Best Equipment I've ever had - Dmg feels underwhelming - what's a possible Chaos-Reskill?

There is a hit based ED which will obviously get a much bigger effect from unnerved but the default one is pretty much DoT only and won't see much use

And yes there is one that will basically kill you if you cast it yourself, it does ~ double the damage but you have to use it with a proxy - personally i despise this lmao but I guess its interesting in its own way.

As to Wither the issue is Chaos damage used to be desirable because it was close to other games true or pure damage, enemies had very little resistance to it, it can't be reflected so it naturally has a lower value to compensate. Wither was the ramp for that to reach normal values.

Now though it isn't any different to any other damage source, so Wither is just a tax to get Chaos damage to normal values - it has far less nodes available on the passive tree, chaos pen is rare/limited, no chaos exposure etc.

All that would be fine, except Wither also requires 15 stacks to max out which is very hard to actually hit reliably unless you are using a shotgun skill, a balance of terror or play pathfinder/occultist.

Personally I think they all suck except occultist which is why so many chaos builds are occultists. Its very restrictive.

Like lets take OP's ED for example - already numerically bad as a skill we are going to have to get 15 wither what are our options?

Play an occultist, that's literally it you can put wither on a totem and it'll have marginal but probably OK uptime all the other sources are never going to work ED is too slow, doesn't shotgun and you'd never get 15 hits in per 2 seconds even with 100% chance to apply.

Meanwhile skills that convert other elements to chaos or just have a busted base source then wither frequently overperform like replica Alberons or Original Sin etc because they were never expected to have an extra 90% ramp to begin with.

Its just like I mentioned earlier its like having to apply shock before you do damage, but we can apply full shock instantly or increase its effect/application, support it with other things etc. They need to add full passive support for wither or just remove it and increase the correct chaos skills damage.

Yep, makes sense. I see what your saying. Its either a struggle to get it working or completely busted.

I'm not sure exactly how much it needs changing. Like I said I league started venom gyre last league and it seemed pretty balanced. Not sure about pure chaos DOT builds. I know they were being used a lot some years back. Still working but seem to be out of favour. That's a bit how it goes. Melee was buffed this league, maybe its something they will look at next update. I think the proxy builds are cool, so long as it is not mandatory to run the proxy because it is much better than self cast.

AFAIK venom gyre multi hits so you consistently have full stacks, Wither tends to be fine on the skills that can ramp it without having to think about it and that opens up playing those skills on other ascendancies.

Poison builds inherently tend to be fine because unless your going low tolerance you tend to just want to maximise your cast/attack speed anyway.

For example i've got a pconc of bouncing tree ready for next league, 8-10 wither stacks with 0 investment is fine, I could cap it if i want or invest more to get it to 15 that is kinda how it should be.

But for essence drain/bane/soulrend(not spiral) etc its just gross.

Thanks for all the nice comments so far and pushing me to refine my gem setup where I still clearly lacked understanding of the Awakened stuff etc...

To push my damage further I'm trying to find a new wand the last couple of days but there's just not a single one copied into PoB that even comes close to mine..
I'm always hovering around +/-5% total dps, am I filtering wrong or are the two DoT attributes just so powerful for the build?
I bought this one for iirc 1.4div really early but it's shitting just over every item in the 20div range on the trading site..

- % incr spell dmg
- % incr. DoT
- +1 to lvl of all chaos skill gems

are the only things I'm filtering for inside mym budget, even without the +1 there's just a few offers.

Am I too late this season and I'm stuck or just looking the wrong way? -.-

Could be that there's not a better one for cheap, the one you have is not terrible, just thought it might be something that could be improved. I have no idea if it's economically worth the investment, just that it looked like there was some room for improvement on the mods. Could be that crafting one or just sticking with the one you've got is the best option. Most builds do get to a point where larger investment is needed for smaller gains.