tl:dr at the bottom If you're unaware, base cooldown for your melee ability is 69 seconds, while the cd for your grenade is 60 seconds. At max reduction, your melee ability takes 31 seconds, and your grenade takes 27 seconds. If you consider the general usefulness of grenades versus melee abilities, I don't think many would say that melee is more useful than grenades. Grenades have the ability to oneshot players (fusion, magnetic, tripmine), lock down entire areas (vortex, solar), or home in on enemies (Swarm, Axion, Firebolt). Melee abilities? Aside from perhaps the bladedancer melees, the shoulder charge, and the shield melees, ability melees are somewhat useless in comparison. Overall, they do less damage than grenades and have much lower situational impact, aside from periodically keeping you alive in pvp. Not only that, the shoulder charge isn't even a melee ability; it's a melee override that you're allowed to use again and again with no need for strength. While I don't think you should be able to use your melee ability after turning every corner, I do think it could use a significant buff, such that strength is actually viable outside of very specific, somewhat gimmicky builds (monte carlo, backup plans, instant refresh on kill, etc). Considering that grenades, as powerful as they are, do not break balance with their cooldown that is almost ten seconds shorter than melee abilities, I'm of the opinion that melee abilities should receive a significant buff to their cooldown. I feel like 19 seconds shorter than current at 0 str would be fair, which would bring it to a 50 second max cooldown. If you're worried about breaking the game's balance with a reduction like that, think about this: a reduction to 50 seconds parses out to 22.5 seconds at max strength. Voidwalkers can have a grenade every 22.2 seconds with max discipline, hunger, and embrace the void. [i]The math for this is at the bottom. [/i] If you think that's not very impressive for a voidwalker to have a grenade that often, let me show you the damage numbers. Axion Bolt deals 90 damage per person. Vortex deals 100 dps for 3.5 seconds. Scatter deals up to 160. All melee abilities, aside from scorch and a headshot throwing knife, deal 110. All uncharged melees deal 100. Now, while the game might be fine as is with the long cooldowns and all, there's a good reason to fix what ain't broke in this case. In fact, there are two reasons. 1. Diversity. If someone asks "What stats should I choose?" then people usually say something like int>dis>str, or dis>int>str. Point is, Strength always comes last, except in gimmick builds. Strength should be a more viable option, and cooldown is the easiest place to make it better. 2. You know what makes people feel good? Doing cool stuff. You know what makes people feel better? Doing cool stuff more often. At the very least, this is a quality of life change that enhances the health of the game due to making people feel more impactful when they melee, even if strength isn't that good. Lastly, what if it breaks the balance of the game? Strength sure as hell ain't doing anything right now, so going from trash tier to god tier means it just needs to be tuned back a little to make it properly balanced. [b]tl:dr[/b] 1. Grenades are more impactful than melee abilities, but have shorter cooldowns. 2. Even with drastic cooldown reductions to strength, grenades can still have a shorter cooldown. 3. More melee ability use = more fun for everyone 4. Str is the least useful stat. Making it more useful increases stat diversity. 5. If it becomes OP, it lets us know the buff was on the right track and can be scaled back to a better balance. [i]Math on voidwalker[/i]: hunger gives 3sec of extra energy drain, putting it at 8 seconds. Energy drain increases grenade recharge rate by 1.6x. Embrace the void activates energy drain on grenade damage. 1.6x8=12.8 27-12.8=14.2 14.2+8=22.2 Sidenote: Another possible fix is to increase the scaling of strength. Currently, 270 str gives around 56% cooldown reduction. If simply reducing the cooldown by a static amount was too powerful, such that str was useless since the cd was reduced anyways, then this could rebalance those issues.