Mace / Warrior Feedback for 0.3

After seeing the recent interviews and mentions of buffing skills and Mace gameplay for 0.3, I wanted to bring to GGG's attention of different points brought up by Warrior players.


[-] Make Armor viable
- It's been mentioned before numerous times but the idea is to make Armor similar to how it performs in Campaign in being able to reduce the damage from big hits in endgame rather than its current scaling to only be useable against small hits.

There's been a few suggestions to couple with this like:
A. Introduce a stacking "Grievous Wounds" debuff that reduces your damage dealt and self-regen (flasks unaffected) and possibly taking increased damage from hits for a set amount of time. This would encourage players to still dodge big hits but will still allow players to tank hits at the cost of a prolonged fight.
B. Make armor become better but lower the scaling of damage reduction to be capped at a certain point


[-] Ways to scale Life besides STR stacking
- Warrior players were frustrated in being unable to scale Health similar to Energy Shield on the passive tree. There was a dislike from resorting to just stacking as much STR as possible since that's the best way to gain HP currently besides amulet and some runes.

[-] Remove Attack Speed Reductions on Warrior side of Passive Tree
- It's not understood why there's Attack speed reductions on passive tree nodes when Warrior is already the slowest attacking class archetype. Players try to avoid these nodes if possible since it's too much of a detriment. Attack speed should just be scarce for Warriors on the passive tree rather than giving downsides

[-] Reduce the need to use Deepest Tower helmet endgame and give scaling in other ways
- Endgame Warriors expressed a dislike of having to resort to Deepest Tower to scale their damage since it's the only viable way to scale higher damage output. Players wanted different ways to scale rather than resorting to this specific unique helmet and the corresponding passive tree nodes.

[-] Buff 1-hand Maces to actually be good to use
- Nearly all Warrior players don't bother with 1-hand Maces since they're significantly weaker than 2-hand Mace with Giant's blood. 1-hand should be faster but their poor DPS and the costs makes them unusable. One suggestion is to make 1-hand Maces be faster and have more DPS in a smaller area while 2-hands are slower but hit in a wider area.

[-] Possibly redo Melee skills so that you can move while attacking
- Suggested that Melee skills needs to be redone that you can swing and move, unless it's a charge move/perfect strike. This would allow better maneuverability and smoothness of using skills as a Melee in comparison to Ranged

[-] Mace skills should have higher base speed but less scaling that evens out with max attack speed endgame
- A lot of Warriors would like to see Mace skills be faster as one needs to stack attack/skill speed nodes and modifiers to make skills feel "normal". Increase the base speed/animations of the Mace skills and lower the scaling to even out at the same point endgame with max Attack/Skill speed in builds. Attack/Skill speed should be seen as a somewhat nice addition but not needed in builds.

It's disliked that Warrior basic auto attacks can come out feeling better than using skills.

[-] Certain skills like Leap Slam as an example should inherently be faster and not require tons of skill speed to be where it should be (i.e. using Hit and Run + skill/attack speed stacking
- It's been noted how slow Leap Slam is and other skills too, requiring Martial Tempo, Hit & Run, and skill speed to be appropriate against fast moving mobs crowding you. Significantly increase the skill speed to allow the fantasy of a hulking Warrior dropping fast onto mobs rather floating in the air due to how slow the skill is

[-] Remove or greatly reduce the animation lockup/delays after using skills (aka players shouldn't be forced to dodge roll/blink out of the end of certain skills
- Warrior mains are now commonly using Dodge roll or Blink to animation cancel out of skills due to the lockup/delays after using skills. Reduce the delays will make skill usage to be more smooth and can be followed up by other skills rather than dodge rolling out after each skill use

[-] If Warriors must have long wind ups on certain skills, then they should have an appropriate damage reduction during the wind up for the downside of it being slow to perform
- GGG has mentioned before of making Maces slow, but players would like to see a damage reduction during the slow wind ups to counteract mobs swarming/bosses hitting you while you're trying to perform a long wind up skill.

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I don't know if anyone will see this but I hope someone does while they're doing the skill touchups for 0.3.

If anyone has additional suggestions, criticisms, or anything else, then please comment!

