It's been a very busy time for me and I haven't played as much as I wanted to, but my runs with Warrior have left me with these early impressions:
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Berserker has a lot to gain from regular shielding at low health. Pairs well with Ring of Tenacity, enough that it didn't feel like a meme to run it. I don't think it represents a huge power spike but a setup that allows you to reap the benefits of lower HP actually exists now, which is cool
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Gladiator on the other hand feels somewhat worse to me. Typically I played Gladiator as an HP tank, so that passive shielding was more like active HP protection and the lack of cooldown on shield regeneration + permanent uptime meant that after any given fight I'd already gain the benefit of the shield, if I even needed it - if not, I'd just try to maintain combo between encounters. That's been turned on its head now and the shield can actually trigger frequently but disappear after combat, which makes the need to combo kill at the end of every fight is pretty crucial now, so building combo for a good kill feels far more pressing than it used to. You also gain nothing for doing so until you drop to half health, so you're not leveraging a big HP pool anymore.
Low health still feels like a risky way to play and while there's far more reward in it for a Berserker now, the Gladiator doesn't feel like it gains anything from this rework and maybe loses a little something - at least, in the way I always used to play Gladiator, it just doesn't exist anymore.
I'd be interested to hear what some other players have thought about the Warrior changes. My TLDR is I'm a lot more inclined to pick Zerk, a lot less inclined to assume Gladiator, and Ring of Tenacity feels way less like a meme now with regular shielding popping up once you're low enough health to make the shield effectively worth more than it says on the box.
Really? The accompanying change to Lethal Defense allows Gladiator to essentially have double shielding every encounter (that's up to 30 HP).
It's deceptive though, right - Old Gladiator would persist the shield through the next encounter regardless of their life total whereas Gladiator even on -100% cooldown will still lose the shield at end of combat, and if you're storing combo for the next encounter it means you're not resetting your cooldown.
I think combo is a frustrating currency to manage because it can go sideways for a lot of reasons. Maybe you miss too much, maybe an opponent doesn't die to your melee damage but some other effect (blazing enchant, thorns glyph, toxic/corrosive gas, enemy "friendly fire", any number of things) and so you don't get extended turns to re-engage in melee so the timer runs out, etc. Maybe if combo were less goofy to manage this change wouldn't feel quite as much of a downgrade for Gladiator, idk.
But now there's an added pressure to keep your shield cooldown as low as possible, which means you're actually killing with combo hits consistently, so you're trying to hit this sweet spot between doing enough melee hits to build combo but not enough to accidentally kill with regular attacks, but getting enough successive combo to kill with your chosen move. And you have to be <=50% health or the shield isn't even in play. So it's the combination of shielding requiring continual cooldown resets, being on low health, and managing an awkward resource in Combo hits to keep Gladiator, uh, gladiating
It feels like a big change from the old Gladiator, where the shield was already actively managed rather than passively; you could always choose to combo kill and refresh the shield, cooldown not even being a thing. Combo was still awkward but at least you could accrue it at your leisure and spend it when you saw fit to gain all your shielding back at once.
I will continue to try and refine my approach to Gladiator since it just doesn't function as it used to, this is all still pretty early analysis on my part. I don't assume everyone plays the game like I do, there are a few variants of Gladiator given the way combo hits get their damage, and maybe a different one that's more aggressive and less of a wall of EHP is simply more appropriate now. But my old standard method, where there was less pressure to sustain and use combo and shielding was always present and ready to be refreshed is definitely not in the game anymore.