Witch Contagion+ED, gems + tooltips

Hello.

All in all I find it enjoyable that GGG has made things harder, although perhaps a bit too much on the hard side now? I am playing a Witch and have gone into ED+Contagion, figure it could be a nice choice since the game is less twitchy than POE1 and you are not immediately punished if you have a more than 1 button build.

However, I focused on scaling chaos damage and spell damage (which incidentally also scales minion damage). I can't go into minion survivability though, because the damage of ED+Contagion is mildly put lackluster even when invested in more spell damage and chaos damage.

So, I'm left at the end of act one with a build that does absoulte crap damage and where my minions die almost at once against any boss and most mob packs. Facing a boss that chills me, drops stuff on my head while chilled (basically unavoidable damage if you are chilled and not just happen to luck out and already be moving out of the red circle and SWIFTLY push dodge), I am starting to thing this built was never meant to work.

I went in with the mindset "Oh, ok, I'll have to avoid better and wear him down". No such luck because it is the opposite way around. He wears me down.
After trying this fight for hours and being able to jump away from most of the charges etc, he STILL manages to deplete my ONE health flask before I kill him.

IF I could CHOOSE what potions to equip, I might do it with 2 health potions, but I am instead forced to use a mana potion that does NOTHING for my build.

I could try to get better gear, but I am already overleveled 2 levels and I just don't seem to get any good drops. No upgrade at all in the last half-day playing. Making the end of act one a gear grind is not really all that pleasurable. I am honestly unsure if it would make much of a difference too, perhaps DOTs was never intended as a playstyle, at least not this variant?

Further - the new gem system is JUST as opaque as the old one.
Tooltips doesn't get updated at all about damage or changes when adding support gems as far as I can tell, and it's hard to understand what is worthwhile and what isn't.

Saying that something is affected by spell damage, but then not being able to tell how much and how it compares to for example more chaos damage, makes it just as much as a guessing game as old POE without POB.

With some tweaks I'm convinced this could be a stellar game, but I would like even more clarity about the skills, how the support gems affect them, and clearly measurable outputs somehow so one can understand how a change affects the build.

This feels borderline like the things that are most important right now (at least with my build) is health-flask management and dodging/not standing in a fire, then waiting until my minions respawn to try to get a poison cloud off before they die to the next boss AOE.

In short - very challenging, and no clear way to understand
how/if this build could be viable. I feel like I am speccing in what should scale the damage, but it's very lackluster.