Suggestions to Make Warrior Playable

Hello, I've spent over 200 hours in POE2 primarily playing Warrior and have some suggestions to solve the issues present for this class. As it stands, warrior is almost completely unplayable in almost every aspect of the game. The underlying issues for the class become progressively more unbearable as you continue through the campaign and into maps/end game. This feedback is suggestions that would hopefully bring the class into a playable state.

Damage

Warriors abilities do damage however, there are numerous abilities from the mace tree that are problematic in different ways. Specifically, the sluggishness of the abilities are the most noticeable issue. Here are my suggestions on that:

1. Remove unnecessary delays/windup with all abilities. For example, Supercharge Slam can charge up to 3 stages however, there is a 1 second delay after before the ability completes the animation after reaching the final stage. Since there is no skill check or timed window for this ability, this 1 second delay serves no purpose. There is also no visual indication for when each stage of the ability it's at so the player is left to guess or hold the ability.

Another example is the delay for earthquake. The 4 second delay for this ability is overwhelmingly hated by every warrior player. The only playable version of this ability is to socket support gems to reduce the duration down to a little over 2 seconds which is still unreasonable. A simple solution is to flip the order of the two actions for the ability. Damage should come first, then the Jagged Ground stays after.

Sunder is so unbearably slow that 9/10 times you'll die from pressing the ability alone. Especially in a breach, you're toast for standing still for even two seconds because you'll get stunned or just die to mobs. Just remove the initial jump from the animation and it should be fine.

In short, almost all mace abilities have this issue and the only way to play around it is a well timed dodge roll to cancel the animation after a strike and just pray you don't die for slams then bank on leach/cannibalism healing you back to full.

2. Rolling slam has multiple bugs that need to be fixed. Aftershocks do 0 damage and ancestrally boosting the ability make the AOE smaller for some reason. Additionally, socketing any gem that adds a cooldown somehow remove the ability to control the direction. This ability just has too many bugs that have gone unaddressed since launch.

3. Warriors are stuck to one filler ability which is mace strike and it's insane. Mace strike is easily the strongest warrior ability by a mile and truthfully that's only because of the armor break/explosion combo from support gems. Without that it's still good for single target but that's it. I would suggest to add a new ability that's a basic cleave type attack rather than a strike. This adds more variety for warriors to choose from.

4. One-handed weapons need to be buffed. All warrior builds are forced into using two-handers and often have to take Giants Blood which is super punishing in terms of build variety.

5. Giants Blood is extremely punishing and borderline unplayable. Triple the strength requirement is insane and can only be achieved by getting 500+ strength by using the Titan ascendancy AND potentially 20 talents points to get the +10% attribute AND % requirement talents/weapon rolls. It's insane. Just make it double...

6. Strength spirit gems are completely lackluster compared to the other attributes. Every other class gets to do these insanely satisfying combos that clear screens yet Warriors are stuck with scavenged plating or in time of need... We need some creative spirit gems that can change some gameplay here. Something like "Warcry on Stun" would be cool where if you get enough energy based on the mobs you stun then you use the socketed warcry. Or a gem like "Herald of Blood" where it bleeds nearby enemies on overkill. Or Aftershock on kill, etc. These should complement the warrior/strength theme.


Defense

Warriors die... a lot. Which is crazy seeing how the typical melee, plate, tank type class should be well... the tankiest however, that is the farthest from the truth. They die to everything, especially from physical damage which is super frustrating.

1. A big issue is being stunned. Even if you build into max stun threshold, you still get stunned like crazy because you're often stuck in an animation or just being hit because you're melee. To add to this, players can't even see what their stun resist is. There's no stat on the character panel and there's no visual indication of when you're about to be stunned. Waystones with the +%stun modifiers mean instant death for warriors, it's every hit from any mob interrupts your animations and stun locks you on repeat.

I would suggest to add the number into the character panel so players can see what their stun threshold is. And also add in a bar somewhere the player can see how much their stun buildup is at so they can avoid it or play around it. I would also suggest that armor factor into stun resist somehow so there's some natural stun threshold added into playing melee.

2. Warriors do not have enough health. Without seeking out uniques that modify your effective health pool with energy shield warriors have about 2k-3k hp which is just too low. There's also literally almost no talents in the tree that add to health at all. My advice here is to make strength give like 4-5 health to compensate and add more talents to give % health increases. Warriors should fill that role of being able to take big hits and live and should have about 4k-5k hp in my opinion. This would also support adding leach into the mix for warriors and it's basically useless right now.

3. Active block is a cool idea that doesn't pan out. There's almost no reason to active block aside from Magma Shield spirit gem but even that is problematic as it has a .5 second activation window which makes the ability completely unenjoyable. That's an insane skill check to time up a hit to do mediocre damage. Additionally, players can't even put support gems into the active block skill to change any sort of gameplay with it. My hot take here is that it doesn't fit into POE2 and should just be removed while making skills like Magma Shield work on passive block with an internal cooldown.

4. Leap slam currently does not check Z-axis or ground abilities and projectiles. Hell, players get melee'd from mobs while jumping and technically you can be stunned mid air. I don't know why this works like that but it's crazy that warriors are forced into walking over ground damage and abilities like Leap Slam can't be used to avoid it.

5. The movement speed penalty for wearing heavy armor is lame. A character can wear plate and two big hammers even while leaping into the air but still be slow? If a warrior has so much strength then all these thing should be light as a feather. Makes no sense and should just be removed.

6. Armor has been talked about enough and I don't have anything to add. Although, I do think the 0.1.1 patch didn't change a whole lot and it still needs to be addressed. Personally, I would like to see it become a flat % mitigation across the board. I don't understand the reasoning behind the current calculation. If the character screen says it blocks 56% of physical damage then that's what it should do.

This has to be seen.

+1 This is a fairly good post covering multiple angles.

DOes this belong in that "melee constructive feedback" Thread or not?

I subscribe to every point. I've been playing as a warrior titan for over 300 hours and sometimes I feel like I'm already dead inside(By the way, I myself passed the Sekhem test for 4th exaltation), but I don't want to switch to another class. We just need a little more speed, health and survivability.