It really does have crap damage.

I was slightly preoccupied yesterday getting an endgame gear set on Nemesis, among other things, but found some time to squeeze in a little bit of testing with my pretty Darkscorn. I chose to use Eye of Chayula for anti-stun instead of taking US, and used Alpha's Howl for anti-chill along with anti-freeze (credit to Perz for pointing that one out to me!) Testing was done in docks, with the rationale that if I can't neatly clear it with a gear set thrown together in 5 minutes, then I can't clear higher maps with gear I spent 6 hours optimising.

Started by respeccing a 70 witch into the dex (evasion) variant of the tree. LA GMP chain WED LL - couldn't sustain mana. Well okay, only 25% of the damage gets 2% leech from Mind Drinker (I later specced out of that, so it's not in the tree linked above, but did take it at some point in time), and I'm not trying for crazy high damage so it's not enough, I get it. Substituted a mana leech for chain - turns out chain's important in getting LA to hit the max number of mobs. Huh. Regardless, even with evasion, I'm taking too much damage and not dealing enough. This sucks.

Well. The easiest option was to go via the str half of the tree and take IG. So that's what I did with my 80 witch. (Recoloured Darkscorn to 5G1R somewhere along the line so I could run both chain and mana leech, couldn't be bothered to recolour further, didn't have a WED gem slotted in but 1.4*terrible is still terrible. I figure as long as I'm doing the testing with the same gem setups on both, I can get a decent comparison in.)

First thing I noticed. Knockback is rolled per attack, like crit, and not per hit. That makes the little 15% knockback wheel next to useless. Next thing: went IR, and it boosted my survivability a ton. I kinda sorta knew that, but still. I'm still not doing enough damage to return as much HP as I'd like, though it's definitely better with IG.

To do:
- try out Blind
- try IR with the dex tree, and ditto the above.
- try socketing Knockback gem along with the skilltree wheel
- try a physical skill (split arrow + chain/fork?) which should allow for better mana return from leech; not sure how I'd pull off static-blows except by gear lightning damage though, and that's always iffy to depend on. Since I don't actually appear to have a leveled split-arrow right now, though, that might be a while in coming.

Where do I go from here, if it doesn't work? Well, I figure a Chin Sol will be a pretty decent damage boost, maybe enough to kick the 80 into viability for maps on this build. Probably better tanking too, with a guaranteed knockback meaning less damage taken. Would like to make it work. On the 70, I still have enough of my free respecs that I can rework the tree into Perz's crit claws tree, or I can do pretty well anything else that involves CI and the dex side of the tree. I don't know yet.

Or I can leave the characters hanging around until I get another idea, while I play Nemesis. Yeah, that sounds better to me. As a bonus, here's what one of my friends asked when I explained my build to him, and my response to it.
Q: This looks like it would be better done from Scion, why didn't you start there?
A: I didn't have a sufficiently high leveled scion with a full respec to play with.
My priorities are most definitely slightly skewed.