Warrior in POE 2 !?
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In the first sentence, I want to EMPHALIZE that I really enjoy playing the Patch of Exile series from GGG.
However, after several attempts to master the Warrior class in POE 2, I must share my observations and my gripes. A strong, powerful warrior, clad in heavy armor and usually armed with a two-handed hammer or axe, behaves irrationally during combat in this game. He jumps and rolls in the air like the most agile acrobat. Instead of slicing and crushing enemies, I'm forced to choose between skill-based, irritating long, vulnerable rolls or striking my shield and simulating a brass band to knock down attackers. Playing this character in the campaign is so irritating and unappealing that it takes away my desire to reach the endgame. I don't know if the developer of this game realizes this. This character's designer was likely someone who subconsciously avoids physical contact and a brutal approach to combat. With this post, I want to draw the game developers' attention to the issue of player perceptions still familiar to those who can decipher the acronyms of the RPG genre. Best regards. Last bumped on May 14, 2026, 5:43:21 PM
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Most people play 2h-warrior incorrectly.
The reason Giant's Blood is so popular is because it lets you get a shield that gives extra stats and base 26% block chance, more if you invest into block, and it's the only way for a "pure armour 2h mace warrior" to have an avoidance-based defensive layer. That avoidance layer is huge for survivability, and it also benefits from tree nodes that not only increase block chance, but provide life on block, adding to recovery. People playing 2h without using a shield and still cosplaying an "Armour based warrior" are unnecessarily forgoing avoidance layers, and stacking armour into diminishing returns. You're supposed to use evasion to fulfill that avoidance requirement, and regen/recoup to fulfill the recovery requirement. (ignoring unique item aspects) The only alternative to forgoing avoidance completely is to stack increased life % until 4500+ life along with reduced crit bonus damage, or go the AR/ES hybrid route to increase your max-hit and then also invest in some way to integrate ES recovery on top of your life recovery (like Zealots Oath). There are also ways to convert incoming damage to other types that are more easily mitigated, but that's advanced unique-enabled tech, and people who know about that probably already understand the basics. Both hybrid routes are less "frictional" (ie. easier) to reach suitable feel-good numbers, but I think going the hybrid armour-evasion route is usually more complementary to the way that people play 2h mace builds. Going that route would mean you'd probably have an AR chest piece and then some AR, EV, or AR/EV boots/gloves/Helmet and maybe some evasion on rings too. With good rolls and proper tree investment and support from skills like scavenged plating you could have substantial amount of armour along with enough evasion to mimic the avoidance you'd get from block chance % on a shield while also having decent life regeneration. Chance to evade can also be considered the chance to avoid a critical strike - which is what you get quite often when playing "pure armour" based, 0 evasion characters. There's lots of nodes that support this play style well in between the warrior/merc start sections, you just have to give up the "Pure Armour Warrior" role play concept to make 2h feel safe without using a shield and Giant's Blood. As a final note, you are allowed a weapon swap. You can have a 2h weapon, assign all of your skills to be used with the 2h, and keep a shield in your offhand just to benefit from having access to the "raise shield" skill, which blocks 100% of hits, as well as having a bash that can apply daze to make stunning easier and also interrupt enemy attacks/wind-ups. Who am I to say anything, I don't respect my time either. Last edited by karsey#2995 on May 14, 2026, 10:56:07 AM
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Some of offensive side problems would be fixed by removing additional animation time for slams and allowing skill speed to affect the entire skill animation. For defense - yes they push everyone into dipping into ES, hybrid ES/Armour only if it is buffed in 0.5.0 - currently it is terrible (no support for hybrid defense nodes in passive tree is one of the reason) and GGG said so themselves in Q&A. Also Giant's Blood affecting HP negatively is really punishing (while also adding insane attribute requirements). 51 % of >90lv Titans using Shield Wall kind of tells you everything unfortunately.
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I’ve played warrior every patch and yea, MAYBE starting out for newer players a shield might be the route
Personally I play without one now and just 2H, however you’ll need to keep your armor up as well as armour to ele at a pretty decent level. Stuff like regeneration helps to. Once you get access to consecrate staves having that as a swap is amazing as well. Mash the clean
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Also Warrior can shout endlessly and knockback everyone
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" Considering that only Rolling slam and leap slam have flat added attack time this suggestion wouldnt really have a large effect on mace skills as a whole. Besides, leap slam has this restriction to prevent players from using it as a movement skil to teleport around quickly. Rolling slam is also designed differently because of it, having large base %damage scaling aswell as 50% more damage to heavy stunned enemies. Removing the added attack time would also require changing the other parts I mentioned in a way that would destroy the skills identity as a slow but hard hitting boss destroyer. (Which is exactly what happened to sunder after they made this change in 0.3) |
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" I actually disagree with most of the advice and statements made here. Playing 2H mace without giants blood and investing fully into armour is completely viable (at least in SC) as I have done so myself in SSF without exceptional gear (or 4500+ life). Armour (with large amounts of "applies to elemental damage taken") protects you from smaller hits while mapping. If you pair this with life leech for recovery (+overleech from the tree or support gem) you dont need an avoidance layer to feel quite tanky. I also dont think theres such a thing as "stacking armour into diminishing returns". In fact the opposite is true, you need to stack armour in to 40k+ range before it really starts to shine. Consider that Giants blood comes with the downside of lowering your max hit due to lower life. I would also advice against going down the hybrid AR/EV route for now since the passives for that type on the tree are currently terrible and are supposed to see major improvements in 0.5. Youll have neither an appreciable amount of avoidance nor physical damage reduction. |
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Spoiler
" Perhaps it's more "correct" to say that focusing only on armour as a 2h Mace user is not the most efficient approach for covering your defensive bases, and that my opinion is from a hcssf perspective. Lots of things can "feel good" in sc when your death tolerance is a little bit less constrained, and I've no doubt you're probably a skilled player willing to roll the dice in a lot of risky scenarios and have come out the other side completely unscathed. My point was that stacking armour is inefficient in the context of how accessible and comparatively beneficial other supplemental layers of defense can be at much lower investment levels, not that stacking armour can't be done. And to be clear, I consider "stacking" to start being the case usually somewhere around 75k+. 40k armour isn't anywhere near the realm of diminishing returns. For a 2h Mace user it's pretty much the minimum starting point after buffs for armour to being considered tanky, as long as you've got other complementary layers. From there the term "diminishing" is dependent on many factors. AR to ele doesn't need to go past 75% outside of typical endgame juiced content if it's complemented by other balanced defensive stats and getting overleech or regen or recoup or whatever is great - you need to bring recovery into the equation somehow. But I'm sure as hell you aren't building a fully "pure" armour-based 2H-mace warrior that also has the ability to soak the maximum physical damage hits you'll see extremely often in juiced endgame content without also bringing super-rare enabling uniques/near-mirror-gear and/or specialized jewels into the mix potentially alongside even rarer enhancements like beneficial corruption outcomes or extra exceptional rune sockets.
