Give them 23 str over their current 22. Give them the option to be anything other then a battle berserker, PK fodder for everyone else, or RP champions.

.

And good priests second

... I don't generally play successful warriors, dwarf or otherwise, but I've done well with a dwarf shaman and fairly decent with a dwarf healer.

If I can hypothesize, you get a lot of HP to work with which means you can gear totally for damage and soak up hits while winning a slugfest of attrition. That's how I played my shaman except replace "damage" with "mana."

Dwarves are weird, warriors especially. They take a very peculiar way of building them compared to other races. If you can manage to wrap your head around it though, they can be pretty gd powerful. Even stupid dwarf sword.

Twist rocked a pretty impressive nexus dwarf sword. Fwiw it takes a fair amount of intelligent gearing & solid prep knowledge to work as well as an unconventional build.

Its actually not so bad, especially if you manage to snowball.

Ya I played one to 42 fro the inspiration I got from him. I am definitely two or three tiers below lol. On all factors. The gearing looked way more important than spec to me.

I'm played 2 (relatively) successful dwarf warriors and you're tough when you're geared up and have cabal powers.

That being said, you can still be overwhelmed by high str builds AND outmelee'd by DEX builds.

The only thing dwarf warrior shines at is fighting mages and most communers, usually. Probably why the best build for dwarf success is Battle Dwarf.

Eh, I had what could be considered great success with a dwarf warrior. Hell, my dwarf warrior was even better than any of Twist's that I can name!

I'm a firm believer that there will never be a dwarf build that becomes the new flavor of the month, but I do believe that it will always have a place in the top end of viable.

But it ain't as good as duergar/fire/cloud/storm/felar/arial/half-drow/half-elf/elf/drow/minotaur.

It's on par with svirf, human, and azure.

So 3rd to 5th worst warrior race is probably a fair assessment.

I wasn't super deathful but 117 PKW is nothing to stick one's nose up at being 86th of all time warrior PK list.

At least in the PBF era, so yeah, kinda proved my point

That's much harder to do now with the edge point nerf.

Of course that could be said of most builds.

Seems like there can be one non-RBW dwarf ass kicker at any given time. Need full set of spiked and mark of the dwarven crusader. This assumes it's not on some dwarf healer or paladin.

For fun, I looked at top dwarfs over at Dio's. Of the 14 dwarven characters with 100+ PKs:

7 were Battle; 7 were non-Battle
12 were warriors; 2 were non-warriors (one shaman and one paladin)
of the non-battle, 4 were Fortress and 3 were Nexus

I would have been the only uncaballed