In this Path of Exile 2 Warrior Starter Guide, I’m going to be discussing how to Build theWarriorclass. This Guide is designed for new Warriors out there—how to get off to the right start with Warrior, explaining some of the basic mechanics. How to play it is not an advanced build guide that’s meant for endgame or Cruel difficulty or anything like that. I’m not going to be going into exact, specific unique equipment or anything like that that you need. I’m just going to be simply explaining some of the mechanics and skills of Warrior to give you an idea of how you’re able to play.
Path of Exile 2 Warrior Starter Build - Skill Trees
The first thing with Warrior is that you’re going to start out on the southwest side of the beginning of thePassive Skill Tree. Here, you’re going to have options for melee damage and for armor. I recommend going melee here because you want to try and kill things quickly at the beginning of the game. You also have decent survivability early on, but eventually, you probably will want to pick up someArmor Passivesthat increase the amount of armor that you have in order to protect you, because you are going to be getting hit while playing a Warrior.
The other thing that you’re going to have to decide on is whether you want to takeMelee DamageorStun Buildupin-game. What Stun Buildup is: when you hit with physical damage or melee attacks in this game, you’ll build up what’s called stun on an enemy. It’s a little bar under their health gauge, and when it’s full, they’ll be heavily stunned and basically incapacitated for a few seconds. you’re able to, you know, wail away on them while they’re stunned. If you’re playing aTwo-Handed Warrior, I don’t think you need stun buildup. You might want to consider it if you’re playingOne-Hand and Shield, but early on, you should be focusing on killing enemies and bosses quickly and not worry so much about stun buildup. So I recommend going here more the melee damage route.
The southwest side of the skill tree basically is going to give you options in terms of increasing your damage, increasing your armor, increasingArea of Effect, and focusing on a certain attack type—whether you want to go for one-handed damage, two-handed damage, or even if you go down to the southeast a bit, you can getDual Wield, increasing your attack speed with dual-wield attacks and such like that. Depending on your playstyle, you’re probably going to be aiming eventually for one of these clusters to improve that style of play.
Path of Exile 2 Warrior Starter Guide - Playstyles
So let’s talk a little bit about those playstyles. First, you haveTwo-Handed. This is the slowest attack speed of the three types of play that you may do as a Warrior, but it typically does the most damage. It also does an incredible amount of stun buildup, very useful for stunning elite enemies and bosses—you can do this pretty easily.
Next, you’ll haveMace and ShieldorOne-Handed Shieldplaystyle. This has more survivability, obviously, because you have an innate Block Chance when you have a shield equipped. This has a chance to block attacks that are attacking you automatically, reducing the damage you take when your shield is out even if you’re not using the Shield skill. It also improves your armor. The shield typically has an amount of armor on it that’s going to reduce the damage you take overall, so you have more survivability. You obviously have less damage than playing two-handed with this.
The other playstyle isDual Wield, which would be, in this case, two maces at the moment. This is less damage, in my opinion, than two-handed from playing so far, but it’s certainly more damage than one-handed shield. One thing to mention is that the attack speed is a bit faster than two-handed. There are specific skills, which I’ll go into in a little bit, that benefit more from dual wielding than some other skills do. So you’re going to want to look for those skills if you like the dual-wield playstyle and attempt to focus on those.
Obviously, because you have two weapon sets, you’re going to have two of these playstyles available to you. you’re able to doTwo-HandedandOne-Handed and Shield,Dual Wield and One-Handed Shield, orTwo-Handed and Dual Wield. I recommend doingTwo-HandedandOne-Handed and Shieldto start. It takes a while to get down to the dual-wield skill tree and also to get some of the skills that benefit more from dual wield, so I think two-handed and one-handed and shield are the best way to start.
Additionally, what’s really great with a one-handed and shield setup somewhere in your two slots is that you may use theRaise Shieldability even if you are currently on your two-handed weapon. It will switch your weapon sets by doing this automatically. You can just Raise Shield even if your two-handed weapon is out and block attacks, which is great.
Talking about Raise Shield, this is one of the best advantages that Warriors have. It’s kind of counterintuitive to the way a lot of people will play Path of Exile 2 when they start. When you’re standing there with your shield up, you’re not dealing any damage. However, there are some skills that will continue to do damage for you while your shield is up, preventing you from taking damage. The great thing about Raise Shield is that it blocks a lot of attacks, and you take very little damage when using it.
