Constructive melee feedback (Warrior centric)

"

1: Sound, environment, animations, models are all phenomenal. 10/10 all around on that side

2: Dodge roll adds so much depth to moment to moment combat. Each fight matters.

3: I actually feel rewarded with my "payoff" abilities for huge damage. It is quite satisfying to land a big combo.

4: Gear changes and currency changes are great all around. Upgrades can be found anywhere

5: Loving the new way delirium, breach, etc....give rewards. Always something to look forward to

"

1: Hitboxes. Monster pushing mechanics and hitboxes feels like an area not fully explored. Charging mobs regularly cause you to desync and animation freeze.

Abilities like stampede and leap slam rarely take you to where you want to go, which for a big burly class, feels pretty bad.

Potential solutions: Reduce monster hitbox size, remove monster pushback, grant phasing during travel ability duration

2: Map modifiers. Added damage mods are the new reflect. PoE 2 was clearly scaled around campaign, with certain monsters tuned finely to an area with no additional modifiers.

A single source of added damage on a map in PoE 2 is enough for any pack to one shot you before you have time to react. This is further compounded by issues with monster balance I outline below

In PoE 1, damage mods "made sense" because:

1: Players were zooming hard

2: We got 6 portals to work with

In PoE 2, this is not the case.

Potential solutions: Remove modifiers which just make monsters deal more damage (dmg, pen, crit, -max), introduce modifiers which are more interesting or focus on toughness, or modifiers which grant rares/uniques unique abilities or mechanics that a player can learn and adopt to (but maybe dont one shot)

3: Heavy stun mechanic This mechanic, new to PoE2, seems so core to warrior but is rarely (if ever) utilized fully due to many issues with the class.

Notably, heavy stun has a very short duration on many bosses, meaning your window to land a "payoff" ability is incredibly short.

This is further compounded by the fact that many bosses or arenas have sources of chill/slow which make you slow on wind up as well, combined with the fact that some bosses hitboxes are small or very finicky to hit.

Similarly, we have no sources on the tree of STUN DURATION which is odd. The slowest class has no way to make their heavy stuns last long enough to do a combo.

The monk and other classes just utilize heavy stun far, far more effectively than warrior which seems backwards.

Potential solutions: Stun duration added throughout warrior tree, enough to at least double the duration with 1 or 2 clusters.

4: The warrior area of the passive tree is an illusion of choice. If you play maces, you click mace nodes, which feel bad to click as they often result in a net-negative of damage and survivability due to the reduced attack speed they often give.

Warriors are shoe horned into grabbing every AoE node possible to make the class feel usable in maps, and block is also mandatory.

And you don't feel stronger when you get these -- these simply enable you to play the game

The nodes for warrior/mace are just a bit uninspired overall -- for example, consider this notable:

- Damage
- Stun build up
- Reduced attack speed.

There are like 3 of this *exact* node on the tree

Other than that all our other nodes hinge so much on conditions, usually heavy stun, which is awful. You heavy stun once in a while and its over by the time you realize it for most payoff abilities, as noted above.

So many things hinge on heavy stun. Armour explosion, bleed aggravate, boneshatter, etc etc....SO much just hinges on heavy stun. Can warrior please get something a tad more interesting to build around?

Potential solutions: Add another vector of scaling to warrior via gems and tree. Buff baseline AoE, speed of abilities to make those passives less mandatory. Improve non-shield build defence perhaps by buffing armour.

5: Life vs. ES. Similar to early PoE 1, we are back in a situation where it is far, far easier to scale the defenses of an es/evasion based character that just feels better than the big beefy guy.

A life based character without evasion is in a bad place right now defensively. Ideally something gives - either non-boss monsters are tuned down, or strength needs to provide quite a bit more than 2 life, or a third option needs to be explored (such as armour applying to elemental and chaos damage from hits, baseline)

Otherwise, max block is basically required which in turn makes giant's blood a required node if you care at all about being a 2h mace user. This is an illusion of choice.

