My experience as a Warrior > Titan in PoE2.

I want to preface that so far I am loving nearly everything in PoE2, in a way this is the idealized D2 form of ARPG to me. However, there's some serious pain points that I have encountered and that I feel need addressing in the short-term. Some of these might be due to not having the full game, others are problems that start at the root.

Minor Spoilers ahead.

Early game - as a Warrior, this is atrocious. The game is not fun.

The class is severely underpowered and slow at literally everything. It deals little to no damage, it's slow at going anywhere and reacting appropriately to dangers. What is not slow at, is dying.

What tools you have available to you in Act 1 are ineffective, clunky and/or boring.

Armor Breaker takes 6-7 hits to break armor on bosses and deals no damage on its own. Perfect Strike isn't online yet and earthquake I have no idea, I still have to wait a little longer for it to go off. Some, like Rolling Slam, are all 3 which makes the situation even worse since that is your bread and butter at the start.

While I didn't get stuck at any boss for more than 1-2 attempts, watching other classes breeze through everything that I had to sweat for with little to no challenge whatsoever was slightly frustrating.

Mid game

This started to change around late Act 2 as the class started to come online, however, this led to another problem. The class only has one skill setup that I can consider viable from this point onwards and deep into endgame mapping.

Leap, Boneshatter, Infernal Cry, Perfect Strike.

The entire class can be summed up in two skill sequences. Leap into Boneshatter for pack clear with some autos for rares and Perfect Strike spam for bosses.

Anything else might aswell not exist. From this point onward I was oneshotting entire packs and melting bosses in 30-40 seconds at the slowest. Outside of boss "oneshot" mechanics Nothing damages me and what little damage comes through I recoup if it's physical or I have enough regen to render meaningless anyway.

Despite trivializing the entire game, even maps, I still cannot get through a single cruel trial for the rest of my ascendancy. If the tokens even dropped, that is.

Endgame

This is the part that leaves me disappointed. While I am liking the systems and reimagining of league mechanics tied to the endgame, playing through them feels...bland.

I do not have to adjust anything to deal with different league mechanics or bossing, nor do I need to alter the style of my gameplay. I have been using the same build and repeating the exact same two motions since the middle of act 2 at this point.

My plan going into PoE2 was trying to recreate something like Ice Crash using Supercharged Slam. This failed spectacularly early on, partially thanks to the channel speed nerf, but I thought I could use the literal dozens of extra talent points and gear to make up for it but instead this also failed. Again.

I tried building around Sunder+Volcanic Fissure. Same thing.

Creativity through player knowledge, skill expression and gear in PoE2 is effectively dead. On Titan, at least. The class has one build that is arguably overperforming and then the rest of the kit is dead in the water.

If you've noticed I haven't said anything about shields yet. That's because they have as much presence in the game as in this post.

TLDR:

- Warrior is severely underpowered and boring, becomes arguably overperforming in the mid to late game if built correctly and there's only one way to do that.

- The game severely limits creativity through skill expression, gear and game knowledge. Both due to lack of tools aswell as core issues like glacially slow and long animations or forced movement.

- Titan Ascendancies do not feel impactful, I only have 2 and I am clearing juiced (As much as I can juice them so far) maps with bosses and several league mechanics regardless.

- Even thinking of running a trial gives me a renal colic.

- The game is actually easier than PoE1 by miles, the difference is that difficulty is frontloaded in PoE2 and in PoE1 is endloaded.

I concur. Sad nobody cares about the class enough to respond.

Wait until people find out gemling is also the superior ascendancy to play with mace skills.

More life, and you don't need to use meme support gems on skills.

I like playing titan from the start to now in maps.
This is my thread for lvl 57, I will write one about maps later.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3654263

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krenderke#3861 wrote:

Wait until people find out gemling is also the superior ascendancy to play with mace skills.

More life, and you don't need to use meme support gems on skills.

That's interesting.
Where does the life come from?
The other advantage is option to use each support twice?
And benefits from titans asscendency don't recompense that?

Double life from str.

You have like 700 str, that's 2800 life instead of 1400. (And this is before we account for %inc life soul cores)

Titan's 15% more is like 600 life at best.

Early to mid game, you have only one option which is boneshatter.

That is actually a great skill, no bs "added attack time", can close distance to enemy, has high attack damage and it is an AOE skill when used on primed to stun enemies. You hit once to a pack of enemies, if even one of them become primed to stun, then use boneshatter and clear the entire pack. Herald of ash goes really well with boneshatter aswell.