You block almost all the damage—some attacks you can’t really block but if you’re outnumbered by a bunch of enemies and you’re blocking, you’re going to be able to block most of their attacks. What you’ll notice is you have a littleStagger Thresholdat the bottom of your screen that starts filling up while you’re blocking. If that fills up, then you’ll basically be Guard Broken, and enemies will be attacking and staggering you. So, you want to verify that you don’t just stand there and hold it until that fills up. You want to make sure you’re doing damage in some way while that’s happening, or you’re blocking sporadically when a big attack is coming or a bunch of enemies are hitting you.
Eventually, you’re going to have to let your Raise Shield skill down in order to get that stagger buildup to go down. What I like to do is use the basic attack fromTwo-Handedinstead of putting a weapon swap skill on my bar. So, when I use Raise Shield, I can just attack with my basic attack for my two-handed weapon. That switches my weapons immediately for me. Keep in mind, if you use Raise Shield and then you use a skill, it’s going to use your one-handed weapon for the damage of that skill. You want to have your two-handed weapon out when you’re trying to deal damage, when possible, because otherwise you’re going to do less damage.
Path of Exile 2 Warrior Starter Guide - Stats
The next thing we’re going to take a look at isStats. The three stats of the game areStrength,Dexterity, andIntelligence. Strength gives you health, so you’re going to get more health natively from using higher strength. Coincidentally, a lot of the weapons that we’re using require strength as well—the higher and higher strength in order to use them, as well as the skills that we’re using.
This build is going to focus predominantly on strength, which gives you more health to help keep you alive when you’re outnumbered by enemies and getting hit regularly. Dexterity gives youAccuracy. Accuracy is more beneficial for ranged weapons—the accuracy stat will make it so that you miss less when attacking enemies further away. Since we’re playing a pure melee build here, you really don’t need to focus much on accuracy, particularly at the beginning of the game.
Intelligence gives youMana, which is not bad early on when you’re playing a Warrior. You really don’t have mana problems until you get a lot more skills and have a better rotation. Eventually, you’ll be able to empty your mana pool very quickly as you move from group to group, so it’s not bad to have.
Let’s talk a little bit aboutDefensesfor Warriors. One of the things you’re going to want to look for on your armor as a Warrior isArmor. You want to actually add armor because you have a lot of passives that are going to increase the percentage of armor you have. Armor directly reduces physical damage from ranged and melee attacks, so you absolutely want to have a high amount of armor.
Coincidentally, armor pieces with the highest armor stat usually haveStrengthor high-strength requirements. You can also find armor pieces that mix stats, like armor and evasion (Strength/Dexterity) or armor and energy shield (Strength/Intelligence). I strongly recommend looking for the armor stat specifically because of the percentage boosts from passives.
If you end up going southeast in theStrength/Dexterityroute or north in theStrength/Intelligenceroute, you can pick up passives that boost Evasion and Armor or Energy Shield and Armor. It’s up to you which direction you prefer.
Path of Exile 2 Warrior Starter Guide - Skills
Let’s take a look at some of theEarly Game Skillsfor the Warrior. I’m not going to go through all the skills because I’m just trying to start you off in a general direction.
One of the first skills you’re going to get isRolling Slam, and Rolling Slam is a really devastating skill particularly when you use it two-handed and get maximum damage out of it, it has a very good AOE radius, and you’re able to usually one-shot packs of enemies with this through the early parts of the game pretty regularly. The challenge with this weapon skill is that it has a very long animation, so you kind of have to start it a bit early, and sometimes that first slam is going to miss a couple of enemies so that you can connect with the second slam. So it can be a bit unwieldy, but you definitely can build up a lot of stun on enemies and bosses with it, and it’s mostly for groups of enemies.
The next skill isEarthquake. Initially, when you see this skill, you’re going to think this isn’t a great skill to use because what it does is allows you to put earthquakes down on the ground that eventually detonate and deal damage in an AOE. Typically, you don’t want to throw down an AOE and then wait 3 seconds for it to detonate—you want to kill enemies quickly and move on to the next pack. But as the game gets tougher and tougher, this becomes a more valuable skill, and it’s particularly valuable if you’re using a mace and shield because you can put the earthquakes down, then raise your shield up and block and let enemies pile up around you right on top of those earthquakes while those earthquakes detonate. Then you’re good. It’s a little bit slower than using Rolling Slam, but it’s definitely safer.
The next skill isBoneshatter, and what Boneshatter does is it basically allows you to detonate enemies that are almost at their heavy stun threshold. This is definitely very valuable because when you hit packs of enemies and not all of them die, they’re typically almost always very close to being stunned, and you can almost just anticipate and hit the button to do this very quickly and then get an extra AOE out of it. So you’re going to want to use Boneshatter quite regularly, especially if you’re using one-handed and shield or maybe even dual wield because you’ll do a lot less damage than two-handed, and enemies will typically have this status that they can be detonated because you’re not doing as much damage—you’re not killing them outright all the time.
