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The original was posted on /r/pathofexile by /u/Bluedot55 on 2025-01-04 18:52:05+00:00.

There are currently 2 melee archetypes in poe 2, and everyone seems to be in agreement that monk/quarterstaff feels good, while warrior/mace feels bad, in their current state. I think a lot of this comes down to their defenses and how they compliment their playstyle

Monk

Monk and warrior have a slightly different play style they seem designed around, while still both being melee. Monk is designed for close-mid range skirmish, with movement and evasive play being used. This is apparent through the fast attacking light skills that tend to give you some range options, and allow you to keep enemies at a slight distance, avoiding getting many attacks on you. This perfectly compliments their defensive options of evasion&energy shield, since evasion will help mitigate the few hits that get through, and allow energy shield to tank the rest, recharging while evasion dodges a few more hits.

This gives you useful mitigation vs all damage types, with small attacks/projectiles being mitigated mainly by evasion, and by some energy shield, and big slam/AOE hits being mitigated by the energy shield, or by an optional point of acrobatics, which allows your evasion to apply to everything, if at a reduced effectiveness.

Warrior

Meanwhile, the warrior play style emphasizes trading hits with large crowds to wind up big hits to kill many enemies at once. You have armor and block, with life as your defensive options. Armor, despite its flaws, tends to do rather well for mitigating the many small hits you get while trading with crowds like this, until you start to factor in other modifiers in endgame. Once enemies start using more aoe attacks, spells, and general elemental damage, this defense starts to fall apart. You don’t have any good way to mitigate AOE damage, since armor doesn’t apply to elemental damage, shields cant block it, and you can’t effectively stack near as much life or life recovery as energy shield builds. This makes it very hard to be able to play offensively when your attack time is long enough that you will need to eat numerous attacks to get your own attack off, despite not having any effective mitigation vs it.