Warrior is boring/hard to play

Been playing POE2 for 2-3 hour sessions since release, and overall, Warrior is not fun at all to play. Every attack is slow and doesn't do the kind of damage you'd expect for a behemoth of a character. Either is fine in isolation, but together it makes for a very boring experience. The only thing so far that has been satisfying is Boneshatter, and that is because it had a fairly unique mechanic and also the attack lands faster than every other attack. Rolling Slam sucks. You try to use it on an enemy and you end up flying past it, or go for a group, hit an enemy, and you stop moving completely and hit either nobody or just one creature. A bulk of Earthquake's damage is from the secondary effect, which takes several seconds before it actually hits, which makes it really annoying to deal with as you're constantly dodging the attacks that are faster than yours. Armor Breaker is useless as you waste more DPS trying to apply Armor Breaker than you do just flat-out using your basic raw attack (this is actually true for every skill the Warrior has, but let's not dwell on that). Molten Blast is one of your only ranged abilities and it's still really annoying to use. The only other ability I have used to increase my overall DPS is the Totem, and that's because it helps you do damage while you're too busy dodging every second to not get hit.
What I would love is for most of the abilities to get a damage increase to make them actually worthwhile to use. That, and some abilities should be faster overall. There has been a boss that I cannot kill because they attack faster than me, they slow me (with their AOE ice effects, so I both move slow *and* attack slower), they do a lot of damage, and they don't take much damage. This overall just makes the boss impossible, and most of that is due to poor skill kit.
Outside of skills, there are enemies overall that are just extremely annoying to fight as a warrior, specifically because you cannot close the gap and kill them fast enough. Any ranged enemy that can teleport is notorious for being frustrating, and it's even worse if those ranged enemies are so fast that they leave the range of your attacks when you try to hit them.
I've only gotten close to the end of act 2, but I'm so bored and frustrated from the enemies and skills that I've just been losing interest in playing altogether. And reading the other forum posts here, I don't have a unique view here. Many people have the same opinion that melee classes are overall more difficult, the game feels so slow, and it's all just in-general unsatisfying.
Here's some skills/changes I think would absolutely make the Warrior really fun to play:
A skill that lets you hit enemies with the pummel. Just a quick whack that does very little damage but adds a lot to the stun threshold. While it would mostly only be used in conjunction with Boneshatter, Boneshatter in itself is already pretty fun to use and does quite a bit of damage. Second, bosses should sit in hard stun for longer. They often-times recover before you can get a single hit in, or their animation causes your attacks to not land at all.
Make Leap Slam fast. No running-up, no flying-in-air for a solid three seconds, just up and down. Give it a cooldown if you care so much about it being "unfair". We need our mobility, and we need our satisfying skills.
Something like Shield Charge, except you just blow straight through a group of enemies. Similar to the Leap Slam change I suggest, it should be fast. Give it a cooldown or wind-down at the end of it or something.
Remove Jagged Ground. I don't ever see any enemies actually slowed down. Instead, make Earthquake similar to the similar skill in POE1. That one was satisfying and actually worked. Make it do more damage and feel free to make it take slightly longer to use.
Please, just give us ANYTHING that makes our main attacks NOT be our main source of DPS. It's boring, it sucks, and it just means that there is no thought put into the skill system!

early game warrior is extremely slow and lack-luster. Took me til like late act 2 or early act 3 to get geared up and get the better skills like sunder and stampede. I had to over-level to beat the act 2 boss and get a lot of lightning resistance even if the gear was bad since armor doesn't matter. Word of advice is to just equip movement speed to make your life due to how slow you are with heavy armor/shield if you use it.

Most of the warrior moves are slow, get interrupted, and you die half the time doing it mid animation to fast enemies that you can't cancel out of. I remember not even seeing some charms that I needed until later as well like the slow immune one or the poison resistance or ice ones that would have helped on certain fights.

The terrain isn't your friend either where you have to go through zig zags to fight enemies with your slams or hits while my ranger just breezed through act 1 normal.

Unfortunately for end game at 83, I literally have the bonk melee main attack mace strike build that clears mobs and builds up stun/armor break and then does the perfect strike but pretty boring play style.

Warrior is boring to start off with and in general the mechanics of the class can be a little annoying (priming stuns etc) it does get better later but for sure it's frustrating to play early on.

Sorry, too long didn't read.

