Detailed breakdown of every Mace skill and why people think it's bad

Summary of the Issues:

Rare mobs have too many "automatic" AOE spell damage mechanics and on-death effect.
These mechanics are unblockable, capable of one-shotting melee characters with 3500-4500 HP, and force melee players to keep dodging and waiting for openings, while other characters do not face the same restrictions. Quarterstaff users, for example, can attack while moving, making mace players feel especially punished.

Additionally, maces have the slowest and clunkiest attack speed in the entire game, and their total attack time cannot be reduced, resulting in a double penalty for mace users.

The passive skill tree surrounding the Warrior and Mercenary archetypes lacks proper HP, armor, and damage reduction nodes. This makes it difficult for mace players to reasonably engage in high-risk melee combat.


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Detail of every mace skills:



1.Earthquake: F

The aftershock duration is too long, the slow effect is too weak, and interacting with other skills is troublesome and yields very low benefits.

It requires massive investment in passives and support gems to have basic effectiveness. However, when you finally manage to reduce the aftershock duration to a point where you can fight normally, using a splash mace for basic attacks can outperform Earthquake in terms of damage, area, and mobility, without requiring any investment and without spending currency to increase socket numbers.

I believe the current design of Earthquake is meant to make Jagged Ground last for a long time, rather than shortening the duration like in PoE1. However, the help it provides in combat is very low, and given the extremely slow attack speed, spending 1.5 seconds on a completely ineffective support skill is worse than quickly using your highest damage skill to kill monsters. Don’t forget that the Warrior has poor survivability.

F for its overall bad experience, it shouldn't be placed on lvl 1.



2.Rolling Slam: D-

Poor targeting, slow speed, incomplete functionality, it is the only skill in Mace that has a daze effect, and you wouldn’t want to keep using it during boss fights. It deals more damage when the enemy is heavy stunned, but due to its slow speed and difficulty in targeting, you'll end up discarding it when you have Sunder, and discarding sunder when you have HoG.

I think most warrior players forced to use it for the first boss fight on the beach would have the same thought: this is a terrible experience, what a terrible skill.

D-, because at least it can be used for Mercenary totem, which slightly raises its rating, and for Mercenary, it’s more useful than the Sunder totem.




3.Boneshatter: C+

First of all, it can't interact with Titans that have Crushing Impacts, which is really frustrating. The only class that's themed around stun can't use a skill that relies on stun as its core interaction mechanism, even though it's one of the most useful skills in the entire campaign, second only to basic attack and HoG. My friends and I, who all chose Titan, had the frustrating experience of selecting Crushing Impacts in Act 2 and then being unable to use Boneshatter. We had to stay in place farming gold to refund passives, which was a very frustrating and unpleasant experience.

This is something that doesn’t even require hands-on play; just reading the Ascendancy passives and skill descriptions reveals this massive oversight. It’s hard to convince me that the designers are actually playing this game.

By the mapping stage, Boneshatter faces another disaster: if your weapon is too good, you might stun the monster with one hit, and if your weapon is too weak, the first hit might not trigger Boneshatter, while the second hit could stun the monster. This means that Boneshatter’s damage must constantly be adjusted according to the monster's HP, which is very unpleasant.

If players don’t want to use the boring basic attack, Boneshatter is almost the only dignified and reasonably fast option, but its design is full of flaws, and in the end, people will still choose the basic attack because it clearly performs better.

C+, because I still have some expectations for this skill gem. The real rating might be D- or F.



4.Armour breaker F-
Low damage, slow, feel no different after using it.
Armour is terrible at the moment, so Armour Breaker is terrible. Player armour is essentially useless in the face of large damage, and vice versa. Even as a pure physical character, when encountering maps with monsters that have extra armour, you don’t feel the difference at all. Therefore, it’s completely reasonable that this skill performs very poorly. On top of that, its damage and speed make it several times less worth using. If someone gave me a level 20, 20 quality, 5-socket Armour Breaker gem, I would still use a 3-socket basic attack because it’s that bad. If this skill gem were left empty with “coming soon” written on it, I would actually be happier because that would mean the devs know it’s so bad it shouldn’t even be released to players, but that hasn’t happened.

