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When the classes of Wraeclast reconvened for an initial balance pass in Path of Exile 2, Warrior certainly drew the shortest end of the stick. Among my 250 hours in the game, I spent the first 40 with the Warrior. Without knowing much about the game on day one, this brute-coded hammercore Strength class seemed the right fit for a simple-minded player such as myself.
As I would slowly realize in due course, Warrior is a tough lesson learned the hard way. Not only is it the fateful wrong turn for a Path of Exile 2 beginner, it is the unfortunate pincushion beaten around by the departures the game makes from the first while still holding on to its tenets of balance.
Here's how Path of Exile 2 punishes you for picking Warrior
Warrior is by far the purest follow-through in terms of class migration from the first game into the second. On day one of Early Access, Warrior was one of two melee classes available in the game, the other one being Monk, a DEX-INT hybrid.
Trending
Out of the two, Warrior advertises the simplest playstyle: pop an occasional Totem, chug the occasional Life Flask, and swing your hammer till the target is decimated.
In practice, Warrior gets eviscerated in the crossfire of transitioning an Exile-like into a slow-paced Souls-like design. Until the Endgame, at any rate.
Warrior, ironically, presents the purest form of Path of Exile 2 zoning into Dark Souls territory. It's true that all classes have to confront the newly roided-up enemy design, the body blocks, the lack of mobility outside of rolling, and the emphasis on bespoke boss attack patterns. However, Warrior falls face-first into the other side of that coin. To match the enemy attack telegraphing, your own Skill Gem animations are slow.
Slow and big hits make thematical sense for being Mace Skills, but there are a lot of problems on the execution end. Rolling Slam is the first bread-and-butter move presented to you by Path of Exile 2.
The label of this Rolling Slam Skill presents a rather innovative gimmick — the first slam builds up Stun; the second one deals heavy damage. The problem? A lot of enemies are agile enough that you cannot reliably land the second slam before you get hit. Furthermore, enemies can push you around during the animation, further disrupting your cunning plans (quite out of character for a Warrior to be devising cunning plans, but needs must).
This sluggish animation is a peril present through many of Warrior's Skills. It's supposed to be the slowest melee class, and the in-betweeners like Duelist or Druid haven't made it into the game yet. The problem is that the current iteration of Warrior is too slow for the enemy pacing paradigm Path of Exile 2 sets forth, and that cannot be solved by slapping Martial Tempo on your favourite Skill (literally, it does not speed it up enough).
Combat is only (the better) half of the battle
To make matters worse, Warrior is a pure-Life class, and his neighboring nodes on the Passive Skill tree pump armor and Physical damage mitigation. Armor is under tuned in Path of Exile 2 at the moment, with the meta far favoring Energy Shield.
You can find a more detailed explanation on our Path of Exile 2 Defense guide, but the gist is that Armor does not make your Life pool durable against high-damage hits, a problem that Evasion and Energy Shield do not face.
Energy Shield can be easily stacked much higher than Life, granting you a better EHP pool against big physical hits and all non-physical hits than investing in Life and Armor. This is why Mind over Matter spinny-dress mages are effectively tankier than the physical Shield-brandishing Warrior with the most powerful Armor gear trading currencies can buy.
Speaking of getting gear from trade, let's talk about the non-trade League (Solo Self-Found, SSF in short). Warrior is a martial class, meaning he suffers from the martial class economic crisis. Increasing Skill Gem level does precious little, you'll need to constantly get better Maces (or Greathammer if you're a true madman) to upscale your damage.
In the first game, item crafting recipes were a solution for the SSF Marauder down on his luck. Combine a Greatclub with a Magic Rustic Sash and a Whetstone, and you get a guaranteed Physical damage affix of up to 64% increment.
In Path of Exile 2, the item-crafting choice for the Warrior trying to get more damage is down to getting 40% Physical Damage from Iron Runes if you're using a two-hander and 20% if you're using a one-handed Mace.
GGG buffed the amount of crafting currencies that drop in the campaign with a few pre-holiday patches. Yet, it's not nearly enough to cover the blindspot of an SSF martial class fully at the mercy of crafting roll RNG. When we call it 'Dark Souls' to play SSF Warrior in the current state of Path of Exile 2, we use it not only as a cliche of mechanical difficulty but as a metaphor for how hard the game stiffs you compared to other classes.
Admittedly, the melee brawlers in Path of Exile 2 have some new tools to play with. Dodge rolls are so-so based on your luck, but blocking is certainly a robust tool to shrug off a lot of punishment. Warrior is a fancy sloth: all of your moves seem to have a sluggish wind-up, but you can certainly pull off some cool gimmicks and fun combos from charge builds to AoE-stacking.
Furthermore, Warriors can very much be viable in the pinnacle content of the game. But to get there, you'll have to circumnavigate problems that other classes don't have to juggle with that much. This makes it seem like a baseline roadblock native to your class — a design problem Path of Exile 2 needs to solve eventually.
