I would like to talk about acid/poison gloves
Just to make things clear, I have no experience in retal builds, so I simply not going to cover the retal side of the items below.
Vilescorn bracers
Overall, not bad. %AS, usefull resistance, +2 to retribiution and LA, flat acid. However, that’s basically it. No other stats, no CC resistances, no %CS. Compared to some of the epic gloves [Runesinged Handguards], they looks a bit bleak. It supports only melee/retal gameplay.
Handguards of Perdition
And again acid retal oriented epic gloves. Why there are two of them? Anyway, let’s move to the stats: a lot of OA (great), health, physique and %armor, elem resistance, +2 to PotT and finally CC res. On the other hand - no %acid damage, no AS or CS, so the only use is probably acid retal. And yet again - why there are two of them?
Dark One’s Grasp
Well… Acid Dark One is beta-version of vitality Dark One. And we allready have a better gloves for poison Ravenous Earth.
Viperfangs Grips
A tonn of OA (always welcome), flat poison with increased duration, bonuses to Ravenous Earth and … that’s it. Vitality res is both low and useless for acid builds, %AS (only 8%) available exclusively to Occultist mastery, bonuses to AoM are ok, however non-retal acid shields are in bad state.
Summary
You might have noticed one little thing… there are as many as 0 acid gloves with %CS. Yet, there are items and sets that supports poison casters. (Radaggan just on top of my head)
Then, there are 2 epic retal gloves. Only one of these 4 gives AS for everyone. Which is underwhelming. They are also poor in terms of CC resistances (which is a general problem for acid builds) and %crit damage (general prorblem for acid builds). All aforementioned leads to the scenario, when it’s simly easier and better not to pick gloves with %acid/poison at all. And modifiers are pretty meh, nothing interesting.
Afterword
When I decided to create this topic, I wanted to talk about general problems in acid/poison itemization. However, it took me about an hour to write just about gloves. And there are also problems in shoulders and boots slots and some holes in acid devotions. If I have some more free time, I’ll write about it. And excuse my poor english, please.
I appreciate you making this post, and looking forward to you expanding on it. I’ve had similar thoughts but never took the time to lay out the reasons. Playing an Acid/Poison caster in this game is viable but still somewhat fraught. It often feels like the game expects you to be an Acid weapon-user or Vitality caster instead.
I’m actually developing with dw acid dervish, I figured out to cap CC resist. There are ways to get them up to a point without gloves so its kinda ok. And AS is a problem, because those gloves make you choose between AS and OA and everyone know OA is important so they get the OA and find another AS or CS sources. But now you have nice OA let’s say. What to do with that? Oh you crit right? But noooo. You can’t literally crit because your crit multiplier is no more than %20. To get even more than %40 you have to sacrifice far too important devotion procs or items. So I believe the real problem of Acid builds is Crit damage. If both of them buffed, they’ll be too op because there is too much -acid RR but acid builds definitely need crit damage from somewhere items, devotions I don’t know bu somewhere…
I generally agree with you, however, OA for acid builds is kinda useless, because of inferior %crit. I’ve build one of the strongest in case of dps dervishes, and it has 2600 OA and 16% crit damage. OA is worth to be sacrificied in exchange for some other usefull stats.
Some joke about different feedback thread.