Witch Hunter QoL feedback for next league

G'day GGG,

I would like to share my thoughts so far on witchhunter and offer some suggestions to help bring the class up to par with some of the more popular ascendancies.

My goal: get some QoL changes at least considered for next patch.

First, my creds:
1. 94 on Standard
2. Pinnacle diff cleared: Arbiter 2 / Xesth 4 / Expedition 3 / Simulacrum 0 / Ritual 0
3. Hours on WH: over 400
4. Minimal POE1 exp, but thousands of hours on other arpgs such as torchlight, D3 ect.

Bottom Line Up front: Witch Hunter needs new/inproved options that enhances the things they are meant to do; 1. Disable and Kill "witches" (i.e. powerful enemies like bosses) 2. Have poweful defenses against magic.

Why ask for changes?

Currently we are the least or second to least popular class. Deadeye can do burst and defense better. Gemling can clear better. We need to excel at SOMETHING.

Where is witchhunter strong
Currently, the main "flavor" we possess is the ability to instantly (but randomly) shave off 15-60% hp off of any non unique enemy we face. with a certain unique helmet, this raises to 25-90% hp. For bosses, its only 10-40% hp and 15-50% hp respectively.

Additionally, we are able to reduce skill (not attack) cooldowns on enemies, which is mostly only noticeable on prolonged boss fights. For example, the arbiter will sometimes not utilize his famous lazer and bomb combo on phase 2-3 if he is fully affected by concentration loss. One, or both of the skills may be "on cooldown" so he just swings his sword around aimlessly.

Lastly, we can AoE clear 10-20% of the time. This is not so much of a strenght but its useful for leveling phase. I honestly don't know what GGG vision was with this ascendancy. If you really wanted to give us some demon-undead hunter flavor, why not just make the chance 50% and add 25% more damage for only demons/undead and zero for other monsters? then we could specialize in breaching and actually have a purpose and be sought after for "contracts" like "hey i need a witchhunter for +4 xesht carry".

Where is witchhunter weak
As amazing as our strengths sound, the fact that nobody plays us should give you a hint. Being able to shave off all that life from enemies is irrelevant when damage from any good build deletes enemies anyway. So our signature "speciality" never gets to stand out at all, except in rare cases such as 100% delirium maps, which if you are running you most likely have enough dps to delete anyway.

So then, we take a look at our other "speciality".

Sorcery Ward.
This skill must be reworked from the ground up. Let me explain.

1. As I understand it, this skill is meant to provde witchhunter with a "second chance" against "magical" attacks. Fully investing in armor or evasion or energy shield is not as beneficial for us as other ascendancies which all have some sort of additional bonus with either. Even gemling gets double life, or mana or both. The idea is, you somehow end up getting hit, your ward takes the bulk of the hit, but you survive, now you must dodge and reposition while ward recovers. Repeat process.

2. In practice, this does not work. If you are endgame mapping, and i mean truly mapping, you know that 99% of the dealiest most nasty hits are AoE PHYSICAL or CHAOS hits. Theres only a few really deadly elemental attacks, such as the Expedition wizard tri elemental blast, or Xeshts Fireballs. And honestly, not even the ward may save you from those.

3. Some of these "non magical" attacks are CLEARLY non material hits, such as the blast pressure shockwaves from slams, or the poison projectiles from snakes, or the DEMONIC SPIKES from breach LITERAL DEMONS. I dont care if the damage is physical or CHAOS, thats as magical as it gets.

Proposed Solutions
I suggest sorcery ward be reworked to prevent all hit damage from "SKILLS". This retains the flavor and consistency but makes the skill not completely useless. Also, the penalty to armor and evasion should be removed, but the effectivenes brought down to 15%. Why? because you cannot take acrobatics with sorcery ward or get a good amount of armor with the current penalty with out losing a valuable slot to put a cloak of flame on or literally putting everything on evasion and having zero damage. its just not feasible and ive tested BOTH ways extensively.

Lastly, let's talk about "weapon master". I 100% this was made with other unreleased weapons in mind. But in the current state, weapon swap is not used to have two totally different builds. The reason is you can swap passives, but you cannot swap jewels. Jewels are a good 25-50% of my total power. So any real dual build would really require a way to swap jewels too. Right now all i get from the swap is extra shock magnitude and thats it. How about instead of extra weapon points we get 2-4 extra jewel slots wich are independent from the main passive tree? Now that would be something unique and cool and enable some wacky things like socketing multiple megalomaniacs.

conclusion
Please dont forget us as you roll out these patch notes, GGG. But no matter if we get some mucb needed love or not, I'll continue my crusade against evil as a witchhunter! thanks for your time!

im waiting for new league and i will not play merc anymore

A did a simillar post, but talking about the witch hunter and the crossbow.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3714469