Let’s briefly review gear options first.
Gear
There is one decent set of items dedicated to Acid&Poison (A&P): Deathguard.
Deathguard Reapers are moderately powerful, but they are still Reapers, meaning they are getting resist reduction only from one mastery and overall class combination is on the squishier side. And the build that is suggested is very limited. But overall I think it’s an ok, slightly above average build since Reapers are far from being the strongest class combo anyway. At least they have their set (unlike Defilers).
Every other gear that is dedicated to A&P is below mediocre or straight up hot garbaggio.
To start with, we have two signature A&P sets, both older than time itself. The Vileblade Pact, a meme tier build with its infamous fisting toy as one of the weapons. It boosts Amarasta’s Blade Burst and Ring of Steel. Firstly, Amarasta’s Blade Burst is a garbage level one skill, but someone in Crate has a love affair with it or something, because I keep seeing items that boost this awful skill with each patch since 1.0.7 or whenever it was that I first installed GD. Ring of Steel is cool, but let’s compare it to Cold RoS provided by Korba set. 60% weapon damage versus 150% (!!) for Korba, 10% cdr versus flat -1,5 seconds reduction, well, it’s kinda obvious why there are no builds in the compendium dedicated to Vileblade Pact Witch Hunters.
Deception of Dreeg, another signature A&P build that is borderline useless. It is supposed to be a DEE spam set, but to spam DEE you kind of have to use a very hard to find monster infrequent off-hand, but then weapon damage is VITALITY FOR SOME REASON. Weapon itself is awful, it looses to Plaguebearer of Dreeg, a mace that was meant for poison pet builds. Every other item is pretty bad as well, helmet gives you a “fail-safe” mechanism that activates when health drops below 30% and gives you such amazing amazing stuff like “100% skill distruption protection” (like really, Crate, for a set that will be always used together with Possession as an exclusive skill?), “-100% skill energy cost” (again, why?) and 20% casting speed (which you should be capping already if you are planning to play a DEE spam build). So imagine getting cornered by Reaper and Grava’Thull in Crucible and getting to your last 30% of health, all your heals on cooldown, no aether clusters or Blade Barrier, and you are like “Hey, wait a second, guys, guess what, I now have 180% skill distruption protection and all my spells are free, haha, so I guess I just die a horrible death now!”. Set also occupies amulet slot and is outperformed by a vitality first set Dark One’s Raiment that only occupies 4 slots.
Mythical Nightshade’s Reach, an item that suggests we can play an acid Shadow Strike build. Except there is no decent gear for an Acid Shadow Strike. And it seems Crate is still having nightmares about dual wield spellbreakers of the past since it’s kinda forcing a 2handed Shadow Strike build in our throat, but actually throwing us just a bone all Shadow Strike lovers can choke on in a form of just one item around which you can build a really gimmicky half-assed A&P shadow strike build.
Venomlance. What is this item? Why does it exist? What are we supposed to do with it? Noone really knows.
Ugenbog Bilelauncher, an ugly brother of Ugenbog Sparkthrower. Boosting a useless skill. Why?Ugdenbog Venomlauncher pistol. I guess you can build a beronath fury dual wield range Infiltrator with two of those, but there is no gear support for such gimmicky build, even if you happen two find two decently rolled pistols (which is doubtful), build would still be subpar to every other ranged autoattacker in game. Also, why 45% conversion, Crate? Do you want to make sure that nobody will ever use that item?
What else is there. Not a single decent A&P ring out there except epic Mythical Ring of Eternal Rot. No belts either. A&P boots are criminally bad and give a lot of Poison resist to a class combo that is very likely going to have 100% poison resist just from Aspect of the Guardian.
Skills
There are very few skills that are dedicated to A&P. Let’s start with Merciless Repertoire. Decent enough passive, flat Poison + %Poison. It’s good, right? Now compare it to other similiar passives: Brute Force: more relevant flat damage, %Damage AND Health. Ranged Expertise: Flat, %Damage, %Attack Speed AND it enables pistol dual wielding. Elemental Awakening: Flat, %Damage AND %Elemental Resistance. Flame Touched: Flat, %Damage AND OA. You can see where I am going with it.
What other A&P skills we have, ah, that’s right Dreeg’s Evil Eye. Another iconic Grim Dawn skill. And as someone who has decent enough experience with it I should say that skill is average or below average for the amount of points invested. It’s on par with Panetti RM, but Panetti got tonns of fancy gear to make it half-decent. DEE got one awful set, one impossible to get MI that promotes DEE spam gameplay and that’s about it, few modifiers here and there (like one okay one on Plaguebearer of Dreeg and one semi-useless on Conduit) and that’s it. Terrifying Gaze nod is trash.
Besides Blight Fiend for pet builds (that someone can add input for) we don’t have any dedicated Acid&Poison skills, just an occasional nod like Nidalla’s Justifiable Ends and poison component in Ravenous Earth.
So please, Crate, give Acid&Poison some love. Yes, we have Chaos, but at least Chaos got one really great set (Darkblaze) and one decent mini-set (Harbinger). Right now we have good A&P devotions, decent resist reduction support from classes, but everything else needs rework.