[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

POE does not, to me, seem to be well-balanced at the moment. Some builds (see below) are just significantly more powerful than any other counterpart.

GGG is full of bright people - I'm (pretty) sure that they're aware of this - and will address this in the future.
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Too Powerful
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Any build that's able to apply poison or ignite without large sacrifice (Cospri's will for poison or crit/Elementalist for ignite) is bound to be way too powerful when compared to builds that cannot apply these DOTs.

At first blush, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Poison, afterall, is only 8% of base damage per second lasting 2 seconds - seems to be a 16% overall boost in damage - no biggee.

And ignite, 20% of base damage over 4 seconds but doesn't stack - we'll that seems to be even worse - a maximum of 80% base damage but since it doesn't stack, worse for sure, at least for builds that hit often (emberwake/the taming not considered).

The trouble is... double dipping. If you wisely choose your "% increased damage" types - they'll apply not only to the initial hit, but to the subsequent damage as well.
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Let's look at at these cases assuming 600% increased double-dipping damage and 300% more damage:

Let's look first at poison:

Let's say that all of your damage is either physical or poison (this assumption is likely wrong but the results below are representative of what happens).

Lets say you do 100 damage to a mob. Let's then compute the overall damage (ignoring physical/chaos resist).

100 base damage * 1.6 increased damage * 3 more damage + 100 base * 1.6 increased * 1.6 (double dip) * 3 more * 0.08 of base damage * 2 seconds since it stacks =
480 + 122 = 602 total damage versus only 480 without poison. Roughly 26% more damage due to poison.
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Now let's look at ignite.
100 base damage * 1.6 increased damage * 3 more + (100 base damage * 1.6 increased * 3 more) * 1.6 double dip * .2 * 4 seconds =
480 + 614 = 1094 total damage versus only 480 without ignite. Roughly 130% more damage due to ignite.

The drawback is that ignites do not stack... but to counter that, use a slow skill that hits for a ton of damage. Once it hits, you're free to move around and dodge stuff - once it's safe, repeat.

Flameblast seems ideal for this.
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The poison and ignite dot bonuses are huge and builds without these bonuses suffer tremendously.

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Next up are channeled builds and builds that increase damage as channeling duration increases.

For these builds, you'll need to stand in place for awhile to get maximum DPS. If you move, you're DPS drops to zero and moreover, as you start to DPS from a new location, you must stand still and wait for the duration benefits to kick in.

Incinerate is currently unplayable (totems make it OK) for this reason at high levels.

I fear that the new channeled skills will suffer the same fate - simply unplayable for Guardian/Shaper kills - or at best, far worse than alternatives.

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To balance the above, I think that some fairly significant changes must be made.

We don't want to eliminate dodging skill - so a huge leech bonus to channeled skills making movement unnecessary isn't in order.

Maybe a really big DPS boost for channeled skills plus some leech? Probably that has drawbacks as well.
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So...

Although the new channeled skills look interesting...

I've decided to try an Inquisitor/crit, flame trap trapper build for my last build in Essence Leage. I just can't see any of the new channeled skills getting anywhere near close to the effectiveness of the trapper build I mentioned or many other builds that leverage poison/ignite.
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Mathil got me thinking this way based on one of his latest videos (I forget which one). Mathil plays a ton of builds both spell casting and melee and has a deep knowledge of the game.

I don't think Mathil came to the conclusion I've draw above - in his video, I think he was just overviewing the game as a whole, pointing out areas where he thought that buffs were necessary.

One conclusion Mathill came to is that shock as applied by skills and freeze as applied by skills are pretty worthless for boss fights since the amount of damage you'll do against Guardians/Shaper means that the duration of these debuffs will be so low that they'll never apply.

Whereas, ignite and poison have entirely different mechanics and always apply so long as you hit and poison/ignite. Which means that all cold and lightning skills - absent damage conversion - are immediately at a huge disadvantage.
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Other areas of the game are unbalanced as well - some Vaal skills are way too powerful - for example allowing you to one-shot any boss that doesn't have phases - or to repeated kill boss phases give the ability to replenish soul charges.