Mace skills, in their current iteration, put 2h at a massive advantage

Typically in Path of Exile, there was a pretty solid balance in usefulness between 1h, 2h, and dual wield setups. 1h was a bit tankier, 2h had more damage, and dual wield had attack speed and damage in the middle. However, the mace skills in POE2 massively favor slow attacks, with the fact that 2h maces attack slower and with a huge jump in damage per hit, which tends to mean that anything else feels fairly weak in comparison, without running giant's blood.

The gameplay loop of mace is basically to build up stun/armor break on a boss, get an opening to do damage, then dump a ton of damage all at once. There's 4 main skills that can provide this burst of damage.

Perfect strike- Fire based, so it doesn't scale off of armor break, and it also ignites, meaning that a heavy hit will get a big ignite, vs several smaller hits from 1-handers that will get less ignites, even if they would otherwise have higher dps weapons

Sunder- Like many of the mace skills, this has a large flat added attack time. So attack speed has minimal impact, and with the armor break consumption, you're far better off having one slow hit over multiple fast ones, since the fast ones wont even be fast, but will still suffer from vastly lower damage. This also scales its damage off of crit, so you lose the option of RT, which really hurts.

Supercharged slam- Well, unless you have 1 2-hander, you can't even use this skill. It would otherwise be the perfect fit for fast attacking builds, with it scaling fine with attack speed, being straight phys, and being a nice and normal slam that can be used as fast as you can attack with it. The restriction on this to 2-handers really hurts.

Hammer of the gods- While attack speed does work normally here, you instead have a long cooldown between attacks. So once again, attack speed is essentially irrelevant, and you should get the biggest single hit you can.

Are you seeing a pattern here? All of the big and fun skills the mace has are all pretty explicitly designed to suck with 1-handed weapons. Was this really necessary? This is also especially brutal as warbringer, an ascendancy designed around armor break and shields/warcries, when none of the warcries really benefit using armor break and a shield, and using a shield makes you either stack strength, or use a significantly weaker weapon.

Not to mention clear speed on warrior doesn't care about attack speed, with things like leap slam and rolling slam, the 2 main clear skills, both having massive flat added attack times, rendering 1h weapons just a crappier version of 2h.

Uh....

this is no different from POE1 1h vs 2h


The only slight difference is that there just isnt enough mods like elder/shaper that add those extra supports and gem scaling what not like with lacerate in settlers.

1h with VF has this as well in POE1.

The mods just arent there yet, games very base level.


You can def do more than what you put though


But the TLDR for your thing on 1h v 2h:
Its EA we just dont have alot at the moment.

The Strength skills absolutely feel unfinished. (It is EA)

I hope we get additional MACE skills to give the opportunity to non 2h / 2h+shield builds for Warrior.

There are other melee skills coming, such as the Sword, Axe, and Shapeshift skills, but I don't think they will help much, since the skills are so hard locked behind weapon types. (In PoE 1, many Mace/Axe skills overlapped so you could choose which one you had on)

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Leonemeaeus#0087 wrote:

Warbringer here.

+1 to this thread.

It feels odd that our ascendancies both limit and support us in such contradictory ways.

For example, breaking enemy armor below 0 is useful, but most of our attacks either convert to fire (which doesn't benefit from armor break) or consume the broken armor. This forces us into using totems with subpar damage scaling.

I don't have any attacks that convert to fire, and all of them work great with broken armor.

I use totem to break armor, then shout to empower, an ancestrally boosted hammer of the gods on the boss which consumes the broken armor for a ton of damage.

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The 40% shield guaranteed block is lower than most end-game shields with block chance. Trying to scale it to 60%+ after receiving a -35% penalty just to use a shield like Svalinn (which offers cast on block for a spell-less class? I suppose you could use some of the bone physical spells with no scaling?) feels almost pointless. When considering the passive node investment, it doesn't seem ideal at all.

Yes, it frees up a stat line on a shield for free.

Svalinn cast on block requires int (not sure if the skill does / just the spell does / etc) and due to the scaling issue I'm assuming the best cast would be something augmenting defenses, not more damage (don't really need more clear anyway).

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Warcry builds are underwhelming, and the "one-button" playstyle they promote offers minimal interaction with the passive tree.

The one-button you refer to is the clear. I don't think any build for warrior is a balanced clear + boss, so you're going to always have multiple buttons. Warcry 1-button is no different than totem spam 1 button, mace strike 1 button, stampede one button. You're leaving damage on the table if you're not comboing w/shouts, stacking slams/aftershocks/etc.