This skill is fundamentally broken both in design and mechanics, an absolute F-. Even if armour became 200% more useful, I would still feel that it’s not worth using in 99% of cases.



5.shockwave totem A

This is a totem skill that was accidentally placed in the mace category. Its strengths have nothing to do with mace, and the poor performance of mace doesn’t affect its effectiveness, so it gets an A.

If the designers want to say that it actually interacts with other mace skills, then this little plan is an F.



6.Infernal Cry B

Players don't have a stable source of endurance charges, so its multiple effects were never considered in the plan. In fact, when players use basic attack and stampede to handle the vast majority of monsters, and only use HoG for stronger monsters, Infernal Cry only needs to provide one Empower. For players with sufficient damage, Infernal Cry is much more useful than Seismic Cry because it can take effect the moment the boss appears. Once the boss is oneshotted, the rest of the interactions become useless.

It's boring, but it faithfully fulfills its purpose, so B.



7.shield charge D

It's one of the few usable mobility skills, but it's very clunky. There's a significant pause before and after the dash. I'd rather have a longer cooldown but smoother movement, rather than seeing my character hesitate for a long time . The pause at the end can sometimes put the player in danger. Since it no longer deals significant damage, can we at least make it less unpleasant to use?

D, because it feels awful to use, but people are forced to use it, otherwise, they'd spend even more time in the map.



8.Perfect strike B

The mechanic of timing attacks is very interesting, but players are often obscured by monster effects. As mentioned above, the warrior lacks effective defense, so in T15+ maps, players often can't even perform properly.

The most frustrating issue is the aiming problem. Since GGG introduced the strike tag in 3.7, they haven't really fixed the aiming issues with strikes. Every time I miss with this skill, I have about a 10% chance of thinking my technique was bad, 30% of the time I think, "What? I'm sure I should have hit," and the remaining 60% is frustration, blaming myself for choosing such a bad skill.

B is because this is one of the relatively more interestingly designed skills among all the mace skills, but it is currently not practical.



9.Molten Blast F-

Low damage, slow speed, and poor synergy with the warrior's passives—these terrible stats are all fine, but the issue is that the casting process requires the character to take an uninterruptible step forward, turning it into a suicidal attack. Last time, when I tried to experience all skills during the campaign, I couldn't even kill the first group of monsters and was forced to log out to avoid dying from its stupid animation module. All the feedback reflecting the negative experience of this skill is saying the same thing: it's awful.


F- because ratings typically don't go lower than F. If there was a score lower than F-, I'd give it an even worse rating.



10.Resonating Shield F

I don't understand this skill, and it serves no purpose at all. In my first campaign, after crafting it, I immediately used it on a monster, only to die with the monster still having 90% of its health left. So I discarded it and never used it again.

Over the past five weeks, I've watched various players play as Warrior on YouTube, and I've never seen anyone use this skill. Although I may not fully understand this skill, my first impression of it was that it's weak and useless trash, so I give it an F. I don't think there's much to be mistaken about.



11.Leap slam F

I'm not sure if this is meant to be a functional stun skill or a mobility skill, but it performs poorly in both aspects.

The excessively slow and long wind-up time means that it might even miss the target during the jump, and this delay often results in players dying when trying to use it to escape danger. If I want to stun monsters, applying enough damage to stun them directly is much more practical than trying to meet the strict conditions to build up a small amount of stun value. So, it performs poorly in functionality. As a mobility skill, after several unpleasant experiences, I would rather log out than use it to escape danger.

F, because it provides a terrible experience regardless of its intended use.



12.Earthshatter D

A nerfed Earthshatter from poe1.

