Witch leveling tips

I currently level a witch and tried to get my first ascendancy as bloodmage.

At lvl 21 my essence drain has a tooltip damage of 106

Bonestorm hits for maybe 3-4% of total boss life in the sanctum trial. (fully charged)

I even managed to get into a sort of soft enrage, where the whole room is bascially covered in his spitting vulcanos.
The game is harder than PoE 1 I get that, but holy shit I can't even kill an elite with life regen. I had terrible luck with gear, 1+ chaos gems and +17% spell damage on my wand.

Offhand is just resistance and thats it.
How do people get through it without loosing their minds.

I dont have enough gold to respec, so all I do is run around, trying to get some gear I can either use or sell, but at lvl 20 items are so expensive, I can barley buy one item.

It just feels incredible terrible to level right now. SRS was good in Act 1, but as soon as I hit act 2, everything went to a crawl.


It possible is a skill issue, since other people to manage, but still. Minions are dogshit, chaos DoT seems to be underperforming, in general I just have the worst experience while playing her.

Have you made sure to upgrade your gear and gems?
Especially early on, if you are not going straight for dps nodes from the passive skill tree, missing out on a gem level up or not upgrading a weapon can be pretty backbreaking.
I would try to check for some chaos wepaons/caster offhands, both can roll damage and will help a lot.
Also with chaos, at least for me it helped to use every single possible chaos gem. Essence drain, contagion, decaying hex even profane ritual. And if everything else fails, just reclear the area you performed best at.