Warrior Feedback , build variety ideas; Armour and Life proposals and more

Hi GGG and folks in the community,

I know there is a lot going on with the more pressing issues, and so its possible warriors once again not on top of the priority list, but I couldn't stop myself from writing up some ideas to improve the experience for warrior/melee players.


So let's kick it off with some issues with the new ascendancy, Smith of Kitava:

1. Heat of the Forge

The main issue with this notable is that Giant's blood exists, and its an issue all unto itself that I will address later. The crux of the matter is that players will 90% (or straight out 100%) of the time will always pick strength as the main attribute due to giant's blood existence. If they don't, they're missing out on Damage just to be competitive with other classes.

This means that this notable "Heat of the Forge" goes against what the majority of warriors know is the correct way to play. SO no one is using this.

Fix: Just make this node not require INT investment to use fire spells. Its that easy.

2. Living Weapon

I'm not sure this notable is suffering from the minion nerf in general but it is under performing tremendously. I usually use it with Maim and incision so it becomes a debuff bot but I doubt that was the intended purpose.

Fix: Just make it do your Main hand Damage, straight out.


Warrior Skills

Taking a look at poe ninja for warriors, we can see that the vast majority is playing the deepest tower + hammer of the gods (which is neat but a bit boring). SO not that different from 0.10. Which is a bummer honestly, because there is so much hidden potential in other skills.

I usually try to avoid Meta builds like the plague (I'm playing all the shield skills + magma barrier, and having shield wall break with totems for boss damage). I think its fun to play obscure off meta builds for the fun of the discovery, but I think some skills need a little fix to make them more viable.

Lets start with the most serious offenders on the skill tree:

1. Supercharged Slam:

Man I want to like this skill so much but it was nerfed to the ground and is useless right now. The risk is now worth the paltry damage.
It's supposed to compete with HotG but honestly even a mace strike has a better payoff right now in terms of time investment vs payoff.

Fix: You need to buff this tremendously in terms of damage per stage (later stages + damage) and my suggestion is to add Hyperarmour while doing this move.

2. Volcanic Fissure

This skill I think its the epitome of the "GGG-wants-combo-play-but-mobs-are-too-fast" problem. The skill does not benefit you immediately and when you finally set it up its mediocre at best.

Fix: I would make this a Meta skill only usable with Slams. So whenever you use a Slam skill it automatically creates the fissures. More Slams, more fissures, more damage. You are already playing a slow heavy hitting playstyle so it makes sense that you get more bang for your buck each time.

3. Earthquake

I think I played this skill once and never touched it again. Again I think this is related to the urgency of melee combat in which is imperative to make mobs back off as soon as possible. You do not have the luxury of time for setting up pure debuffs if you are playing pure melee.

Fix: Just like Volcanic Fissure, this should be a meta skill that rewards your slower playstyle by doing more things with each action.



Shield / Mace skills issue

Now let move on to a strange issue I have encountered while playing essentially with shields: Skills on the Mace are actually less varied than you'd expect, and this is a major issue curtailing build variety within the Mace spectrum.

Shield skills have a redundant counterpart for Mace on the main hand (it sounds strange but bear with me) , so basically if you want your damage to come from your main hand you have one skill but if you want it to come from your shield you have the equivalent skill for the shield:

Armour Breaker and Resonating Shield / Earthshatter and Shield wall / Stampede and Shield Charge

The issue with this is that there are 3 slots that could've been used for more original skills, more utility skills or just more awesome stuff with the mace. Likewise there is an opportunity here to make shield skills be their own thing and develop into a cool play style on their own.

Fix: I propose that You remove all shield skills from the Mace Skill gem tree, and create a separate shield tree (treat shields as an independent weapon), separating the two play styles, both thematically and purpose wise.

This would have a very interesting consequence. Since most classes can equip a shield they would have access to may more skills that could complement their play style.

Wish: While we are at it, I propose one of the substitute Mace skill be somewhat of a mega uppercut/golf swing that launches everything on its path towards the air. It'd be great to look at if followed by a Leap Slam.

Wish 2: On the proposed Shield tree we could have a skill that allow crossbow/bows players to use a shield while shooting at the same time - A Pavese skill. This is both historically accurate and could spice things up between the weapons.

Wish 3: Also on the proposed Shield tree, this time I suggest something for the spellcasters. A Reflect Magic Shield Skill. You pluck a magic shield on the ground and all magic that hits it gets reflected back. Maybe you could pluck several and reflect your own magic as a combo.

Special Mention: The two Warcries

I would merge the two existing ones and create a new warcry that gives hyper armour and increases all resistances for a few seconds, akin to Endure in Elden Ring.


Skill interactability with other weapon skills

I think the next big issue is how Mace relates with other weapon skills in general. Maces seem to be contained in this big silo and really don't play well with other skills except perhaps the exposure spells. Its super tight and honestly this is contrary on what the Vision for the game tried to sell me, months ago: It was supposed to be that a large % of skills would interact with one another but instead its super specific regarding which skills interact with each other.

So I propose some fixes to this:

1. The first one does not relate to Maces specifically, but to all weapons in general. GGG, if you want us to combo, get rid of weapon swapping delays. This is silly and counter productive: you are punishing the player base for doing exactly what you want us to do.