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Jade is nice, but you can't use it for protection without sacrificing the 10% physical damage reduction. I almost never use it, and, apart from a few hard-hitting pinnacle encounters, it doesn't provide much benefit since those hits will likely one-shot you anyway.

i think jade is a dud because it's just more phys reduction, eating "all hits" is better and/or armor under 0 and/or totem mitigation is better depending on build so there's no room for it.

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Additionally, the lack of strength stacking and life nodes for Warbringer makes the build much squishier. This forces us back into using totems to absorb 20% of the damage, which isn't a strong option.

Going totem for damage reduction is a massive waste of points if you're not full totem imo

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The above is further compounded by the already very problematic modifiers found on many rare/unique monsters which are much more punishing to melee classes, especially when many abilities require 1.5 seconds to wind up, often times, many encounters are near impossible due to interruptions to attacks, being pushed out of position by swarming monsters, etc etc.

This really needs to be looked at and resolved at GGG's earliest possible chance, prior to trying to add any more "melee" classes to the game without addressing some of the above inherent concerns with the current design iteration.

The builds I've mentioned above are all "take 0 damage clear" builds so rare mods are not a concern.

To address OP's point, I believe the 1h mace idea is with stun buildup. dual wielding or even 1h a mace gives a lot of daze + stun, quickly. and nothing warriors get synergizes with daze. so i'd expect the 4 coming soon abilities work off of daze/dual maces.



most all of the viable builds for warbringer right now only really synergize off of 1 stat: topend physical damage hit. not attackspeed, not other things. totems just need +melee skills and literally 0 defenses no other stats matter because the totem doesn't use your stats.

for bonuses and stacking, you go bleed / empowered / shockwave stuff. which again, bigger hit = better.

that means 2h mace (and not bothering to dual wield 2h with giant's blood, shield is where your defenses live) is for basically every build, with dual wield 2h for +melee skills on each hand for totem.

Past our 4 missing abilities being 1h friendly/daze/stun related, I'd think dual wield and 1h+shield builds will only really exist when templar/marauder/duelist and their weapons come around. there are currently only 9 dual wielding nodes on the tree at all and they're a bit lackluster, unlike the 2h nodes.

there's just not as much payoff for stunning things and regardless of damage none of the movement synergizes with weaker 1h abilities or stunning/dazing. if leap could do something great to dazed/stunned etc it would open the door.

Giant's blood seems like a mandatory perk for mace and shield. Since 1-hand + shield will lack the damage to deal with enemies fast enough once you reach maps and with 2-hand only you're going to take excess hits due to lack of block.

Also, something that doesn't get mentioned anywhere but... basic attack never changing based on your weapon is a huge reason why it sucks. Let me explain, casters gets all sorts of spells on their weapons, goes from getting VD, living bomb, sigil of power, bone stuff etc... Meanwhile, melee got the most basic auto attack ever, yeah sure you can support it but there's no ancestral call, no melee splash, no multistrike. So... what kind of support can you possibly put on your basic attack to make it interesting really? None?

A really simple solution to that would just be to add some sort of skill to your weapon so your basic attack is interesting, allows 2handers to get their big boom and 1handers to get more appropriate skills that scales off atk spd. You know... the thing they were suppose to do...

There are two reasons that giant blood are so mainstream right now:

1.Most of the mace skills are basically build on one hit damage

-unmodifiable cast time = attack speed can't actually make the skill faster
-force to interact with other skill (earth shatter) = warcry works same as cast time
-cooldown = hammer of the gods
-skill mechanic itself = boneshatter, it is not design for keep using it but for some kind of finishing a group of mobs with "one hit", so the bigger your hit damage is, the more monster you kill.

2.defence system

It's hard to survive T11+ without shield and block.

HP build sucks now, ES build good.



And there's no good skill option for 1h mace.
I tried molten blast yesterday, the only mace skill that is ranged and no cast time.
It works terrible with the movement, it force you to move forward(for a long distance) when you cast it, making you die easier than other melee skill.

Another skill with no cast time and mechanic that need big dph is armour breaker, a dogshit for titan, not sure how about warbringer using it but I hate this garbage.

Agree with OP and others. I know it's EA but theres not really any "coming soon" boxes on the skill table which means they'll end up killing mace like in poe1 when really its a fricking cool weapon and they just need to add more options and make some of the movement less clunky/slow. I'm guessing dual weild will prob be better for swords or axes but it should 100000 percent be viable for mace, having giants blood and the ability to hold a 2H and shield makes it pointless having a 1 handed mace for everything I've tried in the last few weeks to make it fun.

Needs more dual nodes on passive and a big ol' buff.

IMHO all Mace-class items should have inherent and significant armor break AND possibly stun buildup without the need to use supports to get those effects. Not saying that would be enough to make them "feel good" but at least it would be thematic and allow us to concentrate on other supports.