Early Campaign Warrior Leveling/League Starting Perspective

This is intended to be a constructive perspective of the experience I have personally had attempting to practice leveling the Warrior class leading up to the release of 0.5. For me, this is more cathartic than anything. I felt disappointed in my testing, and see why now there are not many content creators that are pushing out content for this class.

I will attempt to structure this as best I can in the format below:

- Frame of reference for me as a player
- What I do not see as issues
- The leveling experience in a vacuum without any tricks
- The leveling experience in a vacuum with tricks
- Comparison to leveling experience with other POE2 classes
- Comparison to leveling experience with analog POE 1 classes (Trigger warning)
- Final thoughts

Frame of Reference - Who is the player?

I am a long-time hardcore casual POE player and ARPG enjoyer. I should preface the rest of this post in this context, yes, I come from POE 1. I am not here to make any arguments for whether POE 2 is more or less like the original game. I mention this as it is a fact that I have played the original game for many years, and it indeed colors a lot of my initial reactions to POE 2. With that said, I have attempted to suspend my knee-jerk reactions to the game, how it plays, the pacing, ect. I am aware that GGG has a different vision for POE 2, and I am onboard with trying not to let my love for how the original game plays impact my enjoyment of POE 2. Let's try to move past this, as I will reference POE (1) as we move into later sections, as I do feel it is relevant to this thread.

With the above out of the way, to add to this section, I primarily lean towards caster and bow builds. I will branch out when something looks fun and usually enjoy myself. Warrior-type classes, I tend not to pick immediately, as they are usually more fun after the first character is up and running for me, so I can switch back and forth. I am a type of player who will go deep into games, systems, strategies, and optimization. I find it enjoyable. Lastly, I am now more of a casual player than I used to be. Over the course of the last week, I have been testing the leveling process of the Warrior class on several characters. I would get them to the end of Act 1, sometimes Act 2, and switch up the progression of the character to just see what felt good to level. I would then delete the character and go again. I attempted to only use what would land in my inventory or items you could buy from a vendor during the session to simulate league start as best as possible.

The above section is simply to inform you of where I come from as I proceed further. You may want to point out things like, "play the class this way", "maybe the class isn't your thing", or "the current state is fine". I will cover some of the rebuttals as we continue, but if you disagree, that is perfectly fine. I am curious what this will stir up in responses.

What isn't an issue with the class

This thread will be exclusively covering the experience of leveling Warrior through Act 1, roughly to the end of Act 2. Past that point, you start to unlock skills that allow your to build to come online, and it feels better to play the class. The immediate rebuttal I can consider here is, "Warrior is just a slow start". Sure, maybe it is, but why? I don't necessarily have an answer to the question, but I feel like if it feels bad to play from the start, then why would anyone play it other than for the Souls-like prestige of leveling the hard class to play? We can go back and forth on this, but for this thread, I am writing under the assumption that it shouldn't feel bad to level a class in Act 1 or 2.

So, what isn't an issue with the class? I will only cover what is in the game. I can only imagine and guess what the experience would be like with Axes, Swords, or flails. So, since they aren't released, we will stick to maces. Overall, the damage of the class is fine. If you get a good mace, you will be okay for damage. It is on par with other classes, and in some cases, you will find yourself enjoying some of the pops you can get from packs of mobs with Boneshatter. Gearing seems fine. The skill tree is fine and is laid out with passives that are good for the early start. The class itself hits like a truck in the way you would expect.

What I feel that GGG is going for here is a class that, while slower, hits hard with slams and interesting break/combo mechanics. I don't have an issue with this, as I can see the vision for the class. Late game, the class seems to have plenty of options and does not look to struggle with power or survivability (ES is stronger at the moment, yes).

The leveling experience in a vacuum without any tricks

So what do I mean by leveling in a vacuum without any tricks? I mean, without considering any other classes in the game, how is the experience of playing early game Warrior without any comparison? Specifically, if it were the only class in the game, how would I feel. To clarify tricks, I mean notable information that makes the experience better for the player, such as weapon bases, stats to look for, functional tricks with skills, ect. I went in knowing some tricks about the classes' skills and general knowledge around gearing and stat attributes to watch for. I went through the first character without really trying to do anything other than just play it out and try it as if I didn't know anything about the class.