It inevitably requires investment in passive skills and support gems to be useful, but even then, it still feels clunky and weak. Many rare monster mods cover the entire screen and are fast, often leaving no time for Earthshatter to be properly executed, not to mention that it will miss its detonations if the monster moves away.

D, because it can still be used to complete a T15, but the process is not very enjoyable.



13.sunder F

Sunder is the skill I spent the most time min-maxing, and it’s the most disappointing. It’s a T1 bait skill.

First, using it is very risky, as it forces players to stay in one spot for 2 seconds. If you encounter a slow bubble, you’ll see your character nearly stuck in the air forever (and if you don’t log out or roll dodge to cancel the action, there’s a very high chance you’ll be interrupted or die due to stun).

Second, with such high risk, the reward is absolute garbage. It’s the only skill that requires you to stack accuracy while giving up Resolute Technique. When I invest heavily in passive skills and gear to get as many crit bonuses as possible, and in combat, I must first achieve a fully armor break, its damage is even lower than a reasonably invested, generic HoG.
You might say: “Oh, but Sunder can be used multiple times within 24 seconds, so its lower damage is justified.” That’s actually not the case, because due to the high risk of Sunder and its conditions, it often requires more than ten seconds to prepare a fully armor break in battle. Using Sunder without stunning the boss is essentially suicidal, so people eventually realize that a properly invested HoG outperforms Sunder in nearly every aspect.

Even players who defend Warrior on the feedback forum against negative reviews about the class recommend to others, “Just don’t play Sunder, everything else is fine.” That shows how terrible this skill is.

F. disappoint about it.



14.Volcanic Fissure ?

I have never seriously studied this skill because it requires extensive interaction with other slam skills, and all slam skills are so slow that it drives me crazy. The interactions just make the whole process four times more painful, so I’ve never seriously looked into its potential.

GGG, please, if you want players to use multiple slam skills flexibly, make them faster to cast. Otherwise, the whole process feels like torture.



15.Seismic Cry D

If the conditions are met, it can be very useful. However, the stun system is currently broken, and the boss's stun protection time is extremely long. If you can't kill the boss within the first stun, mace players have to wait for the right timing. And if players find an effective way to oneshot the boss, this skill becomes completely useless.

D because I don't use it at all after I can oneshot every bosses lmao.



16.Supercharged Slam F

Before I even knew it was useful, it got nerfed, and then repeatedly nerfed again and again, making it slower and worse. I honestly don't know if the devs have ever used it to land a hit in T15+ battles. Now it seems to perfectly match the devs' design: a trash skill.

*I should correct myself, Supercharge is actually the highest-risk skill in mace, but by the time I leveled up enough to use Supercharge, it had already been nerfed so much that no one uses it anymore. In my guild, which has 10-12 Titan players, nobody uses it.



17.Stampede B

Finally, there's a slam that's actually useful. Looking back at all the skills, you'll notice that almost all slams are useless from level 0 to 51 (because players haven't been able to make Earthshatter viable during the campaign). The only things you can rely on are basic attack, perfect strike, and boneshatter. All strikes.

However, Stampede only seems less clunky compared to other slams; it still puts players in unknown danger, even trapping them in the middle of a group of monsters, unable to move. Just a few days ago, cArn died twice at level 99, at 50% health, both due to stepping into unknown damage after using Stampede.

You can have a decent time using Stampede, but if your character hasn't invested a lot of currency into boosting defenses to the point of almost avoiding all sorts of unexpected deaths, you will eventually start to hate the many surprises this skill brings, especially around levels 93-95.




18.Ancestral Warrior Totem A

T0 skill, nothing to do with mace. It could be an axe skill and still be same good.



19.Hammer of the Gods A

Purely a numbers-based beast, combined with a long cooldown and casting animation.

