Melee are technically still king of the new BA, but the build required to get there is much more restrictive and requires absolutely tons of duplicates, making it much harder to achieve. Speaking of, let's get into it.

The absolute number one thing you must have as a Melee build for Arena, if you are trying to reach top ranks, is the Gusion Rebake Shield. The Halberd Throw EX Skill is a ranged, very fast, very strong Melee based EX Skill, and it's pretty unique in that respect. All the other ranged Shield Throw skills are Pierce based, making them much weaker. This one is Power based, and that pushes it well into the best Arena skill slot. Anyways, that's literally it. The one EX Skill Melee users will be using. However, we have a hurdle to overcome here that Shooters don't. Namely, our Halberd Throw has an Inital CD of 8 seconds. We need to lower that to a more acceptable number for Arena first. That number is a CD of 3 seconds. This is because the Arena timer starts at 4:59, but by the time the enemy spawns in and you are able to move, it is 4:56. The thing is, those 3 seconds that pass during the animations, count down on your Initial CD.

So, knowing we need to get the initial CD to 3 seconds, what can we do to get there? There are initial CD traits, but how much do we need? The short answer is 14% initial CD. Halberd Throw has a CD of 30 (8), and Initial CD traits calculate based on the longer, non-initial CD number. 14% of 30 gives us 4.2 seconds off our initial 8 seconds. Not quite enough, except that the game always rounds up when there are decimals involved, in basically every scenario I've ever seen. You can see this in action during events where say, 450% boost at a 5 EN mission awards 5 bonus coins (rounding up to 500%) or even in Arena in the first few days where 1.258 and 1.259 give the same points because of rounding up. So, what methods are there to hitting 14%? Well, we have a slew of event parts that give 12%, namely Sven Cal Bayang, the DODS Rifle, the Hyper DODS Rifle and Shiranui/Unryu, as well as two 1* ranged weapons, the Zaku Machine Gun and Bullpup Machine Gun, that give 10%. Unfortunately, using just one of these pieces isn't enough to hit our 14% mark. So you need to either use Sven + another of the ranged weapons at once, or have a 4* piece with a 6% Initial CD lvl 1 trait. The ones we see most often are the HEAT REV SWORD, Mikazuki Augus and Shinn Asuka. There's also the Sokai limited Unicorn Beam Saber. Heat Rev in particular is very good, as it is also one of the highest Melee ATK weapons that exist, at 3997 ATK. Important things to note, however, especially for those who are lucky enough to get multiple copies of the Gusion Shield, is that at lvl 3 Halberd throw, the CD goes down to 7 seconds, making 12% Initial CD enough to use it right away. Eventually, even 10% will be enough once the CD goes down to 6 seconds, but that's out of range of most people.

Having taken care of our Initial CD, we now need to push for more damage. Like with Shooters, we'll be focusing on part traits. The big ones are the Age Titus Back, Duel Gundam 57mm High Energy Beam Rifle, Susanowo Arms, Nadleeh Arms, Johnny Ridden Gelgoog Arms, Gundam Torso and Barbatos 4th Form Arms. There's also the Turn X Head, but that is Sokai limited. Now, the issue with Melee is that a lot of these parts don't work with each other, because of different Attribute restrictions, but there's enough variety to be able to get some of these to work. Age Titus, for example, should always be on a Melee build, since it works with all types and gives the highest easily accessible boost at +25%.