POE2 Normal Mode Poison Deadeye

Greetings!

This is a build which absolutely rolled in Normal Mode, it was a ton of fun and by the end was as smooth as butter. It has solutions for enemies of all sizes and profiles, it's active and fun to play, and its gear requirements are not high or restrictive at all. For normal mode I'd highly recommend it. I won't be playing it further, now that I'm in Cruel I want to try out further Deadeye builds (namely a Lightning Rod / Ball Lightning / Lightning Warp build), but it's entirely possible I'll revisit it once I hit endgame. Either way since I took it as far as I'll take it, wanted to share it out for others.

https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/9v17o01t

How it plays vs enemies of various types:

Weak Enemies - You stack poison on them, and ensure you've got at least one poison from both gas arrow and poisonburst arrow so they have their armor being stripped, they create a fiery explosion once it's zero (does no damage thanks to the way those support gems interact but detonates the gas arrow clouds), and then they explode on death thanks to Bursting Plague. Contagion causes it to spread on death, and so you take out whole packs and even whole screens at a time. When possible, you want to be kiting forward. Continually dragging infected enemies onto new enemies to keep the chains going, running past everything and only turning back if good loot drops.

If enemies lack an effect (contagion, the armor bursting, the bursting plague, or aren't at max stacks) just toss back one of the relevant effects their way. If something is a bit harder, with the massive armor debuffs poisonburst arrow likely absolutely wrecks them. Where relevant add DPS and area control with vine arrow.

Rare Packs and other medium strength enemies - Gas cloud starts the armor stripping, toxic growth absolutely annihilates them. Really those two are all you need. If you feel like tossing on extra effects or adding in a vine arrow to add DPS and slows that's cool. But they'll melt really quick.

If things are getting close and getting hairy, use basic bow attacks to almost instantly pin them. This also has the bonus effect of providing frenzy charges, so if you have minions with a miniboss mixed in or a pesky pack of rares you can snipe down the hard target, see below for more details.

Bosses - Poison sucks at killing bosses, it just does. Many small hits are infinitely worse than a few big hits. So you switch to the other mode entirely, Snipe and Barrage. If you already have stacks of Combat Frenzy because you're running around a map, just hit Barrage and Snipe and call it good. By the end, if you have max stacks (6) and hit the 50% from Thrilling Chase, hitting the perfect window results in effectively 15 snipe crits worth of damage at once. I've one shot area bosses with that when already stacked.

If it's vs an Act Boss or other major target, start the armor shredding using Gas Arrow, then use Sniper's Mark and Snipe to generate stacks of Frenzy Charges. Once you're maxed, use Sniper's Mark, Barrage, then Snipe to turn them into massive damage. Doing that, the bosses go down quite easily.

Passive Notes:
Generally the order in here is pretty loose, the Frenzy Charge stuff doesn't matter that much until you get your ascension points so focus on increased poison stacks first then make your way up to the Evasion Rating stuff. Worry about getting the Frenzy Charge stuff only if and as you have points for it, and don't be afraid to initially use all your points to push further and only worry about respeccing into weapon set points once you're at or close to the second jewel slot.

Make sure you have your boss killing weapon on 1 and your mobbing weapon on 2. You can limit poisonburst arrow to weaponset 2 and force it to switch, and same with snipe and weaponset 1.

When going up for that last poison stack (Building Toxins), the extra stack matters way more than the increased duration (escalating toxins). Go along the bottom of the skull and up the right side initially, then once you get enough to have both of the notables switch which side of the skull you're going up via refunds because poison on hit is mostly useless to you.

Acrobatics is incredible but please don't take it if it pushes your evade chance to like 40% even after wind dancer stacks. You want an evade chance of at least 60%, ideally 70%+, after acrobatics. If you have no evade, maybe don't take that one until you do.

Gear Notes:
Offensively you want 2 decent bows with heavy emphasis on physical damage. The more + physical and increased physical damage, the more potent your poisons and snipes alike. Extra projectiles such as from dualstrings are great but you're limited from poison stacks, and increased skill levels are nice but not as nice as increased damage. + Elemental damage isn't bad, it impacts some of your stuff, including snipes. But it has no impact on the potency of your poisons.

As mentioned Evasion Rating is key, along with Resists, for defense. Energy Shield is nice but not super necessary and lower importance through normal. Other than that, I would always recommend Magic Find if you can get it and Movement Speed on boots is absolutely king.

Finally the Unset Ring is a nice QOL piece - before you get it, you need to either be running Combat Frenzy (when mobbing) or Sniper's Mark (when you know you're about to face a boss). You need Sniper's Mark to keep generating charges during extended boss fights, but it's nice to generate them passively via pinning and so forth for smaller enemies.

Final thoughts:
I think this could absolutely be endgame viable if finished up and taken to its logical conclusions. It was ROLLING, I just am one who likes to experiment. If you do take it further please share how it performs later into cruel and in endgame. Any feedback you've got or recommendations for refinement are certainly welcome. Just wanted to share it out as far as I got it since it was an awesome experience to play. Thanks!