The experience was awful. The fact is, in most other classes, you can get by if you just read the skill gem. The Warrior class is not friendly in this regard. The default attack of the mace is fine and what I would call an active action skill. Meaning, when you click the button, it does the thing. It does exactly what it is supposed to do. Rolling slam does exactly what it says it will, but the first time you use it, I felt like I had aged a decade before the wind-up finished on the first swing. It was painfully slow. To add to that, you have the follow-up slam, which feels like you lived a second lifetime before you finish the full animation. Keep in mind, this section is not using the animation cancel trick. I tried to play this first character as if I were a completely new player. I knew I could animation cancel and was intentionally not doing this.

Getting your next skill it only makes sense when you look at what you have already to get Boneshatter. I didn't really feel like it was a choice to pick anything else. Boneshatter again does exactly what it is supposed to do. The issue I have is that its power comes from having enemies within stun range. Otherwise, the skill is just a wet noodle. That is perfectly fine as I know that GGG is really trying to go for combo-style play in POE 2. What feels awful is trying to use rolling slam right from the start. I had the "misconception" that the default attack was like POE 1 where it was just there to be there. Not that it was intended to be a main skill. Okay, I accepted that and found that the wind-up time for a rolling slam was too long, and just used the default attack of the mace. It was fine, I guess. It works, it is powerful, and it serves the purpose. Where I will differentiate the Mace Strike from things like Rolling slam is referring to rolling slam as a time-delayed skill for clarity. When you look at the skills available, the only non-time-delayed skill is Boneshatter, and it is useless without one of the time-delayed skills. Because the wind-up to an attack takes longer than a particle of light to travel from the center of our universe to my eye, I found that I was never able to avoid getting swarmed. The time-delayed skill duration and frankly, the complete lack of alternative and interesting active skills felt limiting and bad. For the moment, we will leave it there. Anything else experienced during this play-through was a rehash of the above.


The leveling experience in a vacuum with tricks

So again, vacuum means I am still not comparing to other classes, and tricks will be implemented. The second character, I started animation cancelling, I started to frame my encounters with mobs, I went slower (the original point of the practice was to blast campaign for endgame), and didn't move to rolling slam until late act 1, nearly act 2. Basically, it was mace strike and boneshatter with the occasional rolling slam on a stunned enemy. This still felt terrible to play. I found that once I got okay with the mechanics, my character itself just felt weak. Not attack weak, weak to taking any kind of damage. For a character class that I feel is supposed to be intended as natively tanky, I would get swarmed, stunned, and die way too often. I would change my gear around, more life, more resist, more stun protection, more this, more that. Because of the melee nature, I would either just get swarmed with slow attacks that prevented me from responding or get ranged by mobs. It doesn't feel good. The mobs move so much faster than you can attack that it feels like your response time window is nonexistent. I got to the point where I would take aggro on a pack, kite them into a choke, and then make my stand. I am not saying that isn't a viable or maybe intended strategy, but I never got the feeling like I could just tank a mob long enough to wipe them. Yes, as I leveled it got a little easier, but it always felt bad. I did the starting area mace trick from Angormus to get dual mace at the start. I tested two-handed, two one-handed, one mace and a shield, and different shield types. Nothing felt good. I found I could make it work, and you can absolutely make it work. It just doesn't feel good to play. I probably went through about 5 characters just doing different passive tree versions to see if that made a difference. Nope. By the end, I started to spec my character into caster gear and skills because that at least felt okay to play. As I played more, I just felt that the time-delayed skill usage was the primary driver behind my lack of enthusiasm for the class. To add, the weak feeling of the character. I am not sure if that is due to the way that armor is mitigating damage in the current version, lack of HP regen early on (in meaningful quantities), alternative damage mitigation options (damage taken as X), or generally being able to get decent HP increases from varied sources in meaningful quantities. The class just didn't feel good.