Potential solutions: Buff armour significantly, buff life from strength significantly, add measures to cap defensive capabilities of evasion and ES to reign in the infinite scaling of those builds

"

1: Monster balance. I'll use a few examples

1a: The vaal mob which throws sticks of dynamite. These shotgun, are incredibly hard to see, and have a huge range and huge damage if you stay in t hem.

1b: Pretty much any PoE 1 mob you reused or ported over. Examples include expedition mobs, affliction mobs (the ones that shoot spore pods), and probably a few others. They feel like you accidentally left them over tuned to PoE 1 stats.

1c: The vast majority of ranged monsters. Their attack rates are way too high, damage is way too high, and their effective range is also, you guessed it, way too high. I regularly get hit for huge chunks by some monster I can't even see on the screen, and when I do see them, they are often behind a myriad of other monsters also using abilities which obfuscates my ability to see the actual damaging thing I should be worried about.

Finally,

1d: Monsters need a shared internal cooldown for abilities per pack. Like PoE1, we still have issues where a pack of one monster type can all just use their special ability all at once and kill you if you slip up even a little bit.

This is true for abilities just as it is on-death effects. These would still be dangerous even if you get hit by one, but all mobs in a pack utilizing a skill all at once (that often overlap visually and thus impossible to assess the 'danger') is just leading to a lot of unfair deaths in situations you otherwise played well in.

Potential solutions: Do a pass on any monster thats primary damage is chaos or elemental damage, and any monster utilizing projectiles.

Remove capability for shotgunning from monsters -- this is never a fun, or good way to die in any game since the beginning of time (think back to lightning enchanted multiple projectiles d2 -- the devs had the foresight to quickly remove this)

Added shared cooldowns to monster packs for their signature ability. 5-6 ground aoe death effects should *never* spawn all at once.

Reduce baseline damage of monster ranged monster spell/attacks as these are tuned for campaign and not maps which can roll mods.


2: Map/area design. The experience of playing the game is hindered greatly right now by map design decisions.
Notably,

2a: I am regularly getting stuck when trying to e.g. leap slam or rolling slam around terrain or blockables or even enemy mobs. In general, if I use a movement ability, I want to go to the place I tell the game to go to. I should slide around terrain, fly over it, and ignore monster hitboxes when possible.

2b: Many zones are these tiny claustrophobic hallways and tunnels that make a "fun" melee fight impossible. You either leap slam in and die to something, or you spend 5 minutes slowly luring 1 monster away at a time to fight (and you still die anyway to the 6 ranged mobs in the back off screening you)

PLEASE prioritize much wider hallways, spaces, etc....in many of the maps. There are way too many tiny tunnels and narrow halls.

This also makes most league content actually near impossible. Ritual circles are smaller in POE2, inside of smaller hallways, with bigger mobs and no phasing, meanwhile the ritual spawns tiny hard to see volatile chaos orbs that can two shot you? This is a regression from feedback you received in PoE1 -- please look into this.

2c: Camera angle. I have died more than a few times because the camera prioritizes sticking a piece of the map in my face over me seeing my character model or enemies. This is especially heinous in maps like vaal factory where lighting is already poor.


3: Attack speed I get that titans live the fantasy of slow, heavy hitting attacks with a mace. But I swear to the heavens I am now at maps and my character feels slower than I did at level 2. Where is the power fantasy I was promised?

Warrior class is just punished across so many different layers that it makes the game play feel awful currently.

To name a few:

3a: Most attacks have a 80% attack speed modifier or worse, effectively 20-25% less attack speed

3b: Skills like earthquake which require a duration before the payoff. Most of these are not used by anyone because the payoff is not worth the risk of waiting

3c: Our best nodes on the tree all give 5% reduced attack speed. Access to increased attack speed is rare, and often out of the way

3d: Many abilities add a BASE TIME to the wind up, which cannot be scaled UP, but *CAN* still be scaled down! This is just ridiculous.

What do I mean by this? Consider one of the games MANY slowing effects - chill, temporal chains, etc....these all scale the total duration of a skill like sunder, *INCLUDING* the 1.4 base duration!! It is an insane punishment unique to warrior class.

