Melee in general just gets screwed, even if you build to be a tank, you get shredded too quick, and if you try to be a melee DPS, you don't wipe them quick enough to not get one-shot.
Ranged/magic is fine because they can just kite all they want and too few enemies in the game have ranged attacks to counter them, but melee gets hit by 100% of everything no matter what and get blended into a fine paste.
If it were me, one little bandaid fix I'd do is to lightly weigh drop rates of equipment a bit to lean in the direction of your build, probably using your manually-increased stats to do the math, so if a novice who only dumps points into STR gets an equipment drop, it's like 10% more likely that it'll be a melee weapon, or 20%, IDK.
Either this, or some kind of salvage+craft system that lets you recycle equipment into other equipment so we have a use for all the equipment we'll never use.
Like for real, the fact nearly half my level 12 character's equipment is stuff I got before even entering the catacombs because I can't find anything better is a bit BS, especially when trying to play a tank, probably the most equipment-dependent build of them all. Definitely looking forward to the better shop, anything to get me out of this lv2 equipment hell.