I’m considering a journey through Cairne with a Spellbinder (self-found with no previously collected gear). Is Panetti’s Replicating Missile a bad idea for leveling? The plan is that once I collect the appropriate gear for a Drain Essence or Aether Ray build I would switch to that at the end game. So…
It’s more than enough
Levelling - viable.
Farming ultimate without gear - yes, a bad choice.
You spelled “terrible” wrong. God bless you have someone like me here. 
It’s pretty good.
Bind a spammable devotion like Aetherfire to it, and damage will be good.
Pretty sure all builds are terrible at farming ultimate without gear.
At least aether PRM variant really requires only 1 medal which can be farmed on first difficulty.
Not all. DK is not terrible at all without gear. I used to farm with a DK with (on average) 50% in all resists on ultimate and did pretty well. Some bosses could kill me, but Siphon Souls backed me up every time.
Also, many soldier builds can handle farming at ultimate without gear. I doubt it’s just me being so “good” at soldier class to be able to farm every boss in the game (except for nemesis+).
Yes. All skills can be used to farm with appropriate gear, but there’s a reason why some skills farm way faster than others.
PRM so happens to be one of these ‘others.’
I’ve posted a number of builds for Beginners that can farm ultimate in faction gear. PRM is just weak.
and if you are playing hardcore/softcore you can still just farm elite for all non mythical legendary gear, until you are geared up enough with your build to head into ultimate, and get your mythical versions. This is what I do specifically in hardcore, and even before you do that, it’s cake to farm acts 1, and 2 boss areas in ultimate too, and elite game mode will scale monsters all the way to level 90 in malmouth.
I don’t think PRM is weak if you go the Aether variant.
As someone mentioned, all you need is one easily-attained medal to convert all damage to Aether and Devotions are pretty straightforward as well.
I played an Aether PRM Spellbinder all the way from level 1 (with fresh stash but blueprints retained) to Gladiator 170/Ravager and it was among the smoother leveling/farming experiences I had even on Hardcore.
One part is the all Aether/skill damage (so you don’t need good items), the other came from the Spellbinder defenses.
Some monsters even beyond level 90 in Malmouth. Kreig set is easiest to farm in Elite once you hit level 94 as an example
Thanks guys. I ended up going with this so far at level 42:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/nZoDe8kN
@Weyu:
Which metal is farmable in the first difficulty? It was reference but no one specifically stated the name of the item.
If your plan is to ‘eventually’ use drain essence i don’t see any reason to wait really. Drain essence is an even smoother leveling experience imo.
Imo, channeling skills are way slower than any other skill. Also they’re not safe either. With any other skill, you can just cast it and keep on moving, while channeled skills ground you for a while. This might even result in reduced clear speed. For example, PRM might clear your path in 5 seconds, while a DE could even take twice as long, because you can hit at max 3 targets and if you face more enemies, the DPS just drops, unlike PRM which has DPS drop at one target and still only sometimes. As I said, this is just my opinion.
Drain Essence and Aether Ray most definitely are much slower than other spammable and AoE spells for rapid leveling in the early game when playing self-found. Even when you have DE and its associated modifier spells maxed out it is still slow.
You greatly underestimate drain essence. Once you hit act 3 it hits up to 5 additional targets 30% of the time 4-5x per sec. Combine that with aetherfire proc (and you really should) and it’ll clear screens in 2-3 seconds.
Plus the safety of in built 16+% life leech makes it almost cheating safety wise.