The next skill isInfernal Cry, and predominantly what you’re going to use this for early on in the game is debuffing enemies so that when you kill them, they explode for more damage. This is a great strategy when you combine this with something like Rolling Slam or if you use it with something like Earthquake, where you throw it up on the enemies real quick, you throw down some earthquakes or then use a rolling slam, and they all detonate and boom—they’re dead. You don’t need it all the time early on in the game. I think it’s going to become more valuable the further you go, but it’s definitely a nice strategy to throw on a bunch of enemies, throw some earthquakes down, block with your shield, or use Shockwave Totem and block with your shield, and then just watch the enemies detonate while you’re sitting there taking no damage.
Next, you haveShockwave Totem, and this allows you to send out a totem that has its own health pool and its own damage based off its own weapon that it uses. So it doesn’t really matter which weapon setup you’re using with, which makes it particularly good for weapon and shield because it’s not reliant on them for damage, so it’ll still do the same damage. What I like to do with this skill is send it out ahead of time into packs of enemies, particularly ranged enemies that don’t move into your melee range. you’re able to take them down while you’re fighting melee groups, which is quite nice. But you can throw out one of these and then put block up and wait for this thing to just detonate on enemies and deal damage. If you use another support gem that adds one of these, you can actually put out two at a time early on in the game, and that can absolutely increase your damage. The biggest negative of this, though, is that they can be killed quite easily, and you have to find specific nodes to increase the damage of this skill that don’t necessarily increase the damage of other skills.
Next, you haveArmour Breaker, which is going to break armor on enemies with each attack. It also increases your attack range a little bit, and when you break an enemy’s armor, you deal more damage to them. That’s going to be very valuable for you. It’s particularly obviously better on elites to bosses because regular enemies die too quickly for this, but it can be particularly good on them. It’s very good when you’re dual wielding because you actually attack much more quickly when using Armour Breaker while dual wielding. So if you like dual wielding, this should definitely be one of the skills you’re using.
The next skill isMolten Blast. This is going to throw out a fire projectile that converts a bunch of your physical damage to fire, and it’s going to explode and then go into small chunks that are going to hit enemies for fire damage. It’s a really good skill to use at range into packs of enemies if they look dangerous or to lead off with it, and it’s another skill that’s really good to use when dual-wielding because you actually gain two projectiles when you use it in exchange for slightly slower cast speed. That should easily make that skill much better, so if you like this skill, highly recommend dual wielding in order to use it.
Then we haveResonating Shieldas well, and this is a skill that allows you to raise your shield up and pound on it to deal damage and break armor from enemies around you in front of you. What I don’t like about it is it drains your mana rather rapidly and has kind of low damage, so I don’t really recommend this one. I likeRaise Shieldinstead because you may just use it in a pinch.
You will also gain a spirit, an uncut Spirit Gem that you can use for a spirit buff that’s basically like a permanent buff as long as you have the spirit for it. I’m usingHerald of Ashto make enemies detonate and set enemies on fire. This is particularly good if you’re going with Infernal Cry, Molten Blast, and you’re focusing on fire damage nodes, etc. But there are a lot of other good options. You don’t get another one of these very quickly, so unless someone else gives you one, I highly recommend waiting and taking one that you want before just picking one that’s available to you.
Path of Exile 2 Warrior Starter Guide - Ascendancy and Final Tips
Finally, I’ll just touch upon ascendancy classes here. Once you get to the middle of Act 2, you’re going to get to choose an ascendancy, which is kind of like a subclass for your class that has a separate little skill tree for it. Your choices so far areWarbringerandTitan. Warbringer is more specialized, in my opinion. If you really like using totems, this could be a good one to pick up for you or war cries. It seems like it’s focused more on one-handed and shield than Titan. Titan seems to be more of an all-around type of warrior that is good in a lot more scenarios. So if you are constantly changing up your warrior and, as you get more skills, you’re going to keep trying new things out, I think Titan is probably a better way to go. But if you know the kind of playstyle that you like already, and that includes totems, sword, and shield, I think Warbringer is probably the better choice.
That wraps up our guide on how to play a warrior class. I hope you guys found this one useful. The general idea of this article is to just kind of get you started in the direction with the warrior. It’s not how to make a build that’s going to clear end game or to get you through the cruel difficulties of Acts 1, 2, and 3. It’s to show you the different ways you may play warrior and to show you that it is a very viable class to play. Understanding some of these basic mechanics can make your warrior play a lot more fun.
As always, if you guys have other tips for warriors out there, please leave them in the comments, and if you have questions, leave them there as well, and I will get to them as soon as I can.
