Returning Newbie here, Ice shot bow build.

Hello all, returning after 6 years. Re-spec'd my old ranger for ice shot. Just beat brine king today.

Ive done some research and it seems ice shot is an incredibly expensive build in the late game and rangers in general are pretty tough because of low HP issues. act six was a great learning experience.

Im not going into great detail on passive tree or skill set.
Right now it takes forever to kill bosses. I die multiple times. Mobs usually are not a big issue. because I just roll through them.

I have been having some fun using decoy totem as a crutch during boss fights and have a decent mana pool to keep spamming it and keep spamming iceshot, I even throw ballista out there when I can. During Brine king I did die like 8 times because Im super squishy, but I didn't find chapter six as a hole being this nightmare its made out to be. I would try to spam decoy totem and posistion myself behind the small crabs to make full use of iceshot. And throw ballista in when the water rose up. It was a fun fight. I did Die multiple times throughout chapter six bosses, everything Ive read says max out resists on gear during six. That sounds like a ton of grinding for just the second half of the "first" half of the game.

I don't have alot of resources to get super uber equipment to get me through the next few acts without just grinding my eyes out.

But I do want to see how far I can take this build to make item tweaks and learn the deeper side of synergies. But Im real sure that its not going to take me to the end of chapter ten right now from what ive read.

I have two questions, My gear is all spec'd out for ice damage. So I don't see a option to swap to another bow. for bosses. The only thing I see is swap out fork for barrage on bosses. Is that really going to help out all that much?

Is there another option to help with bosses on cheaper gear? Im not trying to blow all my nice currency crafting stuff. Though the little crafting I did helped me break the "sixth wall" a bit.

Second question. Is there any build out there that anybody can suggest with a bow like maybe a duelist? They seem to have good access to dex and strength and health nodes. Seems light on the INT side though. Im looking for something that would progress to at least maps game. Without huge gear barriers.

Or is it just a given that no matter the character a gear wall comes at some point, then its a lot of grinding.

Or does it sound like im progressing pretty normally for a what is essentially a first time player because its been so long since I played.

Thank you all!

I can't really tell you anything about your character because characters are hidden (by default) and you didn't enable them.

Anyway.

The most popular duelist bow build is a bleed bow gladiator, which (as name suggests) relies on scaling bleed damage which is usually done with puncture, split arrow, and ensnaring arrow (last one to make bosses take more bleed damage).

Ice shot is expensive, but it should be possible to level with it.

If you struggle, you'd have to check the following:
- how much life do you have?
- how much resists do you have? usually there are few common "levelling uniques" like goldrim hat that help with getting more resist while levelling
- do you use a bow with good weapon damage on it? biggest mistake of people who never played weapon based builds (for example only spells or minions) is using the same weapon for 20+ levels if it's not some very good twink weapon
- do you have decent amount of support gems linked to your main skill and are they good damage increases? (if you'd use ice shot with greater multiple projectiles, chain and fork that could be useful for clear but very low boss damage)

Thanks thats more of the same of what I heard. My issue im running into with rangers is it seems like choosing between dps, or survival. right now im working on getting health up in the passive tree.

I set the characters to open. Thanks!