There's been a couple of interesting comments from the reddit side of my thread. One comment:

"

"I’d add in that while mjolnir is a decent step towards what a 1H mace could be, but when it relies on spell damage, the warrior is in the worst position because it has next to no spell damage near its passive tree position."

I think it'd be interesting if 1H Maces had something similar to Mjolnir or Wands/Staves in having a spell attached to the weapon.

Giant's Blood should be cut out or changed, to have actual flaws instead of turning all warriors to STR stackers. Maybe, reduced damage, which would give you more variations of equipment, but doesnt make it RIGHT choice?

Also, some skills should be turned into some variations of "base attack", while armor might affect elemental damage half of it's power.

+1 But the passive tree should help also Merch class. So anything it has to change should benefit both class Warrior and Mercenery.

+1

I would like to see a new "Athletics Node Cluster" added to the Warrior passive tree that provides a modest movement speed bonus and located close to the beginning of the tree. This would help offset the movement speed penalty from equipping STR armour and shields and generally help this melee class close the distance. The Warrior feels slow and cumbersome and this would help alleviate that problem...

Athletics Node Cluster
• Athletics (4 Small Nodes): 3% Increased Movement Speed
• Armour Proficiency (1 Notable Node): Equipped Body Armour and Shield no longer imposes Movement Speed Penalties

I believe it's relatively easy to make HP/armor-based builds viable in PoE2. We don’t need to overhaul the whole system - just introduce meaningful scaling and mitigation through the passive tree, keystones, and item design. There are two pillars to real face-tanking:
1. Damage mitigation to reduce incoming hits
2. Relatively high HP pool to ACTUALLY absorb those hits

Mitigation ideas:
- Armor on body/shield should reduce all types of damage, not just physical. In every ARPG/MMORPG, the idea of armor is to reduce incoming damage - let it work as expected/intended
- Change “% increased physical damage reduction” modifiers to affect any hit damage (physical, elemental, chaos) or make it roll on the type of reduction.
- Introduce socketables or affixes that let armor specialize (e.g., elemental armor, phys armor, chaos armor) - think like the unique reduction body armour as Palm Sceptres but for damage reduction.

Keystone ideas would be like:
- Rework Bulwark into: “You cannot avoid damage (no evasion/dodge/es/block or so). Damage taken from Hits is reduced by 20%.”
- New Keystone - “The first hit you take in the last N seconds cannot deal more than 50% of your max life.” - will allow you to make a mistake once
- New Str Keystone (or Beef rework)
+25 Strength
You take 10% less damage while at maximum life
+20% increased Strength scaling for life

I'd agree that direct nodes as "+200 HP" sounds bad, but surelly we can allow improve HP scalling of existing Str nodes or hide it in ascendancy/ Like for titan would be great to improve "Mysterious Linage" not only grant hp but for example "Minion can not knockback", like you re titan, no one can push you, you are the one who push


Now, another HP/armor improvement, or generally for melee builds, is a shield.
I believe the first thing PoE2 needs is a new material/currency to improve block chance — something like a “Shield Scrap.” That way, we could choose whether to scale item quality via armor (for defense) or shield block (for reliability). This alone would make many more shields viable instead of getting thrown away due to low rolled block chance.
Second, as discussed with armor, we need to shift “additional physical damage reduction” into “additional any damage reduction.” Armor and shields should help mitigate all hits, not just physical.
Third, let us use certain utility skills while Active Block is up — for example, throwing a concoction bottle or applying a buff or incinerate, or so. Keeping the shield raised while acting would add huge variety to playstyles.
Fourth, an Active Block must always feel better than a passive block. Right now, with nodes like “Turtle Charm,” it feels like a joke. If holding a shield up doesn’t outperform passives, why even have the mechanic? Active Block should block all hits, whether it fireball or a melee hit with a spear, except big AoEs, and feel worth using.
Fifth, when you release Active Block, let it trigger a reactive effect — like Marvel’s Black Panther suit. Release a wave based on % absorbed damage. Not to deal big DPS, but to stagger/intimidate enemies so you can reposition or recharge — a real tactical payoff. The current release of Shield is not good and not worth even trying to use.

+1 this is really on point