Blind Fury on stormbox is hot. Surprised that doesn’t push better results based on the damage numbers, will try giving that a spin.
I made a physical paladin with one last night on the “make a paladin for the spreadsheet” saga but haven’t tried in game yet. Yours already pushes better numbers https://www.grimtools.com/calc/Q2zQknaN
Alright, this one pains me. Haven’t tried major tweaks but other than upping WPS I don’t know where to easily get more damage:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/JVlmD35Z
Maxing the conversion for flat on the pistols and elemental damage heavy devotions, ala the FOI Apostate that worked well, along with sage+seru spam approach.
You can round up the most ridiculously sized pack in SR and feel immortal with relatively decent clear speed.
You will fold to the first double boss pairing in SR75, and occasionally on solo bosses. Bane makes it slightly better but not enough to deal with multiple different combos. I don’t see a good scenario where going all in on ADCTH keeps reasonable damage as you’ll have to drop the big two elemental devos.
Phasebreakers are slow, lowish damage, and in most “on brand” configs are going to require beronath shard which obviously feels anemic. RF doesn’t support elemental well, savagery isn’t ideal because you get no flat nor WPS going pistols, and soldier can’t even convert most of the deadly momentum flat outside of cadence hit. They seem like a novelty support item to firestrike right now but without a clear niche that fits the weapon bonuses.
More should be said about the Cold to Vitality conversion - 2 of these and you have 100% conversion, which is amazing if you can get 22/12 Soul Harvest.
I had been testing an Apostate with dual Mortalities: Vitality Gunner Apostate
I’ve been wanting to use the new Namadea’s Eye ever since I saw those bonuses; 50 flat on one item is bonkers considering how hard it is to get flat damage.
Unfortunately, here are the results: 
Even with near 40K weapon damage, I can’t seem to break the 9 minute mark. It must be the complete lack of AoE combined with having to put up with Shard of Beronath. I understand that it can’t overtake actual master AA replacers, but it sucks how weak Shard feels, particularly against Vitality-resistant enemies like Kuba.
Other than TQ having that shard based hag gunner in this thread with decent results, I had written it off again before trying the phasebreaker deceiver. Agreed, it’s in a tough spot considering it’s a component AA, but considering it only sees use on classes with no AA replacer, I’m hoping there is a happy ground with higher damage potential than it has now. Or some other creative option to get runebinder level AA (which I’ve also struggled actually to make a competent build around) for elemental onto non-AA classes. Also seems like it would have lower potential of breaking things compared to MOAR FLAT
Now however I’m wondering if namadea + something like soullance or spectral arbalest could be used to make a non-traditional vit FOI apostate 
I’m glad your testing shows the weakness of shard of beronath. I think there was some reluctance to buff this component because it is a free AA-replacer, but it’s clear that no mastery with an existing AA-replacer will ever use this, especially on ranged builds.
The flat damage on your build is at least in the top 10% for ranged builds, and if lacking a mastery-based AA-replacer leads to such poor kill speed, it’s quite telling that there’s an undeniable problem here.
A question that needs to be seriously considered: What is stopping the AA-aspect of this item from being a strictly inferior option to Shard of Beronath? This set is stuck between being a Rune-user and an AA attacker, and with how many skill-points all of the skills take up, it’s a very hard sell to use this weapon to good use.
In terms of a strictly Elemental attacker, I aim on testing out something like this: Shard of Beronath Elemental AA Mage Hunter. Any lack of RR is made up by loads of Crit damage (especially as Seekers + Arcane Sigils have a significant amount of Crit of their own), and 40% Damage against Cthonics to give a hearty FU to Grava being resistant to Fire and Lightning.
To be fair I haven’t spent a ton of time trying to get runebinder to work well, but on a full pierce conversion infil and then with elemental focus vindicator, it wasn’t exactly jumping off the page in game. Will keep playing with it but going to be niche I imagine.
That said, even with the useless skill bonuses for pure AA:
Runebinder: 115% x 180% (~2.07), 60 flat, 180% damage bonus including dots and basically 18% AS on weapon
Shard: 110% x 118% (~1.3), 45 flat if you fully convert physical, 120% damage if you’re elemental
Savagery 26/16 (ignoring nodes): 115% x 158% (~1.82), 100 flat + 333 dot, 150% damage. Then a butt load more stats if two hander and the following nodes
Shard also loses on QoL with only 1.5 second charge time vs 2 for runebinder and savagery/RF. I’m not sure if there is any crossbow or pistol combo available that’s going to give the flexibility to make up that damage difference, at least not as a pure AA, but maybe that’s the design goal that you flesh out another damage skill as well (obviously the case for runebinder set).
Interested in how the mage hunter turns out. The other piece of this with runebinder/shared is that I’ve had poor results on the majority of pure elemental builds I’ve tried without at least having double RR along with the hyper damage proc devo focus you’re trying. Hopefully seeker+seru+aetherfire are enough to push it over.
edit:
for giggles, looking at the flat on your magehunter with nar’s + shard vs runebinder. Attack speed is basically a wash once charges start
current: ~16,800 across fire/light/cold X 1.3 for shard for 21,840
runebinder: ~17,500 across fire/light/cold X 2.07 for 36,225
That’s a 66% jump going to runebinder. Obviously more to it from other skills and losing +2 all effectively, but…I don’t see +2 all getting you 66% more damage.
