Fixing Melee (Warrior/Mace)

Animation lock makes our slow skill speed feel that much worse. We need to be able to animation cancel after a skill sufficiently "completes" to either flow into another attack or to start moving. Boneshatter is a particularly severe example of animation lock making the skill feel bad to use. I'm almost always forced to wait for the full swing to finish and return to an "idle" stance, forcing me to dodge roll to animation cancel. While most every (certainly melee) skill in the game should get this treatment, mace skills badly need adjustments to when our character is "unlocked" to use another skill or click/WASD move.

Momentum is another issue, in that skills with forward momentum don't always seem to keep it or impose it consistently. It makes things feel that much worse when Rolling Slam, for example, will just sit in place because so many monsters can't be "pushed", and then Leap Slam can't jump over certain enemies or only jumps a few inches despite mouse placement (could in part be due to the very bad auto-target). Fix how the player controller's collision and "push" works with our skills (arguably all melee skills will need help here where relevant) and that will be a huge boost to how warrior/mace feels. Tweaking the "size" of our collision box might help while using a momentum skill, and adding "push" with melee skills would also help, especially if we get more push with two handed weapons. Further, some sort of "slide" functionality when hitting terrain would also help, so we aren't stopping on a dime from one single pixel and instead can flow in the appropriate direction of momentum. The more parallel the angle, the stronger the "slide" until we're sufficiently perpendicular and stop entirely.

It isn't just that we need to stack Armor, we need the most Life of any class, as well, and we simply do not have enough ways to stack it. Life needs are so significant right now that I feel like I need top tier Life AND hybrid Life AND Strength rolls to get anywhere close to minimally viable survivability. Feeling compelled to need every one of my gear pieces to roll at the top 0.1% of gear for affixes and tiers just to feel viable even in tier friggen 10 (let alone 15 or 16) feels sooooo fucking bad. One idea might be that we just need Strength to be bumped to 3 Life per point. This might be the simplest and most elegant solution as STR/DEX and STR/INT are liable to run into similar Life challenges. I'd recommend the following additional considerations:

- Passive tree (mostly) Armor nodes getting some extra flat and % Life.
- An Armor Notable and/or dedicated Life notables with a benefit like the following: "Gain 1 Life per 100 Armor" / "Gain 10 Life per 100 armor on Chest piece"
- At least one small, quickly reachable Life branch of 3 or 4 total nodes with a notable ending in a flat addition and % increase, say +20 Life and 10% Increased. Alternatively, the notable can add an additional 10 Life per 10 Strength

The difficulty in finding life is exacerbated by how little sustain options there are for Life baked into the Passive tree. This is also then made worse by our only real Mana sustain options being Blood Magic and the branch of Life Conversion Cost passives. While I'm not sure of the best approach here, especially since the Passive tree is clearly trying to push more sustain into gear and persistent buffs and the like, this could use some help. And with how immense mana costs get in general, I can't just rely on a single Mana Leech support gem, either. Without the mana leech on my hammer, I'd be out of mana pots frustratingly fast. Consider the following ways to improve sustain:

- Add a Mana heal component to Time of Need.
- Add a couple Recoup nodes to the Red area.
- Persistent Buff that recoups damage taken as health and mana.
- Buff Life regen nodes, add some more small %life nodes
- Buff flat life regen mods, perhaps more tiers so that mid tiers are closer to current high tiers with a few new even stronger higher tiers, or add flat+% life regen hybrid mods.
- Add small base leech to leech notables.
- Reduce mana cost for mace skills by 10-15% across the board at higher gem levels so flasking is more sustainable.

Our slow speed means we get hit the most out of any skill set, yet we have the single worst defense in the game with absolutely no supplemental mitigation options. There are warriors walking around wearing Cloak of Flame, an energy shield unique, because of just how much better a high stack of fire resist and increased fire resist cap does over raw physical resist because of the conversion of physical to fire. This is absolutely insane (and the issue is NOT with the unique). We can do damn good damage between dual wield and two-hander, and while there may be room to argue 1h+shield damage is underwhelming for the defense boost, we still have slow charge skills and huge attack speed reductions on a lot of skills, let alone flat additional attack time like on Sunder that cannot be compensated for. Like I said in the first paragraph, I feel like a train, but one made of paper mache. If I were a train that was made of metal, then so many complaints of our slow speed would go away (because let's be real, if you hate mace solely because it is slow then mace isn't for you). There also aren't any Physical heralds, which kinda feels bad. I recommend the following changes to tree and additional persistent buffs and support gems in part or in whole:

- Heatproofing branch to be changed as follows: Two more travel nodes, splitting at the 3rd node, next node leading to Heatproofing and the other leading to a new Notable. Each travel node gains "2% of Armor also applies to Elemental damage taken from hits", Heatproofing is changed to 15% from 25% (no net change), and the additional notable provides the following benefit: "15% of Armor also applies to Chaos damage taken from hits."

- Add a new skill gem tag called Wind Up. Wind Up refers to any skill with flat additional skill attack/cast time (e.g. Mace's Sunder, or Elemental's Comet). New Support Gem with the following effect: "Supports Wind Up skills. Removes the Wind Up. Supported skills do 30% Less damage & Area of Effect, and 50% Less ailment and stun buildup. If the skill has a Pay Off, this gem removes the Pay Off effect."

- New Persistent Buff with the following effect: "Increases damage reduction against all damage that is not damage over time by 3%+0.1%perLvl while wielding a melee weapon. Effect is doubled while using a Channeling or Wind Up skill. Quality +0.25% per 5% quality."

- New Spirit Support Gem with the following effect: "10% of Armor is applied to all non-physical non-damage over time sources while the supported skill is in effect."

- New support gem with the following effects: "Supports Channeling skills and Wind Up skills. No single hit can cause more than 25% of your total Life in damage if the damage affects your Life pool. Increases Armor by 5% for duration of attack or channel.

- New Herald with one of the following possible effects, called Herald of Stone:
a) "Adds X-Y+nPerLvl physical damage to Attacks. Further increases physical damage by X%+nPerLvl based on the equipped weapon's base non-modified attack speed at 1.10 attacks per second, or average when dual-wielding, reducing to 0% increased damage for any base attack speed of 1.5 attacks per second or above. Quality gains n% more physical damage."
b) Adds X-Y+nPerLvl physical damage to Attacks. Increases Armor while attacking based on the weapon's base non-modified attack speed up to n% at 1.1 base attacks per second, reducing to 0% increased armor at 1.5 attacks per second. Quality gains n% more physical damage."
c) "Adds X-Y+nPerLvl physical damage to Attacks. Enemies in your Presence have n% less damage with Hits. Quality improves less damage with Hits."