Warrior/Mace - how to finaly fix it and still keep it interesting

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CPTBRUMBL3Z#3146 wrote:

Combos aren't the fix. Besides, those already exist, and are balanced around using Strikes. Warrior/Mace's issue is primarily one of reliable survivability. Aside from Armor/Life just being underpowered and there not being nearly enough means to get it (especially given ES just being so much flat EHP) and armor itself being a terrible defense when it does nothing for elemental hits and falls off exponentially with larger hits, Warrior/Mace also lacks tools.

I posted my own thread https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3699608 but here's the summary:

1. More Life in passive tree, mostly red area, maybe buff Strength to be 3 life per point, as well as more access to sustain.
2. More Passives like Heatproofing so armor can affect Chaos and other Elemental damage.
3. Persistent buffs, especially ones that work around slow attack speed and provide damage reduction.
4. Support gems that help slower skills, mostly through a new tag called "Wind Up" used for all skills with flat added time to use, that increase DR/Armor while using Wind Up skills, plus a support gem that removes the Wind Up for various drawbacks, mostly damage and AoE. I know lots of people want to use Sunder as their bread & butter skill and that would allow for it.
5. Improving combat flow, in particular slow skills have way too much "recovery" time which makes slow skills like mace slams feel bad until you get like 30% attack speed.

I think that would cover it, a handful of Armor/Life focused buffs and a few that would work across all skill and class trees.

The problem with this approach: People had to get all of this to make warrior playable. You would be forced to take the life/armor nodes, you would be forced to use the persistent buffs, you would be forced to use the support gems. Classes like Witch and Ranger have way more freedom to survive thanks to their range and almost all skills can be used while moving with low to none skill wind-ups. And because of that, they can get away with not using all of the survivability mechanics.

Warrior needs a technical solution in order to work. Take a look at Flickerstrike for example. It gives you so much movement, that enemies have problems attacking you. There are many monk builds with flicker strike which aren't too tanky. So even without any defensive nodes, you can clear maps pretty fast and safe. Can you do the same with skills like sunder or earthquake? Hardly, because these skills make you immobile and prone to get hit. Especially since you need to be closer to the target and it usually doesn't effect the whole screen.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind also having your suggestions implemented, since it would certainly give warrior the option to be the tank. But right now this would be the only viable way to play the warrior. He still would feel slow and on top of that, build variation would be very low thanks to the mandatory gems/passive nodes.

I think what GGG tries to achieve is, that you can play the game as a glass cannon if you want and can compensate the tankiness with actuall skill. That's why Dodge Roll and WASD were introtuced. And that's why the monk has all these fast attacks with lots of mobility. The Monk is at a good place and the warrior needs something like this too. Attacking while still being in motion. And all of the warrior skills are to clunky and immobile to make such skill gameplay possible. Just making the warrior tanky won't make this class interesting, especially since there will still be enough one-shots where the warrior will fall short. Mobility is supposed to be king in PoE2 and the warrior goes completely agains that vision.

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AceNightfire#0980 wrote:

But that's the whole problem. Almost all melee skills are to slow. The only real "gap closer" is shield charge, which you can only use with shield. What about 2h play? And what if you don't want to use shield charge but something else?

Shield charge is fast. Boneshatter is fast. Its true, the rest are slow, and could be faster. But to say "theres no combo" is dramatization, because ahield charge and boneshatter works just fine. If you use 2hand, you can always weapon swap and even put points into different skills, which i do for totems, constantly swapping between dual and shield 🤷

Mace skills is slow, tru. But its not that bad as you described it xD theoretically MACE SHOULD BE SLOW. so they lack is power, not atk speed xD

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raptas#1569 wrote:

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AceNightfire#0980 wrote:

But that's the whole problem. Almost all melee skills are to slow. The only real "gap closer" is shield charge, which you can only use with shield. What about 2h play? And what if you don't want to use shield charge but something else?

Shield charge is fast. Boneshatter is fast. Its true, the rest are slow, and could be faster. But to say "theres no combo" is dramatization, because ahield charge and boneshatter works just fine. If you use 2hand, you can always weapon swap and even put points into different skills, which i do for totems, constantly swapping between dual and shield 🤷

Mace skills is slow, tru. But its not that bad as you described it xD theoretically MACE SHOULD BE SLOW. so they lack is power, not atk speed xD

So there are only 2 skills that are useable. Bone shatter only works well on enemies that are prone to stun already (if not prone, damage is low and no aoe) and the other only works with shield. And lets be honest, many play 2h mace, including myself. And Weapon Swap is absultely not intuitive for me in an arpg.