Apologies if I’ve oversimplified this, @tqFan should be able to correct my shit if I’m doing this wrong.
It’s entirely possible that Runebinder will win out in the end - I just don’t want to use a skill haphazardly without unlocking its full potential. If I’m going to build with Runic Bolts, I’m going to do it with full Runebinder set and grab as much out of it as possible.
I have not seen a full Runebinder’s set work since Mad_Lee’s Deceiver in early FG. I know DMT tested the set earlier and found it lacking, and if she couldn’t pull it off, someone of my calibur is definitely not having a good chance of pulling it off. I’m going to give it my best efforts, though. I have theorycrafted a Purifier that could be tested in a few days; far less sheet damage than the above Mage Hunter, but makes it up by having loads more RR, and the extra damage from Runic Bolts should make it superior in the end.
@TomoDaK happened to be cooking with full runebinder today with good results so far and I started doodling some additional setups with just the crossbow. Will have a post up this weekend of mine because it’s silly and yet decently effective
SR goals depend on how you think things are going to be with the new boss room changes. So far, I’ve been able to beat SR75-76 with time left only dying once on the boss wave, but I’m a coward who fights the bosses one at a time. And that’s largely dependent on not having the -% health or -% attack speed modifiers. Iron Maiden & Reaper are really difficult for this build - Reaper more so because of the RR wraiths and the savagery charging, so if you judge time based on whether I can beat something like Reaper + another boss, it’s not likely.
As it currently stands, however, I’ve been able to beat SR75-76 with time left on full Runebinder Purifier, and it would not have been possible without the Runic bolts, so I give it a + based off the offensive potential. I’ll have to try Crucible another day once I get more practice piloting this build.
Gave havocs a try by pulling out the usual flat stacking tricks: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/vNQ1wA8N
Feels pretty bad, and @Crittrain didn’t enjoy in crucible . Going to try more points in stormbox for aoe, but even single target feels slower than expect. Deathdealer smite warlord definitely felt more consistent to play, probably due to very strong wps and the gun procs covering up the downtime between cadence hits
A small thought: I think, it would be a nice idea to buff AS value on M. Vortex of Souls as it is used for AA and not for casting (and it has high CS for some reason)
While I would love this, something would have to be done to prevent the outliers (lightning PS, upheaval spam) from breaking the game with more attack speed since they are already running low 4 crucible. Probably something awful like 30% lightning/elemental -> aether conversion
I’ve wanted to use the cast speed on it but usually end up going with arcblade for similar stats and more importantly CDR
the one with 4k OA due to OA-bloated greens? 
actually, the game doesn’t end at Crucible so …
and that’ not the way as I personally don’t want to ruin any builds.
the one with no greens still does low 4s
Looking at it from a different angle, what about going full Bonemonger + double Tawrot on it for 100% Vitality->Aether conversion? Aether ranged Bonemonger has leagues better options but it could be neat with the 0.8s wave proc 
.
Not a bad idea, I guess. But I still think that swapping +4 SS to +2 to Shaman or OK, as well as 50% acid to vit, would be more interesting, since aether ranged already has decent options.
So about this… turns out that Stupid Dragon already pointed out an Dual-Gunner Apostate nearly two months ago - and I only remembered this post earlier today; turns out the Vitality Shard of Beronath concept was done in a far superior fashion via the Blood Knight’s Set.
So this post isn’t solely pointing out my dumb errors, I’ve been testing out various caster rifle builds that hadn’t been given much attention previously. One in particular is very neat, so I’d like to give it the proper attention and write out a full-fledged build post for it. Making detailed posts is not nearly as fun as playing and testing builds, but I hope to have something out before the end of the week.
Soulflayer again, I have a soft spot for this aether pistol pre-rutnick https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/9373
With veilwarden coming up, and RF now covered, I tried running this on a battlemage to see how no class RR pistols would go
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/O2G1895Z
Surprisingly this has been pretty stable in SR75-76 (haven’t hit reaper yet). But similar to the old oppressor use of this weapon, it’s just a bit slow. Around 27 second dummy kill, and guessing in the 6:30-7 range in crucible.
Couple ideas if this old blue could be perked up. It’s very slow, on battlemage with dual class attack speed, max gun rolls, jackal, and (originally) spider, you’re still under 180% attack speed. Also, Physical to Aether would help outside of cadence shots, as I see cadence as the last big AA option for this gun. And then finally even +1 or +2 cadence could help officially fit that slot.
reaper down with -hp mutator, so this is pretty stable, could just use more attack speed/damage
Just tested this thing: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/xZyXpowV
Did 6.30 and died other 4 times. AoE is shit, solotarget is very mediocre, sustain is bad, thermite mines being thermite mines. Funny enough, it seems like dreadscorcher is not the only issue here, i’ve tried Vortex and it was ± the same performance - better AoE, worse solotarget. Can’t quite point out the reason of it’s being so bad, but here it is.