Yeah his neutered jetpack doesn't help his chances either, if they just made the Pve jump pack as good as it is in pvp assault would be so much better off.

There are some bugs with contested health not restoring properly right now too that are adding to this problem in really bad ways. I suspect it ties in to the melta overhealing fix. You can hit ten gaunts and gain the same contested health as if you hit one.

Sometimes it works right, but mostly it's just pitiful. If you ground slam into a pack of gaunts with full contested health that should be a full heal. You just did well over a thousand damage - ten to twenty times your health yet you gain as little as 10% sometimes?

Hammer swings do 26 damage and in ruthless you have something like 60 health (might be 50 and 10 armor - that one is harder to know for sure). As best I can tell you're getting a quarter of that back at most per swing and hitting multiple enemies doesn't seem to help. Guns seem to give their full damage back even though they have a ridiculously fast attack speed in comparison. This is wrong. The only effective way to regain contested health is through gunfire right now.

The only perk that assault has that can heal is the heavy bolt pistol one for a lil streak at low health. I've never gotten that to proc. If it was five it might actually be good. Ten is too many for a pistol with a low ammo reserve on a melee oriented class. If it could proc off any kill, including melee then it would be cool. As is it's just a wasted point.

Yeah, the non sniper ranged warriors will obliterate you with one volley from melee range. The only way to kill them is to chain stagger them and hope they melee you for the gun strike when they become immune to stagger. If they elect to just fire instead you don't have a chance.

The snipers you just have to hope they don't quick scope you into oblivion because who doesn't love snipers that can randomly aim and shoot in under a quarter second for almost your entire health bar? I do hope they'll at least fix that one soon.

I love to play assault, but with the current skills, I don`t use him in leathal. 

Assault was my first and favorite class. But they have made him a chore to play. I won't compare him to the ranged classes, but if you look at the other two melee classes (Bulwark & Vanguard) they both have consistent and reliable method of restoring actual health - not just contested health. 

The Bulwark can drop his flag to instantly grant himself (+allies) maximum contested health. If you drop the banner just before an execution, you got from 1-100% in a single kill.

The Vanguard restores health passively with each kill against a Majoris & Extremis enemies. 

The Assault has absolutely no method of restoring health or really even contested health with any reliability.

IMO, the best solution is to simply copy the Vanguard's lvl 25 perk so that executing Majoris restores health and apply that to all 3 melee classes. I'd be fine if that perk (or something like it) were actually just baked into the 3 melee classes and didn't even require a perk.

I find assault to be the third easiest to solo lethal, right after sniper and bulwark. Bulwark only because he is almost unkillable.