And the problem is not that mace is slow. The problem is that most of the time you are completely immobile, unless you use bone shatter or shield charge.

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AceNightfire#0980 wrote:

So there are only 2 skills that are useable

Well, theres hammer of the gods and the shield pillars, those are pretty fast too 🤷 thats what you get on early access xD

Speaking of shield+boneshatter, thats what makes it a combo- you slam with shield and mobs insta become prone to stun, which is why is a combi with bone shatter.

While if you dont like manually swap weapons (i hate it) you can set specific skills to be used with specific sets only. I have set my totems to be cast only with dual set and it automatically swaps in to it when i press totem. And with 90% increase swap speed its nearly instant. By using 2 sets of weapons, you actually save skill points too, because you can put them into different places :>

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AceNightfire#0980 wrote:

And the problem is not that mace is slow. The problem is that most of the time you are completely immobile, unless you use bone shatter or shield charge.

Oh, mace being slow is most definitely a problem. It's just not the only one by far, and also one that amplifies the issues with defenses and mob damage levels that exist currently.

I generally like the idea. What I also think, though, is that 3 skills are too much for a combo. There should only be "starters" and "finishers". I don't think they should be "categorized" that way, but basically, the first one gives you "momentum" and the other one pays it off.
Something like "I hit with my skill" AND if I get the "momentum stack" the next skill that can consume it and will be faster/has an advanced effect. Basically, it's power charges, but it is within a skill via keyword (like gives/spends momentum). It could be implemented via Support Gems but can be inherent within a skill. I also think, that there should be skills that generate a power charge/momentum with the first use and spend it with the second one. Like, hitting with the first attack will be slow, but with the second use, this is a fast strike that deals AoE damage or something.
I really like the approach, that various weapons and skills feel different. I really enjoy the way ranged combat is at the moment. It's awesome that I can use crossbows and bows and both feel unique. A similar feel should be for maces, but I don't think that it needs full rework. All the skills should be reviewed, though. More interactions within each other. Like, there is a skill in the druid gameplay video. If you use it in human form, a character transforms into a bear and slams the ground. But if you are the bear already, the skill is much faster. Yeah, those 2 interactions built into almost every mace skill will make it unique and different from any other melee weapon.
And for god's sake, let the warrior move while using the skills.

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FruitLord#0833 wrote:

Combos don't really work in this game. You don't have time to do something like this due to the constant onslaught.

False information, combos are fine.

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AceNightfire#0980 wrote:

The problem with this approach: People had to get all of this to make warrior playable. You would be forced to take the life/armor nodes, you would be forced to use the persistent buffs, you would be forced to use the support gems. Classes like Witch and Ranger have way more freedom to survive thanks to their range and almost all skills can be used while moving with low to none skill wind-ups. And because of that, they can get away with not using all of the survivability mechanics.

Warrior needs a technical solution in order to work. Take a look at Flickerstrike for example. It gives you so much movement, that enemies have problems attacking you. There are many monk builds with flicker strike which aren't too tanky. So even without any defensive nodes, you can clear maps pretty fast and safe. Can you do the same with skills like sunder or earthquake? Hardly, because these skills make you immobile and prone to get hit. Especially since you need to be closer to the target and it usually doesn't effect the whole screen.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind also having your suggestions implemented, since it would certainly give warrior the option to be the tank. But right now this would be the only viable way to play the warrior. He still would feel slow and on top of that, build variation would be very low thanks to the mandatory gems/passive nodes.

I think what GGG tries to achieve is, that you can play the game as a glass cannon if you want and can compensate the tankiness with actuall skill. That's why Dodge Roll and WASD were introtuced. And that's why the monk has all these fast attacks with lots of mobility. The Monk is at a good place and the warrior needs something like this too. Attacking while still being in motion. And all of the warrior skills are to clunky and immobile to make such skill gameplay possible. Just making the warrior tanky won't make this class interesting, especially since there will still be enough one-shots where the warrior will fall short. Mobility is supposed to be king in PoE2 and the warrior goes completely agains that vision.

