Riven Armour is pretty strong when you can proc it over 125 times per second...

Riven Armour adds flat damage to all hits. Fragmentation rounds are used because they have the best shotgun spread and hit 10 times per shot. Putting impale support on Frag rounds is the only damage "increase" you can give riven armour damage (The riven damage is stored as impales at 30%). You can see me ripping the impales out after the first burst window that failed with armour piercing rounds.

I picked Amazon for more consistent crits, good generic damage, and strong defensive shell. If you shoot HVT during the open weakness, you can do some insane damage. My weapon swap tree switches between full attack speed and damage. My gear is pretty average except for a headhunter and good crossbow. Only hit level 90 so far but have deleted every boss I've come across.

For clear I'm just using flashbang and siege cascade (which can pin itself now) but I've tested galvanic and it works great too. I didn't realize how good rampart raptor would be for extracting impales until I was using it while leveling.

Witchunter is probably a better ascendancy for consistent clear. With the weapon swap node, you can get way more attack speed and mobility with fragmentation rounds since damage is meaningless in that weapon set.

I'm really happy with how this turned out. Much less clunky than weapon swapping to a quill rain like I was originally going to do. Also, it's hella fun to have a shotgun that puts out so much smoke it looks like it's on fire while simultaneously knocking back anything across the map.

https://maxroll.gg/poe2/pob/v07td0qm

https://poe2db.tw/pob/WLDxq2V7My

https://pobb.in/oiJ3PCeexomT