Spoiler
There's just not enough efficiently-accessible real-estate in the defensive domain for a pure-AR, pure-life, zero-avoidance character to mitigate critical strike bonus damage AND damage map-mod enhanced high-rolls of non-crit physical-damage boss slams without those super-rare (ie. inefficient) options.
Supplementing in those very-accessible sources of avoidance (like 25% from block or evasion) lets you take a probabilistic approach to a total defensive solution because the marginal benefit received from those low-cost investments is high enough to enable lower investment requirements across all layers, and build a suite of reasonably effective and accessible defensive stats, including armour, life, attributes, etc. alongside other supporting choices that makes sense. Keeping that idea in mind, and without being afraid to grind a bit or divining some prefixes, you can somewhat reliably build towards a 2H mace character in a ssf environment that, at level 97 (when the grind starts being real) will be able to survive a non-crit (which with high crit bonus reduction is more dangerous than a crit) t16 Zekoa slam, before ailment considerations, on a map with: - 30% inc. dmg. & 2 other elemental damage mods, ~33% of the time. - Any combination of 3 elemental damage mods including -max and penetration alongside extra chaos puts you ~95% survival, a little higher or lower depending on which mods. A 4th (from corruption - which would happen to a t15, not 16) is about the same due to the reduced top-end range of the slam damage. Incase anyone is wondering, the 30% increased damage mod is the most dangerous map mod in the whole mod pool. And the probabilities are derived from the damage ranges that the monsters attacks can roll, eg. if a slam rolls between 1-100 damage, and you die at 76 and above, then you can be considered to survive 75% of the time. Surviving those mega-juiced hits 100% of the time (or even 50% of the time) brings the required defensive investment into the stratosphere - and I want to point out that it can be done, but only reliably within a trade league, and you're gonna likely be sacrificing some DPS for it because you'll be using some uniques in some slots instead in place of pieces with +lvls and other stats on it. The constraints around meeting the requirements for reliable 100% safety are just too rare and unlikely to appear in ssf, so that's why I say the "correct" approach needs to come from one of efficiency of defensive investments, to balance effectiveness with reasonable achievability. This is all from my experience of ripping countless level 80-95+ hcssf warriors doing pinnacles and running the kind of super-juiced endgame content sc-farmers complain about having 1 portal for.
Spoiler
Also, the downside to giants blood is primarily suffix-related opportunity costs. The reduced life bonus from strength is supposed to be mitigated by the fact that you already need almost more than double the amount of strength a character would typically have in the first place in order to wield a two hand that's also rolled well enough to significantly outclass a well-rolled 1h, on top of also being able to benefit from the stats that you can receive on the shield - like 8% PDR and potentially another 200+ flat life amount or reduced crit bonus damage from AR/EV shields, etc..
You will still usually have a higher life pool than a non-GB character. Obviously not if you're gonna dual wield another mace lol - in which case I'd actually suggest using Kaoms. It's more likely to make sense in this scenario to do something like "stack pure armour" because it's already a comparatively inefficient overall-approach where conventionally-efficient means of defensive resource allocations aren't necessarily efficient (or feasible) options anymore.
Spoiler
A lot of this is the basis for the "life is bad" arguments, because it does require a lot of simultaneous high to moderate investment within and across multiple layers of character aspects that can get messy and counterintuitive to understand without breaking out the spreadsheet to understand where the efficiency breakpoints are when it comes to things like "how much armour in relation to evasion is appropriate to aim for?".
When going the ES route, the most significantly large part of it is centered around "make blue number go up" which is easy for people to wrap their head around honestly, things are just a bit more straightforward on the ES damage calculation side. There's a lot less "if x, defend with y% of z" and other conditional modifiers that make a complete and effective defensive package more convoluted to build. Who am I to say anything, I don't respect my time either. Last edited by karsey#2995 on May 26, 2026, 5:48:24 PM
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" I mean, when melee skills aren't really melee skills in a game that's not really built for in your face melee, where melee weapons are melee in name only and the only generally viable melee skills are effectively projectile attacks...it's not a surprise the character animations miss the mark on looking like actual movements you'd see with these sorts of weapons. I read somewhere that they did like full motion capture etc. for all the weapon moves. You can kinda see it in some skills but not others. I'll admit, I didn't last long in my experimentations with maces, they just felt bad compared to everything else. |
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