*Just a reminder to any GGG staff who might happen to see this, please remind Jonathan and Mark that monsters with high amounts of ES cannot be bled. I suspect GGG hasn't been keeping up with feedback, or they wouldn't still be unaware of this issue five weeks after the EA release.


20. Shield wall S+

I missed the shield wall! It's perfectly designed and nothing to do with any bug or mechanic abusing. (wink)



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Because I believe the devs are actually not looking at Feedback, I occasionally push this post back up. I will stop bumping it once GGG makes meaningful changes or any staff replies to this post.

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jojo1225#3785 wrote:

10.Resonating Shield F

I don't understand this skill, and it serves no purpose at all. In my first campaign, after crafting it, I immediately used it on a monster, only to die with the monster still having 90% of its health left. So I discarded it and never used it again.

Over the past five weeks, I've watched various players play as Warrior on YouTube, and I've never seen anyone use this skill. Although I may not fully understand this skill, my first impression of it was that it's weak and useless trash, so I give it an F. I don't think there's much to be mistaken about

On my channel, you can closely observe and track how my build evolved around Resonating Shield. I will share here first one.

https://youtu.be/Q3aNBwqvCGU?si=WE9Ext_J7o-HNhuW

It does good damage combined with active blocking with your shield. You just have to pair it with proper support gems and Magma Barrier. In one version of my build, I had around 12,000 damage from Resonating Shield, so every hit caused mobs to die and explode further due to the armour break explosion. This synergized perfectly with Magma Barrier. For me this skill is A because you can hold your block and still do damage.

- Resonating Shield (armour explosion) via Magma Barrier
- Shield Charge to do one bigger hit
- Leap Slam to positioning and placing consecration ground which heals you over time
- Totem to do more damage and rage stacks

I got bored with a screen-clearing build, so I wanted to create something with a campaign-like playstyle. This was recorded before my latest upgrades, where I now have 900k DPS with Magma Barrier while maintaining the same survivability. 900k DPS i big boost from 170k DPS where i could still hold a line and survive everything and kill bosses slower - so.. campaign-like playstyle ended now where i can still one shot everything and for me it's not fun at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfZiQilo_AI

"

jojo1225#3785 wrote:

3.Boneshatter: C+

First of all, it can't interact with Titans that have Crushing Impacts, which is really frustrating. The only class that's themed around stun can't use a skill that relies on stun as its core interaction mechanism, even though it's one of the most useful skills in the entire campaign, second only to basic attack and HoG. My friends and I, who all chose Titan, had the frustrating experience of selecting Crushing Impacts in Act 2 and then being unable to use Boneshatter. We had to stay in place farming gold to refund passives, which was a very frustrating and unpleasant experience.

This is something that doesn’t even require hands-on play; just reading the Ascendancy passives and skill descriptions reveals this massive oversight. It’s hard to convince me that the designers are actually playing this game.

Look I'm sorry but the only reasonable response to that is that you and your friends were foolish.
Lacking understanding of synergy, anti-synergy, and the simple fact that some things simply are not meant to go together, being for different builds.

Boneshatter does not belong in a stun build.
Anyone who tries to use Boneshatter with Crushing Impacts doesn't understand how to make builds.
Anyone who wants to use Boneshatter with Crushing Impacts doesn't understand the concept of building.

Boneshatter is a way to trigger stun in a build that is not a stun build.
The kind of build that isn't going to stun the enemy anytime soon, unless they use the free stun trigger skill.

The entire point of Crushing Impacts is to be able to trigger stuns early without needing to use a stun trigger skill. That's what it's for.
Wanting to use both is ridiculous.
Using Crush with Boneshatter would be like a Mercenary Witchhunter taking the ascension for bonus weapon set points, and not using any weapon set points.
It would be like a Warbringer taking the shield ascension nodes, then dual wielding melee weapons instead of using a shield.
A Deadeye specifically investing in projectiles and using a melee weapon.