Ugly side of this is, you need to make sure, you hit high enough to make an enemy primed to stun, but hit low enough to not heavy stun them with one hit. Which becomes tedious, trying to balance this. Also your default mace attack performs better than most of your warrior skills because of atrocious "added attack time" on most warrior skills.

Mace skills are definitely meh early on. Though a "warrior" can easily mitigate that by using some of the early game abilities that aren't meh, like bow or elemental skills. These far superior ones can easily carry you through the entirety of act 1 without a single node to support their damage, allowing you to clear faster, safer, and more enjoyably, while still investing toward the build you want to actually play.

Armor breaking definitely feels bad early. Stun on bosses wears off fast as well, though at least smaller mobs you can blow up nicely.

I don't think the damage is bad. My fights against bosses were generally shorter with my 2h Warrior. You just hit hard. And for mace and board, you do notice that your defenses are much more effective, and the big drawback is mostly the wait for Earthquake to go off.

That said, I don't think a warrior feels like what a warrior should feel like in those low levels. As a sorc, I feel Sorcy right out the gate. As a ranger, I'm shredding enemies with lightning and/or poison arrows. But as a low level warrior, I'm standing around waiting for Earthquake to do its thing, sending a totem in first to take hits, and so on.

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TomZilla1#5837 wrote:

I concur. Sad nobody cares about the class enough to respond.

It's Christmas break, some people in the world still care about spending time with their families.

I wonder how it feels going through life as the center of the universe? Grow up guy

This post is also my personal impression.

Being a Warrior comes with many disadvantages and with little advantages.

Disadvantages:
- Low Movementspeed, since STR based body armour reduces movementspeed by ~6.2%
- Very slow attack speed with almost any skill, giving enemy/bosses alot time to dish out damage or stun/freeze the player
- Melee combat with most of the skills, which makes engaging some fights very difficult, especially against ranged/caster enemies.
- Slow clear speed, since all melee skills have limited AoE compared to spells/ranged attacks
- less defensive options. Shield reduces damage alot and requires some passives to work effectively. Armour only works against physical damage and has less effect against big hits. Also life nodes were removed entirely, so warrior only have a few hundreds more life thanks to strength, while ES users have 10k ES und Evasion characters can evade physical and elemental hits.

Advantages:
- Some skill combinations are really good boss killers. heavy stun + broken armour + sunder can one- or two-shot many bosses easily.
- Attackanimations and sounds feel very impactful and its fun to watch warrior doing his stuff


I think warrior is not in a good position right now and needs some love to start shining.

they did exactly the same mistakes with POE1 melee and it took 11 years to compensate for them (being accurate they didn't undo or fix them so much as massively boost melee dmg so it would be more worth all the downsides.

hope it doesn't take 11 years with POE2

in short Melee/warrior (outside of some busted/good/OP stuff like stampede explode screen and HotG) has these massive attack speed and rooting in lissues that are not merited by having crazy payoffs, just massive downsides for meh beneifts.

Meanwhile minion cucks run auto killing everything casting flamewall while moving because apparently spells needed to be even better in POE2 than they are in POE1?

spark is clearing with no downsides no wind up times, 3 to 6 k more health pool and almost as much armour as a melee if you take the 12% ES and 12% AR nodes...

I don't know if the problem is that no one can tell
"the melee guy" anything or the entire design team doesn't get basic design concepts like scoping or comparative opportunity costing or what.

AR nodes are 15% or you can go get 12/12 ES and AR... have one and a half or two times larger health pool with a tad less AR than a life character...

This is literally exactly the state of POE1 in 2013 to about 2017 re: Melee versus spells and Life versus ES. Except its worse by degree due to cast while moving and exaggerated long attack times.

They recreated the exact same problem, and then they put 1.5 to 2 second rooted attack times and "cast spells while moving" on top of this making a multiplier of the mistakes.

"39% more balance mistakes"

Its alweays felt like the guy who designs melee doesn't ever play spells and the guy who designs spells is always making them slicker smoother more damaging and safer.

Explain casting a magic spell while moving to me? Exaplain how that makes any design sense when melee start an attack get rooted in place, go make a coffee and come back before the boom.

What justification do they have for spells being higher mobility and safety and range while also designing them to have better more scalable health pools and defenses? The math makes no sense even if melee DIDN'T HAVE TWO SECONDS WIND UPS.