The build is based on grabbing a few Bleed and affliction nodes and using them to scale damage through Pins and Herald of Blood explosions. Defence comes from Armour stacking, Armour shards and soon Deflection and layers of immobilize/pin. It sounds absolutely AMAZING.

I started this league off with a Permafrost/Frag Merc, (thanks to the lovely u/linkyshadow for tips and moral support) and quickly fell into love with the Pin mechanic from Tactician and then fell out of love with the constant weapon/ammo swapping of Perma/Frag - something about it started to annoy me, then tried cluster and that feels awful to me too, so built this from the bottom up.

Clearing is 'fine' - it's not Cluster Mortars but you can see and engage with the game so meh! 90% of the timee spraying around Armour Piercing rounds, with Chain II propagating bleed and Pin, nailing everything down and setting off aggravated bleeds from Rusted Pins, so that HoB explosions can spread out over the screen. Siege Cascade's in there with haemocrystals to thin out large / heavy packs. Run and Gun / Spray and Pray give good movement around maps which, combined with fast reloading keystones gives an almost constant stream of AP rounds. Yes, PoE2 is now a twinstick shooter. Clear is alright, but it's bossing where the real happiness comes out.

Elite/Boss rotation of "A clip or AP Rounds, 3-4 HV rounds, then a clip of AP rounds to finish off" absolutely melts everything I've come across so far. Swapping out Chain II for Uruk's smelting is a thing, but I often forget. I'm only on low tier maps, but everything dies super fast. often before being particularly threatening. AS I understand it, the "tech" of HV rounds goes a bit like this:

AP rounds removes armour, adds bleeds to the Boss and Pins it. HV rounds do big damage then proc larger bleeds (made even larger via Wasting notable) and stack Impale from the big hits. Next clip of AP rounds activates the impales and does extra damage too via wasting.

To grow from here it seems sensible to scale into Crit, especially with the "Perfectly Placed Knife" notable and milk the massive Impale and Aggravated bleeds until either I run out of money or run out of interest.

Current Tree/Char: https://pobb.in/i4FUzOQ5UEPC