Huntress is better at wielding a Hammer than the Warrior.

Hi, I recently discovered that builds centered around the use of a 2H hammer works better on Huntress than on the Warrior and I will explian today why.

1)The quality of nodes in the starter area of Huntress are net superior to those of the Warrior.

What I mean by this is that the increases to attack damage, evasion, movement speed and attack speed you gain between levels 1-10 are more efficient on a melee build then what warrior offers in terms of nodes at the levels 1-10 mark which is increases to armor, melee damage, stun threshold as well as increases in stun build up and to life regen (these last two are the only good node on offer, imho).

While you can tehnically squeze more melee damage out of Warrior, that damage is useless in most cases due to the plethora of anti-melee modifiers available to most rare and unique monsters (temporal bubble, temporal chains and lighting mirror image on hit being some of the most devastating ones). Same goes for the bosses.

This means that in the current build of Path of Exile 2, projectiles and other ranged abilities are king.

Sadly Hammer, has three of the worst abilities I have ever seen in this game - Volcanic Fissure, Earthshatter and Molten Blast.

For the sake of keeping this short, I will explain why the best projectile Hammer has to offer is Molten Blast...which on it's own requires a lot of work and investment in support gems to be good.

Thankfully for everyone involved I discovered which gems are the best in making this skill viable for damage.

Acceleration & either Scattershot for better chances of hitting stuff or Chain to make the shrapnel jump back toward the initial target.

Chain is more RNG based and may not always work as intended, but Scattershot makes this skill so much easier to aim it should be baseline for the skill.

The sad part however is that this skill moves you forward as you cast it, which isn't ideal in most situations. However, if you are running low on stun time and are close to the enemy, this skill can move you in closer so you are more likely to land auto attacks...which will not matter anymore when you get a burst skill like Sunder or Leap Slam and spam those away.

2)Evasion based clothing is better than Armor based clothing.

And this hasn't changed since PoE1, as far as I am aware. Unless you are channeling some spin to win stuff a X% to avoid all projectile damage from monsters is worth more than whatever damage mitigation armor has on offer.

From a defensive stand point, the Warrior's biggest flaw is that he has to take bonuses to his armor value and then increase either his life regen or stun threshold stat, when in reality, he should be forced to take life regen and then decide between increasing armor or his stun threshold stat.

In the current state of the Warrior, he is simply a better Quarterstaff user than the monk, because all his melee damage increasing nodes synergize with banging on the Tempest Bell for more damage than the monk can generate, without the aid of an Ascendancy.

In support of my claims I offer these two videos. In the second, I was ghimping my damage with Molten Blast because I like how Scattershot and Chain interact with the skill, resulting in an easy to aim skill, plauged by an RNG factor regarding where the Shrapnel will chain into.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr2NUK1jxQM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re8dU1XY5VI

The reason the quality of this video suck is because I have no idea wtf I am doing when I record myself play and I have a shitty microphone so commenting is out of the question.

Every weapon build works better on amazon simply cuz you can scale crit over 100% and just get huge multiplier from crit damage. Hammer, bow, xbow, quaterstaff... Every weapon is better on amazon.

I'd argue it's not about the crit damage potential, but damage scalling, in regards to Huntress weapon builds.

I mean ok, you can scale some crit with ascendencies, but with most of the nodes, you can scale weapon damage even before building up that uber crit which gets shafted as soon as you come across crit resistant mobs.

Might be missing something. Don't want to be dismissive but it looks like you're working so hard on that King of the Mist video.

I'm not great at boss fights so for me if the damage is too low the fight drags on and I invariably get caught in boss attacks.

On warrior this would go down much quicker. I bet even just Rolling Slam will do at least as much, and it's safer when you do a lot of stun buildup.

I think it's probably the gear, because I was boss rushing to the King in order to be able to farm him for rituals.

My hammer is like my only good drop since I started Act 1 Cruel. My chest piece is something I got from mid Act 3 Normal and everything else is from late Act 1, early act 2.

Also, I decided not to unlock my ascendancy because of a gut feeling which is telling me I shouldn't take neither Ritualist nor Amazon and wait for the Huntress 3rd ascendancy to be revealed, because that will be a real game changer.

I had the same gear in the fight when going against all 3 bosses in the cemetery of the Eternals, except that my Molten Blast was doing even less damage than in the fight with King of the Mists because I had both Scattershot and Chain support gems on the skill so it was easier to aim against targets while the shrapnel was bouncing randomly to other targets.