Born in the Shadows synergy/design intention

I'm a perpetual noob at this game so I'm probably missing something. But there's something I find a bit puzzling about the Saboteur notable passive 'Born in the Shadows' in the current version, from a build design/synergy perspective.

1. It's a strong and unusual defensive perk, and has absolutely nothing to do with traps/mines.

Nearby enemies are automatically blinded: that means melee opponents (unless they're immune) are 100% guaranteed to be blinded before they can swing at you. Throw in the 25% blind on hit, and most ranged attackers will soon be blind as well. So essentially you've halved the chance for you and your allies to be hit by attacks, and halved the chance for enemy attackers to score crits if they do hit. Then on top of that, you're taking 10% less damage from hits (including by spells). It's the kind of passive you'd love to have on any close-combat build that doesn't use Unwavering Stance. (Immunity to blind is a minor thing, but it's also much more meaningful for an attack build than for the typical trap/mine build.)

Now admittedly, there are other ways to blind your enemies, but generally it's fairly inconvenient to do so: Smoke Mines have to be planted specially; Stibnite Flask uses a flask slot; Blind support is only 10% chance on hit and uses up a support slot; a few uniques give blind, but generally not on the scale that Born in the Shadows does. Born in the Shadows by contrast causes mass blindness with very little effort.

2. The rest of the Saboteur ascendancy is a bit lacking unless you use traps/mines.

Explosives Expert is fine if you're using elemental area skills. You can justify Pyromaniac if your main damage dealer is not trap/mine, as long as you use a lot of utility traps/mines. (I suppose Siphoning Trap will be one way to go for tank builds in 3.3?) The rest though isn't really worth it if you are not using traps/mines as your main weapon.

3. Trapper/miner builds are not natural tanks.

I know you can never have too much defence in PoE, but as a trapper/miner, it's not like you need to put yourself in the line of fire as much as a direct hitter would. The inability to leech also makes you kind of bad at tanking. So in practice, your approach is going to be more about positioning yourself so enemies won't touch you, rather than getting the most out of the evasion mechanics.


So where does this leave Born in the Shadows? It seems like whatever you do, you're not getting the full benefit of it. For a non-trap/mine build that wants easy blinds, you can go Ascendant with Saboteur notable, but it's not as good.

Perhaps the Saboteur ascendancy could have one or two more notables that do not require traps/mines to give benefits, so it makes sense to build a more general 'shadow warrior' Saboteur? Even a single extra notable behind Born in the Shadows (giving some kind of additional advantage against blinded enemies) would increase the number of options significantly. Or would Born in the Shadows become too strong if the ascendancy as a whole synergized well with direct attack/spell builds?