Shin's Blood and Steel - Witchhunter

The play style depends on whether you are fighting a single target or packs.

Rotations:

Packs: Armour piercing rounds in a quick burst to apply broken armour on the pack, then follow up with a flash grenade to break the armor using the exploit weakness support. This will most likely proc a blood off the grenades along side doing great aoe burst physical damage.

Feel free to switch to High powered round to pick of any survivors.

Single target:

Same as packs, we start by breaking the armour of the enemy, however this time we follow up with a High velocity round to the face to proc a massive bleed. Before firing the Round, pop Emergency Reload to maximise the damage of the round. Rinse and Repeat until dead. Feel free to throw a few grenades in to the mix, but be sure to use it after a High velocity round as we don't want to waste a broken armor on the lower damage grenades.

If you come to a point you get to start a fight or are panicking, pop down a Ripwire sentry. These lil guys draw aggro like crazy!

Defence:

Witch hunter is kinda crazy when it comes to negating Elemental hits (not ground effects) with its sorcery ward. This thing gives you a "shield" that completely negates ele hits until its hp is depleted. Its hp is calculated by 30% of the total of your armour and evasion. This means it can get really large. The down side is it cuts your armour evasion by 50% which hurts allot, but can be fixed by the passive tree quiet easily.

Overall, it is insane against anything that has ele hits and decent against physical. So keep moving and avoid attacks best you can either way.

Gearing is very simple.

Get a Crossbow with LOTS of Physical Damage and +to projectile gems levels. Later on you will want to get one with Crit chance as well to push the damage further.

For Armour, you just want armour evasion gear best you can get. Prioritise ele resists first the increased armour/evasion rolls. And life. Always life.

Gems can come online pretty early as we dont use anything insane.

Main gems are Armour piercing rounds, Flash grenade and High Velocity Rounds.

Id also suggest picking up Wind Dancer asap. But for full details, read on.

Skills and supports explained:

Armour Piercing Rounds:
>Chain>Demolisher>Life Thief
This is our main uptime ability. We dont use it for damage, we use it to remove armour as fast as possible. Due to this, we get chain asap and demolisher to make its purpose just that much better. I pop life thief on it as well as it helps a lil with sustain.
Use is simple, spray and pray until everything is debuffed with broken armour.

Flash grenade:
>Scattershot>Exploit Weakness>Ingenuity>Discombobulate

This is our go to area clear and the main reason we can get pretty fast clear speeds. Linked to scatter shot asap and we turn grenade in to grenades, allowing for much larger clear area. Next we link Exploit weakness and ingenuity. Exploit will allow us to do massive damage to all the enemies that we have applied the broken armour debuff to, paired with bleed chance and Zealous inquisition, we have a aoe clear machine. Ingenuity decreases cooldown and discombobulate makes enemies in longer fights dazed.

High Velocity Rounds:
Brutality>Execute>Heft>DeepCuts

This is the main big boy and the skill we put the most t3 supports into.
We link this straight away with Brutality, increasing its damage by a massive 35%. Next execute, this allows us to do another massive 40% more damage when our target is on low life (This is amazing for bossing). We use this setup for awhile as its mainly a single shot we dont get other good skills til later. You could add Double barrel support if you want.
Next is the t3 gems, heft and deep cuts. Deep cuts lowers our damage by 25% but increases the bleed damage we do by 75%. Heft is a interesting one. It increased out maximum possible physical damage by 30%, this is pretty good as all bleed scales of the physical hit.


Emergency Reload:
Premeditation>Persistence

This is simply just a short buff we can use before we shoot a High Velocity Round. It adds a 25% damage boos to the equipped mag and can be increased to 40% with the premeditation and give you more time to land the shot with persistence.

Ripwire Ballista:
Lockdown>Ironwood

This things fun, its so good at gaining aggro that i dont leave home without it. Pop it down to distract packs or prepare for a fight. Linked to Ironwood to make it survive longer and lockdown to increase its ability to pin enemies.