But here is my take. I have multiple characters at maps, including Warrior. And I have many classes at cruel. Warrior leveling, especially early is the worst out of all classes. Warrior need better skills available at level 10 or something. Skill that could AOE clear like Ranger Lightning Arrow build for instance. Give us Stampede or Sunder early. And significantly increase default animation speed for most warrior abilities

Warrior definitely feels late blooming. The speed of attacks (coupled with the slow drip of needing accuracy that they can't reliably get from passive tree) and the damage potential feels really tough to work through. Supercharged Slam also get changed in their first big patch in the worst possible way as to be unusable (seriously needs an overhaul at this point if we don't get good charge skill support gems). But, empowering slams and popping a Hammer of the Gods boosted to hell feels so damn good, especially since my RS is supported to break armor and HotG to exploit armor break.

Bear in mind, RS aftershocks also do zero damage for some reason (they buff its second hit but ignore aftershock bug amazing). I'm not sure what the appropriate buffs would otherwise be without risking making warrior OP af. He feels amazing if you like slow, heavy attacks, but only after you get the levels, passives, and gear necessary. You practically NEED Resolute Technique (which kills Sunder's armor exploit) unless you can get 100% accuracy and only kinda miss evasive mobs, because the slow attack speed means you're getting hit too much to afford even one miss. Lack of sustain options in passive tree are also kinda rough, and even 72% base armor (higher with rage and when hit) and slightly above cap ele resists T7 maps still randomly hit like trucks.

With my limited experience with the campaign I think all of the above is limiting warrior:

1. Early on "heavy armor" warriors don't have the mitigation needed to mess up any boss mechanics and the negative to move speed of heavy armor causes issues early.

2. When trade more fully comes online [Act 2 to Act 3?] the warrior has enough passives to get some damage, mitigation, recovery, and specifically can improve their gear significantly through trade. A3 until T10 [ish] maps seem to be reasonably smooth sailing.

A lack of "screen-wide" AoE, comparatively low move speed, and [with non-meta builds] comparatively low clear speed does hold the warrior back some.


3. End game. I don't have a good-enough PoV to be taken seriously but the biggest problems I think warrior has are:

A. Life + Armour doesn't seem to [comparatively] have as much survivability as ES based classes / builds [or hybrid? classes]

B. If the warrior can't chain-detonate the screen they likely run into more issues as move speed, strong CC, etc. isn't as readily available as the better performing builds / classes.

C. Stereotypically I think the warrior should want Armor, Life, Accuracy, Attack speed, STR, RES, Life Regen, and maybe Crit affixes. That's a LOT of affix pressure that a lot of other classes / builds DO NOT HAVE.

The right title would be: Maces are boring and difficult to play; I’m hoping for axes and swords, even though the lack of easily accessible attack speed nodes makes the warrior a challenging class to position. It almost seems like the only class that adheres to the new vision of the game, yet it’s also the least effective in terms of end-game performance.

What I hate is that they always make the melee class some kind of geomancer. I want to crush things with my weapons not hitting the ground and kill my enemies with earth spikes.
Waiting for the Marauder and hoping for some new wweapons with new skills and abilities.

Warrior isn't necessarily hard to play it's just painfully boring to level. Most of the worthwhile warrior skills are locked out till like level 41. Compare that to Sorc & Ranger who get their best skills right away.

Mace skills need a huge overhaul. They're just terrible unless you've got enough currency to buy Temporalis or HoWA to negate the dogshit wind up time.

I can only hope that Spear, Sword, & Axe are better but I have my doubts.

I'm having a blast now with Earthshatter and Warcries Warbringer.

I have two level 90 warriors in SSF.

Imho a big part of the problem is the game doesn't give you a good sense of what makes your character stronger.

Like I used to die a lot and then at some point my character started feeling tanky. WTF?

It s not the 45% chaos resistance, its not the +1% max fir/col/lightning

It's not the blocking above 60%

etc.

Its ALL of them, presumably.

The game keeps throwing a ton of small damage spikes at you all the time when you are on warrior and you just cant switch on a node on the passive tree and be like "ahhh feels more tanky now".

Also the game is very unintuitive. I *assume* that having 76/76/76 resists made a substantial difference for me, but how would I know? You look at getting +1% to max lightning resist, say. 1% ? Comeon! But no, because of all the nerdy maths, it does make a BIG difference.

POE2 does better than POE1 with all the builtin tooltips but it still has a load of obscure mechanics and uses terms like you're in some cult. Like "2% increased explicit modifiers yadi yada". The F? Can you speak plain english?

Now I could be wrong, but it seems to me the most underrated mechanic for damage in POE is level difference. It is tempting to beat content at level or even under level, thinking you're going to be rewarded somehow like in many older RPGs but nope. In POE endgame you are better off doing maps way above level you can get good xp to level 90 by doing maps at least 5 levels above.