any element? yes? well good, because it is MULTIPLICATIVE… what ever damage we have talked about so far, all the damage you already deal… well you will deal an EXTRA 80% of that… and that quite frankly is INSANE damage boost…
as for the legendary affixes there are 2 to look at:
white elefant:
30% chance to attach a sticky bomb
this will by chance attach a bomb to the enemy that will explode for INSANE abnormal damage, it does maybe like 2-4 times the damage you did with you melee attack, I have seen it proc for me for over 150k damage! ^^ ( they do explode in a random element as well)
and it is hilariously fun with the face puncher, as EACH pallet has a chance to attach a bomb (but they only explode for the damage of one bullet) so if we say it deals about 300% of all your damage and proccs a third of the time, this will basically increase all of your DPS by about 100% total! which is ridiculous!
BUT, it is not reliable, and it CAN feel slow, since the bombs take about 1,5 seconds before they explode, so basically if you shoot an enemy with a face puncher, shoot him to half health, and then it should explode after 1,5k doing the other half.
AND it does not refrech blitz if the blitz attack attaches a bomb and only the bomb kills the enemy… so it is not ideal for a “one shot” build and more so good for DPS (damage per second)
alternatively we have: Commander planetoid:
69% (hehe) random elemental damage on each melee attack!
this striked me as hard as the flat bonus damage on a relic… because yes… this is MULTIPLICATIVE too!.. holy sh-ite Rakkman… so if you have something like this:
you will actually deal 149%(165% in my case) MORE damage MULTIPLIED to EVERYTHING we have talked before this point. (ofcourse resitences will still apply, so not actually 149%)
IF you have a fire augment on your action skill and the random element is maybe shock, you will hit an enemy for 50k Fire damage, 40k Radiation damage and 34k Shock damage
this is just a quick screen I took right now for demonstration
but as you can see, still not enough to one shot a badass…
STILL if you want to go for a one shot build you HAVE to use this combination of elemental relic with commander planetoid.
I am using a lifesteal+grenade relic right now… because the one shot build just does not do enough damage…
but I think to have the best of both world you want a lifesteal+commander planetoid relic, which I do not own and therefore could not test.
EDIT:
WELL never mind that talk about relics and especially the elemental boost relic… just forget about using a 80% relic for normal mobbing… yes it is still the best option for the blitz mechanic to get it back… BUT you know what is better than doubling all your damage?
well… TENFOLD YOUR DAMAGE!.. thanks to the comments I found out that there is a legendary relic called
unleash the dragon (you can get it from a rare mob right at the start of jakobs estate):
I don’t know if it works as intented, but it applys a burn to the enemy at 100% chance that literally burns for the melee damage you first dealt to it with EACH (let me emphasise this…) EACH! individual tick! so if you hit an enemy for 39k there will then be a dot applied to the enemy that ticks for 39k damage every half second or so… and it does so for about 5-6 seconds without me even having points in the “Anima” skill so this more then tenfolds the damage actually… and well yeah… this is unbelivable strong… in a good way.
you can even easily one hit chubacabrath with it… probably could one shot 2-3 of them with one hit.
BUT ofcourse it does have downsides too…
-first of all, you obviously dont have lifesteal… so you CAN be downed, but as long as there is an enemy there you will also get back up
-and although the damage is rediculous, the dot can only be applied ONCE, meaning that if on graveward for example, where you can’t really one shot him, it might just not be the best option, because all followup hits after the dot is applied do not tenfold your damage over and over and just do a normal hit (which is weaker that using other relics) so for dps in a fight with a really high health target, it is NOT necessarily the best in slot.
-some fire immune badasses or annoited complete counter this relic as they are status immune and therefore this relic will basically be as if you have no relic at all vs them.
so you either need to change your relic on the fly or just switch to a weapon that can deal with them.
-also it is really not that good to use with the face puncher, because it only applys a dot from a single source, only a dot from a single tiny pallet from this shoutgun is applied, ticking for around 2k each tick… which is still nice, but not even nearly as good a grenades or flat added elemental damage.
but if you just want to punch things, this relic is for you!
For skill interactions with unleash the dragon:
Anima DOES work and makes the dot EVEN STRONGER than your melee hit by 20% multiplicative and also increases the duration to over 10 seconds! so it deals TWENTY TIMES! as much as damage as the inital hit. this so far as I can tell is complete overkill! BUT maybe it is good to go for if your damage gear and setup is still lacking… I have yet to find a normal enemy I can not one shot.
Wildfire DOES work with it and spreads the 50k dot to a nearby enemy, funny but not worth the points
Catharsis, expoles, but for tiny damage
Conflux does aplly a dot, but a really tiny one and is super bad
Freezing
when meleeing a frozen enemy (not chilled) the enemy will take three times as much damage. thats 300% damage you would usually. this obviously sounds extremly strong, and itis! but I have not found a good way to freeze that is not clunky to play. I only use hex cryo for that.
yeah… I think this is it for now!
TL;DR and what we have learned:
use a braweler shield
use a weapon with a melee attachment (facepuncher obviously)
get exactly ONE phaseslam melee augment, more does nothing.
and try to get melee damage as a affix everywhere.
as far as diveristy goes:
go play a blitz build with an elemental damage planetoid relic if you want to one shot in mayhem 1
or go for a safe melee dps build with a lifesteal grenade relic build if you want a DPS build in Mayhem 3
or just equip unleash the dragon and really melee everything to death with your fists and burn them (krieg would be proud!)
PLEASE let me know if this was helpful, since it was ALOT of work and even took me 2 hours to write this all .
let me know if I forgot something, got something wrong or if you at least enjoyed this compiled information! 
good hunting vault hunters, and dont forget to like, comment and have fun!