So is the ranger just the game's hard mode?

I seem to have the most difficulty surviving with my ranger and that seems inevitable with the way she's designed. She can't realistically mass life and armour or energy shield. She seems positioned to rely primarily on dodge and evasion. This seems like a huge problem, because at some point you really just need to make sure the hits that do make it through can't kill you. For a while I didn't bother investing in life because I thought it was pointless. Now that I am, surviving ordinary monsters has become a bit easier, but bosses seem like an insurmountable problem. The one-shot potential seems out of this world with bosses dealing thousands more damage than I can realistically hope to have in HP. I've bounced some ideas around in my head like Blasphemy + Enfeeble and Arctic Armour. I was originally planning on running Grace eventually (I can't do any of this quite yet because I still need Purity of the Elements) but now that I think playing the lottery every time a boss swings seems far less appealing than making sure he simply can't kill me in one hit.

It still kills me that GGG won't release boss stats so that I know where the goal posts are. No, I won't let that go.

Ranger is not weak. But "generic overspecialization" in Evasion/Dodge is weak.

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Blasphemy + Enfeeble

Enfeeble can help a lot.

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Arctic Armour

Arctic Armour is good too.

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I was originally planning on running Grace eventually

Thing about Evasion is that it suffers from diminishing returns. Evasion can be very good as an additional layer of defense. But it is not good at replacing "hard" defenses.

If you want to do life/evasion based you should use several "hard" mitigation tools. Like the mentioned Enfeeble and Arcic Armour. Lightning Coil can help a lot too. Also a good choice for some builds: Mind over Matter (MoM) keystone - but a bit more complicated as you may need mana recovery.

Anyway there is no hard reason for going evasion/dodge with Ranger. You can go ES CI or multi hybrid defenses (like: life + MoM + evasion + armour + block) or whatever if you want to.

Edit: Forgot: You really want Basalt flask for Evasion based.

Also two of my best friends when I played ranger: stone golem (for taunt) and blink arrow/mirror arrow.

the only hard-mode thing about ranger is its not really that close to ES nodes yet its local life nodes all generally suck, its very difficult to get above 6k hp on a ranger without gimping yourself.

That being said what the other posters are saying is the direction you want to head in, when you make an evasion/dodge based character you need to understand how often you will get hit (evasions predictable, dodge is not keep that in mind) then you need both a solution for when you do actually get hit, and another to regenerate/leech your health back up between the hits.

If you get the balance wrong you either take alot of one shots from bosses, your overly reliant on potions or the build just feels plain bad but if you get it right its pretty stellar, especially against mass trash.

That being said its extremely easy to achieve high values of evade without much investment which is why nobody will really recommend stacking it, a stibnite + jade flask together give you something like 75-80% evade if rolled correctly and your in the blind cloud, after that it really isn't necessary to have any evade based gear anyway (this is more of a problem with high uptime high value potions than ranger itself)

Enfeeble and AA as others mentioned also cover the occasional hit very well, enfeeble also lowers their accuracy which helps your evade out anyway. Endurance charges can help reduce the phys spikes you take too. Other than that only things i can really think of is fortify on a movement skill and if you are really evade focused Kintsugi is an extremely good chestpiece.

To the above, I would add that you totally can evasion stack (just look at the popularity of Queen of the Forest right now), but you just need to supplement that with a TON of life. I think you underestimate how much life is feasible to get for rangers, honestly. Looking at your character, you have 3k life at level 81. That's insanely low. I'd want at least 5k by that level. You're missing life on a lot of your gear, and you only have 115% increased life on tree, including missing free life nodes at the Ranger start in favour of damage. I'm not particularly familiar with Caustic Arrow builds, but I can tell you that I would always aim for about 170% increased life on tree at level 90 as a Ranger. For example, this is the tree I have in mind for the beginner Tornado Shot guide I'm writing.

(By the way, you're still using hallowed life flasks. That can't be doing you any favours, get some divines and a basalt!)

Well thing abouth defences this days is you just need to know how to use them.
I even run skiny to the bone characters but what mather is to know how each defence add to another. Most are situational, cheep to invest, well main thing alweys is to understand how they worck and sinergy. This days even just using flask can be suficient, its hard realy to point to what is best becouse frst of you gona need to cros ower difrent stages regarding items and content before you get there.

But common mistakes are usualy just lazy bum, got fortify but never triger it, got flask but never use it, got charges but dont maintain it, easy cwd setups, suport skills, game mechaic like taunt, knock back, stun and many more.

Wen it come to sinergy simplest one is probably evasion with enfeecble, but you need to use it as such that its effecting evrithing else its not mach difrent then just using blinde from flask and such. Dodge is great for evasion becouse it can reset entropy and thos making evasion stronger and same go for block. For armor you can say charges and flask offering flat phys rediction are what dodge is for evasion, same go for enfeeble and blinde.

Check wiki on how things worck and how they add to each other so to get best metod for gretest effect.

What? Have you seen raider? Have you seen Pathfinder? ranger is one of the most powerful class if the the single most powerful class

Thanks for the help. This is a lot to think about.
So I guess I should undo all of those projectile damage nodes at the start of my tree and work them towards life? And maybe even those chaos damage nodes at the shadow's starting location? That's 112% damage total. Ouch.
With an Enfeeble aura I'm wondering if I should give up on my Frenzy + Vulnerability on hit combo. But I really want a DPS curse...
I'd really like to work CWDT somewhere in there. I've been thinking about Phase Run, Arctic Breath, and Immortal Call. But I've got this Wither Totem taking up sockets not to mention that Frenzy + Vulnerability setup. Something's gotta give.
I'm really not excited about the idea of replacing my Carcass Jack with a Lightning Coil. I'm hoping I can do without that. Making up for that resistance seems like such a pain and the Carcass Jack has bonuses specifically helpful to Caustic Arrow. It also seems to fit the theme, being a carcass.
The funny thing is I got a lot of these ideas from Caustic Arrow builds posted a while ago (Wither Totem, Frenzy + Vulnerability, etc.). Maybe things have changed since then. I'm also wondering why Grace is so popular, but maybe it isn't and I'm completely wrong about that.

Here's what I would do in your situation.

Ditch Perandus Blazon for a Life belt (preferably 140+).
Ditch Le Heup for a Life ring (preferably 70+).

Replace one Life flask with Stibnite, another with a Basalt.

Try to kite more and facetank less.

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kjykjy1985 wrote:

I'd really like to work CWDT somewhere in there. I've been thinking about Phase Run, Arctic Breath, and Immortal Call.

Phase run kills your frenzy charges so if you get hit often it may be an issue.

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kjykjy1985 wrote:

But I've got this Wither Totem taking up sockets not to mention that Frenzy + Vulnerability setup.

You probably need the Wither totem if you dont have separate single target.

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kjykjy1985 wrote:

not to mention that Frenzy + Vulnerability setup.

You can get Vulnerability from this - dont know trading prices - but it interferes with Enfeeble if you use it. And you need to build tanky and play "aggressive" because the range is not very good. As survival is your problem here its probably not so good for you. (Unless you want to completely redo your build.)

Edit: Increased DoT damage on flask works independent of the curse - so flask gives DPS even if enemy is out of range.

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kjykjy1985 wrote:

I'm really not excited about the idea of replacing my Carcass Jack with a Lightning Coil.

This one also works but its not so good if you have no armour due to dodge. Coil is really strong vs phys damages. You get ~30% "more life" out of the coil bonus vs phys hits.