On armour, monster elemental damage and the warrior

Hey GGG

I wanted to leave some feedback on the warrior playstyle, this coming from a player that went to t15 with melee and got his last ascendancy points from trial of the Sekhema (awesome content btw, please tune down the hourglass spread on the last boss or remove it all together)

The playstyle that i want to leave a comment on is specifically the tanky armour character that plays melee and block. I will try to steer clear of commenting on the design choices that are obviously part of the vision, but rather talk on the mechanics that lead to extremely frustrating interactions when playing.

The expectation:
Going into the melee playstyle i (quite reasonably i think) expect that it is alright for actions to be slow, because i can take the punishment while charging up my attacks. Whenever this strategy succeeds - great! It has all the bells and whistles of satisfying visuals, sounds and being mechanically awesome. Whenever it fails, resulting in my character dying, i am expected to try to solve for this outcome.

The build:
Now my character was WAY ahead of the curve for what is expected at the point of breaking into tier 15's - 100-200+ life on every piece of gear, 500 strength, 18k armour with scavenging plating, capped chaos res and several max res nodes from the tree alongside a 750 phys dps mace + 40 block with turtle charm and 8 ascendancy points. I expected this to be enough, but two primary aspects of the game killed this character consistently.

The issues:
Monster speed on map, with the most excessive examples being in breaches and rituals, seems unsolvable for a melee character in t15s at the moment. You quickly enter a catch-22 where whenever you are swarmed, which you get with density and monster speeds, you get into a stun loop that the game is quite specifically designed for you to be in and never get out of. Actions are too slow on melee, so you cannot deal damage to the mobs around you. Dodge-rolling only results in being alive for longer but with no recourse. This play pattern almost made me leave the melee playstyle in Path of Exile 2.

"Monsters gain +#% of damage as extra <element>" map mod is excessively difficult to solve for as an armour/block/life character at the moment. The reason is quite simple; this is not just a x% more multiplier in monster damage against armour characters. This damage gain is obviously calculated before armour takes effect, which means that small fast hits from monsters gain orders of magnitudes of damage against armour characters. This is a problem unique to armour characters.

Armour characters are presented with 2 readily available options to help with this issue: Max res and block. Max res is very effective, but not nearly effective enough on its own to solve for this problem, since damage is so high compared to the life pool. Physical damage that has been tuned to be effectively modified by high armour creates excessive instances of damage with the elemental damage mod on map, even against 80%+ max res. Block is linearly scaling so the 40% block is a good layer of defence but is quite remarkably not effective enough in conjunction with max res that it doesnt feel like getting hit by a truck when the elemental damage mod is on maps. This was what eventually lead me to leave the melee character for good to ensure that i didn't have to buy new periphirals and a new screen.

Usually, when looking at PoE1, the fix to this issue is quite simple as there has been added several layers of defense against this specific problem over several years. The newest and arguably best solution to this issue was the reduced elemental damage taken from endurance charges.

I would strongly advise that you look to ensure that there are more avenues to reduce elemental damage in layers than is available at the moment. This could elegantly be fixed through having percentages of armour apply conditionally through Scavenging Plating as to ensure that elemental damage from boss mechanics still have the intended weight while mapping does not get out of hand.

... Man i really hope somebody reads this.

Kripparrian also made a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw-uD-vz_5s

and as someone who is stacking atleast 22k armor in tier 15s, I can confirm this feels really bad, warrior which was suppose to be the tankiest class become the glass cannon of all classes... we either slam the entire screen and one shot everything or we just die to white mobs..
not being able to run extra damage map mods also feels like half of the maps are unrunable which makes progress even worse.

well articulated post honestly.

while it would absolutely be a feelsbad bandaid, there is a chest that applies armor to elemental damage, blackbraid fur. Unlike the og trancendence, I don't think you lose your phys mit, outside of only having 60 armor on the chestpiece. Might be worth trying?

Yeah I'm in tier 4 (lol) on HCssf and I just opened my 2nd breach and was instantly surrounded by mobs and almost instantly died lol, not sure what to do, doubt I'll be popping any breaches any time soon.

I do think we need another layer of defense. Fortify, physical damage taken as, flat PDR, some of these we should be able to access as a warrior.

After watching Kripparians video, it's clear there any many issues with regards to armour and energy shield. Hope GGG finds a solution.

Yeah I agree with you. Armour by itself is pretty underwhelming and it seems to have less synergy with other layers of defense than other defense types have with each other eg. es and evasion.

I think the fact that endurance charges inherently doing nothing hurts the playstyle by a lot. Man I was so surprised when I found out that they didn't work the way they did in poe 1.

As someone else said the body armour blackbraid kinda helps with elemental damage but it's not a very good solution to the problem either.

I too hope that they do something soon.

"% of armor applies to elemental damage" on a passive tree and equipment would be a good first step in fixing this.