Potential solutions: Remove the attack speed penalty on all warrior mace skills. Remove the attack speed reduction from warrior mace passives. Add "Unstoppable" (speed cannot be reduced below min) protection to skills like Sunder, Rolling slam, stampede, etc....

4: Armour as a defensive mechanic is bad Just like in PoE 1, this stat still feels terrible to invest in. Nothing has changed.

Notably,

4a: Bosses have built in overwhelm (???) which unfairly punishes the one class which is weakest defensively right now

4b: Evasion is easier to get and is far more powerful of a stat

4c: Enemy physical hits from non-bosses are not threatening enough to matter to EVA/ES builds who just have 2x the effective HP of warriors anyway, plus options like freeze/chill to further their defensive capabilities.

Potential solutions: Armour applies to damage from elemental and chaos damage from hits base line at 100% effectiveness. Just make it happen. Worry about the balance later. See how it feels or changes the game first. Outside of this, not sure how to make it appealing outside of significantly changing game monster balance.

5: Area of effect. Without a huge amount of investment into this, talking like 100%++, the warrior class just has little potential to deal with screens of enemies unlike other classes.

Baseline aoe for all mace skills just needs to be doubled and that still won't begin to address the issue but it would be a start.

"

1: Melee skills have a weird negative momentum bug. This happens e.g. if you cast a totem then immediately try to do a melee skill, such as rolling slam or sunder. You carry this weird negative momentum which makes the skill 2x slower, leading to death a lot.

Likewise, there is a bug where you sometimes permanently carry a slow modifier on you if you dodge roll during another slowing mechanic or something. I am not 100% sure what the parameters are but there is an edge case where your characters speed is permanently set to a lower modifier than normal (100%) due to dodge roll I believe.

1a: I logged a nasty breach bug here as well: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3639101 (seems to be fixed?)

2: The game has great bosses, but we fight them 3% of the time in the end game This is a pity given they are some of the best content in the game.

In general would love to fight bosses more frequently in maps, especially for warrior because this class is lackluster when it comes to general mapping (clear speed, etc)

"

Base attack times. I get that melee characters live the fantasy of slow, heavy hitting attacks with a mace. But I swear to the heavens I am now at maps and my character feels slower than I did at level 2. Where is the power fantasy I was promised?

"

Monster balance. I'll use a few examples

1a: The vaal mob which throws sticks of dynamite. These shotgun, are incredibly hard to see, and have a huge range and huge damage if you stay in t hem.

"

edd1148#5941 wrote:

Regarding your point 1D on mob attack cooldowns, I think another solution could be if the AI could get a randomized aggro timer inside a narrow range (0.3-1.5s for example), so that they're not all spamming you with the same ability at the same time. Tune aggro timer longer for easier difficulty, and shorter for harder difficulty. Tune accordingly by area level.

"

Eep#5463 wrote:

4: Gear changes and currency changes are great all around. Upgrades can be found anywhere

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1: Hitboxes. Monster pushing mechanics and hitboxes feels like an area not fully explored. Charging mobs regularly cause you to desync and animation freeze.

"

Gorwarth#3476 wrote:

"

Eep#5463 wrote:

4: Gear changes and currency changes are great all around. Upgrades can be found anywhere

Any thoughts on the compounding problems of warriors (or attack-based classes) needing to constantly find weapon upgrades while leveling, you can't just luck out once like a caster, find a +4 skill gem affix early to carry through the whole campaign or is that just poe?

I feel like the all important physical damage\phys dam% is not easily achievable and when you do find one it barely even closes the gap vs casters/range.

Really want druids ><

"

MKhaos#4633 wrote:

"

1: Hitboxes. Monster pushing mechanics and hitboxes feels like an area not fully explored. Charging mobs regularly cause you to desync and animation freeze.

Player hitboxes too, specifically default attack swings with the 2h mace i've noticed is questionable to terrible. I'm at 100% chance to hit so I know it's not that, but almost without fail against small to medium enemies the second swing in the mace default attack almost always does not hit. I feel like these really need to be looked at to make gameplay feel better, whiffing your attacks when you're standing on top of an enemy does not feel good, even if the hit box is "accurate".