Potential Idea for Mace Fix/Buff

TL;DR: Add a Spirit/Support gem or Mace skill line that simply applies a Guard effect while in a Mace attack animation. Even better if said Guard is modified by Armour.



First of all, this idea was partially spurred from a reddit comment I saw after the stream this morning, but it builds on a couple other things I already had in mind.

So to give my perspective, I haven't played a ARPG before, but have played other action games in the style of souls/souls-like and always use heavy weapons in those games.
In PoE2 I played Warrior with Maces first, and it was particularly frustrating to play with Giant's Blood because of basically all the skills that don't have a flat time addition to the animations having a 30% speed penalty for using 2 weapons. I almost didn't make it through Act 3 Cruel because of how much damage things were doing at that point. I couldn't clear Tier 1 maps at all, and had to completely respec my character and spend more currency than I had to get gear that was good enough to carry me.

Now building off of that, in those other games they have the same problem with heavy attacks. Now for the most part you don't really have to worry about being 1-shot during an attack animation, but the problem is that any attack, even small ones, can stun you.
The solution those games use? Hyper armour. Basically making it much harder for the player's attack to be interrupted the bigger the weapon is. This balances out so large attacks will still interrupt you, but you're not sitting there ripping your hair out over some lvl 1 trash mob griefing you while you can't do anything.

Now, in PoE2, the issue is obviously outright dying from high enemy damage before you attack can go off (Which I do understand is only the case with the current enemy power balance and will likely change in the future).
Now here comes the solution, it can come in the form of a feature all mace skills have, a spirit gem, or just a support gem.

The solution: Add a form of Guard based on your armour that applies to you during attack animations. It can either be a flat value modified by your armour (eg: 1000 × 50% armour; 1000 ×(1+50%); etc), or just a flat amount scaling with skill level, or even just the armour value itself.
This allows players to actually take a hit while using mace skills (Because let's face it, if you use a mace skill you are gonna get hit).

I for one love big heavy hitting attacks with colossal weapons. Nothing is more satisfying than a massive slow attack landing a chunking out a noticable amount from a boss healthbar. I don't want a blanket attack speed increase to Maces to be the solution, cause then it loses it's charm of the slow heavy hitting attacks, and likely won't ever be able to feel like it hits hard due to balancing.
And the only thing holding Maces back from feeling this way and good in this game is that you often die while using them, and that level 1 skills like Spark can do infinitely more damage than Mace weapons, especially when you consider how often a mace attack has to be cancelled just to delay death a little.


I really hope someone from GGG sees this, but on the more likely situation where they don't, I'd like to say thanks to everyone else who took the time to read this.