Comparison to leveling experience with other POE2 classes

After going through, I don't know how many Warrior starts I finally did a run as a sorceress. I hadn't played the class, but I know casters. I had no specific build, no plan for the passive tree, no specifics of any kind. I just went in and did a run and made decisions as I went. I would say that the gearing was on par with the Warrior. To be honest, I spent some of my endgame currency on a few of the Warrior runs just to see how it felt. I stuck to what dropped on the ground or what was available at a vendor. I picked from the skills list, picked passives as I saw appropriate, and geared what I could as I could. What I felt was way different. Damage was fine between the two classes, but the feeling of getting swarmed without being able to respond did not exist with this class. I felt like I could immediately do something to fix the situation I put myself in. When fighting bosses, I was just as nuts to butts with the boss on the Sorc as I was with the Warrior. I wasn't ranging the boss out. I actually felt like I face tanked more with the Sorc than I did with the Warrior, which is a wild thing for me to even be saying. I was able to move twice as fast, not literally but in the sense of progressing quest lines, as the Warrior. I did this again on another Sorc character. Random build that was different than the last. I even made a rule that I could only put on boots, a weapon, and rings. It still felt better than the Warrior. That is insane to me. I did an initial run on other classes and had a similar experience. Ultimately, this showed me that the experience of Warrior was not a git gud scenario on the whole. It seemed more systemic than that.

Comparison to leveling experience with analog POE 1 classes (Trigger warning)

Before you start in, I am aware that POE 2 is not POE 1. I am not drawing parallels here as a way of insisting that GGG should make one game more like the other. This is purely comparative, as POE 1 has similar classes, such as the Marauder, to do a comparison against. In POE 1, the number of time-delayed skills seems much smaller than POE 2. With that said, this could absolutely be due to age and design choice differences in how the skills were implemented. I will not be talking about crossover skills that are typically used on other classes. I will not mention skills like spectral throw that can't be in the second game yet, as we do not have the weapon bases for it. For similarities, we have skills like glacial hammer, smite, heavy strike, ground slam, and I could go on. None of these skills feel anywhere near as slow, clunky, or unfun to play as the main starting skills for maces in POE 2.

I get the impression that the reason for this is that the current state of skills is entirely based on either building up stun or breaking stun. It doesn't seem like there is the concept of just having a fun strike or AOE strike skill that isn't necessarily classified as a slam or stun builder in POE 2. This is extremely limiting in my opinion. The initial starting skills in tiers 1 and 2 are lackluster in comparison to the starting skills in POE 1. Again, remember we are just focusing on the first couple of skill tiers here primarily. I am fully aware that once you hit mid to end act 2 or the beginning of act 3, you start to unlock the fun skills. This also adds to my point, where in the early game, you are basically locked into a single play style. You cannot really deviate in any way that feels like you have real agency over the character progression to the late game state of your skill setup. Early on, your choice is Mace Strike, boneshatter, rolling slam. Maybe you decide to use the totem. Throw in a warcry. That's the entire game until you reach your fun skills. From level 1 - 10ish, I felt like there wasn't a choice I could make now that I would ultimately keep later into the game. I would basically be replacing most of my skill kit when other skills were available. I know about perfect strike. I am not going to mention it because you get it so late into your Act 1 progression that it isn't a starting skill to me.

