Can someone explain the logic behind insisting on running Giant's blood as a Titan with Hulking Form?

One thing to clarify because I can't tell by your post if you're aware of this or not; the travel nodes that give you +5 to an attribute of your choice don't actually get buffed by hulking form. Only the small passive nodes that aren't these attribute nodes get the buff from hulking form.

2h maces can get +7 level of melee skill vs +5 that you can get on 1h. This is insane for things like totems for example. Weapon swap is also a thing: you can use a 2h + shield in your main weapon set and swap to 2x2h in your secondary weapon set, for example for bossing.

From my experience it's basically 3 things:
- You care a lot about single hit damage with warrior ( hammer of the gods ect. ) and your weapon is you main source of flat damage
- Added to that some of the power budget of 1h maces going into attack speed makes them clunky for mana sustain
- strength gives flat hp and you get increased strength from the small ascendency nodes going to hulking form so stacking a bunch of travel strength node isn't that bad

The main reason here simply is skills scaling off of weapon damage. The amount of points you're saving by not running Giant's Blood is actually quite low if you have a lot of strength, which actually isn't all that hard to get. Sure there may be a point earlier into the late game, where you'll struggle to equip Two-Handers and would rather invest in passive nodes that would make up for the lack of damage from your weapon, but later on when strength is not an issue, you just have a much higher ceiling in general, since you also have the +Melee Skill Levels on Two-Handers having a higher cap, and also being able to potentially equip two Two-Handers on a weapon swap to maximize raw weapon damage and mace skill levels.

Simple. You can’t scale dmg for 1H maces very well so you’ll end up travelling anyway.

Melee right now sucks in general. The only thing making melee remotely competitive is the DPS you can get with dual two handers, and the ability to use a shield with a two hander. Without Hulking form you simply do not have the DPS to make melee worth it. Every melee build that is not a totem build MUST have a shield, and totem builds of course will need dual two handers more than other builds.

Not to mention the dogshit state of armor means you MUST have a certain amount of strength anyway, in order to not get one shot in T15 and above maps. So the strength investment not only isn't wasted but is necessary.

Wrong way to think about it . You are trading suffixes on your gear for strength for wich you gain more weapon damage/life , its just a very efficient trade.

To add some numbers: The best one handed physical dps mace that is for sale as I write this 637 pdps. The best two handed mace has 1275 pdps. Looking at just the bases, 2h maces are ~50% stronger than their 1h equivalent.

To make 1h better than 2h, you'd need to get 50-100% more dps from only whatever opportunity cost you don't have to pay for the strength and travel to the keystone.

2H mace is so much better than 1H that no amount of passive tree investment will make 1H competetive. Current tree is very barebones, there aren't that many useful nodes. And pathing down to Giant's Blood and even further to Polymath is far from wasted, it gives you a ton of flat life which you can't get anywhere else.

TLDR 2H maces do much more damage even with heavy investment into STR and having a lot of STR = a lot of life = more survivability

Dont you usually use a two handed mace and a shield?

You don't have to run giants blood. With 1h mace you have faster attack speed so things like HOWA and damage on rings become more important. Also expert warpicks have added base crit chance and base crit damage, making a crit focused build viable.

If not hulking form, what else? For gem level scaling, you have no choice but to go with Giant's Blood. Even with traveling nodes, you hit enough small passive nodes to make it worthwhile.

But that's ultimately what makes Warrior clunky. Titan has a decent ascendancy bonus. But as a package, they don't work synergistically. More inventory slots? Wow... handy, but I would rather have something less metagaming.

As a mace user (and soon sword/axe) you need a base amount of STR to begin with or else you will have a tragic hit point pool (unless you go es). The +14 from 2x 2hand is a huge boost for most skills totems/magma/HotG etc. +5 from 1 hand is meh in comparison. Having 3x the STR req is a significant downside. With weapon swapping much of it is mitigatable. The only way to scale HP is with STR stacking, so if you are going solid HP for your hit pool you will get plenty of STR. If they make it so HP has more than a 3% node on the tree there may be more room to not STR stack. You can also get -attribute req on 2 hand maces that would help. 2hand + shield is my primary play style on most of my characters. Many builds have over 1000 str in end game, and really 636 is all you would need at most for giants blood so far so its not a bad idea.

Further thoughts. Would a warbringer benefit more from running Giant's blood compared to a titan, Given warbringer's shield ascendancy nodes being more effective and require less shield blocking investment in the passive tree?