2. Also not specific to Maces: Make each point on the passive tree directly translate to 1 point to every weapon swap. Essentially let us make two passive tree routes for the 2 weapon swaps. If you really want us to make meaningful combos, increase build variety, and quell the issues with defenses, this is step number 1. In Points 1 and 2 I'm just echoing Off-Meta Michael because I fully agree with him on these.

3. All Slams could and should interact with ground effects. This could work offensively and defensively.
Imagine you have grenades on the ground, it'd be interesting if slams could set them off. Imagine lightning rods and stormblast bolts interacting with slams as well as ice objects that could explode and freeze, like frost wall/glacial bolt.

Also slams could and should evaporate those pesky blood/poison pools on the ground: the reason being that Maces have the roughest when dealing with these ground hazards, especially when surrounded by mobs, making them impossible to see.

4. All "earthbending" skills should inherently cause Impale and Bleeding. Let's think about it: I'm conjuring a sharp jagged stone spike to erupt in the vicinity of your buttocks.... I'm talking Earthshatter, Earthquake and Shield wall here. These all deserve a buff and thematically I this is the way to do it. Besides the fact that Bleed and Impale could help bridge to other weapon Skills.


On Armour and Life

Here's my take on how Armour should work, and this comes in part from observing Armour in real life:

1. Armour should not only mitigate damage in general it also straightout prevent smaller hits from even being felt. So the bigger the armour value the bigger the "no damage threshold" should be. This is contrary to what is now: you get mitigated damage by any hit and the bigger the hit, the less it mitigates.

2. Armour should defend against non-physical damage. In a world of Magic, the Armour/weapons race should still exist, meaning that lore wise it would make no sense for anything to be called Armour if it didn't defend against a common threat like Magic (blacksmiths and armorers would be out of business very quick!). Especially the majority of these Armour pieces already have affixes that cannot be considered anything but pure magic.

3. Now HERE is how you balance it: The amount of Armour also translates to X amount of Armour integrity points and THESE points go down every time you get hit by big hits, but they recover if you're not constantly getting hit -- Imagine having a stun bar but for Armour.

The big hits are still mitigated in the same % as a medium hit but your Armour pays an extra price. Once they reach your maximum integrity threshold, your Armour has a malfunction and needs repair. While your Armour is in this state you get 100% full force hits.

The implication here is that Armour WILL save you from one shots but It's not going to survive them a second or a third time. But as long as you are moderately cautious and still avoid most big hits (one shots) you should be able to survive hordes without needing a shield.

Now there is an equal opportunity here for Uniques/affixes with this proposed mechanic:

1. Heroic Resolve: Imagine that when Armour is destroyed you get a buff that allows a few seconds of max rage, hyper armour, damage buffs and movement speed buffs.

2. Reactive armour: Imagine that when Armour gets destroyed it also explodes outwards just like modern tank reactive armour.

How do you get your armour back online? I have 2 proposals:

1. Use the the against the anvil animation and have that represent a quick fix to armour on the battlefield -- but you can only get it to 50% of what it was before the malfunction

2. You have to use currency (armour scraps) to fully get it back to 100%.


Now let's talk about the counterpart to Armour: Life. And how Giant's blood is affecting this conversation.

Playing with Maces you always have to answer the same question: Are you taking Giant's Blood or not? In 99% of cases it is so imperative that you get better damage that the answer is always yes.

And so everyone is forced to route for the Polymathy notable and fill every possible socket and affix in their gear with strength giving runes/affixes.

Meaning in most common cases you have around 500-600 strength as a common base for you to use Giant's blood. This gives you around 3000-4000 HP. While this is more than enough for mapping, it means nothing when you start encountering real threats and big one hitters.

As a comparison, when you get to the stage that you get 500 strength, energy shield users have 12000+ effective health pools, compared to your paltry 3k health pool.

Here's the problem with this: You shouldn't balance life around Giant's Blood. What happens if you just want to try something else out? You'll be stuck with a meager 1.5k Life!

Problem #1: Giant's Blood Strength strength requirements are too high! It makes no sense to nerf all attribute stacking builds and leave the most problematic one intact.

Fix: Halve it. Let players use the remainder points for defense or something else and balance Life around a less excessive use of strength nodes.

Now on to to the other general Life issues:

Problem #2: Strength nodes don't give enough life to be competitive with other forms of defense.

Fix: Add 50% more life per node so every player has a healthy 3k to 6k Health pool they can play around with.

Problem #3: Life Regen has an issue of being flat % wise. This means that at the lower end of the Life spectrum life Regen is too slow to contribute to effective health.

Fix: Make a life Regen acceleration an horizontal asymptote function so that diminished returns are built in. So that the more time is allowed for Regen to happen (not getting hit) the more it accelerates the regeneration.

Additional Fix: You could also create a node called "Adrenaline Junkie" that has the above effect but it kicks in when you are in low life or you are dealing damage.

Problem #4: There is no way to increase Life on the passive tree % wise.

Fix: This one is pretty easy, just put %HP passive nodes on the tree.

So Thank you for reading my feedback ideas and hope this serves to help out on the balancing issues!