I made my own build, and got to maps, but it's getting unplayable, please help if you can

After many years of copying other people's builds, I decided to make my own.

The concept is "simple" SSF Toxic Rain CI Ranger

I like dot skills, I like the concept of CI (never played it), and I decided for Ranger, because I had never played one, seemed good.

I planned it all in POB to have 7k ES and enough damage, you can see my planning here: https://pastebin.com/vYYPUXM4

I believe you can see my characters from my profile, but if I'm wrong, here's my current situation: https://pastebin.com/776h4Ptm

In playing, the acts were easy enough, I got some uniques, I got a tabula from Gwennen, and eventually some other ok gear from Rog.

Now I'm doing T1 and T2 maps, and I'm soooo squishy! The damage is still good, but I have almost no survivability. I managed to fix my resists, and it didn't help.

The question now is: is it salvageable? Can I do something about this build yet?

The reason I decided for such a combination was to avoid falling back into looking at poe.ninja and youtubers doing the same thing, and it influencing my decision making. Maybe this needs a lot more gear to work, but I don't know that...

Do you guys have some insight to give me?

Thanks in advance!

Your current build is unplayable, the target build is not playable either with 11k ehp its not going to be smooth gameplay, your 7k es has no damage mitigation, you will be dying to white monsters.
https://pastebin.com/1g67QA0f]
heres example build that has 3 times more ehp than your current build without even changing to proper gear with life roll on each piece

mh, I don't really see the point in going CI or Energy shield at all for that build. There's not much synergy imo.

But if u really want to stick to it, I'd suggest trying hybrid ES + Evasion.
U have over 220% increased evasion rating in ur build + the 35% more evasion with onslaught.
That might lower ur ES to 5-6k(with good gear), but give u a pretty high chance to not take any damage. Ur fast ES recovery should cover the cases u get hit.
The only problem with evasion is, it doesn't cover spells, so since u already got 15% spell dodge, u might want to add to that. (Atziri boots, crafted influenced boots, Sirus jewel for getting phase acrobatics without having to spec into acrobatics etc.)
U also wouldn't need Flesh and Stone with that and could instead use Malevolence.

Btw. increased Area of Effect isn't really benefitial for Toxic Rain. It decreases ur single target damage, because the explotions don't overlap as easy anymore. U could save some points there and even use concentrated effect as support.

just a few points to consider :)

adding to that, it's not a good idea to play a CI or ES character as ur first character in a league.
ES is very gear dependend and until u got that gear, u're going to be very squishy.

Thanks for your responses people!

I have a lot to learn about builds, but it was a fun experience trying to create one =]

"

Sadaukar wrote:

mh, I don't really see the point in going CI or Energy shield at all for that build. There's not much synergy imo.

The thing about it, is that I've always wanted to try, but it seemed (still seems) too complicated. Also, I really dislike chaos damage against me, I always have low chaos resist... Someday, maybe, I'll figure it out

"

paulin wrote:

"

Sadaukar wrote:

mh, I don't really see the point in going CI or Energy shield at all for that build. There's not much synergy imo.

The thing about it, is that I've always wanted to try, but it seemed (still seems) too complicated. Also, I really dislike chaos damage against me, I always have low chaos resist... Someday, maybe, I'll figure it out

there are more sources of chaos resist now than ever before.
amethyst ring implicit got buffed, up to 23%.
there are chaos resist implicit boots up to 17%
chaos resist on all cluster jewels.
Elemental+chaos hybrid crafts up to 15%

"

paulin wrote:

"

Sadaukar wrote:

mh, I don't really see the point in going CI or Energy shield at all for that build. There's not much synergy imo.

The thing about it, is that I've always wanted to try, but it seemed (still seems) too complicated. Also, I really dislike chaos damage against me, I always have low chaos resist... Someday, maybe, I'll figure it out

I know exactly what u mean.
When I started playing PoE I found CI and the concept of energy shield very exciting myself and once I started doing my own builds I tried to make it work.

I can asure u, I made alot of mistakes and bad builds in the process :D
The thing I learned about it and poe builds in general is, that it doesn't make sense to shoehorn stuff into builds.

Don't try to play a certain ascendency with a skill that doesn't have any synergy with it, just because u always wanted to play that ascendency for example.
Same goes for CI/ES... don't try to make a CI Berserker work, just because u like the idea of CI and u want to try out Berserker.

Always try to figure out what u want to play the most. Is it a skill, build everything around it, what ascendency to choose, which defenses and so on.
Is it an Ascendency, try to find skills that fit in very well.

U didn't do a bad choice with raider and toxic rain, but they don't benefit Energy shield in the slightest.
I think Trickster would have been the best choice for that, alot of synergy with ES + Evasion and DoT scaling.

Anyway, keep improving and u'll eventually get a good CI build :)