Wind dancer:
Vitality>Precision

This ones amazing. You can get it early and you can add supports as you expand your spirit. It gives you a % of evasion per stack up to 3 stacks and if melee gets through that evasion, the stacks will be spend and a blast of wind will launch enemies away from you, giving you time to gtfo. Must have asap. Linked with vitality for passive life regen and precision for extra accuracy.

Scavenged plating:
No links

This ones a no brainer once you have finished the story and acquired all the spirit you get from quests. It gives 3% armour for every broken armour you apply and stacks to 10x so 30% armour just by doing what we do is a great choice all round.
Sorcery ward:
This passive skill is acquired by the first ascendency we should get. See how it plays section for more details.

I used mobalytics tree as i could'nt figure out how to export maxroll tree and i just dont like the look of poedb.
link: https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/profile/b1ad00fb-3a93-47a1-ba03-cb1b4f8e95ce/builds/65abe06b-5936-42e7-8151-9721a9aaa913

Skill tree is broken up in to sections, using the "sets" buttons above the tree to see the progression. I've broken it down in to 3 sections.
Main = Start to just past mid-game
Set1 = Mid to late (pink)
Set2 = Maps onward (green)

*Select between STR or DEX depending on what you need. Try to keep them balanced as you will need both for gear.

Rundown on each section:

Main Section:
Our main priority here is to get as much damage as possible to allow us to clear the story and progress as smooth as possible.

We take early Evasion and armour nodes to help with survivability. These nodes are Backup Plan and Feel no Pain. This will be more then enough to play comfortable with our inherent mobile gameplay.

On the way down to the Backup Plan, we also take the Ailment such as Exposed Wounds which will increase our chances to proc a bleed later on and a MASSIVE bonus to armour break with enemies that have ailments applied.

Next we grab all the bleed nodes to the right of Backup Plan to allow us to bring Bleed online fast.

Now we will start seeing a falloff of damage so we now pick up the Twohanded cluster below the bleed cluster. We want everything here. It will not only give us loads of extra (its a very noticeable boost), it will also give us 10 of each dex and str (not shown on mobalytics tree version :S) and a 15% boost to accuracy which is handy when we are blind from our grenades 90% of the time.

From there is a straight run to the next large bleed cluster which is the next big upgrade on the build. Access to AGGRIVATED Bleeds. Get all the nodes here and you will start seeing bleed picking up and mobs bleeding to death quite effectively.

Now we are almost done for this section and should be feeling quite good. Next up is the bleed cluster just down below the last and a free projectile clusters right next to it. Go ahead and grab the entire bleed cluster with Bleed out node. This will give faster bleeds and a massive boost to our accuracy vs bleeding enemies. Other on the right we grab up to Advanced Munitions as this gives us more bleed chance.

Last run is all the way to the right to the Deterioration node. This bad boy with make your bleeds feel oh so nice.

At this point you should have at least 2 ascendency points and sorcery ward. Grab Zealous inquisition right after.

Section two:

now we have decent damage and clear, we will start noticing our defences are getting a bit bad. We will fix this in this section.

First lets grab the two arms of the Evasion/armour circle in the bottom left just below the last bleed cluster. This circle will make you allot.
Once thats done we want to work on the evasion and armour nodes around the middle of our tree. Grab Defiance first as it gives a massive 80% increase to your armour and evasion when on low life (around 40% if im correct). Next grab the Afterimage node to make it allot less likely to be hit in melee. Paired with winddancer later on is great.

Finally as mobs start becoming beefy, we want to break more armour to maximise our damage. This is were the Cruel methods cluster comes in. Located to the left of the starting nodes and below the first bleed cluster is where we need to go. Aim for Cruel methods first then grab the nodes either side of it.

At this point you should aim to have 6 ascendency points and completed the Sorcery ward arm and Acquired the Zealous inquisition.

Section Three:
Now our job is to fill out the damage to push in to maps.

We want to grab the Crossbow nodes now, they are located at the bottom of the tree to the slight right of centre. Grab the Full salvo first as it will boost our quick swap playstyle, and then grab Powershots.

From here we grab all the crit we can that near by. So naturally we get all the tainted strike cluster just above the last. Then we make our way all the way to the Perfectly balanced knife to give us more crit and bleed magnitude.