Precisely my point, actually. Warrior/Mace is inherently built to be a big, slow hitting playstyle. Its problem is that it lacks the necessary tools to make it work in an end game of enemies that just get faster and harder hitting thus making it harder to reliably get off the slower attacks safely enough, let alone fight in melee range in general. I imagine very few people would genuinely invest poorly in defenses, and my post involves adding more hybrid nodes and more utility nodes in passive that people already would be getting, anyway. There's plenty to be argued that Warrior requires more investment than others in defense, too, at least in part due to how little return we get by comparison. As such, having more tools, options and variety of options means we'd have more wiggle room in how we build and invest. And for persistent buffs, I doubt many ES/EV builds are not using Ghost Shroud, for example, and for lack of anything else I've hardly seen a single warrior not running with Time of Need for that extra sustain and the cleanse. Some things already feel mandatory, so having more breathing room to decide what to take for what kind of build would be a huge boon to build diversity.

As for mobility, that has a lot to do with how anal retentive GGG is about Move Speed mods and how it works on boots. They seriously need to rework that (I have another thread just on that alone https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3691700), but Warrior/Mace is very much built with slower, weightier combat in mind. We simply lack tools to allow it to function as intended, and the fact that for the same amount of investment an INT class and run around with 20k ES AND chaos damage immunity, we're barely scraping past 3000 health and 10k armor that presents a far lower EHP, including for physical damage. We need Life buffed, we need access to damage reduction, and we need a reliable means to apply at least some Ele/Chaos damage to armor without needing a unique that then tanks our Life total. Tack on some support gems and persistents that play into slow attack speed and Wind Up skills that improve our tankiness to more consistently land our attacks safely, and we should be in a pretty solid spot.

For all we know, your ideas are already how Axes or Swords will work, which means Warrior/Mace would still need attention and still need its own identity that isn't piggybacking another weapon/class core design.

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DreadlordMephisto#4974 wrote:

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FruitLord#0833 wrote:

Combos don't really work in this game. You don't have time to do something like this due to the constant onslaught.

False information, combos are fine.

It depends on the situation. If you're doing something like a hideout map that decides to place 20 groups of enemies right near the entrance or else you are doing a map where enemies get faster movement and attacks, the enemy type is a fast one, and they happen to be minions of a hasted elite, combos probably aren't fine. Because unless you're evasion based, you'll get pushed around, stunned, or otherwise interfered with and barely be able to get off one skill, let alone two.

Of course, that's definitely the type of thing that falls into the "It's EA" category, the type of stuff they will hopefully adjust/fix.

But yeah, generally, they work okay, especially if the first skill has a defensive benefit, like, say, the slow on an oil grenade, before you ignite it, the active block that goes with the shield thumping in mace, or the wall provided by Ice Wall or the mace one.

Love everything in this thread; personal opinion for my play style it's the clear speed that lacks on mace vs every other class (played) entire screens pop and some off screen but you do stampede even mid 90s with a 1000dps mace, damage up on everything I can and you roll 2/3rds of the pack then have to finish it or stampede again - same with shield crush. I think cranking the damage on those for clear would make it so much more enjoyable.

I love the idea of momentum/combo building but right now an example of that is when I'm in groups with high dps'ers I literally pop solar orb, flamability, war cry twice then hit hammer of gods.. by the time the hammer falls the boss is well dead haha and on juiced up 17s etc with 5 people stampede does about 1/5th of the monsters hp per run.

I love the idea of more attack speed, momentum building, everything! I feel like with a big sword, axe, flail etc it'll feel similar to mace right now - depending on how they've done skills (I reckon the first thing you'll see with sword is a cleave, yawn) but yeah, love this thread, go the melee!

PS "combos wouldnt work" - Monks bread and butter, well anyone with a staff is 4 taps of the mouse, drop the tempest bell and repeat - thats a combo, they have a few others too. The real melee one might suck because they've hindered the attack speed so much - I think a quick "mace attack" is like what .5 or .6 secs and a rolling slam of 2.20 seconds INSANELY slow and small area'd even when you max the aoe out? I think my tempest flurry was like .18 or .2 probably quicker for a lot of people with better gear and stats - not sure what that is percent wise, 300% more (I'm bad at maths but you get the idea lmao)