Boneshatter is about triggering stun without having to fill the bar.
For someone who can't otherwise do it.
You don't do it to make the enemy stunned, you do it to interrupt something the enemy is about to do. The use of Boneshatter is to leave the enemy susceptible to the trigger and not actually do it until it'll stop the big incoming attack.

A stun build isn't about triggering stun, it's about keeping the enemy stunned. Like how a poison stacking build wants to keep the enemy poisoned, continuously.
You want to not need a trigger. The purpose of Crushing Impacts isn't stun triggering like Boneshatter, it's maintaining is-currently-stunned uptime for Surprising Strength, and, to say again, it's about making it so you don't need to use Boneshatter anymore.

I'd say too much in the game's design is unequivocally anti-warrior and the tree and support gems don't need to punish damage boosts with AS and CDR reductions so much.
The kit is so slow that most skills become situational because monsters reposition and surround you too swiftly. When ranged monsters are in the vicinity, using a slam becomes prohibitive as they can dish damage too quickly for you to be rolling or sundering.
Also sticky corners are Rolling Slam's biggest handicap.

It's just my opinion though. I'm still in Act 2 (Cruel) anyway.

"

The_Song#4903 wrote:

Look I'm sorry but the only reasonable response to that is that you and your friends were foolish.

Adding a rude and ignorant comment after 'sorry' won't make things any better. Perhaps I didn't explain it clearly, but this happened on 12/8, the day EA was released, when people still didn't understand many game mechanics.

My friends and I, who also play Titans, come from a PoE1 guild that's been around for 4–5 years. While we aren't giga-brain players, we’re all experienced veterans who can earn Mage Blood within two weeks. After obtaining Crushing Impacts and encountering one or two groups of monsters, we realized the mechanics within a minute or two, quickly found a solution, and continued progressing through the campaign.
We didn’t cry or complain everywhere like a crybaby or reroll characters outright because we’re veterans. It’s laughable that you used over ten lines to describe how foolish we supposedly are—this was just a normal encounter during a Day 1 attempt in a new game.

What I want to say here is that while Boneshatter performs so effectively in the campaign, it inherently clashes with the only Ascendancy passive related to stun, Crushing Impacts. This is counterintuitive, and the frustration isn’t unique to us—I’ve seen several feedback posts mention this. I don’t think this is a 'foolish' problem.

As for your conclusion, I find it rather strange and "foolish": 'A stun build isn't about triggering stun; it's about keeping the enemy stunned.' That statement is complete BS because any Mace build (it doesn't even have to be Titan) can easily do a first stun on a boss with a reasonable setup. However, everyone has to wait for the boss's stun immunity cooldown. For most fights, the battle should be over during that immunity period. If you can't accomplish that, your build is problematic. I seriously doubt where 'keeping the enemy stunned' comes from—what kind of world is that? One without stun immunity? Is that even poe2 I played?

Need to save this post for later as I already disagree with the EQ analysis/take but will have to make things concise rather than several paragraphs

bump

Bro personally, there isn't a single Gem/Skill anymore on Mace for me that I enjoy.

Exception: Resonating SHield/Magma Barrier -- that's it..

I hate the single-target damage options: HotG/PS is just so freakin' bad.

Everything else is just boring!

Just need new weapons/classes to explore for Templar/Druid/Marauder...

The interview from GGG showed it all...Warrior's dead...lol :(

Those 2 reps from GGG in the interview just laughed man, it's done lol.

They acknowledged that it was the worst class for Offense, Defense, and everything in between. They just shrugged it off and said "sure".

There's no hope for Warrior my man...sorry lol

I've learned that over time from these forums/Reddit/YT/etc...it's the GGG way...they hate melee. It's been like that forever...

Resonating Shield is useful, if paired with totems, and that build also uses Sunder. Not directly, of course, because that's one of those mace skills afflicted with too much delay in a game that punishes you overly heavily for getting hit. No, you let the totem do the Sundering.

Youtube video on such a build here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmD8DxAFfh8