My thoughts on the game so far (Titan level 88)

I am playing a titan that basically does the following:

depending on map tier infernal cry or not, leap slam, boneshatter. This has huge AOE and is great clear, but there are a couple problems with it.

The good

1: When you nail everything the seismic + leapslam -> boneshatter the closest prepped mod -> screen deletion feels awesome. I also like that it kind of does just enough damage that you are clearing white mobs that feel like they should die to that sort of thing but it's not so strong that you are just taking a magic eraser to the game and you still have to engage with rare mobs using perfect strike or HotG or something like that.

2: A lot of people complain about this but I actually like that the basic attack has utility. It feels reasonable that you would sometimes just smack something.

3: I was worried about WASD and melee feeling clunky. It does not. There is a lot of really cool stuff you can do strafe swinging and popping in and out of swing distance.

4: In the early game the fact that getting surrounded is dangerous feels good. It feels good for things like knockback to actually be useful.

5: If you don't do the optimal thing with your passive tree (see below), the rest of it feels pretty comparable. It's OK to take a little armor break, a little stun buildup, just your one favorite warcry node. It's also OK to take every armor break node on the tree. Everything makes your character stronger and it really is down to preference what you go for.
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The bad

1: Prepped for stun is an incredibly frustrating mechanic. You are always trying to keep your stun buildup high but not too high and if you drop down a tier or 2 in maps you can't clear because your leap slam just heavy stuns. If it's not high enough though you literally cannot even function in T15 maps. You essentially have to keep it in this perfect sweetspot that is incredibly difficult to maintain. Getting too much stun buildup on your mace bricks it. Not enough bricks it. Stun buildup is an incredibly frustrating mechanic, that becomes even more frustrating when you watch an LA deadeye literally drooling their way through maps.

2: This topic has been beat to death but I feel the need to mention it again. Armor (and health) are garbage. You have to go for them because they're all there is, but as many have said before you can have no passives supporting it and replace a 1600 armor chest piece with a cloak of flame and instantly upgrade your character's defenses by double. The big issue with this from my perspective is that armor and block do the same thing: increase QOL against trash mobs while having literally zero impact on bosses.

3: The opportunity cost related to giant's blood feels absurd and I kinda hate it. We've been playing for a few weeks and the warrior passive area feels very much "figured out. You're just weedling around with your last like 8 or 9 points whether you want to scale ignite or bleed or half of both.

4: The shoehorning of "mace is fire & physical" feels antithetical to POE's design philosophy. In principle I feel like it's fine to simplify the game a little bit and throw things into the game that are sort of intended to function in tandem. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like you guys saying "This is how you play mace." For a long time I tried to just keep everything physical hit damage and didn't go bleed or ignite. I got stuck in the back half of the campaign. Switching to perfect strike for single target and focusing on igniting (with zero passive tree investment) literally trivialized the challenging bosses. I don't want to feel forced to play the game a certain way. DoT is too good. Everything else is too bad.

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Maps:

I basically only have negative things to say about mapping with 1 exception. I actually like that you have to succeed the map to do the content in it.

1: Sustaining T15s feels like shit because there are so many mods you can roll that brick my character. In POE1 you just reroll these. In POE2 you're simply fucked and this might force you to drop down multiple tiers of map which is very very annoying.

2: Speaking of those mods, playing the build I am playing -max, stun threshold, low regen, turbo, more than 1 damage mod... All of these pretty much make a map bricked even if it's blue. Especially -max will literally double the damage I am taking most of the time.

Massively agree on prepped for stun. My best idea would be to provide a brief interval post heavy stun where you can use boneshatter (provided of course that you didn't use boneshatter to achieve that heavy stun in the first place).

On armour, I found my ranger had significantly more survivability than my warrior (until getting giants blood and block).

Regarding giant's blood and feeling pigeonholed, I think the short answer is that it's just our best defensive layer, and so there's no competition with it.

The shoehorning of mace as physical / fire isn't really unique to warrior, each weapon type / section of the tree sort of has its own elements. Ranger is cold / lightning, but predominantly lightning for example.