warrior melee is in a sad state of affairs

So I have been playing the 'endgame' maps with my warrior and am realizing a few things.

For a melee character design to work it has to compensate for the fact that it has to get up close to enemies in order to hit them, which means putting oneself at risk of getting swarmed and of the enemies melee.

The primary tools the warrior has to balance this is armor and the option to use a shield, this helps the warrior deal with melee mobs.

But those tools are useless against ranged aoe spells...

and the funny thing bout ranged spells in POE2 is that they are much faster than in POE1. Combine that with the fact that the character.. especially the warrior is so slow that its like he has a permenant temporal chains debuff and all the enemies have haste to boot.

As such ranged and ranged spells are the most dangerous things to a warrior.

I was noticing the following things in the maps:

1. ranged mobs can shoot you before they are even on screen.

2. ranged mobs can shoot you from across impassable areas on the ground.

3. the crabs for example, a mob that shows up in the first zone of the game are weirdly powerful, they will shoot a whole array of batches of spines at you from off screen, so many at once that even if you active block them you can get staggered, and there are even magic or rare ones that have the multiple-projectiles mod so its like they are 3 crabs in one shooting so many spines that it covers half the screen.

4. if you try to leap slam towards a ranged enemy, the projectiles they have fired and are seemingly underneath your warrior.. still hit you. This is very frustrating because you can't exactly run straight towards a group of ranged mobs, you can roll to avoid some of hits but some are still going to hit, this problem becomes worse when the ranged mobs are also fast enough to kite you.

5. in darkly lit maps there are some ranged mobs types that shoot arrows or throw stuff at you that you literally can't see, they guerilla warfare style snipe you, combined that with the impassable areas on the terrain and your forced to take damage to even get close enough to hit them. Perhaps its an argument for the light radius mod I dunno.

6. There are fast moving ranged mobs that effectively kite the melee warrior. If for example you can't use a big AOE skill because you have no mana, either cause the skills cost so much that you can only use one or two skills before your mana is gone or you have a mana drain rare up your ass, well you have to close the gap to the kiting mobs somehow, but even if you do close the gap and get a hit in with the mace attack skill, it usually takes multiple hits of that, so what happens is, you hit it once and in the time it takes for attack animation to end and start again the enemy has moved away from you and because there is NO +melee attack range passive nodes anywhere near the warrior's side of the passive tree well that means you have 0 strike range and have to be right on top of the enemy to hit them. This can then happen multiple times for each kiting enemy.. it is lame and stupid that not only is the warrior's attacks ludicrously SLOW but he has no strike range either! I mean I'm using a two handed mace and that doesn't even increase the range at all despite being a bigger longer weapon. Its just ass!

7. Death rattle effects primarily impact melee characters, after all a ranged character can just keep their distance as the death rattle bombs go off, but a melee character is forced to evade them. To me this seems like purely a curse on melee and there is no compensation for it in the melee passive tree or skill or gear or anything, not even using a shield helps.

As an aside I'll describe a recent encounter:

When I was doing the vaal factory lvl 67 map on the atlas for the first time, I ran into this white mob, some kind of legged machine thing, and it was the only enemy in the area, I had full health and it literally two shot me in an instant with some kind of lightning attack that was an instant attack, unavoidable, undodgeable, no chance to active block, it literally killed me in less time it takes than for the leap slam to reach it. My warrior has 2,100 health and 50% lightning resist and 50% block chance, yet somehow that white mob was doing around 1,100 damage per hit with that attack, that means it was doing far more damage than the soul core boss I just fought in the previous map who also used lightning attacks. (and no the map did not have damage increase mods)

The point is, white mobs are weirdly overtuned damage wise and in this case it was an example of a ranged attack that melee warrior had zero answer for. A group of white ranged mobs is therefore abnormally dangerous.

So to summarize the game design shows disfavor for or does not even seem to account for the nature of melee gameplay.