you don't think 4 second cooldown axe would help him in turtling for his sword or to buy time? how about using far meter burn god smack on wake up with armor to fly over there head since you recover immediately on whiff? what would you say he needs exactly?
I was sort of joking. Not really I guess, he would still be far below the top tiers with the changes you suggested
The axe cool down is a decent buff, but it won't help all that much in a lot of his problem match ups. It mostly helps in match ups where he already did well. Lots of character don't care about the axe much at all - they either stuff it on reaction or don't have to deal with it for other reason. Superman for example can jump and air dash the axe on reaction, usually for a full combo.
Fixing 223 is nice, but literally is only an issue in 4 match ups, and none of those are Ares really bad match and it's easy enough to work around in those match ups. It's really just a bug fix and not a buff anyway.
The MB Godsmack buff does sound very useless for me. Using a bar of meter to run away? When Ares has mediocre zoning and poor mobility? Not getting punished when GS whiffs will be alright, but again it's just completely missing so many of his real problems.
There's in depth threads about this in the Ares forum, but I guess my wish list would be: something to fix his wake ups(I don't even know what), better back dash(or better walk speed), alter the hitbox on his d1 so it has proper range against characters that float(it's complete horseshit that d1 gets less than half it's normal range against Wonder Woman), and decrease either the start up or recovery on his teleport(it shouldn't be slow enough on start up that you can't teleport out of much of anything on reaction and recover slow enough that it's easily punishable)