Going back to the POE 1 skills, the feel of play is much different. All of the strike skills mentioned for the most part, feel good to play. Whether they are powerful or viable is debatable, but they don't take a feature-length film run time to finally hit something. Let's take shield skills. We have 2 early game skills in POE 2. Raise Shield and Shield Charge. Raise shield is just boring. It does its job. I don't care for it. Shield charge, I kind of wish they hadn't added to the game, so I wouldn't have been disappointed in it. I understand that GGG doesn't want POE 2 to have the same speed of play as POE 1, but good lord, it felt clunky early. Shield charging in POE 1 is so satisfying that non-melee builds will use it just because it was an awesome skill. That is pretty much it until you hit mid to late game. Why not have something similar to Shield Crush from POE 1. You swipe the air with your shield, releasing three overlapping AOE zones of damage. If you wanted to POE 2ify it, then you could make it one and have it do stun buildup at a lowered damage rating than POE 1. Cool, you have a fun shield-based skill that synergizes with the combo play style GGG wants, provides some mid-distance AOE damage options, and allows for the usage of a shield and mace separately from each other, where the stats on each contribute to a greater whole. Instead, you have to wait until you get shield wall, which just looks like it is a snooze fest in the late game, with how slow it plays. Alternatively, you go with no shield and just do double single-handed maces or a two-handed mace for more damage. I tried variations of shield, and no shield and no combo really felt that much better than the last. I feel that drawing comparisons from POE 1 can be helpful, as it has many fun melee skills that could be altered to fit the vision of the POE 2 play style. Alternatively, maybe focusing too heavily on combo play and not a synergistic type of play is where the problem is. Almost all melee builds seem to have a skill rotation. Meaning that you may have a main skill, but that is the skill you use last in your rotation, as it doesn't have the same impact unless you use other skills beforehand. I am not suggesting that a 1-button skill is the way to go. I feel like the current state is completely combo-dependent, where you can't use a single skill to just do white and magic mob clearing versus rare mobs or bosses, where combos seem to be more appropriate. If you have only played POE 2 and want to experience what I am referring to, just play POE long enough to get to the climb zone in act 1. You will have a variety of fun skills to play with at your disposal. Maybe that is the point I am making in this section. For the experience I got, I feel a large part of the negative I found was because I had three skills to use, which were not fun to play with. The other part was feeling like a glass cannon.

Final thoughts

This section will be fairly brief. I have my general thoughts above, but here we will condense.

The class is fine on the power scaling. It has skills later in the game that absolutely make it viable mid to late campaign. The early game experience from act 1 to some time in act 2 is atrociously bad. The class skills seemed to have been designed with a limited focus on combo play style that interacts exclusively with building stun and breaking stun. The skill play speed for most everything except for Mace Strike is slower than the movement speed or action speed of mobs. Leading to frustrating situations of being swarmed without the feeling of being able to react to the situation. Leading to a player almost exclusively setting up mob encounters proactively to avoid situations where they may get swarmed. For some reason, the class feels like regular printer paper in the wind. I feel it is not an unfounded assumption to make that the class should have some native tank to it. I did not get this feeling. I felt more tanky on other classes where I intentionally undergeared my character to test my perception. I did not find that the early starting skills were fun, engaging, or felt good to play. You can absolutely make it work. I just don't want to when I can have more fun with another class.

I want to conclude that the perspective I offer above is my experience and general impression of what it feels like to league start this class. I want to play in class and enjoy myself. I see builds for it that look like they might be a lot of fun. I hope that this class gets some attention, as I cannot imagine that the way I approached my testing of the class would differ from a new player or regular player who is starting Warrior for the first time. If I were to be asked, "should I play Warrior?" I would confidently say, not as a first character. Maybe a second or third character. While I will not be playing this class on league start for 0.5 I hope those who will enjoy themselves. I do not expect that this class will see many notable changes when we receive the patch notes in a few weeks. If it does, maybe I will try it again. For the moment, this is going to be a class that I look to revisit at the end of the league, as I see myself enjoying the game much more, experimenting with one of the new ascendencies. I may go with a Jungroan or Ziz build. Who knows. What I do know, Warrior is no longer on the roster for league start in 0.5 for me, but I hope that changes as we see more releases to the game.

GLHF Exiles

Didnt read the entire thing since I just got home from work and am tired but the parts I did I agree with. Very well done.

The base of the problem is it is way too damn slow and on top of that you have the disadvantage of playing melee and on top of that there are no life options and on top of that you have a movement speed penalty because of armor... The entire thing is rigged against melee in this game.

Its either ES CoC/CoA or blood magic or LA.... There really are no other options anymore.

Side note, going druid wolf form early is also the exact same problem I felt last league. By late game is was pretty good and overall I gave it a 7/10 but early game was 1/10 just like warrior. Sad part is, tanky melee characters are my favorite to play and the refuse to release melee weapons and are against life characters in general it seems.