I don’t think it’s been brought up yet, so I’d like to approach Grasping Vines.
Acid Grasping Vines is okay now thanks to the Conduit for providing duration and the Archon class for CDR to stack a lot of Grasping Vines together. Vitality Grasping Vines is still going through turmoil depending on how good or nerfed Wildblood Set is. There are two Retal Vines builds out there - one being Mad_Lee’s Bramblevine Archon, and the other is this Retaliation Grasping Vines Warder that I think uses Lightning damage, but I can’t see the damage makeup of the skill.
Meanwhile, Bleeding Grasping Vines - one of the main selling points of the skill - has… Wildblood Set. There’s the Gutripper Rifle that’s supposed to be the big Grasping Vines weapon, but it’s effectively forcing you to combine it with 2H Bleeding Cadence with no Savagery benefits which include attack speed… and oh yeah, no attack speed on the weapon either. Then you have Bloodsurge Amulet, but then the Goredrinker set came out and made it so that you need the amulet to get the Soldier skills and the juicy bleeding mods to Cadence.
In the meantime, other equipment pieces that give +points to Grasping Vines are a Drain Essence caster helmet, Forcewave Shoulders with no Bleeding bonuses, and multiple items that combine GV skill bonuses with Blade Arc + Ring of Steel in which case you’re just picking the Bloodrager’s Set and doing Savagery instead and forgetting GV altogether.
It’d be really cool to try some sort of Grasping Vines + Goredrinker’s Vire’s Might Archon where the weapon has extended duration on the Vines so you can place the Vines, slow enemy movement to a crawl, then use Vire’s Might to run all over them (I tried an initial theorycraft, but the OA/DA was so bad that there was no way to rectify it while keeping the skill bonuses). But there’s no MI options at all and the equipment that does give bonuses chokes out any other skill from being adequately invested.