Giant's Blood, generic warrior nerding, and QoL recommendations.

Pardon the wall of text. These are my observations, or perhaps merely boomeresque ramblings. You can be the judge.

1) On my warrior, slow attack speed is the most dangerous thing going. Yet we can reduce our attack speed by 13% just by taking what look to be the best mace nodes (singular purpose and crushing verdict) and a whopping 30% from giant's blood. Attack speed penalties make mace warrior far more likely to die, and adding 30% attack speed reduction to 2h mace strike while dual wielding is truly uncomfortable.

I would like to see all attack speed reductions removed from these skill nodes and replaced with less damage, while simultaneously removing the 30% 2h mace strike attack speed penalty for dual wielding entirely. We already need triple strength for Giant's Blood, that's enough.

1a) And yes I know you can "clip" into the back of weapon swings and skills to dodge quicker than your attack speed denotes, so ultra high skill timing can make you significantly better, but if I'm a millisecond too fast it interrupts my damage entirely (while still incurring full mana cost and cooldown I might add.) It becomes a tedious and all around awful experience in it's own right and requires an unsustainable and truly exhausting amount of effort and focus to stay on top of as long as I'm trying to progress. This can be done better.

1ab) Which reminds me, the portals disappearing so quickly is absolutely trolling. If a map takes 45 minutes and I'm literally pumping the entire time, I'm gonna want a break. You know healthy gaming habits, work/life balance, etc.. but if I wanna get up half way through a map to get air, stretch, do a chore, answer the phone, whatever, when I get back the portal is gone and I get to pump the whole level again. This isn't poe 1 where maps take 3-5 minutes, let's be reasonable here gentlemen.

2) While dual wielding with Giants Blood my Sunder's "average damage per use" goes from 10865 with 1x 2h to 7998 with 2x 2h. The 30% damage reduction is fine, but I don't think it's even registering the 2nd weapon for slams on the tooltip or it would be closer to 16k. Though it's hard to tell cause I'm 1-2 shotting everything here in cruel a2 with either one or both of my ~30ex maces.

If the faster weapon (with lower tooltip physical damage) is in my main hand, Sunder does less damage than when the slower weapon is in my main hand (with higher tooltip physical damage.) As such I believe that while using giant's blood we'd need 2 fast hammers that won't let us be sitting ducks while using our non-slams, and for slams we'd want 1 hammer on swap without giant's blood allocated with as much tooltip damage on it as possible to get the most wombo from our slam combos.

If that is in fact the case, we'll need 2 completely different sets of hammers for quality of life's sake. As I said above, 1 max tooltip physical damage hammer for slams and 2 fast hammers with max attack speed and dps for everything else.. First, you know how expensive those are? cause we'll be lucky to craft 1 good hammer during a play through, let alone 3. Then keeping them up to date with the content as we get to it, sheesh. Second, that would cut out our shield set effectively eliminating our Raise Shield ability, and ability to use Shield Charge which is our only good mobility skill at the moment. PS stampede feels very slow for a travel ability.

Possible Solution: Allow slam damage to be based on the average DPS of your weapon(s) or at least the combined total damage of both weapons rather than just the total damage of our main-hand weapon.

3) Please give us a way to not get moved while in mid air for slams. A keystone, support gem, unique item, or something else. Of all the things I've encountered with this warrior, there is nothing worse than having a pack of mobs pushing you around like you're wearing flip flops on an ice rink and you just get to sing "jesus take the wheel" while your slam winds up and hope you don't get pushed into a doodad that'll block your slam entirely.

4) Can we get more than 3 life nodes and 4 resistance nodes on the entire skill tree? Defensives are seriously lacking, and the price for gear with life and resistance is excessively high on everything except shields.

5) On your trade website, can you please add a search option for "total elemental resistance" that includes fire, lightning, cold, and all elemental resistance mods, and possibly even include implicit elemental resistances? That'd be huge.

6) Let us use essences to add one modifier to any item (with space for a mod ofc,) rather than just white items.

7) Let us remove runes from sockets. Permanent runes feels tedious and makes resistances feel like so much more of a chore to manage.

8) Maps.. 1 life on each map. It's as if your intent is to cater this game to the 0.1% of the 1% ultra-sweaties. Have you guys seen how many random 1 shots exist and how long it takes to progress maps? cause from what I've watched on streams, this needs to be changed and the sooner the better. (Like before I have to waste my time enduring such a disrespectful system.) You folks DO value your player base's time, right? Cause the current map model design screams otherwise.

Again sorry for the wall of text, I hope you can get something useful from it. Oh and despite the criticisms, you folks have made something quite incredible with this game. Were I to write what I like about this game, I'd be here until Christmas. I can't wait to see what PoE2 looks like in the future. Keep up the great work gentlemen.