I feel like I finally got the rhythm of the warrior. Drop earthquake, roll, do the rolling slam, then the shatter skill. I don't like it. Earthquake is extremely slow.
It will be nice when the game adds a melee class, because warrior is not a melee class.
When fighting boss, wait for obvious telegraph and then roll, then slap boss repeatedly with mouse clicks (basic attack) until they stun, then slap boss repeatedly with mouse clicks. Rinse, repeat. Deep and enticing action gameplay. Also a little annoyed that player characters are immune to heavy stun according to the tooltip, e.g. why waste nodes and skills on heavy stun buildup for a core class mechanic that is useless in PvP? Dislike design like this.
I fucking hate rolling, rolling is cancer and I fucking hate it.
Also, I'm profoundly disappointed that you are still locked in place while attacking, even with WASD controls. This was always one of the pain points for playing melee for me in these point to click style action games. Being locked in static animation is a sure way to get farmed in player vs player, which is exactly why barbarian devolved into mongoloid whirlwind (with teleport gear) in D2. I know they won't change this as it's baked it, but it was really refreshing when I played World of Warcraft for the first time and I could actually position with WASD while attacking.
This is not Dark Souls, it is not a Soulslike, Souls has good melee combat, this shit ain't it.
I don't use hold to block at all because it doesn't seem to be useful at all. It builds a stagger meter, you can't attack, you move slow as dogshit, it only blocks from the front, dodge is infinitely better in every way because it allows easy positioning and is literally required to avoid most boss attacks. Plus I can tank most of the regular autoattacks without even using it, and if I can't, I'm just going to roll anyway, so what is the point? I can't DPS while using active block, so it is really a self-nerf. It seems underbaked to me, there is no parry/riposte, no stagger, no stamina bar to manage, very few cases in which pressing the button would be more advantageous than simply dodge rolling and rolling slam or left mouse clicking the thing.
By the way, for those curious about Linux/Steam Deck, yes it runs in Proton. May require tweaking as follows. ProtonGE 9.20 tested. Had to download from ProtonUp-QT and then for some reason since I installed Steam as a Flatpack on Fedora, I had to go searching for the specific directory for a Flatpack install, which is:
~/.local/share/flatpak/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/x86_64/stable/active/files/share/steam/compatibilitytools.d
And place the ProtonGE folder there by hand for the Flatpack because for some reason ProtonUp keeps throwing it somewhere completely different even when I select Flatpack. Looks like the actual directory is not visible to ProtonUp-QT at all, which is annoying, so I can't select it manually.
https://www.protondb.com/app/2694490
From there, if you have an NVIDIA GPU, you almost certainly will have to edit the config to make it run in DirectX12 instead of Vulkan, or you will get a black screen and then crash.
Consequently, you need to navigate here, if you installed it the regular way, to edit the config file:
~/.steam/root/steamapps/compatdata/2694490/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Path of Exile 2/poe2_production_Config.ini
In my case, with a flatpack install, the config ini was here:
/home/{username}.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2694490/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Path of Exile 2
Some minor graphical artifacts with this version of ProtonGE but it seems perfectly playable. Tweak around with versions until you find one you like.
