Smoothness/Flow of Skills in PoE2 - Review and Suggestions on Improvement

Isn't Killing Palm supposed to be the combo finisher? It has built-in synergy with Culling Strike after all. If you start your combo with Killing Palm then you're doing it wrong.

Warrior has a similar kind of "Combo Finisher" called Boneshatter which by itself does low damage with long recovery animation. The combo there is to use any other skill that Stuns (say Rolling Slam) then when yellow balls appear on monsters, you detonate those yellow balls with the Boneshatter. Thats a basic Stun-Boneshatter one-two punch combo that collapses entire groups of monsters like a stack of dominoes.

This feels especially true for warrior. Many of the warrior skills are incredibly slow for no discernable reason and it feels mandatory to stack as much attack speed as possible just to make it feel playable/viable and have any sense of flow/synergy, otherwise it feels like you are playing in slow motion while everything zergs you at lightspeed.

To make matters worse, the warrior tree is riddled with 'reduce attack speed' nodes. These are basically unpickable, since they contribute to the problem you are already trying to solve, and reduce your survivability (more time spent locked in slow animations = more death, and with how brutally punishing deaths are in PoE2, this isn't really an acceptable tradeoff).

I understand that they are trying to go for the 'big slow heavy hitter' archetype, the problem is that the rest of the game is not designed to support this, and in fact goes the opposite way, where speed is heavily rewarded and being slow is heavily punished in almost all areas of the game, not just combat specifically.

With enough attack speed stacked up, leap slamming into a pack of enemies and then boneshattering one to blow everything up ALMOST feels great and achieves this feel of flowing nicely, but leap slam still feels pretty slow even at this point, and as you are still hit by everything (even projectiles passing underneath you) while you are floating through the air unable to take other actions, it's pretty dangerous. Not to mention if your stun fails (there are monsters with stun resistance for example) then you are pretty screwed.

Now in isolation all of this might be okay, if that was just the game for everyone and the game was designed to work with this sort of playstyle, maybe that'd be fine. However when you inevitably see a non melee build spamming one button and deleting everything within a 2 screen radius while also still getting to move while doing so, you start to question your life choices.

I always first pick warrior or warrior adjacent classes in fantasy games to try and live out the class fantasy of the tanky heavily armoured wrecking ball, that's just what appeals to me, and I'm sure many other people. It sucks feeling like I have made an objectively 'incorrect' decision by picking the class that speaks to me the most, because the devs seem to want to penalize this choice so heavily. (Movement speed penalties: slowed by your armour/shield. Survivability penalties: You're slow, need to be near enemies, armour does nothing, very difficult to gain enough life to not feel like paper, easy to get stunlocked to death as you need to be in the thick of it - even with a stun charm and stacking stun threshold. Sekhema Trials feel designed to be specifically anti warrior with the honour system. No real advantage or niche to make up for these downsides).

That turned into a bit of an off topic rant, apologies.

TLDR: I think the weaving and flow of abilities is hard to achieve when the design of the rest of the game does not facilitate it. If the combat meta is essentially kill instantly or be killed instantly, which is especially true in melee, the idea of a skill rotation as OP described is essentially moot. Path of Exile 2 combat is not a game of managing resources and attrition as it is in something like League or Souls or WoW and this is the key issue I believe. One shot kills being the primary way to challenge the player forces the gameplay away from the slower more methodical style they have said they are going for.

For reference: Level 93 Titan, 6k life, 78-80% ele resists, 75% chaos.

Thank you for reading.