Warrior(Titan) Feedback - level 88

General feedback:

Across the board, all warrior(at least 2 hand mace) skills should have 30% more default attack speed and 75% more range.

I went through the campaign and the start of maps using a 2 handed weapon and no shield. This was like slamming my head into a wall over and over and over again. The best defense in POE (and apparently POE2) is mobility and range. Warrior is slow and needs to be extremely up-close to deal any kind of damage. Meanwhile everything is hitting you, pushing you around, and cornering you. Using a shield feels essentially mandatory. One could argue that using the 2 handed weapon in a single hand keystone is also mandatory in late-game because damage is so crippled by not having the higher base damage weapons.

Some means of getting mana regeneration on the tree without using anoint or blowing a ton of travel nodes to an otherwise worthless area of the tree would be great. Itemization is such that you can maybe use one suffix to get it, but even with that suffix (I have it) mana still feels too slow. Blood magic is an option but that feels really odd to use because we only have the two flasks and it completely removes the second one from play.

Resolute technique feels mandatory because getting enough accuracy to not whiff all the time feels impossible with gearing.

Ascendancy:

The whole concept is so fundamentally flawed for everybody and there are a ton of people explaining why. I echo these concerns. It's also bugged. You know this, I presume. Helped a friend through Temple of Chaos (level 72) last night to get his third ascendancy and the altar was not interactable for him.

Specifically to warrior, the Sanctum honor mechanic is nearly undoable - because of our extremely slow, extremely short range attacks, that result in all enemies hitting us while we are winding up from stand-on-their-toes range and meanwhile getting hit. The upcoming patch about reducing honor hits from close range is an attempt to deal with this but I don't think it will be enough for warrior as it stands. If we got faster attacks that hit from further away, it might be.

If the mechanic of which ascendancy path to choose is meant to be flexible depending on playstyle - great and that's cool, but it feels bad to have them gated behind higher level requirements (in the campaign due to what act they show up in) or in end game due to what level of invitation you need to use to unlock X points.

Skill-specific feedback:

Perfect Strike
The range issue is especially egregious with perfect strike, which has a long windup in addition to a hilariously short range. While you are charging up, the enemy steps two pixels away from you and you whiff. Awful. Nearly useless on mobile enemies. Only really useful on huge bosses where you can step on their toes and they are not going to move anywhere.

Earthquake
Nearly unplayable. Why does it take 4 seconds for my earthquake to show up? Everyone has moved away in this time.

Rolling Slam
I see you are patching this, hopefully a sign of things to come for most other warrior/2h mace abilities. As it stands, feels awful, misses all the time due to the huge roll, and slow. Actually has range (kind of) but the mechanics are terrible and not fun to play as it stands.

Earthshatter / Volcanic Fissure
Has potential but just needs to be better. Doesn't do enough damage. I was extremely disappointed with both.

Molten Blast
I did not enjoy the mechanic at all, but I haven't tried since getting it at low level. Our sole true ranged ability.

Hammer of the Gods
Is largely ok, basically carries the whole class, but about 90% of my deaths are from waiting for the windup animation to finish. Maybe that's ok and would be resolved by fixing some of the other issues I've described. But one thing that does suck with this skill is that any cancellation of it due to stuns or anything else during the long windup cause the very long cooldown to happen anyway. I don't think the cooldown should be incurred if the skill doesn't actually fire off. Also - Currently the game is kicking me to character selection when I die during the animation of the hammer starting to drop.

Story time:
I want to share a story that happened to me last night that illustrates why all these things combine to make playing warrior such a frustrating exercise as it is today.

I (finally) found the Stone Citadel on my atlas and slotted in a Tier15 map, cleared the map, and found the boss. SPOILER:

I do not recall whether it was due to the mods I had rolled on the map or if this is just "the way it is" but this boss had a LOT of energy shield. Due to his fast movement speed, and all my real skills requiring a long windup, essentially the only attack I had which would hit him at all was my default "Mace Strike" attack (which also needs more range).

So I would run up to him, try to stand on his toes (remember he is constantly moving) and "Mace Strike" him, which would take off a tiny chunk of his energy shield and do quite a bit of stun damage. Due to the slowness of my attacks, this was literally one attack, move again, one attack, move again, one attack... and so on. Eventually he would become stunned, which knocks the enemy back and you have to run up to him and try to get an ability off again. I was trying to do hammer of the gods because it's by far the biggest damage dealer I had slotted, and perfect strike would NEVER have been able to fire off before the boss stood up and flew away.

This process sort of worked, but the boss' ES regen was eagerly kicking in if I missed a single opportunity to do damage to him. (Remember, these are sloooow default attacks, not doing big chunks of hit to him because those abilities to the extent they exist at all are just too slow to ever connect).

So for about fifteen minutes, we did this cat and mouse game, and I would get his ES down to about halfway (never touching his actual health bar) and then I would miss an attack due to the ridiculously short-range warrior attacks and/or imperfect timing on my part - and his ES would regen to full. I never actually touched his health. Neither of us was really able to damage the other - I would probably have fared a lot better on that, because the hitbox is large enough to connect with, even with ES.

Eventually as I said, literally 15 minutes of doing this, I and it one shot me via a crit, and so my stone citadel opportunity was gone - until God knows when I find another one. I've probably run ~300 maps, just to find one, only to lose to this silliness.

Anyway coming back full circle - this would all have been avoidable with faster attacks and more range. It just felt dumb and frustrating. ES kinda sucks on bosses in general, and always has, but this was especially awful. It wasn't particularly challenging until I had mentally checked out and mercifully died. There's no way to get a town portal off and swap your skills unless you are carrying around a whole inventory of gems - so when you lose due to attrition and the heinously rare citadel is bricked, it's a real demotivator. I hope you guys figure out a better mechanic for this because as it stands, it's just a kick in the you know where.

As for me, I'm gonna reroll to something else.

I've encountered the same frustrations as the OP.

I think I would like the rest of the game to be more like the mace skills rather than the other way around (still meeting somewhere in the middle), but either way something should change (the endless struggle against a highly maneuverable energy shield boss is real... I ended up using a low level power siphon wand in weapon set 2 just to ping the boss at range to stop energy shield regen).

Curious what you think of my suggestions here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3641973

I really want to play 2H weapons only. No shields. It's rough as you progress into endgame. Attacks are way too slow. I'm constantly whiffing. Defense is way more important than doing more damage. So I don't see the point in playing without a shield. I hope they somehow make Warrior viable without a shield.

When you're right up in an enemy's face with a huge 2H weapon there should be zero chance of missing unless there is some special modifier that makes the enemy harder to hit. I really don't get the constant missed attacks. I know I can invest into accuracy, but it just feels wrong on a Warrior that's all up in the enemy's face to have to do that. We have a lot of other problems to solve. Accuracy shouldn't be one of them.

Melee skills are all bad.
Slow, difficult to aim, delayed effect forcing you to stay inside mob's hit range to land attacks.
Animations leave you very vulnerable.

To make matters worse, building a tanky character to actually do melee, is almost impossible. You need to str stack to get anywhere near 4k life, 3k was a big ask.
Mana costs push you into paying for skills with life, making you already low health pool even worse.

Then I watch a stream of some sorcerer with 15k energy shield doing instant ranged spells with low mana costs.

Wow GGG, you must REALLY hate melee.
You even promised you had "Fixed it".

It's so bad most people bluntly reroll their characters. It's unplayable in endgame without some crazy gear you need insane luck or another character to form currency for.